The Breakdown - 0xResearch: Crypto Meets TradFi: The New Convergence

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

In this episode, our Blockworks Research analysts cover shifting macro conditions, the growth of tokenized gold, Solana’s rising institutional interest, and the evolving overlap between crypto and traditional finance. They also examine airdrop mechanics, critique Berachain’s approach, and debate what trends will define the next two years. Sponsored by: Crypto Tax Calculator Accurate Crypto Taxes. No Guesswork. Say goodbye to tax season headaches with Crypto Tax Calculator: Generate accurate, CPA-endorsed tax reports fully compliant with IRS rules. Seamlessly integrate with 3000+ wallets, exchanges, and on-chain platforms. Import reports directly into TurboTax or H&R Block, or securely share them with your accountant. Exclusive Offer: Use the code BW2025 to enjoy 30% off all paid plans. Don’t miss out - offer expires 15 April 2025! Ledger Ledger, the world leader in digital asset security, proudly sponsors The Breakdown podcast. Celebrating 10 years of protecting over 20% of the world’s crypto, Ledger ensures the security of your assets. For the best self-custody solution in the space, buy a LEDGER™ device and secure your crypto today. Buy now on Ledger.com. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribe to the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Spring Break Week, and that means we are checking out a new Blockworks podcast. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it. Give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, as you know, this is spring break week here. We are down in Florida.

Bringing the kids to Disney for the first time. It's a grand old time, but it means that I am not sitting at my computer changed to the tariff and crypto madness. And so what we're going to do instead this week is preview some other great Blockworks podcasts. Crypto has something for everyone. There are the DGens who just want to talk about trading. There are the builders who want to talk about tinkering.

There are the hoddlers who want to talk about Bitcoin. They're the just generally interested who are fascinated around. around how this is a force for change. But then there are the big brains, the academics, the researchers, the analysts, and Zero X Research is the show for them. Now, what research means is pretty broad in the context of crypto. It can be anything from protocol developments to new narratives, but it's a really in-depth approach. So for those of you who are looking to dive a little bit deeper, I'm excited to share an episode. And if you like it, again, go subscribe to Zero X Research wherever you listen to your shows. So I think like you're seeing that

institutional interests pick up, not just like in Seoul, the asset, but actually institutional players launching their own products on the network, which is almost better than just being interested in like buying Seoul as a speculator. Like actually building on the chain as an institution showcases that they have the same amount of confidence they have in Ethereum where most of the tokenized products and institutions see today. Nothing said on ZeroX research is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Boccaccio, Ryan, and our guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed.

He's singing. Paco's feeling good today. Hey, guys, welcome back to another episode of Zero X research. I'm joined by Bach, Carlos, and Mark. we got a full research crew today. Our lovely Boccaccio is back to join us on a roundtable again. We always love to see that. Before we get into things, as always, we are constant shills for our events here.

So I want to give another quick reminder for permissionless coming up in the end of June, June 24th through the 26th in New York. Lots of conferences in New York this year. Zero X10 is the code as always, if you want to get tickets 10% off. A bunch of us will be there. I know Baccio and I will be there. I don't know how many of the other team from the research team and OX research, you know, favorites will be there, but we should have a pretty decent crew showing up.

So if you want to come, you know, meet people from around the industry, chat with us. We'd love to meet you. So 0X10. Bach, you want to say something? No, that was it. I covered it. He's speechless.

He is gawking at how good my shills have become. We can get out of the shills. We can talk. Let's dive into the markets a little bit. I'd love to get Mark LARPing a little bit on macro because he doesn't get the chance often, and we try to avoid that. But, you know, big news last week was like peak uncertainty. No one knows what the hell is going on. Like there's going to be massive tariffs.

And then all of a sudden it's like, no, there aren't going to be massive tariffs or maybe there will. You know, Trump and admin kind of pulled back. on what they had been headstrong on for, you know, the past month or so, two months maybe. So now things are kind of up in the air. It's like maybe there's exemptions for certain things like chips, electronics, different specific industries and materials. Though like this kind of battle with China still seems ongoing or like TBD. But at the very least, like the markets have looked up.

Like we've seen some excitement, at least in our space. Like, you know, we, Bitcoin was in the 70s and like now we're back, you know, mid-80s and, you know, alts and other things have seen, you know, a little bit of room to breathe. How are we thinking? Mark, what are your thoughts here? Yeah, well, I mean, when the, I said the chaos ensued, prices were down. I mean, I've been in the crypto space for a little bit now. So I just saw that as a buying opportunity, but mostly for stocks.

I got, you know, some of my resilient equities that I've had on my watch list for all. a bit cheaper than I'd like. So that was good. I mean, these things kind of don't worry me when, you know, equities, even BTC comes down, you know, it's like just fundamental support. You know, there's this thing. Past performance is not, you know, can be used as a good future indicator. You know, I look at U.S. markets and I just think the opposite.

I just think, like, you want to hold the assets where the top 1% are. So I'm never like, it's something I never panic about. But, I mean, what, but one thing that was concerned, was the bond market. It was it April 2nd? April 2nd, there was an announcement, I think, or somewhere around there. And then for like no,

no company below investment grade. So investment grade is like companies that have a strong balance sheet, able to pay back their debt. And if you're below that, you're considered junk or like non-investment grade. Like no non-investment grade company issued a bond in the market at all until like,

I think until like maybe this week. So that was actually kind of see like spreads really picked up high. The treasury yield, 10 years, two years, they all picked up high, which is kind of the antithesis of what Trump and Bessentor trying to do. So I think the bond market was a little bit more worrying and I'd probably put more pressure on the administration than any other than like stocks or like, I don't know, like main street, you know, because, you know, there's been nobody wants to oppose President Trump right now, none of, there's no, like, lawsuits against it.

Like, I think, M.H. She just wants to play by his rules, go along with it because that's probably the best strategy, and I think I agree with that. Even though some of the smaller, I don't know what to call them, like trade into, like, I don't know, groups have put some lawsuits and they think, like judges will be the way to block these tariffs. But this, the on again, off again with the tariffs, I just think it's a great environment for traders.

But yeah, I think ACTILR there. Yeah, I also think like on the macro side, the other news is gold making the old-time highs. I think this morning, I think we all bought the wrong digital gold. Should have bought the physical. But like, yeah, I think we're nearing like maybe at top there. A lot of Burbs trading platforms are listing Pax G, which is like the, the gold issued by Paxos. I know Drift listed it like this week.

So seeing a lot of like attention in that regard. And just curious to have Bitcoin trades like in this environment where we're seeing outflows from US equities into maybe European and nation stocks. And how just curious to see how PTSD performs in like this like new new regime. I think that's actually really good point. I think, sorry, Ghani, but it hit off all-time high or like on-chain, $2 billion. So that's a record. And trading volumes last week or this week were $1 billion.

So, I mean, we haven't seen that, I think, in some years. And, you know, it's probably, it's, I was looking at our new Ethereum dashboard today. And it's the most traded tokenized thing on Ethereum. So I put a tweet out about it and I call it digital goal because now there's actually like a proper digital goal. No offense, Bitcoin. But yeah, I think that's a solid point. Very interesting to see like this wave of tokenization is starting to ramp up in different areas. Yeah, I'm just pulling up what you shared showing the tokenized gold, which is a great point.

I do think this is something that we're hearing a lot, maybe not about gold. like about these like inflation hedge assets again, you know, the week or two ago or maybe last week, like the talk of the town very briefly was, you know, Bitcoin is decoupling from, you know, risk and equities. I don't know if that's really true, but I am seeing more and more this sentiment of like, I don't know, fears of continued inflation and people are, again, bringing forward these ideas of like maybe you should have some gold, maybe you should have some Bitcoin. Bitcoin keeps kind of rearing its head in these conversations more, at least more and more broadly than I think it ever has in the past. And maybe part of that is just driven by like, you know,

when you just look at it over the past couple of years, it's a far different asset today than it was, you know, a few years ago, the market cap. The market cap and the size has expanded rapidly in the past few years. The other thing that I find maybe interesting or worth pointing out as well when we think about what the market's thinking about is our friends over at polymarket and this U.S. recession in 2025. Maybe you're right, Carlos. I mean, who knows whether that was like a short-term bottom or like a top in terms of like fear, but at least in terms of what, you know, the polymarket traders are saying on this one.

There was like a bit of a peak in the in the worries for recession here back, you know, a week ago or so. Who knows? Maybe things could get worse from here. You know, I'm not an Oracle, but we, it. It is nice that we have more data and more markets that kind of like play into these different things. And, you know, they might not serve as signal or alpha, but at least being able to look at them

after the fact and understand, you know, maybe at least how the market is pricing some of these things in. It's funny, Danny, that chart that you just pulled up, it very closely mimics the ice bond spread. Normally they say a four, maybe a 4.2% is like we're heading to a recession. Um, last week it was, last week it was three percent spread and I was come back down to two. So three percent is like, okay, there's, uh, you know, 66 percent percent chance, two percent. We're back at 50 percent chance and it's like kind of like, it's crazy how polymarket like can

mirror these things just through like just through just the masses. Yeah. I mean, they're playing at that, that old saying or Adja that like people can, the average sort of figures its way out to the rough true probability, whether that's true or not. But at least, you know, we've seen that with the election, that that seemed to be somewhat true, at least in the way that, you know, people were spending their dollars. And I don't know, we'll have to see whether this one turns out to be true or not. We've got quite a few months left in the year.

Right now, the odds are pricing in a recession occurring, at least, you know, to a coin flip today. We'll see where that goes from here. Yeah, I mean, the Atlanta aspect GDP now is forecasting minus 2% growth for this quarter. And then a recession is like defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. So if we already have one and then the other like I would say 50% sounds about right. But it begs the question. Does that mean we just, you know, this is like if it happens, it would it wouldn't be it would be an event driven recession. and then is the question, is it a recession or is it a technical recession?

You know, two quarters declining GDP and then up only from that. Like, I think, I wish there was a Polly Market for that. We might have to see if they get more specific, but I think the big problem, at least, for polymarket is just getting in a volume on even those markets alone to make them compelling. But we are seeing more platforms adopt that, like Robin Hood, Robin Hood rolled out their event trading platform. There's some other platforms. I know, you know, Drift has had there. their sort of version of this as well since last year, since maybe around the time of the election

as well. So that's becoming more popular. Maybe we'll see more of those markets start to flourish. The other sort of thing that's kind of making its way through these different platforms now is crack and announced their rollout of U.S. equity trading. So we're kind of seeing the reverse now where, you know, I think there's a lot of expectation for, you know, trad-fi institutions and brokerages to offer like crypto services. Now we're seeing the inverse where, you know, crypto-focused trading platforms are offering, you know, equities and like more brokerage-like features, which is interesting. I'm curious if you guys have any like big takeaways there. I know we've talked recently about this idea of like trading stocks on chain. I guess the big

question is like, does that matter if, you know, all of these crypto platforms are going to offer their own, you know, equities trading and other market trading just on their platforms alongside the crypto? A quick take. I think it's the same thing. We talked about this before, but like to get access to equities, it's already relatively easy in the US. And then maybe you're trying to branch into like a wider market, like with crypto, like

young crypto holders who maybe don't own any equities. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, on chain. I mean, crocking and stuff is still going to be limited to sit in markets for the US stocks. Whereas on chain, I guess, anybody around the world with a wallet. can purchase these, like from pact or whatever, can purchase these chains. I think it's more like, you know, and a few weeks ago, we also talked about NASDAQ looking to go like 24-7 or 24-5 with their trading. And I think just as the demand for like 24-7 global access grows, you know, it doesn't matter

who you are, you know, you want like a seamless all-in-one trading apps, you know, to have everything in one nice package. So I think, you know, for Cracken and probably some of the other. others, it's, you know, expanding into equities is like a natural step for them. And, but I think, you know, more excitingly, but it like paves the way for tokenized assets on that platform. So, even though it might seem like all these, you know, centralized exchanges are coming to eat the lunch of on-chain equities, they can actually be the gateway that opens up more tokenized assets to the masses. Yeah. That's, that's also my thing. I think. I think, I think,

like whenever sexes start doing something, then I imagine that more and more Dexas will focus on listing those assets on their, I guess, not listing because it's mostly permissionless, but for purpose, Dex's listing for regular Dexas, it might just be that more people want to tokenize it. I think you probably want to focus on, I know we mentioned Crocket and I've historically said that Coinbase is slow. I think you probably want to focus on Coinbase in this scenario, though, because they have base. I imagine they're going to try and onboard as many equities as they can.

On the technical side, it makes sense. They hold a lot of the USDC for Coinbase on base. So it should, like they are, I assume they already have a process for accounting and ensuring that this works out. So it should be relatively trivial for them to make this happen. If they actually do make it happen over the next year, we'll see. Like I said, they tend to take their time, but we'll see. For me, the main takeaway is like the convergence between like fintech and crypto. Like there's been talk over the past year of Robin Hood competing with Coinbase and other crypto platforms.

And I think these semants like this convergence were Robin Hood was like venturing into crypto more and more. And now you see centralized exchanges venturing on the Tradfai side with stocks and ETFs and stuff like that. So I think over time you will see both of these platforms kind of having the same offerings and competing on the same ground. And my other takeaway is just what what does this mean for platforms? like backed finance who offer like tokenized stock. Like for instance, BACT offers tokenized coin on base. Like if CoinBers, if Coinbase starts offering like tokenized coin, like what does this mean for Pact like, do they still have a net or like do they become like are their services no longer needed?

Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think it's sort of the question we have a lot of about a lot of these. like crossovers between like fintech or like centralized exchange versus like decentralized platforms is you know are they going to build it themselves and then just like kind of uproot the players who are kind of playing in the permissionless space right now and it's i think it's kind of like hard to say because at least from what we're seeing with coinbase and base they're kind of experimenting on both sides right they're using morpho for like bitcoin lending but that at the same time they're experimenting with uniswap v4 hooks for like permissioned pools and then trading so

It's hard to say, you know, they're using some of that infrastructure like right now and like making use of uni and morphos and other teams's work. But I don't know that the direction is clear, at least from like a both a permission list versus permissioned as well as like a, you know, are we actually going to use D5 versus like, you know, fork and co-opt it for ourselves. Maybe Coinbase will reuse, you know, reuse, you know, make use of Uni's Infra and Morpho's Infra and others. And maybe Robin Hood will come in and just like build their own stuff for KDahl and, you know, throw KIC up behind all of it. Hard to say at this juncture. But we'll see. We're kind of slowly seeing some of these pieces at least kind of trickle into place, which is prompting the questions. Yeah.

Sorry, Mark. You probably have something more important, but I'm going to cut you off. Something to think about here is that like sexes move very, very slowly and regulation moves even more slowly. So there's probably some time for, I know that all of it has been already happening, but there's no need to panic. Not everything's going to be forked overnight. Yeah, I agree. I think like you said, the regulatory aspect is going to be the slowing factor. versus the actual technology.

But in that front, I was going to say something with the blending of, like, the converging of, you know, blockchains and the Tradfi world. Something I learned this week is that in the U.S., there's these Heluk loans, like home equity lines of credit. And last year, 20% of all of those loans were done on the blockchain, well, specifically provenance. And then that's through, that's through, you know, figure markets. but they have like a white label product. So there's many like different like distributors. Let's call them that.

So like, but the end, you know, these, these borrowers, they don't know that they're using a, you know, blockchain in the back end. You know, not necessarily. It's not, it's all obstructed away from them. So like this is kind of an example. I mean, this has been years in the making and because again, you write, you know, the regulatory approvals take some time and, you know, you have to get these things done right. But, you know, this is a good example of how this technology can make, you know, accessing these kind of. of loans cheaper without anybody delving into any of the complexities, but, you know, still having some form of like, you know, centralized legal, like entity who's facilitating it.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And then maybe to hammer home the regulatory front, like we've seen as well with Robin Hood in their attempts at rolling out the event trading platform, you know, they got shot down initially by the CFTC, I want to say, when you they tried to do trading on Super Bowl outcomes, but now more recently, at least within the past month or two, they've been able to do a broader role out of that platform. So at the very least, we're starting to slowly see on some of these things. In this case, it's just prediction markets specifically. The regulatory gears are turning a little bit.

Paying attention to what's happening, it's like it's laying out the threads for the future. We can kind of see some of these things start to form. maybe in a slightly different gear, I want to talk about, I think this is kind of a hot topic right now, like Solana's sort of institutional mindshare is becoming a bit of a topic or a thing that's happening. You know, there's conversations and at least around potential ETFs coming to the U.S. It sounds like there may be some products in Canada and some other places already that are live. And the other sort of shock that we've seen in traditional markets is Janover is taking basically the micro strategy approach, right? They raised some money and then

they bought some Solana. They've bought more since this announcement of $4.6 million. I think they've maybe doubled or tripled their buys. But I think they essentially raised something like $40 or $50 million with plans to invest a lot of it in this whole ecosystem and run a validator, things a lot. those lines. And so we're kind of maybe seeing like a sailor strategy, but with soul sort of approach, if that's the right way of thinking about it. I guess I'm curious, you guys' thoughts. There's a lot of talk, it's funny.

There's a lot of talk actually about ETH and Ethereum's like institutional mindshare. All the institutions are going to come in and buy ETH because ETH is the best place to do things on chain. But I find more and more that there's actually maybe a lot of interest on the institutional side for Solana, or at least some of the conversations are popping up and seeming that way. What are your thoughts there? I mean, people want the coin that goes up. Like, even institutions, that's really it. No, nobody wants to buy.

I remember actually one of the things that people kept pushing back in the day when Yves hadn't underperformed for this long was institutions are going to look at EF and say, wow, this has a lot of catching up to do. Don't think that's been the case, as you can tell by like EF TF flows. And yeah, I think, I mean, these guys, like I think we often, obviously institutions have different forms of approaching investments, but at the end of the day, they also have the same monkey brain that we have and they see a chart that's going up or a price that's going up

and they're interested more in that asset. And when you're interested in an asset, I think we also realize this, and I think a lot of people who are listening will also realize this is, if a coin is going up and you become interested in it, then you read into it. You want to learn why it's the case.

And I think that's why also, like, as Ethereum underperformed, everyone started talking about why it was underperforming. And then at that point, it's almost like, yes, price is affected by causes, but also like the causes are constantly being repeated because of the price. And then that becomes kind of a flywheel. So I think like institutions also hear about that and they see it.

Like yes, Larry Fink is going on television and saying Ethereum is where everything is going to be tokenized. But if he can earn the fees off of stable, salana, not stable coins, if he can earn the fees off of Solana, a Solana, a Solano. on ATF, then he'll change his tune immediately. Or if you can make money off it, because that's his job, is attracting capital into his products. And if Solana's going to attract more capital, then he'll go for that.

So I don't think there's ever been, I don't think that narrative is going to hold for much. Like, oh, we should have done Ethereum. We've seen that it hasn't held up. And I think unless they make a lot of changes, including to the price. then it's probably not going to change. People want to make money as simple as that, I think. Not a great fake, but... No, I think I agree with Bach.

I don't know why you would invest your treasury into Seoul as a company. But yeah, I have no take on that. But I've seen these additional interests picked up in Solana over the past few months for sure. last month, the CME devided sole futures. And that's like a prerequisite for a potential ETF approval. We saw the same thing with PTC and ETH last year or two years ago. There's also like indications of institutional interest on chain, like BlackRock launch,

it's Biddle product and Solana. You've seen new stable coin issuers on the network. You've seen First Digital, the U.S. Global Network that's like a consortium with Paxos, Robin Hood, and other players also launch on Solana, and they already have like $100 million of USDG on chain. So I think like you're seeing that institutional interest pick up, not just like in sole the asset, but actually institutional players launching their own products on the network, which is almost better than just being interested. in like buying Seoul as a speculator. Like actually building on the chain as an institution showcases that they have the same amount of confidence they have in Ethereum where most of the tokenized products

and institutions see today. Yeah, 100%. I think you see ME features as a dead giveaway that ETFs are incoming. I think the market has the odds at like 80, 85%. Not that they were necessary, but with the current admin, we kind of know it. I think institutions, as a weird question, I don't think, I think institutions are kind of using blockchains as pilots and as like distribution.

You know, for the most of it, they're very, you know, blockchain agnostic. I think, you know, securitized is the one who actually, you know, goes through the legal process and the technical process of tokenizing these assets. And they're on like 12 chains. Like every chain has some, like some real world assets on it, you know, even like ZKSink, Polygon, Aptos, all of them, you know. And, you know, it started off with Stella, I think originally on Ethereum, some of the, the older blockchains, and I guess from a sense of like security, Lindy, these have been around the longest. They were relatively safe to launch on, you know, maybe some years ago Solana had outages problems.

But I think as the tech has evolved and the understanding of these technologies has evolved with it, you know, these institutions are feeling a lot more comfortable, tokenizing on these chains. and at the end of the day, these are off-chain liabilities. So if Solana goes down again or if something else happens, they still have a first ledger of records in some other digital ledger that's not a blockchain somewhere. So like those risks can also be mitigated to some extent. And plus, you know, most of the buyers are into, most of the buyers of like Black Rocks, Biddlefun, I should say all,

you know, institutions themselves and they're KYC'd. So these settlements can happen off-chain as well. So not a huge risk there. It's, you know, again, I'm still looking for more when these assets are directly issued on the blockchain as the primary and only point of ledger. That's probably a bit more exciting. And when some of these other like smart contract risks and chain risks matter a bit more. But to go back on the sole strategies and the Junova side of things, like it's, Yeah, I mean, sold strategies was the first one I heard of doing it.

And, you know, the name tells you, they're trying to very well mimic micro strategies, which also changed the name, which I don't like, by the way. Strategies, I don't like it. Micro Strategies are a lot more powerful brand-wise, I think. But anyway, I digress. I think what's neat about these companies, too, because I was, like, reading some of their filings, and they are also going to be validators in this space,

whereas, you know, with micro strategy, they just buy Bitcoin and hold it. Whereas, you know, Genova and Soul Strategies, they can actually stake their soul. And if they buy a lot, they can be, you know, it's stake weighted, you know, QS. So they can potentially be a meaningful, validator in the ecosystem or, you know, not insignificant, at least. And through that, they can earn income, earn a yield from that. So that's like a proper business line. And then, you know, who knows, maybe we see them expanding into like client development or, like, investing in, you know, like applications on the, on the chain, you know, things to help build

it out. Even, even Michael Saylor has said that they're starting to look at Bitcoin infrastructure place to help support like, you know, payment rails or Bitcoin or whatever it may be lending, whatever I'm not really, you know, I'm not in those rooms, but like we're seeing it being more than just a treasury asset. Yeah, I think that's a great takeaway, Mark. it would be interesting to see, and it makes sense, right? It would be in your interests, especially if you're Michael Saylor, for example,

you know, you own or strategy owns a massive portion. It's like 2.5% of Bitcoin supply now, I want to say, some massive amounts. So, yeah, I mean, at some point you then want to further invest to ensure, you know, that this asset or this network that you are so heavily, you know, tied to. has some lifeblood running through it in the future. So yeah, just makes sense. They're aligning themselves in every way possible. So yeah, it would be expected if we see some of that from some of these sole strategy-based teams as well.

Something to look out for, though. If they raise a ton of money and then use that to invest in particular apps or parts of the ecosystem, that might be something to keep eyes on. Today's episode is brought to you by Crypto Tax Calculator. If you're looking for accurate crypto taxes with no guesswork, check out Cryptotax calculator. Get accurate CPA-endorsed tax reports with full support for IRS rules. For those who have fallen down the on-chain rabbit hole, CTC has you covered with more than 3,000 integrations. They have full support for Defi staking and NFTs.

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Alongside Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, the company also launched the Ledger Security Key app, offering a safer alternative to traditional passwords and enhancing your digital security. If you are in this space, you owe it to yourself to at least check out Ledger and their ecosystem what they have available to you. So thanks, thanks once again, to Ledger for sponsoring the show. jumping to maybe a totally separate topic, maybe one that warmed some people's hearts if they received the YapDrop. Wayfinder prompt token launched. This is, I want to say, more of a discussion about Quito and their sort of product at this point. But Wayfinder did, I'll call it a YapDrop, but basically allocated some portion of the supply to emerging yappers.

on the platform. And I think the only stipulation was that you just had to log into the Wayfinder application and connect with your Twitter account or your wallet that is connected to your, like, Kyto Yap account. And if you were on that list of yappers, you got some portion of this. I think the bigger question that this prompts for me is like, you know, the commentary that I see around Quito right now is, you know, people just sort of making fun of the idea of like, yeah, like, let's just,

let's just give all the slop printers and, like, Twitter farmers, like, more free money. I don't know that it's, like, necessarily more free money, and maybe that's the question that it boils down to. You know, previously, I think a lot of these, like, threadors and people writing about certain things, like, maybe they're being paid under the table and you don't really know that, and you just kind of scroll the timeline and you see what's being talked about, and you just kind of have to guess, like, is this guy a paid chill or did he, like, think of this himself. You don't really know that. I guess at the very least with Kaido, they're drawing some definitive link there where you know, you sign up with your Twitter account tie your wallet to it and you can see who's getting paid for, you know,

the type of content that they're putting out. I'm curious what your guys' thoughts are. They dropped an announcement the other day with a ton more details. Let me pull this up. What do we feel about the Quito model? Like, what do you guys' thoughts, big thoughts, small thoughts. I just want to know what we think about. I'll, I got both of the airdrops. So I got both the Kaido Yaps AirDrop as well as the Wayfinder AirDrop. I think I overall staked Prime for probably a total of 90 days or maybe a little bit longer, but indifferent. So you could max lock it. I didn't max lock it. I thought that was stupid. I just locked it in like 30. increments or like a little bit higher so I got a better multiple based on my that was a spreadsheet

going around I just used whatever the like the shortest thing on that that made money was and I did not make money not only did Prime go down higher than when I bought it just FYI but still lost money on overall and the air drop that I got was 25 times less than what I got for my Qaeda air drop and I think I've tweeted about way fine I tweeted about Prime twice, definitely, maybe three or four times actually. But I think that speaks to a different thing, which is the entire point of an air drop is to incentivize certain behaviors. Like that's why we have a lot of these token emissions programs as well as like these

air drop programs is like liquidity mining is clearly to incentivize liquidity. Air drops are to incentivize people to use your chain or your product before. Like, you're making them lab rats to potentially get hacked, to, you know, deposit some form of money for something. I don't know what they use it for. But anyway, there is something that you expect from the users to do to get money. And that's historically been, like, the social contract between the user and the developer. And if the developer fucks around, the user gets really angry. Kaito kind of changes this because you don't really have to do anything.

you just need to tweet and you need to have enough followers when you tweet. That's the only thing. And you need to sign up for the past. I don't know how beneficial this is for projects. And I think this is something that is different. And like in crypto, there's this very clear, different type of team. And in that team, there are marketing and BD people and growth people. And I think those people generally approach.

crypto in a different way than you and I approach it, in which they very much want to boost up. Like, it's their job. They want to get as much eyes on the project as possible. And typically this means, like, random partnerships, Kaito leaderboards, et cetera, et cetera. And it's not exactly, I think, what you want to incentivize, first of all. And, like, you have to think how much of that is useful. Like, are you going to reward the people who tweet? I'm very happy because they rewarded me.

I got free money. I'm, you know, fantastic. But like, do you want to reward those people just because that's like the marketing mindset of saying we need to get as many eyes on our protocol as possible? And to do that, we need to give a percent of our token to Kido so that we can be on their leaderboard. Or is it, I don't know, do something else. Like there's a million ways to air drop. On top of that, you can also do coin sales. token sales, that's something that we're doing, Echo, Legion, etc.

So that's like my big takeaway is there's a clear like shift in how things are done. And I'm not sure if it's the best way to do it because the token is technically the best tool that you have as a project to incentivize certain usage. Like it's our form of what traditional apps got with like gamification. We have it with the token and the token is 100x more powerful because it's direct finance. financial alignment. So I wonder if they're kind of wasting their juice on on some like social media engagement that some marketing person came up with and said, we should give this out versus like if there's actually better ways to use it. That's my personal opinion. I'm kind of upset clearly because I didn't get theirdrop that I wanted from the tokens locked. I honestly, 25x less is ridiculous for staking. money and then not receiving it. I know this sort of reminds me to the NFT or drop meta where projects used to reward certain NFT communities with air drops without really doing anything for the project.

I know Athena, for instance, AirDrop Me Lady. I remember MadLads got a lot of allocations from Seoul projects. I remember Bad Kitts also got allocations from random projects. And at the end of the day, I don't know how beneficial. it is as a project to just airdrop to these random communities. Like Box said, it's like a marketing play you see on Twitter people tweeting about the project thanking them for the air drop. But I think most of these people just end up dumping those tokens just because they have no financial incentive or skin in the game and they are real users of like their project.

So even though you might get a little bit of attention like in the short term, long term I think it's not beneficial for the project just to give away your tokens to rent those just for a few like yaps online yeah and just to add to that um like people who farm air drops or people who get air drops do sell it as well obviously so it's not just like a yaps game but the social contract is that if you're a project and you can boast metrics based on user activity you can raise on it and then like you have a responsibility I mean we've

decided that you have responsibility we can get more into the could people be giving out equity this easily like tokens this easily or not that's a whole different discussion but in the current way that things stand when somebody uses your chain you air drop to them you're going

against that which isn't fantastic even though they might dump they have the right to dump they they let you raise more money. You need to let them dump it. Yeah. I think these are fair points. I'll say Ian from Kairos, he kind of gave a similar opinion, at least in the short term, that you would just expect a ton of, you know, cheap talk, people just, you know, scheming the system of, I just need to mention, you know,

positive words in relation to this project on Twitter and then I'll get paid for it. I guess the question is like if they can really align the activity and like via AI understand if that engagement is real or not. I think that's kind of an open question. Maybe you could. Maybe you couldn't. I don't know that it would be possible to figure out if someone's words are genuine or not. I think it's pretty easy to just be like fakingly shilling something that you don't actually care about. maybe the bigger thing is like, you know, some of the pieces of this like change to their system that they announce are having assigned yaps from a yapper leaderboard, but then also assigned staked Kaido, which rewards you with some token reward sharing in relation to like a specific project.

And then Kydo Genesis NFTs that add multiplier effects. So, you know, maybe there's a leg to stand on here in terms of like if you get the people who are staking their Kaido engaging with this thing, like, I don't know, I guess you would assume it's to some level of genuineness if they didn't just like dump all their Kaido at launch and, you know, they continue to interact with these things. But at the end of the day, it feels like it's, you know, not too much different than just giving away funds to people who mention your thing in a tweet. which is free to do. You know, any one of us could spit out 10 tweets right now about 10 different projects. And if that gets us an air drop in the future, you know, we didn't really do anything or bring anything to that project in exchange for that. So I think realistically they'll definitely have to work harder to, like, you know, add caveats to this and, like, really build out a system to make sure that it's not just like this free

gimmee for anybody who tweets about anything. I guess we can talk about like we can talk about what productive, user activity is and like staking tokens versus tweeting about it there's two different takes there like are staking tokens in a contract just to earn some yield um not being used by the way this isn't like provided as liquidity this is just staked that's not more useful technically than like sending up tweets. You are locking up capital, but you're not actually, like, it's inactive, useless capital. There's nothing being, unless the team is using that by something to, I guess, earn yield on it. Like the way that, who blasted it that way, I mean, they captured yield, I assume, a little

bit. Like, that was different versus what prime, prompt Wayfinder did. So maybe tweets are worth more there. It's like it makes more sense to reward people who are getting you in front of the timeline. I mean, they're both useless. Like you said, people are just going to game it. It's just 10 tweets. It's nothing but we'll see. It can't be fixed. This is like, just needs to die out the way that the NFT thing died out like Carlos mentioned. Yeah. Like what Bok was saying, like what is more, what is more beneficial like staking or tweeting a body project? I don't know. I'm not, I'm not going to like opine on that right now, but I think that was kind of the biggest thing.

I wasn't involved in this, but this is kind of the biggest thing I saw in my timeline for a lot of the hate. Like, people who bought the token, staked it, locked it up for X amount of time, ended up getting less rewards than, you know, somebody who was just tweeting about it. And, you know, I think it's hard, you know, managing expectations in crypto when you're doing a TG is one of the toughest things to do, especially in a bare market. But I think, like, the disdain comes from, like, that comparison. not really understanding the value crew, like that comparison of rewards that you got versus somebody else got while thinking that you deserve it more. Yeah, I think that's fair. The comps that I

had in my mind is like maybe Kyto just replaces all of these like generic questing platforms, like your gauks where it's like, hey, follow our account, retweet our tweet, you know, share it with five friends. Like it's essentially the same thing if they can just like go and scroll like your activity, you know, get numbers about your, you know, user's activity on Twitter and how much they're, like, talking about a certain thing. It feels largely similar to that. Now, I know there's usually, like, there's sometimes an on-chain component to some of that galque stuff, but I'm sure kind of, you know, they can loop that in as well, right? If they've got people, people's wallet addresses, maybe there's more to come, right? Like, maybe an on-chain component gets baked into that

with, like, test nets and main nets. Um, and that's something they can play with. The other one, like, maybe interesting comp or, like, sort of different approach is this. like ethos network that is doing like this reputation and credibility for what I think right now is like just generally Twitter accounts. So like people rating like good or bad like this guy has good rep or bad rep on their posts or like acts in good faith or not in good faith type of thing. It's a little bit different than Keito where they're just like, you know, using AI to like do sentiment analysis and see like, okay, this thing is getting talked about or like is interesting right now versus, oh, people think that, you know, this person or this community or this thing is good or bad, whatever that means.

Maybe that's another angle that they can play with as well. I'm not really sure. Yeah, I think the simplest way to fix all of this is to, like, Wayfinder is an AI agent framework thing. So why not make people pay fees for that and then air drop a pay? Like, that's what all of it should be. If you want to do productive or, like, for it to be useful, it should always be based on fees. And this is, like, going against what I would want because ideally, like,

I was very happy when they were doing the NFT air drops because I had the NFTs that got airdropped. And same with the Kido yaps. I'm very happy that I got theirdrop because I yapped. But, like, realistically, if you're a team, you want to pay. You want to pay for PMF, like, that's the whole goal, or you want to pay to raise. and both of those lead to one thing, which is you need to reward volume.

No, not volume. It means reward fees, sometimes volume, stuff like that, or like just people taking risk to make your product better, either by using it or by making it more liquid. I don't think it makes any sense. The galaxy stuff always drove me crazy because it just doesn't make any sense.

I'll give like 3% for like Discord. Dude. why? Yeah, I think that's a fair point. It reminds me there were, there have been in the past like absurd giveaways basically for just having been in a Discord

when a snapshot was taken. It's like, why are you giving someone $10,000 just because they were in a Discord which is free to join and didn't do anything or post anything? Like, you're just giving away capital for no reason. But yeah, I don't know. We've seen the game continue to evolve like over time.

I'm sure it will. We're going to go through more cycles of this for sure. If anyone wants some Boclore, I complain about this a lot, like all of this thing, but the Aptos air drop. I don't know if anybody remembers that. You just needed to set up some emails, mint the NFTA and got like air dropped. That's probably like a great moment for me overall. So my lord, I lost, like that was like a fake talk and then he thought better of doing the fig talk on it.

Yeah, I'm not doing fake talk. But that was like 2022, early 2022. No, late 22. It was FTX hadn't collapsed yet. It was before FtX collapsed. It was like post-2020, bare market, I'm going to kill myself. And then the app that said it up. So there is good in all of that as well.

Like sometimes it saves somebody's life, you know. In this case, mine. Nice. Aptos kept walk alive. Yeah. I remember something similar with the wormhole air drop where they urge up to a bunch of NFT communities, but you had to link to their Discord and a bunch of people didn't like link their account like their NFTs to the Discord and that caused a huge amount of controversy.

But at the end of the day, like people don't like people forget it's just free money. Like they're giving you free money. I understand why people complain so much at the end of the day. if they didn't have any financial incentives in the project and then they just didn't get any money it's obvious like i don't understand why they would complain otherwise to be fair i always complain because if you complain people they'll have to try and make it better and i might get free money so maybe i'm the problem yeah uh yeah good points on all sides i mean i think it's tough with all the arbitrary criteria right and you don't know beforehand and so it's then easy for people to run

down the conspiracy rabbit hole of like, oh, well, all the insiders knew, they all linked their accounts, they all bought this thing beforehand, and then they dumped right before the snapshot or whatever. It's like, you know, what are you going to do? The days move on. I will say one thing. The insider conspiracy is less of a conspiracy and more of a fact, I think, because it's not coincidental that they sell exactly at 11, 1201 after their, like, snaps at 12. So, yeah. I mean, definitely when you see, charts move like that on assets that are directly related to like snapshots, then you know somebody knows something. It's just like it isn't you. All right, cool. I think that was good,

good chat. Last topic I want to jump into, and we've got Bach here, he wrote about Barra a couple months back. We had to bring him back on. The timeline's asking what's going on with Barra. I want to pull up our dashboard. We do have some decent data here. I think the big question mark, we can ignore price. But the other big question mark is like, we've got this chart of stable coin supply on Bera, for example. And over the past few weeks, we've gone from a pretty strong high of 800 million plus

down to 378 million. So like a net loss of like 500 million or so of stable coin supply on the chain. There's a couple of other metrics that stand out. But I think maybe the one thing that's worth pointing out is that this week here, like March 24th, does coincide with when proof of liquidity went live and they announced a bunch of new reward vaults.

And there was also a spike in BGT redemptions that, like that day or that week, around that time frame. The other thing that's lingering, and I want you to talk about Bach, is like, does this also line up with, like, Boiko Vault unlocks? I know that was like a 90 day or so thing from when the capital was committed there, I wonder if this is just like a big storm that's kind of all combining and hitting

Barra all at the same time of, you know, changing up which faults are being incentivized and also like a bunch of people in Boyko got their money unlocked. What are you thinking? I mean, that's exactly what you said. A bunch of people got their money unlocked and markets down people want to get out. I need the prefaced this and I already told you, Danny, I have to preface this. is because like the market has gone down and in general we see that

people don't have the same risk cap type that they used to have. So you can't blame all of this on, I don't think you can blame a lot on the bear chain team. But in my report, I did highlight that I thought it was a bit silly that they locked away a lot of interested barricane capital

in Boyco and it wasn't moved until later. And that was, I can't remember how much it was but it was billions of dollars from 30 to 90 days locked away now that's I think the second tranche the second

tranche of that hasn't hasn't unlocked yet so that's something to keep an eye out on the second thing is like I said that's unproductive capital that's can you pull up the RAB or the fees not RAB I'm going to get yelled at

like well first of all you can see where the first one was unlocked. And second of all, or actually, that might not be. Anyway, you can see that, like, that money just hasn't gone in. It doesn't make a lot of sense for a chain like Barrett to not have. If you're a defy chain, you won't activate.

All chains want activity. But, I mean, Bearer just doesn't have it. And that's because I think they locked away way too much capital into these vaults. And additionally, I mentioned this in my report as well. I don't think that they are playing the right game for the stage that crypto is in right now. Like we want fast trading focused chains. Solana Hyperliquid coming up as Fogo, et cetera, et cetera. Like we want Speed Monad, Mega Eve.

Like these are fast chains built to generate either like a lot of volume and fees based on that volume or like people are able to transact in real time. That's what you want. And that's not something that Bear Chain has offered. So I think those two combined with the fact that, like I said, there's a market downturn has led to a lot of outflow from Barat Chain. Also, it was inevitably going to be a very PVP environment. Like, no, but I don't think anybody expected to go into Baratain and say,

oh, this is going to be a fun time. It's just there's too much capital in it already. raises there's too much expectation and like all the yields are diluted and they rely a lot on liquidity mining and these like vault-based tokenomics which people are just too smart for now. I think like even the average retail participant is like I probably shouldn't put money into this 400% L people because my money is going to half and those that do put in get out as soon as they can. I think overall, it just doesn't work that very well.

But like I said, I think it's also a very reflexive chain clearly. Like it relies on the market to go up for the incentives to be used. But that also goes to the downside. When the incentives aren't great, then people don't really want to take the risk of holding something that potentially isn't as great as the rest of the market. Like I think everyone here probably has in their mind like bare market, L1s, and L2s, or I guess all market L1s and L2s and like bull market L1s and L2.

Sonic, Bull Market L1 or L2. Barre chain bull market. So I think you probably have that in your mind as well. And that's how you approach these L1s. I think it'll be fine for them probably. Probably a good idea to keep track of it and keep track of the yield, the activity. I assume they'll have big incentive programs going forward just to get more. more and more attention on the chain.

You think they can turn this, like, so let's say it stays the same because the, the throughput of the chain is kind of vanilla, right? Vanilla EVM, like 15 TPS on an EVM is chain. So unless they've got more throughput than that, VEAS, because it's a little bit unique in their specific architecture, but it's, it's like a, you're going against the grain, I think, a little bit. like I mentioned, I think people watch something different now. We've gone away from, no matter what you're like morality or ephos is,

we've gone away from maximum decentralized. We want like just things to go through and World War Free Resistant. Like we can handle it being a little bit slow towards more. So you know what? We can make some tradeoffs and decentralization as long as it's fast. You can even hear this in institutional narratives. Like we've clearly gone away. towards like we need settlement.

Like the whole thing is that we need quicker settlement for them. So the market has changed. The L1 that people desire has changed. You're kind of going against the grain by having a 15 TPS chain like you said. So you need to offer something vastly different. Like you need to offer something that people want to have. So abstract is I'm not like saying I'm bullish abstract, but I'm saying they're clearly trying to carve out their own niche, which is we won't like user focus.

we want to make it as friendly as possible. Has it worked out for them? Not really. But like if you're going to be a vanilla L2 or L1, that's the angle that you have to take. You have to have a differentiator. But you can't both be like a slower chain. In my opinion, you can't both be a slower chain as well as like your main offering is oh, we're going to bring like 2021 DFI back. Like it. And this is also my scenario for a bunch of other things. Like I don't think the past. can always come back because it relied on a completely different set of circumstances. In that case, like, ZERP as well as, like, people didn't really understand how anything works.

So they just fucked around a lot on chain and they mined liquidity and life was good. It's not the same. We were not in the same environment. I think people want different things. That's my macro take as well. It's not ZERP anymore. So that's it. Any other questions?

I'm happy to field them. no i think that was good you you definitely can't pretend like we're in zirp um the uh that's my mac but i think we're not i like that i like that you mentioned sonic because i think it's interesting that like clearly they realize that you can't just like spit the exact same thing out like and they kind of did spit the exact same thing out but the way that they're marketing it is like oh this is like a you know super fast 10 k tPS evm parallel parallelize chain, what have you, but playing into that narrative of like, we're going to spit out like a fast and cheap chain, which Phantom technically already was. But, you know, running it back and then

also running the incentives and doing the points program all at the same time. It does make you wonder, like, if Barra had gone the same way, kept the whole reward mechanism, proof of liquidity, all this stuff, but then also leaned into the kind of new age, you know, hey, we're going to do less validators, we're going to do what we need to do to, like, get this thing to crank, and it's going to be like a fast, fast trading focus chain, but we also have this, like, crazy reward scheme under the hood. I don't know, maybe, maybe things turn out differently, but maybe not. I mean, it's a down market, like you're saying.

Lots of things are getting, are getting spit on. It's hard to say. That's key there. It is a down market, and Barrett's very clearly a bull market thing. So that's key. And the second thing is, I'm sure somebody is going to yell at me about this, because is my bare chain knowledge is old at this point. But from what I understand,

their whole schick was doing stuff with Cosmos, which you can't really make that fast very quickly. At least in a previous iteration, I don't know if it's the case. But so it's not the same. Like, they're not using, you see a lot of these new chains used like BFD consensus, and it's like purposefully built to be really, really fast.

Or in like Fogo's case, it's like fire dancer with 20. on validators. So they're like purpose built for that and like that's there. Like structurally I just think there's an issue with barit chain. Like structurally it's not built to be fast from the very get-go and it's not built to play the cycles games from the get-go. So it's going to have problems.

I think you can only have one and then you can change the narrative around a bit. Unfortunately. I did like the marketing. I wonder how much you guys think like timing plays a factor here. So like if I think about Barra and I think about like eclipse because we were talking about this one the other day, you know, these teams, they did ideation and like raise money years back. So whatever like the popular hot thing was then, you know, farming all this stuff back then was was like the thing in 2021 like defy summer type stuff. So it's not absurd that like Barra would raise on the idea of like making a chain on this. But when then when it takes you three, four years to actually launch the thing, it's like you maybe already. missed the window of that narrative. I mean, I wonder how much that has an impact here where if they had just dropped that thing right away, maybe it would have done well, like, during the summer of 2023, before everyone, like, fully got on board, like, this fast chain good

salana train. Yeah. I mean, it's something that is very, very relevant. And like you said, eclipse is another one. Think of all of the modularity ones as well. I know they didn't, some of them didn't race for it. They just popped up at the same time. Or, they shifted towards it. Didn't work out. Same with a lot of the eigenlayer-related or restaking-related ones. It's an inevitable risk, though, and I think VCs and protocols both bear this risk a lot more than investors do, like liquid investors than retail do.

If you are going to be at the forefront of frontier tech, I don't know if we can still call frontier tech after how many years, but you have to take, like, obviously risks on what to invest in. And they move really, really fast. Like, think of, we're going to look at some of the things that are raising an AI right now. And we already knew. We're going to be like, why the fuck are you doing this? Like, this is irrelevant.

It's going to be relevant to two years. And that's been the case. And I think you can probably look at some chains that you're seeing right now as well. Like, one thing I've been thinking about is stable coins. Stable coins are massive. Okay. Six stable coin announcements in the past month or two months, like for new chains. Like, yes, of course, some of them.

will do well and I'm sure stable coins are large enough um tam to like feed everybody and their families and the VCs and all of us but I mean come on like there's some that have distribution edge plasm because of tether relationships there's some that have existing defy integrations edge ifina the rest we'll see I'm not trying to shit on any team but like if you are on the liquid side or if you're a retail investor or if you're a VC, anybody, you should look at these and say what's like in two years. I think most people already do this. Maybe I'm stupid for explaining it. But in two years, three years, world is there going to be relevant? People change. I'm not the same man. I was two years ago. Think about that. Yeah, I think that's a great point.

I think that encapsulates exactly what's what happens with a lot of these projects. And especially especially when they just take way longer than expected to actually go to market. I think that that's probably the bigger thing there is like if you come out with this an idea and it takes you four years to actually bring it to the market, then like the market's already different. Like it's too late unless you got really lucky and you pinpointed the exact thing that the market was trending towards. I think there's only, you know, a few cases of that.

I guess I guess Monad is maybe still in the running because they lashed on too fast chain good, you know, alongside some of the others. but also I think Mona gets a lot of shit especially because they raised a lot of money like they raised a lot of money but what they're doing is in my mind a lot more different to what others are doing

so the EVM's main issue is that it's hard to scale cheaply without fucking people over and to make it really really fast and that's like they're building it up from both the hardware side like they're focusing on the hardware improvements obviously they're not running

it on Raspberry Pies. But they're also on the software side. They have a completely new consensus mechanism. Monad BFT, which I can't remember their lab side name, but they posted something on it. I'd recommend checking it out. It's very interesting. So I think they kind of saved Grace a bit there because they have a very, very novel protocol. Now, should they have raised 2030 Mo?

That's not up to me. That's up to the VCs that are invested in it. But I would say they're relatively safe. from this until a new chain comes up and they are like, oh, we're actually doing this 20,000 TPS. And we'll see them for the time being, I think they're relevant. And that's what we're seeing now, Carlos. Like all the SVMs and the other chains are like,

yep, we're gonna do a million TPS. We're gonna do 10 million TPS. That's kind of where we're at now. Yeah, I mean, but again, I think I will reiterate your point on the time to market thing. Like Monad raised in January, 2023, I think. And they still haven't launched Mainet. Like Eclipse launch again like late 20,

raised late 2023, I think. And then they just recently launched their maintenance. Like they raised like $65 million. I don't know why they need so much like money. Same with Barrett chain. They raised like more than $100 million. Like what did they do like with $100 million? Like these like I just don't get it.

And then yeah, I just think it's more like a BC. issue as well of like being like blindly rewarded for just funding infrastructure and random L1 projects and like it's just an incentives issue at the end of the day I think yeah and another thing to add on to that like you said Carlos it is like an incentives issue and vCs have been rewarded with it for a very long time but also something we forget about is that before and I might be completely wrong about this and next cycle we might have something completely different But before the cycle, it was very much like a up for grab. Like nobody knew what was going to win, what tech stack, what, like, if people want to speed or if people wanted decentralization, we genuinely didn't know.

And I would say we still don't really know exactly what we want. So VC's benefited off that. And like a lot of teams also benefited off that is and investors also because you could make a lot of money longing Solunaivex. So, like, we had some form of, there was a gap there. We didn't know. I think that's been filled semi, and we know that we want fast more, at least slightly more than other alternatives. I think the big thing that people knew, everything, everyone knew that we wanted better U.S. and there was no agreement on how to get there.

And that's how you end up with stuff like Altlayer, but also just like Solana and Sue and Aptos, but also like a million L2s and like L2s that then have like a million L3s on top of them. Like nobody had, there was no semblance of agreement on like what the right way to like solve. Because it's not like there's one UX issue. You can't just like be like,

it's the one thing. But there's a lot of like various UX issues that I think the industry. was going after. So were you going to say one more thing? Otherwise, I have a question for the group before we close it. Well, yeah, just asked the question. Okay.

So then if we sit here today, what do you guys think? Like, you look out two, three years. What's like the thing that you think is going to be the same or that? Bitcoin doesn't get you, man. Excluding Bitcoin. Is it, are we still going to be in Salonaland or is hyperliquid usurped it? Or is it something else? at Fogo. I even think Bitcoin might have some L2s in three years.

That might start to be getting some transaction fees. Carlos, vehemently disagrees. I don't know about Solana, to be honest with you. Like, L1 landscape, I genuinely don't know. I think because we recently had Daspe recently as in like a month and a half ago, I'm still on that train of like, oh shit, like the big TradFi guys and the sexes are going to eat our lunch in the L1 space. So like my base assumption is to say Robin Hood is going to buy like an entire deaf team build out their L1 and it's going to cook. But that's probably just like I'm anchoring my thoughts to the last month. So that's probably not the best thing. Probably a combination of, I think Solana probably stays.

but we said that about Ethereum and are you convinced that Ethereum will say? I think it probably will, but I'm not convinced. So we'll see. Hyperliquid though, definitely. Hyperliquid. I do think these things can hunker along

even as shells of their former selves for a long time. So I don't know that like, I mean, you could have an argument about, like, I don't think ETH has gone away today. So I don't know that in two or three years, even if it continued on its current trend line, if it's really gone away. And if it turns around the ship, you know, then obviously it's not gone away. You kind of took mine, but I was going to say that we would see another big fintech ecosystem rivaling base is my big thought.

And that could be Robin Hood. It could be somebody else, but they're, I think obviously the contender in the lead right now for that one. Carlos, you said no Bitcoin L2s or L3s, why not? And then we can close. I don't know. I was just messing with Mark. I think I don't believe in Bitcoin L2. So I don't think it makes a lot of sense.

I think Bitcoin is fine as it is. Yeah, I agree. I think the whole purpose of Bitcoin is that it never changes. Like that's the base assumption. Bitcoin never changes. It's always 21 mil. The chain just chugs along. I agree with both of you all.

I don't think Bitcoin is going to change. I just think we're going to see L2's. whether you want them or not. I think that's fair. I think we're always going to be finding, we're going to be looking for more reasons to like maintain the strength and the legacy beyond like just asset go up. So I think it's natural.

We'll keep seeing that over and over again. Awesome. I think this was a great up, guys. One last reminder for permissionless. Grab your tickets. Link in the description, 0x10, 10% off. Me and Bach will be there. I hope Mark and Carlos will be there.

I don't know who's going to be there. Actually, it's not locked in at all. If you don't buy a ticket, Mark and Carlos will be there. If you don't buy a ticket, Mark and Carlos will not be there. In fact, if we don't get any tickets, one of them will be sacrificed. If you don't get any tickets, none of us will be there. And if you buy a lot of tickets, we'll all be there. So buy your tickets.

We'll see you there in June. X10. Wait, one second. Actually, let me do one thing. We are going to, if you are a zero X10 list, and we're going to be holding events for their extent. So it'll actually be quite fun. You might make the money back on food and drinks.

So that's always, probably not the, if you're flying and probably not the money, but the whole money, but if you're like in the tri-state area, I'll have to talk to the podcast team about this, but I think we can, you can definitely make your money back,

at least on the years. I thought I was going to have to cut you off because you're going to say, you're going to make your money back on the air drop, but that's definitely not, there's no, There's no air drop, but there might be food and drinks and maybe some games or other things. We're figuring it out.

All right. Great up, guys. Thanks for coming on today. Thanks for all the listeners out there. We will see you next time.