TBPN - 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 TBPN Ultradome. But today is the trenches of technology. The domicile of defy, the mansion of meme coins, the capital of crypto. It's Crypto Day on TBPN. We started early. We're talking to people from all over the globe.

Starting point is 00:00:20 We just talked to Bologi. We've actually already been podcasting for hours. We've 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.

Starting point is 00:00:35 But we're kicking it off with Bologi. Let's go. Let's go. Big news. We have Bology in the studio. We're going to bring him in. Talk to him for about 45 minutes. Take his temperature on what's going on in crypto.

Starting point is 00:00:54 I want the update on what he's up to and really just take us on the whirlwind tour. We're going to get to the bottom of what happened in 1971. We're going to get the final answer. It's been hotly debated. We're going to figure it out right now. We'll be over. Let's bring in Bology. How you doing?

Starting point is 00:01:08 Good to see you. Welcome to the show. I'm going to see you guys. Hey. Yeah. 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?

Starting point is 00:01:22 What are you most excited about right now? Sure. So I actually, can I project here? Yeah, please. Is it possible? Yeah, you can show your screen. All right. So in Q4, we just opened something I'm calling.

Starting point is 00:01:35 network school. Can you guys see the opening day shot there? Yep. So that was the kind of ribbon cutting. Cool. And this is something that combines a bunch of things that care about. Here's like the site is at ns.com. And actually, uh, no way. A fantastic domain. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. You guys are connoisseurs also. Yeah, we have a four letter domain. You kind of destroying us at the two letter domain. You mugged us. All right. Well, well, I, we will, you know, I, still, you know, you're in the, uh, you're in the, uh, the four Kamaas Club or something, I guess. I said it out.

Starting point is 00:02:08 The poor characters club, right? Yeah. So break it down for me. I saw 100K fellowship. I also see a school. Typically I have to pay for school. Are you paying me? How does this all work?

Starting point is 00:02:19 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. It's about 10 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.

Starting point is 00:02:39 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-a-I, you're pro-biotech, pro-nuclear and whatnot. And those kind of people exist all over the world. And so we're bringing them here. And so global meritocracy, basically. And there's Vitalik, there's Brian Johnson. Can you see the video?

Starting point is 00:03:03 Yeah, incredible. So this is it basically we're actually doing the startup society. So that's what that's what number of school is. There's much more I can say about it, but that's the idea. 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 going to replace a four-year experience. And I don't know if that's because the four-year experience is fundamentally broken.

Starting point is 00:03:28 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 get whatever you need to out of academia or schooling generally? That's right. Well, very good question. This is a long topic. But just to level set, you know, I actually spent, you know, 10 years at Stanford. I was an undergraduate graduate.

Starting point is 00:03:54 I got my MS in chemical engineering, BSMSP, HETE, Electro Engineering. I taught computer science and stats there. I'm a research scientist, I have 5,000 plus citations, blah, blah, did genomics, taught computer science and so on at Sanford. So I know academia fairly well, and in fact, I thought for the first, you know, I don't 10 years or so of my adult life that I was actually going to be a professor. And then I, you know, started a genomics company and, you know, basically became, you know, gone to tech.

Starting point is 00:04:19 And my view is there's many things I could say about the four-year, you know, college education, but one issue is it's like front-loading all the cost to, you know, 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 you know wheel changes or so on for the rest of life and so people get this expensive education and they forget all of it just a few years later um i'm sure if you gave test retest you know stats and looked at what percentage they actually retained we know all the stuff about space repetition um we know forgetting curves and so on so basically the is gone and what you really want is something that's like continuous education over the course of your life

Starting point is 00:05:04 sure where you know then like for example VO comes out or some new API comes out but you want is 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 forget everything sense that doesn't even get into the fact that you know unless you've been in the world of work 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 error is ending. And then what's next? Like my view, you know, why am I doing this in part because you know how

Starting point is 00:05:47 well, actually we'll get right into it. You know how America started? Lusely. Boston Tea Party. It was actually America was started by the tech and the bro, forming the tech bro. Let me explain. Okay. So. Amazing. Okay. Here's why. So, you bring it out.

Starting point is 00:06:04 Massachusetts, Massachusetts was a tech and Virginia was a bro. Okay. There we go. There we go. Okay. So for those of you don't know, like Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that's a Puritans, they founded Harvard in the 1600s when, you know, it was actually just a one-room schoolhouse, basically a one-room, one-room place, right?

Starting point is 00:06:20 It was a very, very small thing, very modest at the beginning. The Massachusetts, since the technology was found about 200-something years later, but basically Massachusetts has always been the center of, like, higher learning, education, and so on in the U.S. In Virginia, the Cavaliers, you know, they were the, they were the bro. They were muscular, they were on horseback, and, you know, they liked to shoot things and so on. And actually, Virginia was, I mean, the most important state during the American Revolution. And a lot of the early American leaders came from Virginia.

Starting point is 00:06:47 That was like the founder, CEO archetype, right? And both of these were actually different factions at different times, one 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.

Starting point is 00:07:15 Now, of course, not as much. Let's say you have a husband and wife and they have kids and they have, and 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 ripping them, you know, that feels like a large part of the people that you would want to recruit over time. 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 first of all, you know, like my vision that receipt is definitely family friendly. With that said, you know, who moves and who moves at what times, right? So typically people move for education or employment, and they usually move in

Starting point is 00:07:57 their 20s and so and so forth. And once they're anchored in territory, they tend to only move if there's like a, you know, a job for both husband and wife, for example, or if they're like refugees, like things get blown up, like in Ukraine 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, you know, something like that, syringes, 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 or whatever, but like, you know, at least in some places, but I think in general that that Exodus is still there.

Starting point is 00:08:36 That's also actually how the U.S. itself was populated at the beginning. There's two different forms, ways of founding startup 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 because they had an ideological or religious motivation. And then you also had waves of refugees from Europe. There's all 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 people out, right? But so, so the answer is like, there's only so much you can do at the beginning. In a sense, you know how Dropbox started as an

Starting point is 00:09:12 individual product and then it became a product for small teams and then for enterprise? Yeah, yeah, 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 or the whole startup there's moving 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 have brought families. But the product for families is itself a product, just like Apple has a family plan, for example.

Starting point is 00:09:48 There's new permission structures and so on, account structures and stuff you need for 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 okay for these to be initially be frontiers and sort of kind of establish base camp effectively and then bring more people in over time.

Starting point is 00:10:12 Yeah, on the Bitcoin thing, I imagine that Bitcoin could be kind of the gold standard for many network states if they opt in. The interesting story that I've been toying with with Bitcoin is that the narratives have 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,

Starting point is 00:10:47 is there a pattern of this, like, shoot for the moon, you'll land amongst the star? it's okay to kind of build towards like a three-pronged amorphous future because if one of them hits you could still wind up with with a fantastic power law outcome oh yeah I mean like I think I think it's the only way of doing things in sense of it's kind of like people who there's some people there's one guy who Ruan named who like critiques like Elon's self-driving schedule is like he promised it an X date and it only arrived like like a year later he sucks so much and and I'm like You know, like I think Elon is saying like Tesla or, you know, SpaceX, they turn impossible into late. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:29 Right? Yeah. You'll take that every single day, obviously, 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 is 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

Starting point is 00:11:51 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 like gold should be as immutable as possible. And mutability is in conflict with, I mean, programmability is a good value and immutable is a good value, but those are like, you know, fire and water, they don't mix, right?

Starting point is 00:12:17 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. Then you get nothing, right? So immutability, Bitcoin's immutability, it's stability and it's predictability. Think of it as locked, right? And then what happened was privacy went to like Zcash and zero knowledge, you know, tornado cash, which is now legal again and so on. And zero knowledge is booming.

Starting point is 00:12:40 Zero knowledge is one of the big things that people are underpricing, I think. Cool. BiTech, 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, USDC, UST, and then other kinds of things like storing data on chain and, you know, like using as an Oracle, that went to other stuff, like ChainLink and other kinds of things. And then, you know, basically other functions like on-chain data is NFT.

Starting point is 00:13:15 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 could tolerate the risk. Because, you know, you have success and failures then, and Bitcoin couldn't tolerate that risk. Bitcoin was locked.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Yeah, yeah. With the zero-knowledge stuff, 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, some of the hardest programming software to write. Or is it more on the customer adoption side? We're ready for on ramps of kind of the masses,

Starting point is 00:13:57 but it's just going to take time for people to build the bridges to actually make these new ZK products just lovable and like, you know. Well, first, just to explain what zero knowledge is. Zero knowledge arguably is, and Vatak also made this analogy, ZK arguably is to crypto with the transformer as to AI in the sense of it takes a bunch of things that were previously special case stuff 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 uh 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?

Starting point is 00:14:49 And that's necessary because look at these, you know, these KYC attacks on like, you know, Raj of Slun and other kinds of people, right? Like the modern form of KYC is where governments force companies to store giant honey pots full of sensitive information. And then the governments themselves are often hacked, like the OPM hack and so and so on. So that's one aspect of where ZK can come in and beat the solution. Another thing is that ZK is actually, used as a compression technology. So for example, ZK. Roll-ups, not just a privacy technology.

Starting point is 00:15:20 And so this stuff is actually already there and it's being deployed and it's working. There's ZK chains and so on. It's one of those things where is it consumer visible? Maybe not. But I think it's just a really important technology. It might never need to be consumer visible is what you're saying. That's right. 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? You can prove you are a lot of KYC stuff works right now.

Starting point is 00:15:50 I scan my ID. Most people don't know that there is a machine learning algorithm with computer vision 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? Well, you want to something like Sing Pass 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 as your knowledge handshake with something else, right?

Starting point is 00:16:18 As opposed to like a piece of paper like physical card. How are you feeling about stable coins these days? How are you feeling about stable coins these days? I feel like there's an immense amount of energy and excitement, but it's, but they always feel a little bit misaligned with the folks who are like, let's get off the dollar. Let's, you know, we don't. We wanted to move away from that. and we're kind of maybe rebuilding it.

Starting point is 00:16:43 How are you feeling about stable coins? Are you optimistic? 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.

Starting point is 00:17:00 Can you see the screen there? The stable coin videos dropping right now. Let's see. Oh, Coinbase and Circle announced launch of USDC, digital dollar. Yes. October 23rd, 2018. and so guess who's there? Were you behind this?

Starting point is 00:17:14 That's amazing. Lore. This is great. There he is. I remember this video. Yeah, I remember thinking like, oh,

Starting point is 00:17:21 I don't really understand this, but now I do. So you were, so you're, yeah, this is a long way of saying you were early and right. You were super long stable coins,

Starting point is 00:17:29 but I've heard it's hard to make money. That's right. In fact, let me just to show you, just to underline, here is the market cap of USC, which is now $60 billion. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:17:38 and on October 3rd, Let's see if I can get the cursor. Bang. Let's say October 2012 2018. Can you see that? Yeah. I can't see that. But I can see the broad chart.

Starting point is 00:17:49 But congratulations for being early. You're always early. Where are we 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 moving to these few future global currency. And legacy financial institutions. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:07 seeing that we're in a friendly or regulatory environment, seeing the product market fit of stable coins now wanting a piece of the action. Like when the Wall Street Journal reports like the dollar fell in value, like the stable coins 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

Starting point is 00:18:26 because it was stable relative to Bitcoin. Sure. I think you could sort of separate that out 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 the 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 against bread and

Starting point is 00:18:46 PlayStation's and whatever. And if there's an actual shortage of those things, then price might increase for no reason than other than actual physical shortage. So 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, you know, banks are only open like nine to five weekdays, right? So like from 40 hours a week uptime to 168 hours a week, which is 24-7 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,

Starting point is 00:19:34 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 an interesting way, and I think many other things will partition this way, into like a U.S. and a global, right? Like the U.S.D.C. coin or the U.S.S. asset is, like, U.S. regulated, and then U.S.D.T. is, like, intentionally non-U.S. regulated, right?

Starting point is 00:19:54 Sort of like there's, like, coinbase, and there's, like, global exchanges, and so and so, and so forth. I think that'll be a common partitioning of many kinds of markets. And so. So that's a justification for why I'm bullish. But now, on your specific questions, I think that one of 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

Starting point is 00:20:20 up there and what have you because it's become so mainstream and whatnot. But when that happens, you get an interesting thing, which is similar to launch a 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, you know, Miami Tribune, whatever, were 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 newswire.

Starting point is 00:20:55 And you can see this on Google was like 173 other outlets printed this story. It's all the same story every time. Yeah. And that's because those newspapers, they had trucks and they had, you know, used to say, never argue with a man who buys zinc by the barrel now and never listen to a man who still buys zinc by the barrel, right? Because, you know, are you buying any ink? You know, I mean, I actually like pencil and paper to write, but not to print, right? And that's really not. Early days. We went through a lot of days. Never fight with a podcast or who live streams for 20 hours a week. Something like that. Exactly. It's beat you on. Exactly. Yeah, this is the modern version. That's right. So, so, so, point. Point being, though, that they had these geographical monopolies that suddenly they put their stuff online and there was a delayed reaction. And suddenly they realized, wait a second, every newspaper is in competition with every other newspaper. And so, of course, all the local ones that had any brand basically just all died.

Starting point is 00:21:44 And only the national ones survived. And they became much more ideological. And the new partitioning of information space was on the base of ideology, not geography. So you've got the, you know, Jimbrose and you've got like people are interested in, 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 going to happen with assets. And the reason is, first, you've got these fiat currencies that are put on chain. And then we're nearing something which I call the defy matrix. The defy matrix starts the observation that

Starting point is 00:22:23 fiat, fiat, fiat can be swapped like 4x, 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 mandatory of digital assets 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 market makers 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 few. fiat currency, you could just hold that asset. Then when 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?

Starting point is 00:23:08 What's a highbrow way of saying when you sell your company? You get a liquidity event. Liquidity event. That's right. That's another term of talking about cash. Cash is liquidity. Cash is universal barter. Cache can be traded for anything. 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, in the information environment, you compete on ideology rather

Starting point is 00:23:48 than geography, then in the transaction environment, you have to compete on features, not on places, right? So, for example, privacy, or smart contract coins and so and so forth. You compete on the vertical as opposed to the horizontal of France coin, which is a franc, and Japan coin, which is JPI, right? Yeah. And it's a funny way of putting it, but that's like what they are, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:11 So I'm not saying there isn't any utility to geography, but especially given that so many of these things, but are people done? All these countries have gone cashless, right? Yeah, yeah, 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 and so forth. Once you go digital, you don't have to use cash anymore. And many people have, for example, crypto cards where they can hold in one currency and spend

Starting point is 00:24:35 in another. And it just Apple Pay or whatever just works, you know, that people don't know, right? So stablecoins are an intermediate form that facilitates this transition from the, you know, 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, not the one point, they still feel threatened. But they fought this whole battle of the bulge counterattack on social media.

Starting point is 00:25:00 Tried to take away your voice, my voice, everybody's voice. But they lost. You know what X, 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.

Starting point is 00:25:17 Boom, right? Like this. You know, because all, it was still technically illegal. They were like, if you want your own company, why not Beldwan or whatever to get free speech back? Remember those kinds of lines of argument prior to it. right 22 and then Elon basically gathered the forces and every tech guy like some Marvel movie you know putting a mill a bill five mill whatever they could afford pass the head around i mean 44 billion dollars in cash is like anon go ahead yeah no no it's just funny passing the head around

Starting point is 00:25:45 and morgan stanley puts in 13 billion in debt it's kind of classic yes so every every center right centrist center left in some cases person who right just just piled it because Elon obviously was the man, but so many people backed him, right? And this was something where like, you know, Thor landing with a hammer, boom, like this, right? All of these communists just fly back against, you know, the walls, all these wokes 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, there's blue sky and mass.

Starting point is 00:26:27 on and threads and TikTok on the left. And there's a crypto networks like Noster and Lens and Farcaster and so on, right? So you have a towerable moment where Twitter has been shattered. Anyway, this has been fantastic biology. Thank you so much for stopping you. You're welcome to come on and screen share with us anytime. Yeah, this is great. Awesome. Great. Maybe I'm going to be your Kramer special guests. And thank you for kicking off. Yeah, I love that. We have, I think 10 plus other, you know, exciting crypto entrepreneurs. It should be a big day once. Welcome. How are you? There he is. What's going on?

Starting point is 00:27:00 Hey, how's it going guys? I'm pleasure to be here. Welcome to the Temple of Technology. Can you kick us off of the quick introduction on yourself and the company? And then and your and your PFP too. Yeah, what is you 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 all on.

Starting point is 00:27:20 I'm one of the co-founders of Pomp Fun. Cool. Pump Fun is a is a launch pad where anyone can create their own coin. And it's based on the Salana blockchain. And my PFP is Remilio. It is a, is a, an NFT based on Ethereum. Very cool. A little crossover.

Starting point is 00:27:39 Yeah, crossing over some Ethereum floor. Not pure Salonama. Why don't we start with, 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, even fundraising, went through a couple pivots to get to the launch pad that is today. So I think it would be great to hear the backstory. Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I mean, I've been in crypto for a while. Before we built Pump Fund and myself and my two co-founders were building a bunch of different

Starting point is 00:28:12 ideas in crypto, consumer crypto, you know, in NFTs and social, fine, 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 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's different stuff on chain.

Starting point is 00:28:45 And we noticed that there's a whole bunch of different problems that we could solve by by building a launch pad where anyone could 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. So Pump Fun, I would say, it was the first product that really allowed for mass tokenization, and it's something that we then we're going to continue doing. So I want to give a little bit of backstory.

Starting point is 00:29:20 I'm sure you can't talk about numbers, but pump is one of the fastest growing companies in history. That's why we're, you know, one of the reasons we were interested in having you on the 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 launch pad did you feel like you were, did you kind of realize that you were on to something? Was it kind of immediate PMF?

Starting point is 00:29:50 did you even have to iterate 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 for sure. It was only a matter of iteration. It was a matter of finding distribution because ultimately

Starting point is 00:30:24 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 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, whole make it work, but eventually 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 become this great business. How do you actually make money?

Starting point is 00:31:02 Yeah, so two different, two main, well, it's all really the same model. It's a small fee in each trade. So whenever a coin launches, the platform takes a 1% trading fee, and each time the coin 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, it's the same fee, basically, but just a smaller one that the platform charges. And it's a really small fee to feed. You don't get dismediated or you don't get out-competed by other platforms. Like, are you thinking about that? And because I feel like there's this

Starting point is 00:31:42 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 a risk that you're thinking of and like planning against? I mean, of course, you know, when you build something successful, I think in any industry, you're going to expect some copycats. 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. I mean, obviously, we continue to monitor the markets and kind of see what user feedback is on different approaches and models.

Starting point is 00:32:10 But ultimately, we have our own solutions. We speak to our own users. And, you know, we kind of stand our own lane in that regard. Yeah. Talk about the branding. It's extremely chaotic. It feels extremely internet native. But I'm curious what your kind of like framework to making decisions around everything, kind of design brand.

Starting point is 00:32:33 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think when we first started, the 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 all the products we were building were for people in the trenches, so to speak. 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 what the culture, like, 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.

Starting point is 00:33:11 The way we think about it is we don't necessarily want to, I guess, we want to pay respect 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? So I think a big part of why Pomp has succeeded is that it has really built a community of people that are, you know, 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.

Starting point is 00:33:56 Like if we changed everything all of a sudden and it was extremely, I guess, you know, looked like your average product and AI or something like that, then I think there would 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. I know, I know, uh, they're beating down your door.

Starting point is 00:34:19 I think the story is, is you raised from, uh, six man. Okay. Is that correct? Uh, Dutus is fun. That's correct. I can't give too many details on the whole, I guess, life cycle. Yeah, but, but I have a question that, that would be fun to answer. What's the craziest thing of EC's ever done to try to win allocation?

Starting point is 00:34:39 Here we go. Because I know you guys, anonymously. Revenue is just rocketed to such an extreme degree. You imagine people are, you guys, you know, for every dollar venture capital, I'm sure you've generated, you know, at this point, an obscene amount of profit. But do you have any funny stories there? I'm not sure if there's anything in particular there, but definitely there are so many stories where, not just for VCs, but like, you know, I guess influencers in the space and stuff as well,

Starting point is 00:35:07 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 is gained traction. And yeah, this has happened many times. Can you talk to us about the live streaming product that you guys have? I mean, we're live streamers ourselves and so super interested in what's going on. Yeah, and you recently brought it back and made a number of changes to it. So I'm curious, you know, how it's evolving. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:35:36 So the live streaming feature is pretty simple. When you launch your own point, you can also launch a live stream alongside it to, you know, 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, you know, I mean, it gained a lot of mind share late last year and ultimately needed to shut that down for a variety of reasons. But we decided to bring it back with, you know, much, much better moderation as well as I guess an improved product overall.

Starting point is 00:36:04 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 stream 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 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?

Starting point is 00:36:33 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,

Starting point is 00:36:53 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:37:14 They can monetize instantly with no middleman through creator revenue sharing. So whenever someone makes a trade, a small percentage of that goes directly to the creator. So they monetize immediately there's no approvals that they have to grow 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 they, their content is within, you know, 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

Starting point is 00:37:56 on other chains at all. Yeah. So we love Solana. I mean, we, I mentioned Ethereum early on with my, with my PFP. So that's, I guess, kind of where we, 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, like increasingly desperate to get users, we saw that, especially for this, for for for mean coins, people were starting to trade them on other on other blockchains, specifically Solana. Now is gaining a lot of traction back then. So we, we started, you know, we wanted to go to where all the users were, right?

Starting point is 00:38:30 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 and really break into the mainstream. And I don't necessarily believe that going onto any other chain would contribute to that.

Starting point is 00:39:02 Solana as infrastructure has improved so significantly over the past year, year and a half since PumpFlin has been live, that we're very confident that once, I guess, that critical mass has reached, the infrastructure will be able to support, you know, to support the activity on the platform. And more than just that, there's so many ecosystem applications that utilizes pumps, you know, marketplace infrastructure and so on that actually contributes to the, you know, not just to the bottom line, but contributes to the overall, you know, user experience. Like people can use whatever interfaces they like to get the, you know, the best experience possible. So all in all, um, couldn't be happier being on Salon and we're not considering leaving anytime soon.

Starting point is 00:39:47 Very cool. Fantastic. Thank you for jumping on. I know you don't do a lot of, uh, interviews, do a lot of media in general. So I appreciate you coming and, uh, telling the story. It will, I legitimately think there will eventually be a Harvard, you know, 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, you know, pump has become in such an incredibly short period of time. So thank you for jumping on and sharing and we'll talk to you soon. Absolutely. Appreciate it, guys. Cheers.

Starting point is 00:40:29 And that Harvard business case study will be tokenized on chain. I'm sure it will have a meme token. I'm sure we'll get 20 meme coins per case study. Maybe a meme coin for every paragraph. HBS class should just be live streamed on pump fund. They could fractionalize the case study. Every word, you can just get a word. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:50 But anyways, it's interesting that the, I think meme coins were working on Ethereum, but the gas fees on Ethereum were so high. You couldn't make a trade for $100 because, you know, somebody would be like, am I, like, are they going to pay $50 in gas to make a trade like that? Speed and price, you drop, you drop the price, like you increase the speed, you drop the price, like you always just see more activity. And so, yeah, fascinating.

Starting point is 00:41:20 That $1 billion revenue number, is that something that you can just inspect on the blockchain if you just add up? a lot of it. I think a lot of it is, like, is that possible to do? It's visible. I'd seen a post as of maybe last week that they had passed $750 million in revenue. Wow. Wow. And when did they actually launch? It seems like it was like a year ago. Is it like roughly a year ago? Wow. Impressive. So a year to $750 million in like real, and it's not marketplace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like their, that's not GMV. That's actually their, their take home. Net revenue. revenue. Anyway, next time, we have Katie Hahn from Hahn Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the show. Katie,

Starting point is 00:42:01 thanks so much for hopping on. We're excited to talk to her. Welcome. Welcome. Hey, hey, guys. Good Good morning. Good morning. How are you? And wherever you may be. I think you're at the conference. No, we are not. We're in Los Angeles. We're in Hollywood, the future of media. 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? 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 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? How many decades has the last three and a half

Starting point is 00:42:46 years felt like. Oh my gosh. Well, you know what? Guys, I've actually been in the space over a decade. Yeah. Wow. Over a decade. So how many years has that felt like? But the last three years have been wild. But I'm really excited. After how I'm spending my days, I'm really excited about this particular moment in crypto. Sure. Because we have a lot of the fundamentals coming together. And as I said, I've been in the 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. Break down those fundamentals. I imagine it's regulatory, its community, its collective belief. Scale of the actual chains, maturity of the code. How do you think about it? What are you thinking about? Here, you guys do it. I can question you. Great up. 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, she's been in the space for as long as I have, maybe even longer.

Starting point is 00:43:46 We had folks like Meta. I mean, I was on Zuck's original DM Project board. He saw Stablecoins coming years ago. So we had Meta leaned in as an institution kind of early. And then we had other institutions, folks like Black Rock, I think Larry Fink is actually a great exhibit A for someone who really changed their mind on crypto. Totally.

Starting point is 00:44:07 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 called Biddle. So that's some of the earlier institutional adopters. But now we have some of the later institutional adopters, folks like J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab and others.

Starting point is 00:44:28 And you'll see other announcements coming out soon from other institutions. So the institutional story is one fundamental, but I want to talk about three others. You mentioned one regulatory, but before I get to regulatory, because it's not the most exciting, is the technological progress. We've had different kinds of levels of technology. technological progress over the cycles that make up the crypto industry cycles. We always talk about

Starting point is 00:44:53 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 Ethereum was touching $800 after the FTX crisis. And I was like, I don't know where the bottom is here. This feels like the most toxic asset. And that was. And that was. It was like, I basically... A great time to start a fund, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:19 I had just started a fund. No, and in hindsight, I was like, the moment that I thought this... It 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. And when I thought it couldn't go any lower, it even went lower.

Starting point is 00:45:39 We got in when it was pretty darn low. And a lot of assets, you have to, 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, thinking about stuff like the technological progress. If you think about post-FTX,

Starting point is 00:45:56 that era you're talking about, ETH is at or thereabouts. Solana got down to like, what, $9. Bitcoin's hitting like $17,000, $18,000 levels. People were declaring the space dead pundits. Sorry, I know it's not pundits. But everyone was saying, God, it's a terrible idea.

Starting point is 00:46:17 You started a thing. 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 FDX saying hey the technical story here has not changed folks 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.

Starting point is 00:46:53 Stuff is scalable. Stuff is cheaper instead of paying, you know, multiple dollars for a stable coin transfer or an NFT transaction, it's sub one cent. And that's due in large part to the builders that we're 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. You know, you talk about things like product market fit.

Starting point is 00:47:18 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 $3,000 or $5,000. And lo and behold, fast forward these years later, I think it's clear it has found product

Starting point is 00:47:42 market fit as a digital store of value. But also we have things like stable coins have found clear product market fit. And I hope we can talk about stables. We'll dive deeper later in today's session because stable coins are the story of the day that folks in the mainstream are now talking about. So we have product market fit and others. Other product market fit kind of I say we're on the precipice of. We can talk about that.

Starting point is 00:48:04 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, for Mellon, when I was at my prior fund is regulators aren't going to allow this though, right? Like this is all going to get shut down. 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?

Starting point is 00:48:34 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 U.S. regulatory regime was making it pretty difficult to exist as a crypto founder in the U.S., which had the same, you know, sort of effect in some ways. Yeah, you know, fun fact, since there's the conference going on today, I don't know if you, if you guys were aware of this. I was asked probably around 2012, 2013 to help shut down Bitcoin for the U.S. government when I was a federal prosecutor. So it's just crazy to think about, I mean.

Starting point is 00:49:10 Hey, Katie, little project. I don't know if you have time this weekend to look into it. Can you shut down? Open the case, Fennu-Lanoo. First name unknown, last name unknown. Wow. You know, somewhere in the tenderloin, San Francisco 450 Golden Gate said file of Fennu-Lew. But look, I realized early on that this was a really powerful technology.

Starting point is 00:49:31 And regulators, by the way, and we've been saying this for the last decade, regulators should love this technology. I mean, for its kind of permanence, right? all of the things that make a blockchain 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.

Starting point is 00:49:55 Good like getting compliance with a subpoena. But at the same time, I really do worry about the erosion of financial privacy. 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 went back to the Supreme Court today, I think you might have a very different result than the last time the Bank Secrecy Act was challenged within the 1970s. And of course, the velocity of payments has just skyrocketed since then. And now, unlike in 1970, where I couldn't

Starting point is 00:50:30 glean too much information about you from your maybe couple payments or people writing out checks back in those days. Now, if you 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 your kind of early stage investment framework, philosophy. What are you, I imagine there's investments that you get the opportunity to make that you believe will be

Starting point is 00:51:14 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, 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? And if you think about founders that I've previously kind of known in my gut, this is an amazing founder, an 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,

Starting point is 00:51:56 was Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, right? 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 Ethereum and adding all of these other assets, but he was never content to just dressed on those laurels as an exchange. It was always about diversifying the business and the Web3 economy. And he was thinking about things like Sablecoins many, many years ago. Obviously, USDC was a partnership between Coinbase and... Yeah, we had... We had Bologi on earlier and he showed a video of the launch, the web, the web's page for the launch video. And he's like in the first five seconds.

Starting point is 00:52:34 that video. I remember that. I remember that. Did he have a bowl of cereal with cream or something in that? I remember those days with Bala G. Well, you know, with the USC launch happening. And I think, again, he, I remember being in the Coinbase office, by the way, the day, the day that Bitcoin first hit $10,000 for the first time. Imagine, by the way, if we were having this conversation, you know, now we would be like, oh my God, $10,000 market correction. Well, a few short 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. We're not going to get comfortable with this. We're building an open global financial system for the world.

Starting point is 00:53:21 Where are we taking our revenue lines next? He's been thinking about that day the S-1, you know, 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. 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, 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, think about like Netflix. Netflix did was very centralized. It curated content.

Starting point is 00:54:27 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 going to get that user-generated equivalent or the YouTube moment? 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 operates 24-7, and anyone with a smartphone can access that. So we think that's exciting. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:58 So we're looking for, you know, we're looking for exceptional founders. It sounds like an easy job. Just find 10 more Brian Armstrongs. And you're great. 10 more. Sounds like an easy job. I believe in you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:12 Thank you guys. Thank you for doing the work to surface the Bryans of the world. Yeah, we're talking to them later today. We're very excited. Oh, great. Well, I'll tune in for that also. I think, though, you mentioned moral. I think one of the things we've done.

Starting point is 00:55:25 No, I think I know. The context there is like certain VCs will have a, you know, traditional VCs will have a vice clause, right, 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 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 happens already. Right.

Starting point is 00:55:50 Like 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 cryptic. 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. Like imagine if you had said, we're not touching Solana. I mean, Solana is a huge market opportunity.

Starting point is 00:56:16 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.

Starting point is 00:56:40 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? Or is their plan to launch a token? And then we say leave the U.S. That's got to be the most nervous meeting. founder has in their round is pitching you on their regulatory plan. Because like a lot of other VCs are like, you know, great, he's got a regulatory plan. You're like, well, here's like 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 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. Like, it doesn't just go away just because we have legislation passed, which we think is really important and clarity. You still got to comply with it.

Starting point is 00:57:41 And we always said, I always said, look, you got to have a kind of 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

Starting point is 00:57:53 as a company on that front across the different iterations of their company, like one would expect, like is reasonable. So my touchstone is what's reasonable. And you got to build a business too, right? And I think we realize 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.

Starting point is 00:58:15 I don't know what the law is. But like we'd love your health. 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 a fantastic conversation. Thank you guys.

Starting point is 00:58:24 Thank you for having me. We'd love to go way deeper. I'm sure we're more a lot today. This is good. Okay. Talk to you soon. Thanks for going on. Up next, we have Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz, but first, let me tell you about

Starting point is 00:58:35 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 side 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 you invested in Bitcoin back in 1994. And right. Yeah. A lot of the people that we're having on today were early and right. Yep, yep, yep. Good thing to be. So Chris, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:59:13 How are you doing? I'm great, John, good to see you. Good to see you. I upload an early, uh, soil an investor. Yes. Yes. Already good to see you guys. Congratulations on all the success with the show.

Starting point is 00:59:23 Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Um, where should we start? Can you give us a tem. on the crypto markets. It's been up and down. Come on. Let them take a victory lap. Take a victory lap. I feel like you get. I know the job's not finished, but they always twist you, twist your arm into doing podcasts when the market's down and saying, oh, you got to hold you accountable. And then and then where is Kara Swisher calling you when the market's up? You know? That's the point. That's a good point. By the way, can you guys hear? Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah, yeah, you sound great. Okay, great. Yeah, good. I mean, it's, yeah, it's, it's been a long journey as you're. guys pointed out. I think that, you know, 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

Starting point is 01:00:10 with the new administration, it's 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. And then also like the kind of core infrastructure, and we can, I don't if you guys want to talk more about it, but like, you know, the 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 $2 trillion in stable coin volume, which is more than trillion with a T, which is more than Visa. And so, you know, quite a lot of volume.

Starting point is 01:00:39 And 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, you know, 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, you know, there's a lot of challenges too. But overall, it's been fun. Do you think that the narrative around stable coins 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.

Starting point is 01:01:24 It is the one category that I used stable coins for years ago. 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, you know, 195 countries. Each one has many different banking systems.

Starting point is 01:01:50 When you send money to another country, like I'll say, you wire money. Like, actually, we've had this experience at the firm where we wire investment. And it ends up going through like a bunch of humans and paperwork. It's really just a mishmash of systems. And so the way to think about stable coins is similar to how, for those who are old enough to remember, text messaging was like this in the 2000s. You would send a text message and you would say you don't have a plan to send to Canada. You've got to sign up. And it was all these different systems.

Starting point is 01:02:14 And then WhatsApp and FaceTime came along and they built this sort of what they call over the top global network. So think of sort of stable coins 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,

Starting point is 01:02:42 you know, they'll sell a Starlink in, I think it's like some South of Lake Brazil or something, and then they'll immediately, you know, use stable coins for so-called 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, you know, from the U.S. to, you know, whatever, some developing country, countries where the currency is volatile, they want access to dollars or euros. And then, as you mentioned, John, the idea that because,

Starting point is 01:03:08 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. But they're actually, they say they're really excited about it, 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, you know, invoice fraud, so people will send, you know, these, these faxes type things. really old fashioned where they'll say like, here's my wiring instruction. And if you guys, if you've done this, you'll say like, please make sure you call

Starting point is 01:03:33 first, but of course, calling doesn't work in an age of AI because it could be a fake voice. And so, you know, what, what Stripe was excited about is that 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, micropayments, right? Now that you can send money for one penny, that unlocks a whole bunch of use cases. So machine to machine payments, every time you're doing an AI,

Starting point is 01:03:57 API requests, as you mentioned MCP, right? So like, why 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 close 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.

Starting point is 01:04:15 I can do your homework, whatever. And they're all sort of advertising their services. And then you sort of imagine other agents coming along and negotiating and, you know, pennies getting transferred back and forth and this big kind of, you know, economic, you know, kind of mismatch, like kind of collection, you know, on top. So the web moves from like these kind of sign up 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.

Starting point is 01:04:47 Yeah, yeah. How has, I'm super curious to understand how your guys' lobbying efforts have evolved over the past six to 12 months. We went from, you know, a sort of coalition, a large coalition of people trying to basically, you know, block crypto from getting real adoption and traction in the U.S. 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, Mark Andreessen on on you guys. It was a week or two ago.

Starting point is 01:05:26 I watched that and he was talking about 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 two and just and really just kind of trying to explain our perspective, because we feel like the interests of startup. So 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.

Starting point is 01:06:04 And so our kind of logic was that we're one of the few entities, you know, kind of organizations that has enough scale to have a government affairs team who represents the interest 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. They want to have open source AI. That's another really important issue to us. Clear rules on like AI and copyright.

Starting point is 01:06:28 There's a series of things, you know, having a single federal framework and not a 50 state laws on a lot of these things and so forth, right? And so we go and we kind of 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 96 Telecom Act. If, you know, and had things like Section 230, which, you know, you may know is now a contentious issue.

Starting point is 01:06:54 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. So we've always felt that both for AI and for crypto, we want legislation that provides clear rules, pass for innovation, and, and really eliminates or mitigates or eliminates, you know, 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, you know, like the Democratic Party has, like most people will sort of think,

Starting point is 01:07:30 you know, Republicans are pro-crypto, Democrats are anti. That's not really true. Like, we just had a last week, a Senate sort of, it was a procedural vote on the stable coin bill, and I believe there were 17 Democrats who voted for it, you know, which is significant. And I think, you know, our view has been, we want to kind of, you know, shift the Democratic Party back to the values of Obama and Bill Clinton when they were pro-tech and not sort of the kind of blue sky thing, Democrat thing that happened the last years. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about the lobbying is that I looked at the 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

Starting point is 01:08:09 with the spend. And obviously the Republicans won. So it feels like a Republican issue like right now. But it doesn't feel like it's going to remain that way. On the issue of government, I'm interested in 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 stablecoins, 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, if you get Anthropic OpenAI, Google, Microsoft using stablecoins in an agentic application, the user might never know that I'm paying a fraction of a cent to access Wall Street,

Starting point is 01:08:53 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? No, that's a great question. And 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?

Starting point is 01:09:24 And sort of like open source software and there's, you know, other kind of tech movements have started the fringes. And it sort of worked its way in, right? So stablecoin started for the main use case was settling, you know, crypto trades, you know, seven years ago or something. And then over time, you start to see more and more like, you know, payment providers in Argentina, for example. And that, you know, sort of more kind of moving to the center. Now, Stripe, you know, I think if Stripe is very much probably, I think the smartest, a lot of the smartest, if not the smartest, fintech company. is all in on it. You know, they did a billion dollar acquisition bridge to, you know, to ramp up

Starting point is 01:09:56 their efforts. I think the main, like, gaining factor, like, I speak to a lot of, like, what I would love to see is a world where you have banks and, you know, 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. They also, a lot of them say, we just want, like, that final, you know, regulatory clarity piece, right, because they're, look, they're risk averse. We just have. 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, that's just

Starting point is 01:10:31 kind of the key. There's two, and just to say, there's two big kind of bills that we're, that we're advocating for. There's stable coins. 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, but to your point, exactly, I don't think most people ultimately will think of even the word stable coin. I think it'll be like digital dollars, you know, like for the, for the, for the average, person like the industry term like ERP people yeah exactly they don't know and like actually but we'll see like like we have a fintech group at the firm that's not crypto

Starting point is 01:11:00 I don't know folks like I think you've interviewed a niche and yeah yeah all in those folks and then you know they like crypto but they're not like crypto and they'll tell me now like it's become pretty standard in the stable in the fintech stack that people will use stable yeah so let's yeah you're sorry one you're like a three-person startup and like boom you push a button and you got 190 countries that's very different in the old days so yeah i want to 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

Starting point is 01:11:36 fintech and crypto rails. And then you now have big institutional players that are coming in. Maybe they brought ETFs to market to start. 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 so on? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that, I mean, the point is not for like decentralization and kind of this

Starting point is 01:12:10 new architecture of blockchains for its own sake. The point is they have specific benefits. So like why would one build on a blockchain like Ethereum or Solana as opposed to a traditional, you know, on AWS, like a traditional architecture. And the answer is by built, you know, 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, you have no intermediaries that are taking

Starting point is 01:12:34 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 know, 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 a couple basis points.

Starting point is 01:12:51 I actually have it for 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. So, or, you know, two and a half percent for payments and so forth. So so the first question is why would you want to build on them? The other one we mentioned before is programmability. You know, you can do all sorts of cool stuff on top.

Starting point is 01:13:15 And so I think it's your question. I think it depends. Like ultimately, I think of startups is 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,

Starting point is 01:13:29 like a protocol we call it, with a token and so forth. 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 as kind of now as an investor, I skew towards things. I like things with, for example, network effects because they can be very, my career, I've 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

Starting point is 01:13:57 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, 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 it. 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 in 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 undercompeted.

Starting point is 01:14:29 Like we have under two 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. If you're in AI pivot to crypto, we heard it here first. I don't know. We do both. We love AI. It is my way. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:45 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? You know, we had Bologian on earlier. He's, you know, was very bullish on ZK proofs and what's coming down the pipeline there. And there's obviously, yeah, prediction markets. It was cool. During the election, it was like, wow, this is a completely, no one was talking about this

Starting point is 01:15:10 during the Bitcoin white paper. And yet crypto has created. something that everyone gets value out of in one way or another. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think we are still, you know, I think of these technology things always go in S curves. We're clearly still at the sort of, you know, somewhere in the bottom of the S curve. Like I think there's just a lot more growth and just like user base. There's something on the order. There's tens, most of these applications I'm describing have, you know, up to 50, at the highest end, probably 50 million users, which is 1% of the internet. So it's still very early in, you know, Polymarket is doing incredibly well,

Starting point is 01:15:42 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. 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 2010s because of the, you know, the Moore's law and GPUs, right? And so, you know, iPhones, once you had capacitive screens and somebody whatever, processors and so forth, I think blockchain, I think we no longer have infrastructure as an excuse anymore.

Starting point is 01:16:16 Like now it's about building applications, about getting regulatory clarity. And I think we're pretty far along there. I think we have a long way to go fully exploring kind of the IDMAs and all the different cool things you can do. And, you know, and then bringing it to billions of people is the goal. How have you been advising crypto emerging managers? my, my, one of my favorite, I'm going to kind of butcher the stat, but apparently like the sort of median crypto fund massively outperformed like the median venture fund for most of the last decade. And so I thought that that was this beautiful narrative violation because, you know,

Starting point is 01:16:51 people, traditional venture would love to poke fun at crypto VCs, yet they were sort of like 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, I've, I've been investing in venture funds and crypto funds for a long time. I just sort of after I sold my first company. In fact, Mark, Mark and I have done it together for a long time and have been doing

Starting point is 01:17:25 crypto funds since, gosh, by 10 years and just consistently, and I'm still very bullish. And to your point, I think that's probably correct, like on the, you know, the data, like they've just they've done and i think it's just it's just traditional finance in the sense of you have to you know non-consensus right right like as much as we hear about crypto it's still very non-consensus 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 um you talk to fund 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

Starting point is 01:18:01 considered this kind of weird side show. Obviously, the past doesn't predict the future and so forth. We don't know how things will play out. But it's still very non-consensus, I think, from a financial investing point of view, the broader crypto world. So, look, I believe that's where the opportunities are in venture investing. Obviously, you have to also be right. And time will tell.

Starting point is 01:18:23 But I think it's still much more non-consensus in the investing world, I think, to this day, despite the performance. 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. There's some companies that are going to be profitable very early because of their insane product. Yeah, we had a lawn from Pump on earlier, and that's classic example. It seems like a very profitable. It was able to be very efficient.

Starting point is 01:18:56 And I think we've seen on the other side, you have companies like hyperlip. liquid that got out and have a token very early. So I'm curious, yeah, how you think of the capital life cycle. Yeah. Yeah. So we, let's see if I can answer that. So like one reason we started a separate crypto fund originally, like I guess 2018, was so that we could, before that I was doing like crypto investing.

Starting point is 01:19:20 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 was we have maximum flexibility. And we went to the LPs and we said, look, this is going to be different. and here's the idea and here's a lot of them opted out some of them opted in but we were very clear up front what it was and so what we what we think of it is we can do everything from we can buy bitcoin or something just directly which we do um people see our funds and they assume it's all ventures not like we do a lot

Starting point is 01:19:46 of you know just buying like tokens that we think have have upside um we also do a lot of we can do equity investments like a coin base it's just a classic equity investment we have a bunch of those that the goal would be to someday IPO. They could be cash flow 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. Maybe they IPO, maybe they dividend. Maybe they buybacks. If you have cash flows, you have a lot of options.

Starting point is 01:20:12 And then the third one, which is actually, you know, one of our core ones is you'll do an equity, a project will start as an equity investment, but then over time we'll launch a token. And the equity investors get sort of pro rata rights to those tokens. And that actually, that's kind of, that was sort of the new thing that we really wanted to lean into back in when we started the crypto fund. That was a new idea that, you know, we helped kind of pioneer that, I think. And that was like the warrant structure? Yeah, yeah, it's basically. Yeah, it's very simple.

Starting point is 01:20:42 It'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 it well is that they're max, 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. What we believe very strongly is alignment between the investors and the founders.

Starting point is 01:21:12 And so there's sort of this, this equity structure with token rights 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 do. trying to create. And in whatever way that they eventually decide to, you know, whatever business model they pursue, the investor will participate kind of pro rata alongside the founders. What happens to the C-Corp in that scenario where they launch a token? The token grows and the community is, like 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 could happen? Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of times they'll become, they'll just become like,

Starting point is 01:21:56 kind of one software provider in the network. Oh, sure. Like, you know, they're, so, so for example, 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, you know,

Starting point is 01:22:10 they help make a little bit of software, they give some research guidance, but they don't control the network, they don't, you know, it's just 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, you know, so like Uniswap is a,

Starting point is 01:22:25 is a decentralized protocol, that we're investors in. It's sort of a, think of it as a decentralized New York Stock Exchange or something that's doing very well, multiple trillions and trillions and volume traded. And they separately, so they spun off this protocol, and then they separately have a website that they operate, which is what the company does. And the website is now, I believe it's a sub-5% of the volume on the protocol, but it's still 5%, right?

Starting point is 01:22:49 And so they're just one front end to it. And I think that's probably one of the best examples of what you're asking, John. That makes a ton of sense. What are you expecting to see out of the kind of real world asset category over the next couple 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 So you have dollars in the bank account. 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 Black Rock talking about, you know, treasury bills. I think it would be nice if anyone in the world, I think it would be good for the U.S. And I think it would be good for the world. If anyone in the world could buy, you know, four and a half percent treasury, you know, interest treasury bill, right? And have it secure and easy and permissionless and low fee. I think it's, you know, it's good for our, you know, the.

Starting point is 01:23:55 the US, the popularity of the dollar. And I think it's, you know, it would be nice for somebody who has a volatile currency to have access to those. So, you know, stocks, stocks bonds. And then you can imagine, you know, all of these sorts of so-called dark pools. So, you know, still a large part of finance is people using Bloomberg and calling each other. And a lot of that, you know, like trading bonds and muni 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. where maybe permission marketplaces where only kind of certain participants can participate. For them, the benefit is, you know, why haven't they created a network like a marketplace before?

Starting point is 01:24:33 Because they, you know, 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's going to use it. They don't trust each other. You know, they don't trust startups to do it because then the startup will start taking big fees. They've 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 or 100 entities

Starting point is 01:24:53 who previously wouldn't kind of coordinate together. I think that's one broader way to think of blockchains is like, it's like if AI, you know, 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 coordination, right, or more, you know, kind of collective action, getting a bunch of, you know, blockchains are fundamentally social technologies and it's about getting a bunch of, you know, that's what money is ultimately social, right? 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. Like we have one called Story Protocol, a project where investors in that's putting intellectual property on blockchains and letting people, you know, do capital formation and licensing and so forth around, you know, so you create a new, you know, a superhero theme thing and someone wants to make an AI remix of it. And like how do they say AI really important.

Starting point is 01:25:47 And so we think a lot about like in an AI world, like how will, you know, creators get paid. how will IP work? 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 that you could fund. And then a whole regulatory piece as well, which is we sort of force these large, companies now, biology described it as like, you know, to basically hold these, you know, honey pots of

Starting point is 01:26:28 data and there's probably got to be a better way. Yeah, a great question. So you mentioned World Coin. I'll just say briefly. So what World Coin does is what we call proof of humanity. So it's a way for you to get a cryptographic key that proves you're human. And the idea is 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 a 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 pay $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 know,

Starting point is 01:27:02 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, you know, like a bank needs to know I'm a U.S. citizen, let's say, or I'm, you know, have a certain income or certain profile, you know, health data or so forth. But zero knowledge proofs that 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 U.S. citizen and I can prove it back without revealing all, you know, my name and all the other kind of stuff that might docks me, right?

Starting point is 01:27:50 I mean, I just, you know, we just saw like, you know, day after day we see these giant hacks, K-Y-C hacks, so forth, like at this point, you should just assume all of your information that sadly has been hacked many times. And, you know, having Social Security as like your unique ID and password is just like a ridiculous system in this era. So, yeah. And meanwhile, we have these, you know, we carry around these supercomputers with, with, you know, biometrics and advanced cryptography. Like, why aren't we using it, right? The problem is not the, is not the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the core tech, the problem is coordination again.

Starting point is 01:28:22 It's how do you, everyone to agree on what the standards are, right? And that's why I think blockchains can be important because it's really 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? Amazing. That's great. Thank you so much for coming on.

Starting point is 01:28:38 We love to continue for another hour. Yeah, we can go way longer. We need to have you back. Awesome, guys. I appreciate it. It's great to see somebody a contrary an idea that a tech show that actually likes tech. Yeah. What a concept. Very bullish on it. So thank you for me.

Starting point is 01:28:50 Thank you so much. We'll talk to you. Thanks for you coming on, Chris. Have it going. Bye. Bye. Next up, we have Kyle coming on.

Starting point is 01:28:55 Yeah, I'm playing the soundboard. You know, we're talking to some big people. Just because he's the number one guy on the Midas list doesn't mean you can't hit him with the Ashton Hall. Yeah. You can't hit him with some sound effects.

Starting point is 01:29:04 I should have. I should have. But we have Kyle coming on. Let's bring him in the studio. How are you doing? Kyle. Welcome to the stream. Welcome.

Starting point is 01:29:11 Welcome. What's up, What's up, Dordy? It's great to see you. What's happening? Dude, I'm doing great, guys. I'm actually in Vegas right now.

Starting point is 01:29:19 I'm actually looking at the sphere out my window and my hotel. It's a Bitcoin Vegas is going on. It's a fun time of crypto company sponsoring the sphere right now, or maybe we, TBPN should buy the inventory 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. It's great to have you on.

Starting point is 01:29:43 What a bunch of places to start with? 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. Bitcoin conference. Can you break it down?

Starting point is 01:29:52 What are you expecting? What's happening on the ground? Yeah, it's Bitcoin Vegas is going on largest crypto conference ever. More than 30,000 people at Venetian Palazzo. Vance, either I just spoke or speaking shortly. David Tax is here. Bo Hines is here. Ross Oldbrook is here.

Starting point is 01:30:08 David Bailey, Michael Saylor. Tons of, tons of folks are all here. Senators here, Lummus, Haggurty, a whole bunch of other folks. So politics is here. Wall Street is here. Industry is here. Very, very exciting time in crypto. And what are the key indications or news items that people are looking for? There's people still hunting for different companies to establish Bitcoin reserves or news 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 refuteed reserve going to be funded.

Starting point is 01:30:44 You know, 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. You know, when the executive order was signed by President Trump a few weeks ago, it said that they can kind of fund the Strategic Reserve using revenue neutral mechanisms. And so there's a lot of discussion today about what exactly does that mean. Folks like Bo Hearns and David Sachs and the administration are certainly working on fixed. bring 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 defy to Bitcoin with like two or three or four asteris after that end of that statement. But like a lot of people

Starting point is 01:31:30 are trying to figure that out. And then obviously the kind of hot subject of the moment is these Bitcoin Treasury companies, the most recent of which I believe is DJT, which I think it just announced a $2.5 billion offering. Is that true social? That's true 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 and is just cramming. Because crypto's been an important industry for a decade.

Starting point is 01:32:02 You know, 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 breached the technical milestones 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 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

Starting point is 01:32:41 years and was really extenuated by the Biden administration. I don't think our industry would be as politically relevant 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, the thing that moved the election in both Congress and that

Starting point is 01:33:11 presidential in 2024 was the crypto industry in terms of dollars, reach, anger, PR, and kind of et cetera. That now has kind of swung from a very frustrating administration to extremely accommodating and welcoming administration that we have today. The work that Bill Hines and David Tax are doing in the executive branch is phenomenal. We're seeing awesome stuff out of DOJ, SECC, and CFTC on an almost daily basis now. And then the other big got out of Congress. the stable, you know, 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 the pendulum is like kind of swung from one extreme to the other.

Starting point is 01:33:57 I feel pretty good that we're going to kind of basically get, industry is going to 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 at their 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 in the executive branch, then you see Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., embed crypto into all of their respective operating systems. You have AI agents, you know, trading with crypto, whatever. And now crypto financial rails truly permeate global software.

Starting point is 01:34:38 Do you think there'll be a realignment from the left around crypto? Or do you 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 big tent. We're also pro-cropo. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:02 I mean, there's a certainly 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 not remember 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,

Starting point is 01:35:22 has not really realigned and embraced crypto. And I'd say I'm fairly surprised by that. It just seems kind of like a self, 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.

Starting point is 01:35:46 Sure. And so I've been surprised by the like lack of warm embrace. Makes sense. Jordi. Mutual friend Jared Madfez 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? I am really excited for D-PIN, and this is a category that's been around in crypto for a few years now, and we were very fortunate to help pioneer some of our early investments like helium. But the D-Pin things are starting to really work.

Starting point is 01:36:20 Helium, I believe yesterday or the day before was their first day ever, they had a million peak customers on the helium network in one day. Helium, for those we 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-in project called double zero, which basically is bringing private fiber to anyone who wants to pay for private fiber, provide of data. And it's going to go live over the summer. And it's going to trade, it's going to really change low latency trading on public blockchains. There's a handful of other kind of major deep-pin teams like HiveMapp.

Starting point is 01:37:00 Pipe Network and a number of others that we're involved in. And I think these are, you know, crypto is fundamentally financial in nature, but like finances is hard for people to grasp. And these, what's cool about these deep end use cases is that they are like fairly easy for, 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 Salon founders?

Starting point is 01:37:24 Yeah, I met Anatoli first. I don't actually don't know who introduced me to Anatoly, but I was in, uh, uh, San Francisco. go in April of 2018. I was at a co-working space and I met Anatoly on a Saturday night. And I was sent, he had sent me the white paper for the proof of history and Salana Consent's white paper. I remember I read it and 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 set 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.

Starting point is 01:38:00 And Anatoly was the opposite. He was like, I hate academia. I don't ever want to write a fucking paper. 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 going to 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.

Starting point is 01:38:21 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. obviously got the meat raw shortly thereafter and breast is history 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 contrary in your mind um i mean look multi-goin 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 seeing what happened.

Starting point is 01:39:00 In hindsight, I would say like, multi-coins generally likes to invest in more blue oceans than red oceans. And investing in an L-1 was certainly a red ocean investment. And so when we invest in red oceans, we just want to 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, Tolly's background was completely different than the other L1 founders. There's a number of other things that kind of stood out, but that being the primary one.

Starting point is 01:39:35 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 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 people that are trading are trying to trade, you know, specific metas and then identify new ones. But 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.

Starting point is 01:40:23 late, right? Once the thing is already big, you don't necessarily want to invest in the fourth or fifth player in a category. Yeah, I feel very fortunate. We've been involved early in a number of as metas, for lack of a better word. First, probably being high performance blockchains, being Solana. Second, probably being D-PIN, starting with helium and HiveMapper. More recently, we've been very focused on on-chain privacy. 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 and fully homomorphic encryption, which is a totally different cryptographic approach.

Starting point is 01:41:01 So those are probably the three, like, 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. 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 stable coins in the hands of people who want stable coins. We've invested in a number of P2P exchanges that make it possible for people in emerging markets, 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,

Starting point is 01:41:40 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. helping you know people with capital controls get on chain is interesting it's kind of like crypto's 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 into 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 enjoy geordy john thanks for having me awesome be here you're the man we'll talk to you soon cheers bye

Starting point is 01:42:16 Next up we have Ben Pasternak. 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. This probably has to be the most viral new crypto app. Yeah. In at least a year, at least six months. At least six months.

Starting point is 01:42:39 I'm excited to chat with him. So Ben, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What up? believe in Ben. What's going on? Welcome to the show. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:42:51 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 had no idea what a tear you've been on. A friend of artist Dylan is here at the studio. He's going to do a live interview later.

Starting point is 01:43:03 And he brought up. He brought you up. And John was like, Ben, Pastornax? Yeah. We talked a bunch. And then had no idea. He's so locked in on traditional tech that he had no idea what you're up to and then we explained, of course. So yeah, why don't you actually just give me a, catch me up

Starting point is 01:43:21 to speed on what you're building? Yeah. Well, Believe is a platform for belief in people empowerment. So if you want to contribute something to the world, if you want to build something, if you're going to create odd, if you're going to 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, what technologies are we leveraging? It's obviously somewhat crypto related, but then comp it to a Patreon for me. Well, so I'll give you some context. Luke Metro, front of the show.

Starting point is 01:43:52 I believe he used beliefs. Okay. Okay, got it. John's familiar. Okay, I have, you're back to it this. Cool, yeah, yeah. It's basically, we enable people to launch a coin on Slana super easily. You know, the tokenomics itself are pretty straightforward.

Starting point is 01:44:08 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 yet, the product went like Superviral 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 coin. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:44:36 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 the initial kickoff and instantiation happens all on X. Is that correct? Exactly. Yeah. So you launch an X and, you know, 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 kind of like an ecosystem for people to like integrate their coin into that product, you know, engage with different mechanisms and that's all through the app.

Starting point is 01:45:09 So what, sorry, what is kind of like the optimistic use case here for someone actually using this to fund kind of a new idea or a 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 great art or even raise money for the next movie because of Hollywood and all these other dynamics. So what does a win condition look like for you? 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, you know, I guess the big trend is you're seeing a lot of ARR, MR, and people's bios. And I think thanks to AI, you know, engineers are way more efficient.

Starting point is 01:45:54 There's like less of a need to raise a huge amount of money up front. So if you can like, I guess boot shopping 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, like there isn't really a great way to fundraise for anything. Like 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 like massive funding for those types of projects. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:22 Do you think that there should be a link between the token and the equity in the company that's eventually created? I imagine it 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 ship them, we thought there'd be purely like attention coins and speculative, but that quickly changed because, you know, the first launches that did really well, started integrating their coins into that product, you know, introduced different like burning

Starting point is 01:46:53 mechanisms. So I think that the kind of way I do 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 going to come up with all different ways that kind of inspire us long term. You know, yeah, the regulatory environment is rapidly shifting. So I think that, 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, etc.

Starting point is 01:47:27 It's very interesting. What's it been like building in crypto transitioning from It feels like to me watching what you built with simulate from afar, you know, was always very high profile, always in the news. And more so than I think like a traditional CPG company. Totally. So in that sense, like just being good at thinking different and capturing attention and leveraging that probably set you up pretty well for building in crypto. What would have been some of the challenges?

Starting point is 01:47:57 I imagine you're not sleeping a lot because every time you go to sleep, there's something, something's breaking or someone's yelling at you or something like that, but what's it been like? Yeah, well, you know, it's not my first rodeo, to your point. And, you know, prior to simulate, I built a social networking app called Monkey that has tens of millions of users to this day. So I've got, you know, I'm familiar building consumer software. I think to your point, yeah, the crypto stuff is 24-7. So it's, you know, in most spaces, you have kind of room to iterate and make mistakes in crypto, the market is less forgiving. So it's, you know, it's a tricky balance because you obviously can't be stagnant,

Starting point is 01:48:30 but you have to keep evolving and changing things. So yeah, definitely a pressure cooker environment. But, you know, the outcomes are really crazy. And, you know, the cool thing I believe is we have, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of creators that have, like, raised funding. People have, like, 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.

Starting point is 01:48:53 So for me, that's, like, super energizing. And I hope we can continue to do that 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, is there a world? But if you guys become, you know, stripe 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.

Starting point is 01:49:24 So kind of the biggest case study is Dup, which is like a venture back 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 yeah, Bobby the founder of Jeep has 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 might like launch a project that later evolves into like an actual company and the coin is like yeah could definitely be tied to that um you know watching things watching how things unfold i want to talk about the line between like good

Starting point is 01:50:06 and bad projects essentially like there's two narratives one is uh look it's all a casino no crying in the casino the the the the the gen's love to just do whatever and just like you know like you know like you know what you're getting into um the the the the the flip side of that is like you know 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 is the line? What would you counsel people to kind of rules of the road 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.

Starting point is 01:50:58 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, by the way, I had a lot on earlier, Love Al-Lon, he's great, you know, friendly with him. And, you know, so Pump is a huge innovator in the space. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:51:17 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. Like, we can't say, hey, this is good. Because, you know, if we do that, we're going to be wrong some of the time. Sure. But it is quite easy to say, hey, this is bad.

Starting point is 01:51:34 And when we identify bad actors as, like, mechanisms we can integrate to kind of, like, yeah, basically disincentivize them from launching with us versus, like, one of these other platforms. Yeah. The, I think, like, 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 things they do. And it's our job to kind of like create harmony between the traders and the founders.

Starting point is 01:51:59 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 priced round, your first time doing it, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:52:15 But by their series A, they identified the problems they made. So there is education with like existing fundraising mechanisms. And I think that for this two, there's an education. that we need to make like really easy. Yeah. I'm interested.

Starting point is 01:52:28 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. We had talks to people off the ledge. Yeah. After the Trump, you know, coin happened. 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 most basic thing would be like don't rug. 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 native to crypto. But I could I could launch a coin, not sell any. Some traders could come in pump up the coin. And then people buy when it's at the high. And then those 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 like the messaging and the risk reward,

Starting point is 01:53:29 like how do you think the rule? What you're describing is there's like a PVP dynamic. Totally. And so I'm curious for you at a platform level, do you think that, do you think that like for example, you know, are there things you can do at a product level so that if an artist comes on to

Starting point is 01:53:48 believe is like using the mechanism to raise money, you prevent it from turning into this like PVP warfare where people are duking it out. I feel like we're going to reinvent accredited investor laws because the whole idea is like a venture capital firm can lose $100 million on some crazy biotech startup or some hard tech startup. And it really is no crying in the casino.

Starting point is 01:54:09 You know, it's like you guys did your due diligence. You signed the documents and you gave it a shot in that particular technology didn't work out. And so as long as there's no fraud, like you move on and you make money on the next thing. But for, you know, like random retail people, sometimes they get caught up and bad outcomes happen. I feel like there's some vibes in the ecosystem that can just be enforced loosely. There's also some rules.

Starting point is 01:54:32 There's some platform stuff. So I'm interested in kind of how you're dealing with that because 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. Totally, yeah. Yeah, to me, it's so, you know, pumping being the World Wide Web, there's like very small mechanisms that you can integrate that I think just make the whole space a lot safer. Sure. And yeah, to your point, read the snipers where they like buy a large part of the supply, they, you know, kind of 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, you know, the snipers will still get some ownership, but there, the ownership is like greatly reduced. Got it.

Starting point is 01:55:11 There's rate limiting. So there's like a max purchase amount, you know, for the first couple seconds. So, yeah, a lot of these anti-sniper mechanisms are just like kind of evolving right now. And I think they're going to lead to a much healthier ecosystem. That's interesting. And in addition, like, yeah, I think it's like the kind of fee. 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. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:39 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 other thing is that within the so-and-so trenches is, they've been trading these kind of like traditional meme coins forever. And it's a really fun game that everyone enjoys. But there is hunger for a new game. And I think that the vision here has really like energized the whole space.

Starting point is 01:56:10 So that narrative alone, I think, has done a lot of damage in a good way. The opportunity, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, anything else? Very cool. This is great. Thank you so much for breaking it down. I'm sure you have a bunch of new things to work on in the 15 minutes that you've been on.

Starting point is 01:56:26 Good luck building and excited to follow. Thanks for breaking down. I actually look at a time. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. It's been cool to see everything blow up for you guys in a good way. Yeah, yeah, we appreciate it. Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 01:56:38 Great to chat. Cheers. Fantastic. A round of applause. I'd see him winning. If you're in CPG, privates or crypto. Yeah, it works. It works.

Starting point is 01:56:49 I guess that's a play. Every once in a while. Next up we have Tom from Dragonfly Capital coming in the studio. We'll break down some more trends. It is interesting to look at companies like Pump, which was only launched something like a year ago. And now it was done close to a billion dollars of revenue. Then you have the leave, and both these businesses look pretty obvious in hindsight, right?

Starting point is 01:57:14 But just required the specific type of founder to unlock. lock it. Really quickly, if you're designing a crypto app, you've got to be on Vanta. Go to Vanta.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams. Build. What? You said Vanta instead of Figma. Go to Figma.com. I was like, it's a big day. Whoa, whoa. Yeah, go to Figma. Yeah. It is the background of this show. And if you work at Vanta, use Figma to design Vanta. That's right. We're creating a Karetsu. And if you're in Figma, use Vanta for compliance, for SOC2 compliance. Vanta automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process

Starting point is 01:57:56 and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. That's right. Two ads in one go. Let's do it. Nice work, John. Let's bring in Tom. Let's bring in Tom. How are you doing, Tom? There he is.

Starting point is 01:58:11 Good. Nice to be. There is. Technology brothers. What's up? What's happening? How are you? Not how long.

Starting point is 01:58:17 Doing well. I'm loving the suits. I mean, you guys always bring it, but you look great. Have you watched the stream at all? Are we asking two 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, but 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 bare 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 that's not one year out, but 10 years out, 100 years out. What's the future look like?

Starting point is 01:58:52 Break it down. A hundred years out. I think we're all going to 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. I think you're going to get a little, you know, circle equity air drop during the IKEA. They're going to just air drop some shares to all the UCC holders. We're shilling for the U.S. dollar. We're shills. Yeah. Anytime, anytime a company sells. like a traditional crypto asset and buys USC, they're defending the dollar. They're defending the dollar. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:59:23 I agree. I actually, you know, I think you talk about stable coin. And when people talk about stable coins, they talk a lot about flow, right? They talk about using stable coins for payments, B2B payments, P to P 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 stable coins being a way to, mitigate a lot of the U.S. debt because now you have all these new treasury holders. Tether is like

Starting point is 01:59:51 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. Stable coins 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-U.S. And I think like using promoting dollars and the digital assets, which people saw as alternatives to the dollar are now some of the greatest defenders. Yeah. To dig into it though, is, like, Tethers the seventh largest holder. Is that because they displaced like fidelity by taking like all of the treasuries and they just move them over?

Starting point is 02:00:32 Are these, can we really think of these as like net new treasuries that are being bought? These are incremental, right? Because 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, I don't actually, Rob Haddock, who's one of other GPs with me at Dragonfly, just had a great stablecoin research piece come out yesterday, talking about who's actually using stable coins. And it's, yes, some people in the U.S., and yes, maybe some people who previously would have purchased treasuries through the broker,

Starting point is 02:01:02 but actually it's people who are offshore. And that is actually, I think, kind of the killer app. 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.

Starting point is 02:01:27 Yeah. That's part two. Well, they're waiting for the air drop. No, I mean, Asia and the U.S. have always sort of, I 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 U.S. when it comes to anything, C-Fi.

Starting point is 02:01:47 We're early investors in Bybit and Bigget, which are now two of the largest exchanges, incredible businesses. I mean, we're talking billions of dollars in revenue. Some of the features and some of the products that they offered, U.S. exchanges are just now sort of catching up, too. So I would cite as one example, a lot of Asian exchanges offered what we now call CDIFi of offering a totally normal centralized exchange experience in the front end. but wrapping some sort of defy protocol on the back end to be able to offer people, you know, trading for new assets or to be offer, you know, lending and financing opportunities or yield opportunities or whatever is actually available on-chain.

Starting point is 02:02:26 But without all the complexity and yuckiness of, you know, having to manage your own keys, which is kind of what Normies want. Coinbase just launched, you know, 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 kind of playing catch up to what's been happening in Asia for many, many years. I think there's also been this trend of more, I would say, Chinese, previously like O-to-O founders moving into crypto and frankly also moving offshore because they see, hey, venture in China is like kind of dead. You know, 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 and a global capital base,

Starting point is 02:03:13 but with sort of the skills that I already have. And so we're early investors in Kyto, 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 scraping Twitter data right now, ingesting that, and then sort of spitting that back out into the 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

Starting point is 02:03:42 talent now sort of moving into crypto. Interesting. 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, six months? Every two years? What are you thinking? No, but in all seriousness, how are you? I mean, I imagine your consumer crypto investment. you need to get, you need to get this bet right. Otherwise, you're going to look like a fool in 10 years. So I am at.

Starting point is 02:04:15 Jordy, this is what I have nightmares about. 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. I think a lot of sort of what AI crypto is broken down into is people trying to do decentralized inference, sort of this, you know, GPU marketplace. And this is sort of, again, an old idea in crypto. This was something that Ghalam way back in the day was trying to offer for video rendering.

Starting point is 02:04:43 Now kind of 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, 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, you know, that is actually kind of the thing that you want. And so like a decentralized network actually is just like it doesn't really have the right characteristics of something you would, like that type of compute that you want. Compute is not a monolith. The areas where I think we've been investing in AI meets crypto in the area that we get really excited about. You mentioned sort of NPC and agent payments. I agree. This just seems like kind of a no-brainer where you want deterministic finality. You want your micro-payments. Something that just like existing.

Starting point is 02:05:35 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 ATI call for a fraction of a penny, and they're never going to use the service again. That's something where stable point 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,

Starting point is 02:06:11 but basically they allow you to run sort of sharded inference locally on your own network. So let's say you have a couple Mac studios. They're really sort of specializing Apple Silicon right now. It will automatically discover and execute, let's say something like DeepSeekR1 across those different computers on your local network. So you can run really great models on consumer. grade hardware given sort of existing shortage of GPUs. And so you can imagine that, hey, if you can sort of distribute and

Starting point is 02:06:43 ensure 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're going 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, you know, someone else's cloud.

Starting point is 02:07:10 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, 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 seat being like, please take my money versus, you know, maybe 10 years ago would have been reversed. Totally. I think that is definitely a trend that we see. And I don't think it's even as early a

Starting point is 02:08:04 crypto venture thing specifically, but I mean, you were talking earlier about people throwing, you know, 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. 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. 18, crypto was was was a monolith. You give some some capital to a fund manager and they're going to decide, again, I'm going to buy some Bitcoin. Am I going to buy some ETH? Am I going to

Starting point is 02:08:44 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, 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 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 didn't use some wacky custodian. The whole process was very convoluted and so great.

Starting point is 02:09:23 You managed to do it to 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. 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 Ether,

Starting point is 02:09:48 Soul, 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 some liquid assets that we think have sort of venture upside. And then you have sort of true dedicated liquid funds. Maybe those are, you know, Delta unusual 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

Starting point is 02:10:21 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, there's sort of the specialization in the strategy. Maybe to what, you know, Ani was mentioning and what you were mentioning earlier, 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 A, TBD, 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, you know, north of a billion dollars, to your point, where do you actually go and deploy that?

Starting point is 02:10:59 Maybe there are some equity-only companies, and certainly we do a number of those where we think, hey, there's, this company is going to IPO. You know, we don't think there's going to be a token. It can be 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 sometimes see these very wacky rounds where some company raises some insane amount of money and you're like, what is going on here? 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? It feels like the industry broadly, you know, this year has been up and down, but so has every

Starting point is 02:11:45 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 kind of risk do you see at a high level that that that actually were you? Yeah, um, a million things, honestly. It's, it's an industry that is always changing and therefore there's always more things to be worried about, but also things to be, you know, excited about at the same time. Um, maybe to your point around, um, regulatory clarity, I'm more worried that we, we don't get regulatory clarity and we fail to get

Starting point is 02:12:26 a stable coin 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 stable coins 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, they can be, they can have privacy for peer-to-peer transactions or do we get true Panopticon status centralized control? That's something that is going to be bad on a 10 to 100 year time horizon, maybe not so short-term bad, but we need to sort of 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 sort of Bitcoin treasury structured companies.

Starting point is 02:13:16 I think there's only so much market demand for these assets. And I'm like, like 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, just focus on to cut you off right there.

Starting point is 02:13:38 That's that type of everyone 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're saying, it just never dies. Every time someone thinks it's over, that's actually the time that we're so back. 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.

Starting point is 02:14:02 Well, thank you for hopping on. This is fantastic. Thank you for coming on. Come back on again soon. I think you might be a generational yapper. You're one of us. You know, we lived a post. We died a post.

Starting point is 02:14:12 It's all part of the same life cycle. So thanks for having me on. All right. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you, Tom. Cheers. In the meantime, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

Starting point is 02:14:23 I'm just going to clap through this, John. 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:14:48 That's ideal. Yeah. That's our goal. We're trying to capture 110%. of the town. We'll go into that more later. Next up, we have Constantine from Block Demon here. How you doing?

Starting point is 02:15:01 Welcome to the stream. Hey guys. How's it going? Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking it off a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company just to get us started? Yeah, yeah. No, listen, it's a great question.

Starting point is 02:15:13 Block Demon, you know, the word Damon means in computer science and operating system that runs silently in the background. And that's really what Block Demon is. we connect institutions to a blockchain networks and we allow for compliant and secure monetization of the underlying fee and earn structure, right? And so translated, it means we run nodes for institutions. And so we're pure B2B play. And so we run core infrastructure. We run around 250,000 nodes across 40 different data centers around the world, enabling basically institutions to purchase and hold assets in their respective consumers.

Starting point is 02:15:52 That has been the large sort of activity over the last five years. Right now, we're sort of pivoting more into the defy 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 easy to. So BlockDemon is an enabler. We're really purpose-built to meet enterprise-grade demand for infrastructure. A couple of things that are special, I guess, is that we are domiciled in the U.S. For better or worse.

Starting point is 02:16:26 And, you know, we've been able to attract very institutional capital. And so on our board governance, we have people like J.P. 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, you know, we're very foundational to the space. We've been around for seven and a half years. We, you know, raised a bunch of money from, you know, said institutions in order to really

Starting point is 02:17:05 bring institutions to crypto networks and do it in a way that's, as mentioned, secure. I'm from Germany. I've come from the cell network world and I always describe notes or cell networks. at Nokia. Yeah, Nokia. Deutsche Telecom actually is my claim to fame. I worked for back then a young man called Nikesharoa, who, you know, for a moment was president at SoftBank and now runs Palo Alto Networks and also was chief business

Starting point is 02:17:33 office 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. Yeah, it's kind of similar. Yeah. Well, can you give us a temperature check on the enterprise?

Starting point is 02:17:47 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. 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? And what is kind of top of mind for crypto amongst like the Fortune 500 from what you've assessed?

Starting point is 02:18:15 Yeah. So I think there's different categories, right? And so first of, obviously, the core financial institutions, the Robin Hoods, the PayPal's, that enable people to purchase crypto and hold it are now all investigating, you know, how do you earn using these assets, right? And so I think you have existing fintech players that have offered basic crypto services that are now, feel a lot more empowered in, you know, what we call staking or a defense. to offer sort of earn adjacent products to their customer base.

Starting point is 02:18:50 I think you'll see a big trend there. In the TradFi world, 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, how do we actually, what technology do we use in order to custody crypto assets in our own infrastructure? And so I think, you know, 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, all these institutions are really figuring out what their own proprietary basic solution setup is in order to custody assets and then also

Starting point is 02:19:27 offer adjacent earned potential here. And so we see a lot of that. And with the sort of more Sony-esque 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 day. when everybody had a totally permissioned little hyper ledger thing going i think uh we've made some progress there is a funny thing it's like we should we should pay attention to this crypto you know thing and then oh we should just make our own blockchain that's that's that's the

Starting point is 02:19:57 that's the way to get involved it's it's yeah it definitely was a yeah yeah we should start our own visa network competitor yeah yeah why not why not what um go for yeah and then it's changed with like the you know the optimism the zk zinc arbitrams like you know people being able to easily spin up a sort of permission chain on a public network, right? And so there's been some progress there. And we see quite a bit there. And then obviously all the ETF stuff and technology that's that you need in order to basically custody these assets and offer yield over time.

Starting point is 02:20:32 What, what legacy, you know, we've had a bunch of interesting conversations today and 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 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,

Starting point is 02:21:15 right? 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. I feel like I joined Nokia in 2005 on top of the world. I left in 2010 after I ran it into the ground. And so, like, at least you can joke about it now. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, it was obviously a, you know, 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, but very, very bad in streamlining singular software tools across its platform. 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.

Starting point is 02:22:00 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 are so complex. And, you know, JP Morgan has 100,000 engineers and they keep on building and doing stuff.

Starting point is 02:22:24 And so pivoting away from that archaic infrastructure is really, really difficult. And, you know, they're starting to do it. I think, frankly, I think we're all. all way behind here, you know, 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. You know, 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, you know, and let it be a Coinbase issue with stablecoin 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 archeric. But with that custody, you also obviously lose a lot of control. And 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.

Starting point is 02:23:43 And the infrastructure currently is way, way to 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've 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? To just say, hey, I just want to send Ethereum to this address. You know, like kind of, and that can be an AI. It'd be nice if you could tell a wallet, you know, an agentic wallet.

Starting point is 02:24:17 Just make me a 10% return daily, compounded daily, just forever. Please, don't make mistakes. Just get me a 10 back, 10x this. You know, but basically make the, you know, but basically make the amount. the interface that simple, right? Hey, wire securely $100 to France. Yeah, I don't know if they need it. But, you know, we can, those type of things, I think, are going to be real improvements on how this works. Yeah, 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,

Starting point is 02:24:57 stables or other assets. And so how much attention are you paying to the policy decisions in markets outside of the U.S.? Or is that not a focus for you right now? No, for sure. I mean, the outside of the U.S. is still our largest market because we were in the U.S. and obviously got clobbered by regulators and by basically Operation Shokepoint 2.0. And so we expanded massively into Asia. Asia is a really exciting market for us.

Starting point is 02:25:26 see, you know, Asia's lots of things, lots of different technologies and standards. And, you know, 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, you know, reminds me a little bit back in the day we're trying to figure out how to distribute music via digital channels and cell networks, right? And so once you pixelate stuff in ones and zeros, it's just really difficult to contain it, right? And you're going to see that with currencies on a very basic level as well, right?

Starting point is 02:26:03 Like it's just like you can try and do the China and ban Bitcoin and things like that. But the reality is it's a temporary solution. People are going to find ways around it. And so I think we've, 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 without paying for them. So the idea that you're going to sort of regulate crypto out of existence is a bit silly. Last question for me, MCP, people have been talking about potentially integrating stable coins into that standard.

Starting point is 02:26:42 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 what is your preference? Well, my preference is that it's all integrated in one, right? Like, I really want to, ultimately, I'm an old school crypto guy.

Starting point is 02:27:02 I want access and inclusion via crypto rails for everyone that no single entity can control, right? And so my job is to bring a substantial amount of volume from hard-coded institutional rails into open source on-chain networks, right? And so that's my preference. I think it's going to take a minute with regulators, even though we have a much better administration that's a lot more open to thinking about how to regulate this and a 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. And then we've got to see how much support the industry can continue to garner across also the aisle, basically.

Starting point is 02:27:56 It has to be a bipartisan issue on the regulatory front as well if we want to see real progress. And so, but, you know, obviously we're very optimistic here that we can come up with something that is as open as possible and replaces as many of the legacy rails as possible. Fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. Hope you have a great rest of your day. 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.

Starting point is 02:28:27 How are you going. Next up, I've got to tell you about numeral. Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance benchmark series A. Benchmark Series A. Yeah, I wonder how sales tax compliance for a... Well, you know who has to pay sales tax? Pudgy Penguins, because they sell real things in the real world. Oh, yeah, they do.

Starting point is 02:28:49 They do. And we have Luca from Pudgy Penguins coming on the stream next. We should just make the next 20 minutes us pitching new. Exactly, exactly. How you paying sales tax? Let's get to the really important questions. We don't want to know about the NFT market. The people want to know.

Starting point is 02:29:03 We want to know about your sales tax stack and how numerals fitting in. Luca, welcome to the stream. We are, of course, joking. How are you doing? What's going on? Welcome. You guys. Happy to be here.

Starting point is 02:29:16 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 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 62nd version is I was a huge collector 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 bored apes, punks, and penguins. Unfortunately, penguins kind of got mismanaged.

Starting point is 02:29:58 They were founded by a bunch of 18-year-olds in their college dorm basement with no operational experience. So at no fault of them, you know, bored apes ended up being a $4 billion business. Punks became a legacy collection with a multi-billion dollar market cap. And penguins kind of wither 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. I was really involved in just IP. You got to get those for the studio. Yeah, I see those ads all the time. I didn't realize you're behind this. Ben, Ben, order some gelblasters right now.

Starting point is 02:30:35 I'll get you guys, 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 4th. 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 crypto is intimidating. It's taboo. But I think there's no better way to invade the hearts and minds of everyday consumers

Starting point is 02:31:13 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 is severely underdeveloped. 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.

Starting point is 02:31:42 I think children's health and penguins, I think, are the two places that we donate and we're charitable. Awesome. You mentioned that the early Pudgy Penguins community 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, the 10K NFTs go out, they mint, 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?

Starting point is 02:32:24 Like what are they asking for and what are you trying to give them? Yeah. I think what every community member in crypto wants is productivity and pushing the boundaries and forward progress within, you know, both the internal IP and maybe just for the category in and of itself. But just to be clear, like we bought Pudgy Penguins under the, to the guys that the NFT race and the NFT buildout was severely underdeveloped. And there was a bar still yet to be set.

Starting point is 02:32:51 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 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 1 was going to come 20 years earlier than it actually was going to come. And I thought, you know, if this was the next generation brand and all of these companies were raising billions of dollars under this guys, then as a brand

Starting point is 02:33:27 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 toys and 10,000 retailers. Every toy is tied in with an NFT and crypto experience. And the whole thing really segues. You would build this thing the same way you know, Hasbro 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 that you believe will create the most

Starting point is 02:34:11 value long-term and 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, you know, heavily invested in the projects. But then there's also some hard decisions to make at different times. Yeah, I think the community is bought in under this guys 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 relevant for a lot of crypto founders, but I coined this

Starting point is 02:34:53 like three years ago, which is we're basically building a publicly traded startup, where I have all of the cons are being publicly traded with none of the pros, and I'm a startup, right? If I shit the bed, right? And price and crypto is the best marketing because it's such a hyper-financialized asset class. And, and, and, you know, I do something great. Price goes up. You know, 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, you know, the, the financialization to me is, is a hyper form of alignment. And it can be your greatest superpower, which I think we've been

Starting point is 02:35:35 able to harness and galvanize over the last couple of years. Or it can be your, greatest kryptonite and 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 rapport with the community and the whole thing just kind of backfires yeah do you think uh if you look back at at the nft t category holistically is our projects is part of that kryptonite just being overcapitalized has that uh has that uh has that uh have 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, many other projects in the space,

Starting point is 02:36:20 especially as, you know, certain projects got marked, you know, 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 be. make. You know, 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 Web 2 to come here because the premium on users and success here is probably 10 to 15 to 20x would it be in what it would be in the real world, meaning like the EBITA of Pudgy Penguins, you know, might be, you know, we might be a 300,

Starting point is 02:37:04 350 million dollar business today. You know, we've created, you know, five plus billion dollars in value over the last couple of years. And, you know, our total ecosystem is north of $2 billion. So I think from our perspective, it's really just a matter of, you know, being resource constraint has been one of the biggest things for us. And probably the thing, 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, you know, 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 and raise a lot of capital really quickly.

Starting point is 02:37:52 And the NFT cohort of 2020, 2020, 2021 is exactly that. I mean, guys made, you know, 50, 100, a billion dollars, you know, within 12 months of being in business. You're not going to be a superstar organization, you know, off of that. type of growth unless you're just a one in a million entrepreneur and group. But that that wasn't the case here. And so I think I think us being scrappy has been huge for us. We raised you know nine million our seed round and we haven't raised anything else for Pudgy since then. And you know this year we'll do 40, 50 million dollars in revenue. So you know so far so good.

Starting point is 02:38:27 That's awesome. Can you talk about the decision to surface crypto functionality to the user to the customer. The Instagram has 1.8 million followers, never really mentions crypto. There's a world where you're communicating to a non-crypto-native 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 or the other direction? How do you think about that dichot? Yeah, so I'm a consumer product guy. And consumer products conversions and 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.

Starting point is 02:39:16 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. 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 our 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,

Starting point is 02:40:05 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 transcended into my family the way that this has. This is clearly doing something for the industry that nobody else is doing. 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.

Starting point is 02:40:35 But, you know, if we really want crypto to succeed, it's got to be for the woman. It's got to be for the child. As silly as it sounds, those kids are becoming crypto-native. And an anecdotal story that I think your audience will love is, you know, I started to meet some of the top salonathe 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.

Starting point is 02:40:59 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, you know, we're crypto-adjacent and we're crypto-familiar, 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 want to speak to. That's pretty awesome. Talk to me about the decision to tradeoffs between the Ethereum blockchain and Solana.

Starting point is 02:41:25 Obviously, the project originally launched on Ethereum, but the Puggey token is on Solana now. What are the tradeoffs? 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'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 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.

Starting point is 02:41:58 And I think it plays its role really well doing that. 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:42:41 I think building an centralized network state and building a block. to win, right, and to dominate, you know, tech and to, you know, 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 their global and their global, so global liquidity and global composability, 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, humance problems, right? Like, like Stripe used to, you know, stripe and pay out with take your money and shut you down and do the whole nine, you know, like blockchain will

Starting point is 02:43:18 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. 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 Salana doesn't have the best experience for that person coming from Instagram to that. 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 on some gas fees even even when it that's relatively low for the ecosystem you know they don't want to spend a

Starting point is 02:43:56 couple bucks buying the token and that's about it so it seemed like a good fit that's awesome well thank you so much for stopping by this is fantastic yeah I really appreciated your perspective would love to have you back on again for for a longer interview yeah and I'm excited for our gelblaster Nerf battle basically yeah we need it I need to be able to get sent me an address. It's going to be pretty obnoxious. The packages are going to be.

Starting point is 02:44:18 I'll send it to you soon. Amazing. Thanks for coming on. Cheers. Really quickly before our next guest, public investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-ass investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions of course crypto.

Starting point is 02:44:31 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? Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I should have worn my suit.

Starting point is 02:44:46 I know, you should have worn your suit. I mean, it's, it's, it's, uh. I feel so underdressed. Yeah. Well, fitting that you're the first guest. You've been a close friend and advisor to the show here informally. Yeah. Thanks much for a long time.

Starting point is 02:44:59 Happy crypto day. Crypto day. It's been, it's been very fun. It's such a, it's amazing to get perspectives from so many different parts of the industry, investors, et cetera. And there's a lot to be optimist. mystic right now, a lot more so than when you started Crypto of the game. Yeah, I feel like we launched season one kind of in the depths of the bear market. It was, you know, early, early 2024.

Starting point is 02:45:25 I was trying to think about what to do next. And I know we had spoken. Well, you had this idea forever. Years, yeah. I can kind of give you the whole backstory, which I know you know, but could 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.

Starting point is 02:45:41 But in hindsight, it was kind of the best time to launch. Totally. 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 callback. 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.

Starting point is 02:46:07 You picked your tribe mate. You, you know, played Tic Tactoe 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 envision 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 you're listening, you know, you might remember a live interactive game show and started my career in TV but joined HQ for kind of the grand vision of a live interactive TV network. So in the same way that HQ took a game show and made it live and

Starting point is 02:46:49 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, a 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 around drop. Yep. And just kind of like, you know, was starting to think about what was next a couple years ago. Well, it's interesting because it was this one of the most complex products that you can build, right? This like social, interactive multiplayer, constantly evolving game that's happening on chain. So watching you, watching you build it, I mean, you and

Starting point is 02:47:34 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 is, it kind of ballooned into this 24-7 game show. I mean, I kind of assumed, you know, the way that it's set up, 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.

Starting point is 02:48:10 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 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. Weren't people like basically calling in sick or taking vacation days so that they could just fully walk in?

Starting point is 02:48:44 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 Bologi,

Starting point is 02:49:10 but crypto, because it's so financialized, 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. Yeah, I mean, we made up in the DMs for sure.

Starting point is 02:49:28 Yeah. Yeah, so the way that it works is basically you buy your entry for 0.1eath. 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 will try to buy up 51% of the entries and basically guarantee themselves a victory. There were a couple things we did to try to prevent that. and we for season one we kind of kept entries uncapped so that people couldn't like necessarily figure out what the 51% mark would be but yeah right before the entries locked and the season

Starting point is 02:50:10 began anish and his army of bots basically bought up most of the slots and kind of wearing my like web 2 HQ trivia hat I was like oh bots are bad basically like kicked them all out and was like this is this was built for real people and real players and uh immediately got the wrath of crypto twitter which um somehow happens every season to the point where like a few friends joke and think that like i'll intentionally like drum up some ct controversy so more people talk about CTG um but uh i mean i immediately realized that uh you know bots aren't bad in this world and um So, yeah, we ended up refunding a niche and, you know, making things right. And he was so nice.

Starting point is 02:50:57 And, you know, we ended on good terms. What was it like bringing Web 2 or sort of traditional companies into CTG? 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 like humbling and refreshing to see that basically 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.

Starting point is 02:51:39 The rest were all kind of like crypto-native brands, one of which being uniswap. Do you expect legacy brands to get more involved? with crypto. 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? 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 with like the big Fortune 500, like non-crypto brands. Yeah. The artifact example, like didn't go well for Nike. I would say the CTG example probably didn't go well for Adidas, which is like a whole other conversation. But I think we as in

Starting point is 02:52:24 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 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 that as you know the experience in the UI and the US gets better and you know things like Privy like improve the login flow and wallet creation and kind of abstract away all of basically all of the crypto from these experiences I think like big

Starting point is 02:53:08 brands won't necessarily know that they're doing quote-unquote crypto integrations and all just feel like the internet that makes sense how How have you seen crypto? I would put CTG in the category of crypto entertainment or crypto gaming. It's one of the few games that it feels like crypto, Twitter, CryptoX, 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 open-world games that raised massive amounts of money, but then haven't, seemingly haven't delivered. Yeah, ironically for a crypto game founder, I'm not much of like a gamer myself.

Starting point is 02:53:50 I think of CTG is much more of a game show than like 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 played around with YAPSter, but it's an interactive game show where you basically can submit memes. The players can vote on the memes, and like the winning meme each show is launched as a token. So it kind of has that, and it's 100% live, and everyone kind of, like, votes in real time. There's a chat functionality. And because of the speculation of, like, the token that, like, basically wins at the end, it has that feeling of a live show.

Starting point is 02:54:29 So I would put Yapser in my mind as, like, the only other kind of, like, live interactive game show that's, like, really, really exciting me right now. And how big can something like that get in your mind? I think huge. I mean, there's, like, the secret sauce at HQ was that you could win real. money and like that is the case for like 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. Or as with something like HQ tons of people could win but at the same time because of that you had folks basically winning like 25 cents or less than that with

Starting point is 02:55:06 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 going to 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, because 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, you know, and I would, you know, we would have, I remember having kind of conversations about why it would probably not be good for CTG if you were to raise. And then, but many people, I think wouldn't have made that same decision.

Starting point is 02:55:57 Yeah, no, I think with regards to raising, I think like not every single idea has to be a venture-scale idea. I mean, we've spoken a ton about this offline, but I think CTG was dreamed up as initially a drop, 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. To actually build it. Yeah, I think if we had raised,

Starting point is 02:56:34 we probably would be on that hamster wheel of 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 pixie chess,

Starting point is 02:56:54 which I know our friends, Josh has started, and for those listening that aren't familiar, the way that it's been described to me 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, et cetera. 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 like take basically take your deck with you and play against others. I'm really excited about that. I've been playing around with Vertigo, which is a new

Starting point is 02:57:36 like decentralized exchange on Solana that's like anti-sniper. So I know we, you know, spoke, you guys spoke to Ben and Alon and, you know, a lot of these token launchers and tokens kind of have a sniper problem basically where someone will buy up most of the supply. instantly dump it. So I think like building exchanges with like cleaner token protections and anti-sniping mechanisms is something that's just going to be net beneficial to everyone. So yeah, yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind. And then the last is probably token works, which is like the closest thing we have to crypto mischief. They do different like token drops. Yeah, I think I said. Are you pushing about that? Yeah, really excited. So it's Brian Armstrong next.

Starting point is 02:58:21 I think so. I think we'll see. I'll check the calendar. Well, thank you for coming on. Your first, the first official. Yeah. Oh, my God. Thank you so much for having me.

Starting point is 02:58:31 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 gong is still ringing. The gong, the real gong rings much longer than the fake gong.

Starting point is 02:58:47 Yeah. Well, we're waiting for Brian. Let's tell you about ad quick. Adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick 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. 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. Thanks for having me, guys. 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. Those soy. Soilent? Yeah, Soylent.

Starting point is 02:59:25 It's a weird story because I joined the company shortly after YC and I was in a different YC company. But that's the 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 we were not like the hottest startup in that YC batch at the time.

Starting point is 02:59:48 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 YCDs? Was it a full Bitcoin as a referral fee? 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 friend and they onboarded, they got $10 of Bitcoin and you got $10 of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 03:00:12 And at the time, that was like about one Bitcoin. So, so crazy to think of it. Yeah, and there was a lot of people. 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'd try to get them onboard into the Coinbase app. And yeah, as soon as we started out, it was like $5 or $6 for a Bitcoin.

Starting point is 03:00:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how do you tell the story of Coinbase now? 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 do you even map it to like the bull cycles and the and the cycles, 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

Starting point is 03:01:01 one time he said, like, companies have multiple founding moments on the way to being a public company. Yeah. And that was definitely true in our case. So the first era was, it was like Fred Ersum and myself in an apartment, just grinding it out, like, you know, 14 hour days, just doing everything ourselves, like answering customer support tickets, like trying to recruit people, trying to get anybody to join writing code this ourselves right and so that was like the pre-product market fit like how do we try to get something moving and then you go through hypergrowth right and your problems totally changed which is like 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 like build a real board and so you go through this period

Starting point is 03:01:44 of hyper growth where we were like we'd never managed anybody but we were suddenly we were managing 25, 50, 100, 500 people, and we were hyper-scaling just trying to keep up with all the demand. And then, you know, crypto went through ups and downs. You 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 with a bunch of infighting and blowups and drama. And I finally got an exec team that worked.

Starting point is 03:02:13 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 love overnight. We love 10-year overnight success. We lost the overnight success button somehow.

Starting point is 03:02:29 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 looked to for learnings to kind of like build through these boom and bus 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. Did you, were you able to pick up anything from outside of crypto to help you steer the ship through cycles? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, every company has different challenges.

Starting point is 03:03:04 So I actually don't think ours are that bad. But one of the one of the challenges we had when we were getting ready to go public was like our revenue was super unpredictable and volatile, right? Like we'd have a trading quarter where we would just blow it out of the water and we'd be like printing money. And then we'd, it'd be down like 70% the next quarter or something. And, you know, in the public markets, investors really love you to have these predictable revenue streams. I don't actually don't, 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.

Starting point is 03:03:33 There's like some energy brokerage. Like, you know, actually the traditional brokerages like NASDAQ and NYZE, like they have the same issue. They can tell you, one of them told me what time is like, if you can tell me what the S&P 500 is going to do next quarter, I'll tell you what a revenue is going to be. But of course, like, if you can do that, you've got, you got it made in other ways. So, but, you know, whenever I'm, I feel like we're having a bad time, I always look at like the hard tech companies, right? Like 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. You know, I'm like, they're always calling me up and like, I've got four weeks of cash, you know, we're trying, we're trying to raise money. And I'm like, bail me out. You've been trying to raise money like every month for the last 18 months, just living like one month to the next month. And like, those guys have true grit. So in software, our margins are high and it kind of covers up mistakes that we make. And we actually had revenue relatively early in our journey, whereas in, like 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

Starting point is 03:04:43 crypto back in 2012, even before decentralization, resistance to government control, anonymity, just faster payments, all these different 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 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? 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.

Starting point is 03:05:23 So that's like how to give people more self-sovereity, more control of their money. It enables them to not only live a freer life and have 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 like 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. So you see that 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 like higher GDP per capita, but there's also like less corruption, there's less war,

Starting point is 03:05:59 there's lower infant mortality, like all these kind of downstream effects. So the ultimate potential of crypto is to get more economic freedom in the world. And we've been trying to push on that through a variety of ways. Like one way we've done it is by getting legislation passed in the U.S. or pushing on that. We had a big influence in this last election. The crypto voter showed up in a massive way. We had like 2 million advocates who raised their hand in the U.S.

Starting point is 03:06:22 saying they wanted to elect a pro-cryct Congress and candidates. We had like a couple hundred million dollars in the Fair Shake Super PAC. And so we now have the most pro-crypto Congress that we've ever seen. And we're on the cusp of getting stable coin and market structure legislation passed. The other thing is we've been pushing on our products, right? They have to be easier to use for the average person. Like the early crypto products were just, it felt like some computer scientists came from on high down the mountain and they tried to make this accessible to mere mortals.

Starting point is 03:06:49 And like, that was never going to work. So the products are slowly getting easier and simpler for average people to use. And crypto is growing into these areas like payments and tokenizing secure. and it's not just like 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 like the majority of all payments

Starting point is 03:07:10 will run on these crypto rails. They're just faster, cheaper, more global, and that's how we're going to get more economic freedom in the world. 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 pushback from their governments and potentially even more aggressive way

Starting point is 03:07:34 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. It's just like, 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,

Starting point is 03:07:57 are going to be very resistant to it. Like, especially if the government is not fully aligned with the people's interests. Like, the government wants to run their fiat currency because then they can kind of print money and abuse it. And, you know, it's one of these kind of original sins of like fiat currency, right? So, or like some of these markets have capital controls, right? Like in India. So I think the governments will be somewhat reluctant to embrace crypto in some of these places,

Starting point is 03:08:22 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. 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

Starting point is 03:08:56 has their own Linux distribution, Red Star Linux. 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.

Starting point is 03:09:09 Like, how did that come about? What has it been like incubating something like that inside Coinbase? Yeah, a lot of people have asked me about that because they're always surprised that like a relatively big company can still innovate or whatever. But I think the way that it, you know, I can't take too much credit. for it by the way the biggest thing that I did was I we have we have a very entrepreneurial culture of different people we've brought in and Jesse Pollock came to me at one point he was like hey I want to work on a new chain and I was like cool like take a small team go run at it you know like two pizza team or

Starting point is 03:09:42 whatever like five people and I had no idea if it was gonna work but the the biggest thing I didn't 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. And it turned out to actually really hit. And so that's, if there is like a secret to this, which I don't, I don't know if it's a secret,

Starting point is 03:10:06 but it's like you have to allocate some percentage of your budget to these venture bets and and make them small bets because, you know, you want to have two, two, three, four people like working on it, kind of like a YC company, not like, don't put a hundred people on it or something. It's going to be like a big bureaucratic thing. As long as there's small bets, you can tolerate like, you know, 75% of them not working out. And once in a while something hits and it pays for all the rest of the bets. I mean, it's just, it's kind of like having a venture capital internal at the company.

Starting point is 03:10:34 So we actually set up this thing called, um, we call it like next bets. And twice a year, anybody in the company can come pitch. Um, it's like 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, et cetera. Basically, if any one of them raise 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.

Starting point is 03:11:00 You just need one person to say yes. And there's actually some pretty big, like USC, I will tell you, I actually voted no on USC, which was a terrible. 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 to be a massive thing.

Starting point is 03:11:24 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 Thiel 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 coin base 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 changes that would. need to be made and is that even a good idea in your mind? 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.

Starting point is 03:12:07 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 team started with around economic freedom. And the main reason I can think of for that, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. They got acquired by eBay, et cetera. The team changed some of the motivations.

Starting point is 03:12:32 But at the end of the day, nobody wanted a U.S. company to run the global financial system. Like, if you were the Indian government or a random person in some country, like, you didn't, do I really want to put all my money in some U.S. company? But if it was a decentralized protocol that nobody controlled, like kind of like the Internet, it's like, okay, we'll all kind of integrate with that. And so Bitcoin was like the key innovation, I think, that unlocked that. opportunity. You also asked about like kind of tokenizing securities and I do think that's an exciting area we're we're pretty interested in that as well.

Starting point is 03:13:04 You know it's like 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 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 like 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 like most traditional securities are going to get tokenized on chain in the next five years. We've been working a little bit with like the SEC task force on

Starting point is 03:13:39 this and trying to find the right path to do it. 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 you know what you're excited about yeah okay well so I think we're doing a lot of the current best practices that most people are doing with well-run companies and then there are a couple areas on the horizon that we're that are more crypto-specific that I'll tell you to so I mean the basic ones you probably know it's like we got on boarded

Starting point is 03:14:16 all of our engineers to co-pilot and cursor and everything like that so we got 100% of them onboarded that was good Our customer support, I think like maybe 60% of inquiries are being answered by AI now, which is really good. We also, for a long time, been building AI models around fraud prevention and like detecting risky transactions. So, but you can, 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. the ones that are a little more on the frontier or like crypto specific for us. So one is that I guess people are calling it agented commerce, right?

Starting point is 03:15:00 Which is like, you know, your agent is increasingly kind of like your assistant and it might need to book you a ticket to go somewhere or it might need to get through a paywall or something. Like 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. Like, USDC on base is starting to be adopted by some. We actually released this open source thing called Agent Kit, which makes it easy for any

Starting point is 03:15:32 LLM to have a wallet. And we're working on a couple of checkout type solutions with other players that will announce soon where the AI agent can actually get through the checkout flow in many of these e-commerce sites and pay with USDC on base. So I think agentic commerce will be a big one. I think it's also we're going to get like AI agents that can be kind of like your RIA, you're like your registered investment advisor or almost like your trading bot. So imagine like you, you're in the Coinbase app and you kind of tell them,

Starting point is 03:16:03 hey, I want to put like $1,000 or $10,000 or something into this account. And you're talking to a trading bot and you're like, just go make me money. You know, I don't know. Don't make mistakes. Don't make, tell it, you know, make me, I joked about this before, 10%. compounded return daily don't make mistakes don't make mistakes yeah yeah and it may have some questions for you or like it may make mistakes 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 make sure like if i if it

Starting point is 03:16:33 goes up a lot lock in some games you know so i don't regret it later like 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 uh how do you imagine that type of capability ability really being dispersed because I imagine I mean obviously there's people with you know trading bots today and they're actually I imagine some of them are so effective that they just say well we don't actually want to 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 is do you think

Starting point is 03:17:10 part of Coinbase's opportunity is to affect if you know make sure these types of tools are available to as many people as as possible 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 hedge fund or something with the proprietary algorithm. So our goal would be to like make this available

Starting point is 03:17:30 to as many consumers as possible. And yeah, I mean, it might, it's kind of adjacent to financial literacy, right? Like many people might come in and be like, yeah, I want to make like crazy returns. And this thing can kind of tell you, well, okay, that's pretty high risk. Like, why don't you like dollar cost average

Starting point is 03:17:45 into this diversified? portfolio over time and like 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 like you know so it can 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 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 the problem, what's the next few years look like in terms of beefing up security?

Starting point is 03:18:22 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 access directly by the attacker. So what they, unfortunately, they were able to do is they were 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, you know, 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.

Starting point is 03:19:00 Once we were, you know, they realized they'd been found out and customers were kind of getting educated about 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 know, we came together and thought about it. And, you know, on the one hand, we could have paid them the money, right? But we talked to a bunch of security researchers and people, and they were like, you know, there's really, 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. And it's like, do we really want to be in this situation where we're like funding their next attack and like rewarding this kind of behavior or do we want to try to create a deterrent to this kind of behavior?

Starting point is 03:19:39 So we decided to flip it. And as you probably saw, we put out a $20 million 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 9-11, the U.S. government put out a $25 million bounty on Osama bin Laden. And we put out a $20 million bounty on these guys. So we had like maybe 5,000 like tips or inquiries like come into the email that we put out there. Most of it was junk. And we kind of wielded 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 the uh the threat actor

Starting point is 03:20:18 themselves sort of trying to throw us off the trail or run down some wild goose chase um some of the other people sending in uh tips or leads are like other threat actors who kind of have beef with these guys or like they're um it's kind of like no honor amongst thieves right yeah and uh so you know i'm which is fine with me but it no i i really enjoyed the 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, the sort of game theory of who's going to turn in, who, you know, 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.

Starting point is 03:21:00 It's like if you're going to attack our customers, you know, you need to look over your shoulder and always wonder, like, who's going to turn me in or who did I interact with in my entire life who might have known about this is 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 get a good result. I mean, you asked about beefing up security too, I think. Yeah, just kind of going forward, you can imagine let's hire more people, better people, let's throw technology at this. Let's monitor comms and where data's 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 a more secure CX function would be entirely code, right? Yeah. And you wouldn't, it'd be much, you know, you could create an environment. Yeah, 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 inquiry is being answered by AI now. I mean, they're not going to get bribed.

Starting point is 03:22:07 I mean, there are other threat factors with AI too, right? because people are always trying to jailbreak these agents and things. So there's not a perfect solution. And I don't think we're going to have, we're still going to have like human in the loop on a lot of things for a long time. But yeah, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste. Like this was definitely a good moment for us to go implement a bunch of changes. And we mobilized a team of about three or four hundred people right away that just went into

Starting point is 03:22:32 overdrive kind of trying to lock down a lot of these systems. A lot of it was not just our own systems. There's vendors that we work with that, you know, 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

Starting point is 03:22:58 as bribed would have been pretty impactful even in the United States if people were there. We need to have 24-7 coverage, et cetera. So it's not a perfect solution to just move it all in the US and pay people more. 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.

Starting point is 03:23:21 And so we've got to keep investing in that. Do you have any advice for younger builders, maybe the younger version of yourself? You know, we had Chris Dixon on the show earlier today and he said that crypto, you know, one of crypto's biggest problems now is just a lack of talent. There is talent here, but it's probably, you know, could have 10 times more to create a lot of great outcomes. I'm curious if you feel the same way around kind of talent in the industry today. Yeah, well, I think there's a, we've never been, we've never had it easier actually recruiting great people into Coinbase. I think there's, there is like a great, probably that's due to our scale, right? Startups have to really fight for talent.

Starting point is 03:24:04 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 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 grid programming, which is really cool. It's a longevity company. We talked to the founder. We were blown away.

Starting point is 03:24:31 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 to be like the smartest kids up and coming, you know, people, whatever, they all want to work in things that are going to change the world. So like those are those are the top five. And, you know, I think like there's actually a pretty incredible amount of talent in crypto. It's like you've just got to go try. You got to go try ambitious bets and be okay with some of them not working. Like I think sometimes people think that, well, Coinbase started and now it's big. And and so they're just a success. And it's like, no, that's not true. Like we're trying these venture bets all the time. I told you about USC and base. I mean, there's others that didn't work, right? Like we launched Coinbase NFT and it was pretty much a flop.

Starting point is 03:25:15 Like we launched Coinbase in Japan. We invested all this money in time. Like didn't work for a bunch of reasons I can tell you if you want. And we shut that down. And so we're constantly like, you know, stay hungry, stay foolish. Like we're trying new ideas a lot. And you have to be okay with like two or 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 what was the story with the QR code?

Starting point is 03:25:41 Yeah, well as as usual like success has many fathers and mothers, but you know It partially came out of a rushed like a short time you know time constraints breed creativity, right? So we actually didn't I think by the time we bought the ad We didn't have enough time to like go film something for months and months and so the team just got really creative and 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, well, 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

Starting point is 03:26:25 measure how many people just like scan it and sign up if we just put a QR code on the screen. So I don't remember who said it actually in the room, but obviously it was. It worked. It was cool. Yeah. And you tracked the ROI and it was positive? Okay. So that's actually a very complicated. We look at the, for you with the exact details.

Starting point is 03:26:44 But long story short, like, so our site actually crashed because we got about like 20, it was like 20 or 30 million visits in 20 seconds. Like, and we knew there was going to be a big surge. And so we had like, I think the first page loaded and it was heavily cashed. but then like 20 million people started going through the sign-up flow and like everything shut down so we had to email a bunch of them later to come actually come back and finish it long story so we lost like probably about a third of the value in just like overwhelming demand we unfortunately couldn't scale to but it would have been very proper it's it was still profitable depending how you count it the fact that we're talking about the ad today

Starting point is 03:27:30 means something very memorable yeah the brand value you alone maybe paid for itself even with none of the direct revenue. I have one last question then we'll let you get out of here. And 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. And so if anybody ever comes out and we find out who it is like in their will or, you know, whatever.

Starting point is 03:27:59 But the unofficial answer, I think is, It's probably some combination of like Hal Finney and Nick Zabo and maybe one other person, but that's my guess is that it was a collaboration between those people. And, you know, but ultimately it doesn't matter. And Hal Fini is frozen at Alcor, but he's no longer living. So we don't, you know, but maybe if Alcor actually works, which is a big if in the future, we bring back to life, we'll find out. Yeah, that'd be amazing.

Starting point is 03:28:32 Yeah, well, I'm on the show then. have them on the show. Yeah. That'd be fantastic. Jordi, any other questions? No, this was great. 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 and it's, yeah, the enthusiasm is palpable. So I get to see your clips all over. Enthusiasm. What are you talking about? Enthusiasm.

Starting point is 03:29:01 We're going to need a big... bigger gong we're going to need a bigger gong thank you for stopping it's great it's great having you on brian and uh thank you for the work that you do we'll talk to you soon see you guys soon bye bye bye i love it hit john great great hit the the gong is it's working wonders uh next up we have soona from vault capital coming in is it volt i'm going to take one minute yeah yeah i'll talk to suna uh let me tell you really quickly about wander i got to sing the song alone find your happy place find your find your happy place find your happy place book of wander with inspiring views hotel million dollar series B today today congratulations hit the gone one more I mean on your way out

Starting point is 03:29:48 got size Mander 50 million dollars series B congratulations to the John Andrew Kyle the whole fantastic you guys are crushing a book of wonder with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning in 24 seven concierge service It's a vacation home, but better folks. And John Andrew is coming on the show tomorrow. Fantastic. Very excited about that. Fantastic.

Starting point is 03:30:09 But amazing milestone. Well, stay locked in. We got four more guests. Our next guest is sooner. Hopefully, we can bring her in and keep the conversation going. How you doing? Hey. Sorry.

Starting point is 03:30:27 It's been a big stream, been a big day. But glad to have you here. Would you mind kicking us off with? 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, we tried to schedule you, was during that big crypto conference in Dubai. And everyone was like, what are you thinking? Everyone is going, 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, were able to hop on the stream.

Starting point is 03:31:08 But it's a great community. 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, yeah, what you're excited about? Yeah, sure thing.

Starting point is 03:31:24 So I am at Volt Capital. What we focus on is pre-seated and seeded crypto companies. And, I mean, the reason we even started Bolt Capital is if you look at the landscape of crypto funds, there aren't really that many that have a senior partnership 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 the 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.

Starting point is 03:32:01 one, there's an, there's an, like, there's established markets, like, and by the way, this isn't live, right? It is. Oh, okay. So there's established, okay, there's established, okay, there's established markets like payments, defy. Yeah. And, okay, I think the cameras, okay.

Starting point is 03:32:21 There's established markets like defy payments, stable coins that are taking on these tens of trillions of dollars markets. Sure. But then also, I mean, right now, the rest of the world is waking up to stable coin potential. Stablecoin started about five to seven years ago. Yeah. So if you look at what the net new narrative is right now, it's largely around real world case

Starting point is 03:32:41 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, and it's strictly crypto and AI or also DIP. 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. That's cool. Yeah, what is the state of real world assets on chain? I remember during the last cycle, Sam Olm, 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

Starting point is 03:33:17 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. 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.

Starting point is 03:33:40 The tech was probably an iota of it. If you look at the distribution of teams, it's like, or you have an engineering team 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. And with regulatory language being cleared up and getting more appropriate. approval from the administration and I guess more legitimacy for the space.

Starting point is 03:34:02 It's really paved the way. But what we're focused on when we talk about real world applications, in addition to that, are like we're seeing companies at the intersection of crypto and robotics that are finding innovative ways to collect 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 is the way we train web two, like internet LMs. And then also like space and crypto.

Starting point is 03:34:36 We're seeing companies build at the intersection and they're like out of steady research. So like really domain experts in space that are finding really interesting ways to create data marketplaces at the intersection of crypto and the space. One thing that we've seen, and great, great to see you, by the way.

Starting point is 03:34:51 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 the kind of different kind of layers of the stack that you're looking at, whether it's the agent layer infrastructure, the actual tokens themselves?

Starting point is 03:35:15 How are you thinking about investing into that trend broadly? So I'm going to say something contrarian around banking agents. And I don't think from a venture standpoint, It makes sense to invest via private equity, particularly because a lot of that value capture is going to be done through enterprises. We already saw Coinbase Rollout X402, which allows agent-to-agent payments. And they already have massive distribution channels.

Starting point is 03:35:41 So you are already starting off 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. 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. but you're saying that the same thing can exist for data markets. Is the goal there?

Starting point is 03:36:31 With regard to robotics data, you would think that if this evolves the same way that the LLM, RLHF market evolved, it's like scale AI is just going to go and centralize it all and then sell access to that, is there some sort of underpinning fundamental difference with robotics training data that would make it more? more native to an on-chain environment? Yes, so a few things.

Starting point is 03:36:58 So one is up until recently, a 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 egocentric vision data. And egocentric vision data is point-of-view data. It's like GoPro video. So they trained robots to play soccer using. ego-centric vision data or this video.

Starting point is 03:37:25 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. 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.

Starting point is 03:37:43 And so the best way to do that is distributed 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 like the scaly eye piece comes in,

Starting point is 03:37:59 is you can disincentivize or slash users, essentially like a built-in penalty for uploading poor quality data that's like 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

Starting point is 03:38:20 and the diversity of the set of data. Yeah, it's interesting flip around because we've been talking about V-O-3 and Google's massive advantage there with the YouTube data set. I've produced, I mean, through the show, we've produced hundreds of hours of video content. It goes on to a few platforms. It doesn't go on to every platform. Like now we're on most of them, so most of the hyperscalers could effectively train on our data. But if you have a, if you're a YouTuber and you're just releasing 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

Starting point is 03:38:57 another to another company to train very interesting the problem is for robotics right yes similar specific footage what um how what is the state of the crypto seed market today is it 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 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 for traditional venture capital, but is that competitive with what you do these days?

Starting point is 03:39:36 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, but you don't need the series A or the series B. Sure, sure. and maybe limit dilution, but I'm curious what you're seeing. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:39:56 Yeah. So every cycle we see this meme or 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 or people that aren't even founders, but 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 a commodity more than ever.

Starting point is 03:40:23 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. You know, wouldn't really listen to you because you don't have a brand name around you when it's just your startup. 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

Starting point is 03:40:48 when they think they can just like launch a meme coin and then call that their financing for the their lives. Yeah. What are the other value ads that VCs are pushing right now? In defense tech, we're seeing VCs effectively set up like lobbying firms in D.C. 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.

Starting point is 03:41:17 we might get you a couple press pieces. What are the outside the box value ads that a VC can bring to the table? Yeah, on the defense note, I've also heard as some funds purchasing the American flags that they all have because there's actually like a division of the government that provides them. Okay. 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 ad and crypto, there are the universals, like you said,

Starting point is 03:41:44 like recruiting and, you know, helping 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 pin 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 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 real thing that crypto venture funds

Starting point is 03:42:29 should be focusing on beyond introductions to people they can recruit or market makers and things like that. What do you think the first truly breakout D-PIN product will be, is it is, is, is, Is WorldCoin classified as D-Pen, or is that not the right framework? I know there's the cell company, there's hotspots, but 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-in, like even Bitcoin is technically deep-pin because there's a harder component. But WorldCoin absolutely has broken through mainstream. I mean, they were just on the, I believe, Time magazine cover.

Starting point is 03:43:10 the things that we're more broadly interested in are like I said, the crypto robotics 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 in data where you can see the number of objects we've launched into space.

Starting point is 03:43:27 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, or crew landers and others. And that, That's going to be a problem real fast, right?

Starting point is 03:43:43 Like, we need better anti-collision software when you're able to track, like, silent satellites, which are almost like second strike defense capabilities, 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.

Starting point is 03:44:01 The other way is to just crowdsource it. Like, a lot of people have electronic telescopes to use anyway around the world that are hobbyists or taking imaging in the sky 24-7, 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 dynamic up-to-the-minute data that we don't have in traditional rails. Very cool. I think the broader.

Starting point is 03:44:32 I don't want to make too much of a joke, but I do think we should let the aliens access pump, you know, a pump fund. For sure. They should be able to. 100% extraterrestrial should be able to launch. That's the first thing they should do when they arrive. It's kind of a gateway. It's kind of welcome to America.

Starting point is 03:44:45 Welcome to humanity. No, but I believe we should put crypto in space. I'm excited. Crypto everywhere. Thank you so much for stopping by. This is a lot of fun. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you for helping us understand all these different things.

Starting point is 03:44:58 Yeah, this is great. Very cool. We'll talk to you. Have a good one, too. Goodbye. Cheers. Next up we have Mert, Mumtaz from Helias coming in the studio. We'll get a little intro from him.

Starting point is 03:45:10 We got to talk to you about Bezile first. Your Bezile concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch? With Bitcoin at 110-ish-K, you can get a Nautilus. You got a rotate into Nautiluses. Welcome to the stream, Mert. How are you doing? Good, sir.

Starting point is 03:45:26 How are 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. My name is Mert. I work on Helius, which is not helium. I know Kyle was on.

Starting point is 03:45:39 he was talking about his investment in helium, which we get confused a lot. And Helius does infrastructure, high-performance infrastructure for Solana. And I also shitposts a lot on the Twitter.com. That's great. Let's give it up for all of that. Sounds like you're doing God's work. What does infrastructure mean in this context? Are you building data centers?

Starting point is 03:46:02 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 is like some 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 Salana super fast in a structured way and also write data to it super fast.

Starting point is 03:46:38 Got it. What are the different tradeoffs? You mentioned Cloudflare. Like, is geolocation important as you build out infrastructure like this? Yeah. So it depends on the blockchain, but Solana has a lot of pretty advanced trading activity. Now, the assets of their trading are a little funny because you might get like, not said at all, but like, let's say similar types of players really co-locating their servers to ape like Farkcoin or something. But like the co-location and like these latency games. 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 O Camel.

Starting point is 03:47:18 Are we seeing like low level programming languages being used to trade these meme coins now? Oh yeah, definitely. Like you, you have people, I mean, I don't know if the audience here would consider like C and Rust that low level, but like everything from C and Rust 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 amazing. So yeah, it's quite a serious game played with very interesting assets. A lot of fun. What kind of players exist that don't like to talk about what they're doing and aren't loud that maybe aren't doing anything that's, that's, you know, morally wrong or anything like that but are just sort of under the radar under the radar they just don't want to talk about

Starting point is 03:48:07 their alpha because they don't want to bring a bunch of competition so the question is what kinds of people like that exist yeah like are they what's the shape of their operation what's the different types of are they are they coming from other is it is it a new desk in 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 um i think think it's pretty unique in that you have the existing 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,

Starting point is 03:48:47 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 prop trading shops from like Tokyo 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 that 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 Anatoli, which is he basically wanted, he had this vision that I think he got a front run like once or something on on one of these things.

Starting point is 03:49:31 and he got so mad. He's like, okay, you know what? I'm just going to build this decentralized NASDAQ where everybody can compete. That's amazing. What is, in your mind, what's the most important elements of the Salana 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 in your mind is like the most exciting upcoming improvements? Yeah, so we have a very detailed roadmap that I wrote about on salonarroadmap.com. And when you go to that site, basically you'll see four words and it just says increased bandwidth, reduced latency, nothing else to it.

Starting point is 03:50:13 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. 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 founders' apps tokens. 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 Salana first, right?

Starting point is 03:51:07 So that when you have Ben Passer and Ax or Lucas or the world or Alon, why should they pick Salana? And that's because like people like me, but also everybody from Salana Foundation and like investors and whatnot. How do we set up like the best friendly friendliest founder infrastructure? So it's kind of like, you know, the Y Combinator of crypto in a sense. Yeah. 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 great question. Well, I am in the UAE like 360 days out of the year.

Starting point is 03:51:50 But then now I'm in Montana where it's like UAE has no one. nature and then Montana has all the nature. So it's like this barbell strategy. But like, so I'm, I moved to the UAE from Canada, Toronto specifically, where like 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 like coin and then Bitcoin cash. Okay. So like vintage. And leverage trading is illegal. So just to give you an idea how leverage are the band leverage that's so un-American I'm unsurricular I shouldn't be surprised but I am okay so yeah I think I think it's because like one of the pension funds was like an investor in FTC or

Starting point is 03:52:37 something oh yeah that's right which you know interesting but like in the UAE in terms of crypto specifically for example I can pay my phone bill in USDC and I have which is pretty crazy that is and and the government actually is like quite interested in, like, getting you, uh, uh, you know, on, on the phone and really trying to work out, how do we actually like support the builders here as opposed to some other, uh, jurisdictions? But like, um, the way 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. Um, I remember the last time you wanted to, uh, host, host this crypto day, uh,

Starting point is 03:53:19 there was like a massive conference there. I was a terrible. It really shows you how. 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 appreciate the technology they were building. There was that meme of like SQL Lana.

Starting point is 03:53:45 It's not as decentralized as it should be. It's not as pure of a technology as other chains. Talk 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 private privacy based and you know it's very traceable there's been an evolution of the bitcoin narrative has the salana narrative evolved and

Starting point is 03:54:19 kind of take me through the last couple of years Right. So with Twitter, most of the debate or discussions, let's say, happen on crypto, Twitter, which is an amazing place for intellectual sparring, let's say. Definitely nothing gets straw manned or taken out of context. And so like SQLana, for example, was a jab from somebody from Ethereum who obviously is not a very big fan, but that's okay. And it was basically trying to draw the parallel that Solana is actually like this centralized database. And basically I made somewhat of a career out of saying that's wrong aggressively on the internet. 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

Starting point is 03:55:17 to actually tell. There was some certainly quite valid criticisms, and there are still today. One of those was that Salana 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 see one up and so they came to Salana. But like, 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

Starting point is 03:56:05 blockchain. And so what that allowed for is now when the next cycle came, which was with, you know, meme points and, you know, 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 where were you when the, where were you opened X and saw the the president posting a meme coin. Do you remember where you were? Are you sleeping? Oh, man. This is that. Okay. So I had just bought eight sleep. Okay.

Starting point is 03:56:43 It was, it had, uh, just came to the UAE. It's literally the last ad we have to do. Perfect segue. There we go. Five year warranty. 30 night risk free trial, free returns. Code TBN, TVPN. Free shipping.

Starting point is 03:56:58 Check it out. I continue. So you're in a deep slumber. You're like, night. You got 90 minutes of deep sleep. You get, you're comfortable. Does somebody shake you awake? What, what happened?

Starting point is 03:57:07 Yeah. So I'm like extremely pumped. I'm like, oh, God. This is like the first night. I'm going to 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 there was a new future on it. And and then so one of them finally broke through and I opened my phone. 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 like company slack because we power like a lot or most of the infrastructure on Solana. And then I'm like dude. how come I'm getting paid so much?

Starting point is 03:57:43 And then my co-founder was like, oh, yeah, like Trump launched the shit coin. And I was like, what? And I was like, is this real? I was like, chat, 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 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.

Starting point is 03:58:19 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, Malani just launched a coin. And it was like that George Bush meme. Yeah, it's like, just pick her second shit coin isn't 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.

Starting point is 03:58:46 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. That's hilarious. Hey, well, hopefully he understands. What fantastic war stories. Yeah, thanks for taking us through those. Those were really fun. It was great talking to you.

Starting point is 03:59:02 We got to have you on again. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you later. Have a great time. Cheers, Merck. Have a good one. Enjoy Montana. Get a nice round of sleep.

Starting point is 03:59:12 Well, next up, we have Dan from Farkaster coming in the studio. And big news, you can watch TBPN on Farkaster. Someone built a Farkaster mini app. Which is a very cool, novel sort of experience that you have on Farkaster. People can create kind of sub-apps within the app, and they live in the feed. Let's bring Dan in. I think it's Jamie Hoffman who built this for us. To see you guys.

Starting point is 03:59:38 Dan, what's going on? Are you talking about the pirate feed of T. TBPN. Yeah. Authorized reproduction on Vercaster. 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. Exactly. It is fascinating because I remember, I mean, when Farcaster dropped, it was like 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 repurposes is TBPN and like that is something that's completely on not on anyone else's roadmap and

Starting point is 04:00:16 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 what what what is the current pitch for a forecaster where do you see it going and kind of take us through a little bit yeah i have to say yeah please dan and i were neighbors we lived on the same street no way very cool and it's just been amazing to watch to watch you build uh farcaster in such a 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 seem to have this pace of building, but also, like, patience and just, like, long-term thinking 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

Starting point is 04:00:59 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 do. We missed him. We missed Antonio today. That was amiss by us. I'm just going to say, I'm so happy I'm on this show before Antonio. Yeah, yeah. Bragging rights forever. Yeah, exactly. Open an invite to Antonio.

Starting point is 04:01:19 Yeah, so Farcaster, five years in this year, when 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. So there's a built-in wallet and many apps, as you point out. And so if you want to do fun things in crypto, you use Rorcaster. And we're increasingly making that happen in the sense that we support a bunch of different chains.

Starting point is 04:01:57 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 got to get into this, you've 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 like the average Web 2 founder, it's like the UX that's acceptable in crypto is crazy. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:02:25 And so, you know, 2025, we finally actually have the infrastructure to be able to like 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 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 it into like a raging fire and people I guess the meta question is like in 10 or 20 years does the average 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

Starting point is 04:03:06 because everyone just is... I think it's probably more ceased 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. It's a little bit broader base and you can be a much smaller account and get it.

Starting point is 04:03:22 We do that with stable coins. So we do that every week. Works perfectly fine. We didn't have to integrate any other fintech provider or there's no... Every user has a wallet. We're able to stream stable coins to them for a ridiculously cheap amount

Starting point is 04:03:33 in terms of like fees. So there's no metal. So that's for sure working. 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 kind of 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. And 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 just, they froth at the mouth in terms of, you know,

Starting point is 04:04:09 it's all scams and griffs. 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, right? And where did Stablecoin start? Tether was a scam and a griff that for 10 years, everyone kept saying it's on the verge of

Starting point is 04:04:31 exploding, right? and it's now the most profitable business in the world. I think they make like $80 million per employee. And so stable coins have taken a while to bake. The infrastructure is finally there where it's like, I mean, now Stripes in it, right? So it's like Ramp, one of your sponsors. So I think like stable coins are just going to make crypto way easier. And then I think that this concept of embedded wallets, which you know, you may have heard of,

Starting point is 04:04:55 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 like a, you know, kind of 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, you know, Bank of America account, probably not. But I do think everything will get kind of like crypto enabled. And to the degree that you're using a more crypto forward product like a Coinbase or Robin Hood or like a completely

Starting point is 04:05:29 the crypto native product like Farcaster, I think it's just like a 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. Talked 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, as Kovie would say job's not finished. So I think good progress. I mean, we sold $10,120 subscriptions with stable coins in a little less than six 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 greater rewards. So effectively we've doubled the amount of like weekly payouts we're going to do for the next year. And I think 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, over like, how do you actually get out of the, like, crypto-native and move towards a broader base? It's just like most social networks you use today,

Starting point is 04:06:39 what percentage of the value are they capturing? Like, you know, meta's market cap's pretty high. Like, they're capturing a lot of that value. I think that the way for protocol-based social networks and specifically ones that use crypto for the economic plumbing, the way for them to win is to have it be as close to zero-take rate as possible. and basically you, by participating on a crypto social network, one, you're, you know, decentralized social network,

Starting point is 04:07:04 you actually own your audience. You can't get your, like, links nerfed. Like, you guys are building, like, an amazing media brand. If you lost your ability to do streaming on a couple of the major platforms tomorrow, that would hurt your growth. 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-

Starting point is 04:07:21 No, built different. We would just mail everyone a DVD every day. Easy. Daily. Problem solved. Daily DVD. Daily DVDs. With stable coin payments.

Starting point is 04:07:29 Yeah, with stable coin payments. I want to know about some of the economic incentives on a social network. It's been like the micropayments thing has been floated around. Is there a world where with AI slop, we need to be charging people to post or can just algorithmic feeds kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff? Does any of that make sense? Are there any new trends in kind of like the design of a healthy, social network that has high, I guess not just high retention and ARPU, but also maybe high NPS because the classic thing with a social network is like, it's printing money, but everyone

Starting point is 04:08:07 says they hate it. Yeah, so I think that's a stated reveal preference. Exactly. I agree that. Totally. Totally. I completely agree. So, yeah, what does your do you protect?

Starting point is 04:08:16 But I actually think if 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 think there's an economic incentive, you bring out a lot of coin operated users, right? 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 you human, but I could go use chat GPT to write the responses. So like, I think this is an extremely hard problem.

Starting point is 04:08:47 If you actually go look at like meta's 10Ks, like they specifically say that like they're the biggest and best in the world. This is still an extremely hard problem for them. salt. They estimate something like 10% of like all users are potentially like spam or wow. Right. It's 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 is a bunch of accounts paid $120 to a protocol, no refunds, right? Like, you know, stable coins, nice thing is like you

Starting point is 04:09:19 can't charge that back. Um, whether they're bought or not, that money is now going to an algorithm, and this is where I'm actually a big fan of algorithms. Now, maybe algorithm 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 speaking. How do you see crypto long term as a funding mechanism for creators, artists, I mean, we had Ben Pasternak on earlier today to talk about, you know, his vision for believe.

Starting point is 04:10:03 And it's, yeah, you people are using it to create meme coins. They're also using it as a, you know, funding, you know, funding mechanism for different projects. And I bring it up because we've talked about, you know, we had Chris Best from Substack on maybe a week or so ago. And there's this idea that like people subscribe to 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, you know, some, I could imagine a world in the future where a farcaster is powering that type of activity is actually.

Starting point is 04:10:53 correct, incorrect. Is that a problem space that you think about? Yeah, although I, to sub-sac's credit, I think they're doing better than the vast majority of Web 2 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 like we're improving in the Web 2 spectrum. I think what crypto does in a world where the UX is good and it's pervasive, I think these are like embedded wallets with stable coins. You, you, you just start competing things down to zero, right? Like the ability for the platform to take a cut of payments,

Starting point is 04:11:29 I think drops pretty significantly. Yeah. And what the platforms that do take a cut, they are going to say, hey, I'm getting you distribution, right? If you go on an app like Substack, a lot of, then you talk to Substack Newsletter writers, they're getting a lot of their subscribers these days from the Substack app.

Starting point is 04:11:44 So that's value that Substack is providing. I think where crypto is interesting is that, you know, like basic payments, like you're talking like 10% improvement like marginal improvement and I think where you're looking for is like 10x improvements yeah um as I you know you're pretty aware of the space and uh believe is a great example this is like 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 uh like a go fund me

Starting point is 04:12:20 equivalent or a Kickstarter actually someone built a mini app with stable coins called crowd fund on Farcaster, basically is a Kickstarter, right? Like, use smart contract, you put your USDC, like stable coin in, and if it hits the funding threshold, it's unlocked. So that was a venture back company 10 years ago. Now it's a someone vibe coded over three days, right? 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

Starting point is 04:12:49 natively in the product? Yeah, and I think the other thing that you, you, you know, you know, you have as like the liquidity in the sense that I'm not fragmenting. I don't fund my GoFund me wallet over here or I have to like connect this payment method for the seventh time. And again, anytime you're using like a card-based payment method visa and MasterCard and the banks are getting there 3%. 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 kind of like platforms or creators are giving an incentive, right? Like if I can not have to pay 3% to a card network by having

Starting point is 04:13:23 you as a stable coin i'm going to make that the default payment off it and maybe i give you a 2 cash back or you get some loyalty points or an nfts or whatever reason to get you to switch your your payment method yeah what are you seeing um how do you think about international long term i know the farcaster network is like default international because because crypto is default sort of borderless and international but um i i feel like the the conversation in in uh the the beginning the 2020s, really around sort of social media censorship. And then, you know, we had Bology 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,

Starting point is 04:14:09 you know, globally that are, that have even bigger issues than we have today around censorship. And so how do you think about, you know, enabling, enabling free speech through Farkaster? over the long run. Yeah, so we're a U.S.-based company. So I'm a big believer in the Constitution and U.S. laws. Farcaster basically is exporting that as, like, our social network's 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

Starting point is 04:14:42 at the sky. We're beamed in over the Internet. If you want to block our app or the network, go for it. But I think. But then in theory, some of the United States. A dissident could spin up a new iteration of the app on the Farcaster 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,

Starting point is 04:15:07 and having it go out to a global audience. 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 Massadon or Blue Sky, like there are instances where they're already complying with local law of like, okay, well, we won't be able 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,

Starting point is 04:15:36 but should we be successful in continuing to scale the network, I'm confident that if you think that the U.S. free speech laws are like a good baseline global policy, that's basically what Farcester is going to fall in terms of our app. Yeah. Amazing stuff. Thank you so much. we'd love to have you back and get more updates. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 04:15:56 I think you got some of the best. I'll put it on the record, just for the best taste in crypto. Yeah. I put it out there. It shows up in the app and everywhere. Yeah, it's great. Great to finally have you on.

Starting point is 04:16:08 Come back on again soon. 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 of Hollywood. George, have a good one.

Starting point is 04:16:22 Next time. We have the CEO of Lava, Chazahn, 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. You can buy a protect Philippe. Yes. No brainer.

Starting point is 04:16:37 Yes. No brainer. Use leverage to buy a luxury watch. Anyway, welcome to the studio. Chazan, hopefully he is here. How are you doing? Hey, can you hear me? There he is.

Starting point is 04:16:48 Yes, we can. Welcome. Take it to hear me. 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 Bitcoiners, 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 04:17:19 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-hypothicating it. And ultimately, over the last few years, these custodial platforms have lost around $100 billion in customer funds. That's so much money. Ooh.

Starting point is 04:17:46 We don't like losing money. Not good. Not good. That's insane. Okay. 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.

Starting point is 04:18:04 Like you can go to a block explorer, for example, and see that your Bitcoin is safe and secure, that it's not being rehypublicated. And you have cryptographic guarantees, not just legal or reputational assurances from Lava, that your collateral is safe. So that's why it's 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's smart contract.

Starting point is 04:18:34 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 needed to happen to get us to today? You know, it's kind of surprising to me because Bitcoin always had like scripting. Like Bitcoin's always had like programmability.

Starting point is 04:18:57 It's not just like moving money from one address or the other. Lava's kind of leveraged certain like core Bitcoin primitives to kind of take that and use what primitives has available and create this like loan contract. Does that make sense? Bitcoin's not like touring complete to 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. coin, but you can do certain very important things. And one of those is non-custodial borrowing. And honestly, if you look at the rest of crypto, I think the majority of like the main use case of defy really is,

Starting point is 04:19:30 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 true, but it feels like if I want to borrow 50 cents against my Bitcoin, probably not going to have a good it good time? Is that roughly correct? Like, where does it start to make sense? You know, taking out a $100,000 loan, the gas might be, or whatever the equivalent is, might be a little bit more reasonable. Is that roughly correct? The gas fees on Bitcoin are extremely, like, Bitcoin is like really inexpensive right now. Okay. Like less than a dollar. But what you could do is like you could lock a bunch of collateral up and over time take out more and more in loans, right? So we have a

Starting point is 04:20:14 product in beta right now where you basically can lock your Bitcoin up and get a card. And as you swipe the card, more and more gets borrowed. It's kind of like a line of credit. Yeah. Yeah. And then what was the announcement today? So today, we actually like fully officially announced lava loans like out of beta alpha.

Starting point is 04:20:32 We announced that we can fund loans of any size from $100 to a billion dollars just based on the capital. A billion dollar loan? That's so insane. And we've already done. We've already made loans. like millions of dollars and uh like a single loans that have been worth like five million dollars already which is pretty interesting um and we announced that our rates are like 20 to 30 percent

Starting point is 04:20:55 lower than the next best rate on the 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

Starting point is 04:21:28 on there. It's all self-custodial. 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 LavaV,

Starting point is 04:21:47 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 instant dollar payments. So kind of like what cash app,

Starting point is 04:22:05 Venmo 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. That's cool.

Starting point is 04:22:23 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? Because 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.

Starting point is 04:22:38 There's no like underwriting of the individual. So everyone gets the same interest rate. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And how are the interest rates calculated? Where are they sitting right now? Where they've been historically and how do the lenders 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

Starting point is 04:22:58 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 like lava earns like a little bit of a spread and the rest is kind of sent to the lender essentially like the rest of the interest payments. Historically, the, I think over time, the rates will just come down. I mean, they're always going to be somewhat variable to whatever like the treasury rates are, right?

Starting point is 04:23:24 Because you're going to want some premium over that. But I think long term, the rate for a Bitcoin back loan should trend towards the rate for bar against equities. And in fact, like barring 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.

Starting point is 04:23:54 So I think you could even argue today it is that because it trades 24-7. And is there some sort of like reserve ratio where if you have 10 Bitcoin, you can borrow X amount against that? Yeah, how does volatility work here? because I imagine if you borrow if you bargains all of your at some point they're going to take your Bitcoin right but but what what triggers that so when you borrow there's like an LTV right so kind of like if you borrow against your equities you can maybe get 50% against value that you collateralize which is similar to how lava works and there's flexible LTV so maybe if you want to be very conservative

Starting point is 04:24:30 you might only want to borrow 20% against the collateral that you put up yep and then every loan has a like a price a liquidation price where if Bitcoin gets there and you're 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?

Starting point is 04:24:54 No. Very cool. This is fantastic. I think a lot of our listeners are going to go lever up and use it to buy fine Swiss watches. I mean, I guess my last question is 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 kind of this history of when something's working it gets forked and open sourced and there's a lot of competition there

Starting point is 04:25:23 how are you thinking about the competitive landscape as it evolves over the next couple of years if you're really successful it's interesting i actually think there's no company in crypto today Like I very much be of Bitcoin as being very distinct from crypto. I think a lot of the companies in crypto today are serving this like trading speculation use case. Whereas Lava is really serving this Bitcoin saver use case. Like these there's these bitconers 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. replace 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 as 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 then just buy more Bitcoin so it's not like the most common use case we've

Starting point is 04:26:28 have people borrow against your Bitcoin to buy houses which is pretty interesting by 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, they borrow against 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 lunch. Cheers.

Starting point is 04:27:01 Bye. next up we have a last minute ad brandon last minute surprise guest surprise guest brandon co-founder and CEO phantom one of uh wallet yeah I don't know how many billions they're worth now Brandon welcome to show hey it's up guys thanks for having me the wallet king the wallet king the second greatest wallet salesman in the world one of our one of our dear friends to Sean Frank the CEO of Ridge Wallet, direct competitor to you. Direct competitor, both whole assets. Phantom wallet, Ridge wallet.

Starting point is 04:27:35 You can only have one. Collaboration. Yeah, we got them on the bullseye in the office. Yeah. Sean, you're on notice. What's happening? Where are you right now? Are you in Vegas like a lot of our other guests or, or Dubai or in San Francisco?

Starting point is 04:27:52 In the trenches, so to speak. The trenches. The trenches of S. Yeah. That's where I'm from. Awesome. I mean, how are the trenches? I don't think fandom needs a ton of introduction,

Starting point is 04:28:05 but because our audience is not typical, you know, super crypto-native, it'd be great to give a quick kind of backstory on your history and then the company and then we can kind of talk about a number of other things. Yeah, it would 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 today. How long have you got them going at it?

Starting point is 04:28:29 Since 8 a.m. I think I finally understand it. It's like electronic money is what I'm getting from people. It's money but digital. Digital money. That's my take place. The big takeaway from today for John. Big takeaway, yeah.

Starting point is 04:28:44 Well, totally, yeah, I can give a brief overview about 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 sort of like the white paper ICO era. I did a tour of duty there from 2017, 2021 at this early stage defy startup called ZeroX, which is still very much around active. I met my two other co-founders.

Starting point is 04:29:29 And that's basically where we decided, hey, at that time, most used wallet was Metamask. We had this kind of very unique perspective, not only being power users of MetaMask, but also developers in the ecosystem as 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

Starting point is 04:30:03 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 biggest wallet in the 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. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, I think the initial insight was focus on, like, build a wallet that focuses on an ecosystem on a on an ecosystem that was not Ethereum. You know, we have spent, you know, four years in the Ethereum space and I think had a number

Starting point is 04:30:47 of pretty interesting insights. One, metamask continued to be sort of this monopoly, modelistic product and despite a number of different attempts they were sort of everyone kind of understood and you know there it's not great ux so like obviously we should try to attack them by solving that problem but despite that 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.

Starting point is 04:31:32 And so I think those two kind of insights combined, we decided, hey, how about we, we essentially create our own home turf on an up-and-coming ecosystem. That choice ended up being Solana. And that was all being contemplated like late 2020. So that was pretty early on. 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?

Starting point is 04:31:59 Yeah, well, it's definitely, it's definitely abden flowed. I mean, I think from the very beginning, it was all about decentralization at all costs, and decentralization as this meme, which was attracted a number of different folks for a number of different reasons. You know, people who are more anti-disestablishment, people, which felt like the centralization was a method of security and all of that. And I think that it ended up, obviously the spirit of it makes total sense and is something we should all be striving for. But I think in practice, the sort of decision by committee nature that that kind of bred ended up basically fast forward into the of Ethereum today where it's like there's no real cohesive strategy, I guess. There's no,

Starting point is 04:32:57 there's a lot of different competing L2s and different technologies and that the end states, 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, sending you, uh, uh, tweets about pumps, you know, revenue being like, hey, have you guys thought about, you know, 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 Phantoms sort of interaction with some of these new, you know, we've had both the founder of Pomp and Believe on today, which, you know, are getting quite a lot of attention. But I'm curious to get your point of

Starting point is 04:33:47 view on how you think of that market or category evolving and how you see Phantom interact. with it. Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, 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 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, you know, emerging stable coins and real world assets trends.

Starting point is 04:34:42 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. 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

Starting point is 04:35:18 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 like historically? 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?

Starting point is 04:35:37 I know. But 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 than in years past to open up whether that's the Siri button for other AI apps or the app store with what's happening with Fortnite 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 phantom we actually started chrome extension first that was actually a pretty

Starting point is 04:36:20 contrarian thing to do um 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 defy and that being sort of more of a power user thing that people like to do on desktop anyway um and i think the also the prevalence of uh sort of ethereum as the main l1 that people were using Ethereum is 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, you know, pleading all of that. And so nowadays, because you're seeing the protocol layer of crypto get an infrastructure layer get a lot more mature. Now we're seeing a lot more prevalence of crypto on mobile.

Starting point is 04:37:15 So I think in the next couple of years, mobile is going to be a huge story for crypto. And yeah, I think generally, you know, 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. Like you said, I believe that as an eco, as an 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 of that. So yeah, I mean, I do expect them just very similarly to all other, a lot of other tech players like big fintechs, etc. I do expect them to be embracing crypto more and more often, or sorry, more deeper. And yeah, yeah, and making it a bit easier for folks to deploy apps. Last question on my side. What is the state of SF's crypto scene today?

Starting point is 04:38:10 It's certainly not getting nearly the attention that AI is. is, but is it alive and well, or are you traveling a lot and hiring outside of the city quite a bit? No, yeah. I mean, we, uh, so all three co-founders are based out here in SF. I've been living here for 12 years now or so. And yeah, crypto scene is definitely, it's definitely not AI, but it's, uh, it's alive and well of us, folks like paradigm, uh, alchemy, uh, some of the A16 Z folks, etc. Yeah. So yeah, definitely alive and well. New York is definitely another huge scene, but I think places like Miami, they kind of turned over a bit during COVID.

Starting point is 04:39:02 I love Miami. I love Miami. I love visiting Miami. We're in the Miami of California. We're in Los Angeles. We are. What's not to like? This has been fantastic. Thank you for joining and capping off the first crypto day. The first inaugural crypto. Day. Yeah, thank you guys. Maybe we should make it weekly. Weekly Crypto Day. That sounds like a lot.

Starting point is 04:39:21 A lot. But maybe quarterly. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for popping on. Good luck. We'll see you soon. Cheers.

Starting point is 04:39:29 Bye. This entire stream has been not, 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 for us? How much everyone would hate that? Anyway, we never give financial advice. Massive, massive success. We're just a couple of golden resources.

Starting point is 04:39:45 Trevers. Yeah, yeah. We're just having fun out here talking. You ever pushing five hours on the stream 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. When we got Ashley Vance on the show, it's going to be a hundred. We got we got some hitters. We do have some hitters tomorrow. And there's some big news coming. And our first, uh, Fortune 500 CEO, huge, huge milestone for us. First of many. Huge milestone. Uh, anyways, thank you for. folks for tuning in. Thank you for our sponsors. But it was a great day. Thank you to our lovely sponsors. We will see you tomorrow.

Starting point is 04:40:23 Goodbye.

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

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