The Breakdown - The 5 Key Bitcoin Building Themes, With Wolf Lightning Accelerator CEO Kelly Brewster

Episode Date: March 18, 2023

Kelly Brewster is the CEO of Wolf, a new Lightning and Bitcoin startup accelerator in New York City. In this conversation, he and NLW discuss five big themes they’re seeing among Bitcoin builders, including Bitcoin DeFi, Lightning Network infrastructure, gaming, Nostr/social media and ordinals.  Enjoying this content?   SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast Apple:  https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1438693620?at=1000lSDb Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/538vuul1PuorUDwgkC8JWF?si=ddSvD-HST2e_E7wgxcjtfQ Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ubHdjcnlwdG8ubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M=   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. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, March 16th, and today we are talking with Wolf Lightning Accelerator CEO Kelly Brewster. Before we get into that, however, one quick note. There are two ways to listen to The Breakdown. You can hear us on the CoinDesk Podcast Network feed, which comes out every afternoon and features other great Coin Desk shows, or you can listen on the breakdown-only feed which comes out a few hours later in the evening.

Wherever you are listening, I would so appreciate it if you would take the time to leave a rating or a review, it makes a huge difference. All right, friends, while we are living through a fantastic moment in Bitcoin's history, not only is there huge narrative resonance happening as bank bailouts seem to swirl around us and people are reminded of exactly why Bitcoin was originally designed, but there is also just an incredible amount of entrepreneurial energy pouring into the space. So today I am joined by Kelly Brewster. Kelly is the CEO of the Wolf Lightning Accelerator, which is part of the Nidig and Stone Ridge

family of Bitcoin companies. You can think of Wolf as kind of like a Y Combinator, but just for Lightning and Bitcoin startups, and their first cohort is just about to start, and they just announced yesterday that applications for their second cohort are open now. on this show, we talk about five big themes that they're seeing in Bitcoin and Lightning development, including Defy on Bitcoin, Lightning Infrastructure, Gaming, Noster and Social Media, and of course, Ordinals. I'm so excited to have Kelly on the show, and I know you're going to love this conversation.

All right, Kelly, welcome to the breakdown, sir. How you doing? Awesome. How are you? Good. You got that amazing background. This is designed for Zoom videos, I'm sure. It's real. It's not. If I'm not, I'm not. move quickly. You can see it's not pixelating. It's a real background. Awesome. I'm super excited to have you here. Appreciate you taking some time. I know that you guys are about to start this first class of Wolf. But just quickly, before we dive in today, let's start with your background, how you got into Bitcoin and what you're doing now, what the inspiration for Wolf was. Yeah, absolutely. And also,

thank you for having me. I'm a big fan of the show. I listen frequently, so I'm excited to be here. My personal experience with Bitcoin goes back to about 2013. At the time I was working at Goldman Sachs, I was working on one of the trading desks. And initially I heard about Bitcoin through Coinbase. It wasn't first hearing about Bitcoin and then later the exchanges. It was the other way around. But, you know, I heard about this company that was working on this amazing new exchange for these digital assets that I started learning at Bitcoin, learned a little bit about some

of the other assets as well. And, you know, I thought it was fascinating and I dabbled a little bit. But, you know, I had neither the Fiat savings nor the fortitude to get, you know, involved in a bigger way. But a little bit, and I started paying attention to it. And then fast forward a couple of years. In 2016, I was working at Stone Ridge, which is the company that owns Nydig and that owns WALF, which we'll talk more about today. And Stone Ridge was working on the technology and the business that ultimately became Nidig. And it was really during that time that I went much deeper down the rabbit hole, became much more focused on Bitcoin and became much more personally interested in Bitcoin over really everything else that was happening in crypto at the time. And of course, you know, now through a couple of cycles, sort of every time we've seen some of that, I personally just become even more sure that Bitcoin is the thing that is going to stick around and is going to have some staying power. So it's something that I've personally been paying attention to for a while.

I was an engineer for many years, so I have a background as a developer, and so it was always fascinating to me from a technology standpoint, but I also worked in financial services, and I was working at Goldman during 2007, 2008, and saw firsthand a lot of things that happened during the financial crisis, and so, of course, I also became very interested in Bitcoin from a financial services perspective. And I think this moment that we're in now, you know, the timing is definitely very interesting to be having this conversation. It underscores a lot of the reasons why Bitcoin was created in the first place. And you know, you think about, you know, what Satoshi included in the first block around Chancellor on the brink of the second bailout for banks.

All we're reading about in the news right now is bailouts for banks and who's going to backstop what and how it's going to work both in the U.S. and abroad. So I think the timing's really interesting. and I think that that's really causing a huge resurgence in interest around Bitcoin. Yeah, and I think one of the things that makes this moment different, even when we've had sort of other notable moments for Bitcoin interest to be peaked, is the extent to which there is a new and growing entrepreneurial community around it, right? So in 2020 even, when you add Paul Tudor Jones and the great monetary inflation thesis, the places that people were building on Bitcoin were still,

much more limited to today. And I think that that is really notable and part of what we're going to dig into here. So before we dive in, we're going to talk today about sort of five big themes you're seeing in Bitcoin building. I guess just tell us a little bit more about Wolf specifically. And I know you guys just had a small announcement yesterday, but I want to just ground people in kind of what Wolf is doing as well. Yeah, absolutely. So Wolf is a startup accelerator that is dedicated to Bitcoin. Wolf, as I mentioned, is owned by Stone Ridge, the same company that owns Nidig. And the reason that we created Wolf is largely because of exactly what you just mentioned, that we are just seeing this incredible explosion, honestly, of developer interest and

entrepreneurial interest and excitement around Bitcoin. And if you think about what it meant as a developer to work on Bitcoin, even one year, 18 months ago, that large, meant being perhaps a core developer. You were probably funded by grants. It certainly wasn't a way to commercialize anything or to build something of commercial entrepreneurial value. And if you did want to start a company focused on Bitcoin, that largely meant thinking about custodial offerings or perhaps an exchange or maybe something in the mining space. But that was about it. It's pretty limited. And you fast forward to today in just over the past 12 months, I would say, there has been this explosion of activity. And that really started with

Lightning, in our view. Lightning is really the first technology built on top of Bitcoin that has generated that much excitement and has the network effects of now millions of people who have access to it, either directly through the Lightning Network or through other apps like Cash App or others like M-Pesa outside the U.S. But Lightning opens up an entire world of entrepreneurial opportunities, a commercial opportunities, and it gives developers a lot of freedom to focus on exciting new stuff. And I think it's clear that that's caused a lot of people to now focus on Bitcoin where they otherwise might not have. And lightning is just one technology. We'll talk about a couple of others today, talk about a couple of other themes that we're seeing. But we really started

Wolf to help both catalyze all of these technologies that we're seeing, Lightning and others, although Lightning is our primary focus, and to help people that are interested in working on Bitcoin, starting companies around Bitcoin, commercialize what they're trying to do. There are a lot of incredible developers in the space, but they may not have experience starting a company, hiring teams, raising capital, figuring out a go-to-market strategy, thinking about branding and advertising and all of these things that are required for a successful commercial enterprise. So we started Wolf to help people with that. And so Wolf is an accelerator program. We have four cohorts per year, so four groups per year. It's fully non-remote. So it's all based here in New York

City. It's all in person. The team spend the time all working closely together, both physically and in terms of the projects that they're working on. I hope we'll see a lot of collaboration. And each cohort spends about eight weeks here with us in New York working on their project. And at the end of each cohort, there's a demo day where the team presents all of the work that they've done during the course of the program, makes a pitch and shares any proof of concept or MVP that they've been working towards. And, you know, our hope is really that that then sets them on the path to raise some capital, get a year or two or even three of runway, and to really get started on the right foot. Amazing. So you guys have cohort one, which is just about to start.

You just opened up applications for cohort two. And so what we're going to use the rest of today for is to talk about five big themes you're seeing among companies that are working in this cohort, companies that are applying. And so I think it'll be a really good way to kind of ground people in what Bitcoin building looks like right now. So the first one that we wanted to dig into was defy, quote unquote, defy on Bitcoin, decentralized finance on Bitcoin. And I think for each of these, I'd love for you to talk just a little bit about what it is, why it's important and how you're seeing companies start to approach it. Yeah, defy is a very interesting topic, and it's a little bit of a loaded term right now. I think, you know, a lot of things are called defy, and there's a lot of debate

about what is truly defy, what is not. You know, I think as everything from recent issues in crypto to recent issues in the banking sector show, I think anyone that is interested in crypto probably agrees that truly decentralized finance is an extremely noble cause and is something that is badly needed. And in my mind, this is a little distinct from questions around custody, although you could argue that they're the same. But when I think of Defi, I'm really thinking about what are the ways that you can eliminate the trusted parties in finance and truly decentralize the things that you're doing? And so outside of custody, I think you start thinking about what are the the other things? What are the other, you know, businesses that exist in financial services where you

have a trusted third party today or it requires one to do whatever you're trying to do? And so trading, I think, is probably the next one that you think about beyond custody. Exchanges are a big business in crypto. And decentralized trading, I think, is a very interesting way to try to work on letting people actually connect directly with each other, settle directly with each other. And you could really do that in a non-custodial way. It's not necessarily easy to build, especially on Bitcoin, which is probably why, in my view, Bitcoin has maybe lagged some of the other technologies in crypto in this regard. But I think the things that will get built on Bitcoin and some of the ideas that we're

seeing from some of the teams that are applying to Wolf today are the things that will have staying power and will prove to be truly decentralized. I think beyond just simple trading, I think derivatives are another category of things where defy on Bitcoin could be extremely useful and can be very elegant in terms of the way it's implemented. And that could mean the trading of the derivatives. It could mean the margining of derivatives, you know, making sure that you have enough collateral on either side of the trade. And those are things that I could see being used by institutions even outside of crypto. if we can figure out how to use Bitcoin or Lightning for some of the margining that needs to take

place. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is one where a lot of folks have been interested in Bitcoin on Defi. It's sort of a thing that's easy to mean but hard to build, right? And I think it's only been in the last sort of year that people have really dug into what it might mean and also I think appreciated just how much it matters to have the most decentralized blockchain underlying whatever sort of financial applications you're going to build on top of it. I agree. I think, you know, in general, it's incorrect to say that smart contracts are not possible on Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin is not turning complete. And I know that that's something that comes up a lot. I'm not convinced that that's really necessary. I think, you know, the fundamental

function of Bitcoin is actually a smart contract. Even, you know, if you are sending Bitcoin from one address to another, it's actually a very simple Bitcoin script under. the hood. And so there really is no reason that those scripts can't get more complicated, but it is harder to build. There is less developer infrastructure to build these things on Bitcoin than in some other technologies. And so I think putting some of that in place will also be very important. So that actually brings us perfectly to our second big category that you're seeing, which is lightning infrastructure. Yeah, infrastructure, which is obviously a pretty broad term. You know, I think in some ways is the most obvious next step in terms of what to build on lightning,

but it's also one of the more crowded in terms of the number of companies that are looking at it. I think, though, it's clear that we're just getting started here, and there's some good signal from things like blocks recent announcement of C equals and the work that they're doing on lightning services. But a lot of the work that comes along with getting involved with lightning and managing a lightning node I think has proved harder than some might have expected at the outset. And so anyone who has managed a node themselves knows how difficult it can be to operate a node, to manage liquidity on a node, and that could be anything from setting up the node itself,

keeping it updated, patching things, deciding which platform to use. There are three or four different pieces of technology you can choose from in terms of what software you're going to use to manage your node. And then there's a whole category around liquidity. And I think that's one of the most interesting right now, managing channels on a lightning node, buying and selling channels, things like just in time channels are a very interesting thing that companies like Voltage and others are exploring. And so I think that it's not an obvious problem to solve, but that's why there is so much opportunity from a commercial perspective. I do think that the companies that crack the code on this and make it very easy, especially for maybe not individuals, but especially for enterprises and companies to think about managing a lightning node and doing so effectively, I think there will be some huge commercial opportunities for those that can figure it out. And it sounds like when you say infrastructure in this case, you're also part of the challenges

around usability and user experience and sort of not just kind of heavy build infrastructure, but just sort of the endpoints that allow people to interact with these systems more elegantly, easily, and simply. I definitely agree. And there are a handful of teams in the first cohort at Wolf that are focused on exactly that topic. One team that's focused on enterprises specifically and how they can use this. And again, like you talked about, manage a node, manage liquidity, try to automate as much of that as possible. Another team that is focused a little bit more on mobile applications or things that could be a little bit more consumer focused, but also with the same goal, exactly as you said, just trying to make the user experience much better and to make it possible

for those that are a little bit less technical to get involved. Awesome. All right. So next theme that you suggested was gaming. I'm excited to hear more about kind of how you guys are looking into that, what you're seeing in that space. We could probably spend a whole show just on this topic. I think this can be an absolute monster.

And I think that in some ways, this is both underappreciated and underinvested in, in terms of the intersection of Bitcoin and gaming. And I think there are a couple of different angles here. here that are worth exploring for companies that are trying to get involved in the space. A shout out to the team at Zebedee for the work that they're doing here. They're definitely at the forefront of a lot of this. But I think there's a few categories, subcategories, if you will, at the intersection of Bitcoin and gaming.

I mean, so one is just virtual goods. In-game purchases will be hundreds of billions of dollar market, no problem. And there are already some huge markets for virtual in-game property. And so I think Bitcoin is an obvious solution there as the money of the internet, the native currency of the internet. When you have people who are all interacting with each other from different jurisdictions, different geographies, different currencies, Bitcoin's sort of just an obvious solution for a lot of that. But what one of the teams at Wolf is exploring is a slightly different category, which is really around e-sports tournaments. This is also a huge market. There are thousands and thousands of tournaments that get organized every day.

There are payments that happen as part of those tournaments. And again, what you're trying to do is coordinate people from all over the world to coordinate people who are all working in different currencies. And this is exactly the kind of thing that Bitcoin was created to solve. So I think there are some very interesting opportunities there. And that will be a huge growth market over the next couple of years. So this is obviously something that folks in other sections of defy and just crypto in general are looking at too.

What do you think Bitcoin offers specifically that are sort of competitive advantages relative to other, you know, sectors approaches to this within the crypto space? Yeah, I think fundamentally, you know, Bitcoin, for me at least really all just comes back to being better money. If I think about Bitcoin's superpower, it really is that it has been just extremely focused on being a store of value and now with lightning, giving people the ability to transact really quickly and to be able to actually engage in commerce in a way that makes sense with Bitcoin. And so I think that, you know, frankly, these things that we're talking about on gaming,

a lot of them boil down to just simple exchanges of value. And I personally think that for a lot of the reasons that we've talked about over time, Bitcoin is going to be the thing that wins, especially in that category, that if you're trying to coordinate people from all over the world, to buy and sell things, to transact together, Bitcoin is the best solution for that. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think it's interesting just to argue kind of as you are that there's almost a consumer demand argument in there, right? That it's like to the extent that people, you want to sort of build these systems in ways that you minimize barriers to entry,

but still kind of address actual operational challenges of this sort of global coordination. That's something like Bitcoin, which is recognized, used by, demanded by a huge array of people is a good solution. I think that's well said. Join CoinDesk's Consensus 20203, the most important conversation in crypto and Web3, happening April 26 through 28th in Austin, Texas. Consensus is the industry's only event bringing together all sides of crypto, Web3, and the Metaverse. Immerse yourself in all that blockchain technology has to offer creators, builders, founders,

founders, entrepreneurs, and more. Use code Breakdown to get 15% off your paths. Visit Consensus.com. Dendask.com or check the link in the show notes. All right. These next two are really interesting topics, certainly of the moment. Number four you have as a big Bitcoin builder theme, Noster and social media more broadly. So give us a little bit on that.

I think Noster is extremely exciting. And as I talked at the beginning of the show about lightning being one of the first things built on top of Bitcoin that really has hit critical mass in terms of the network effect. I think the second one that has come along and moved even faster than lightning is Noster. And Nostr is not that old. It really was kicked off kind of in earnest when Jack Dorsey gave out a couple of grants in mid-December, but that was only about three months ago. And since then, the explosion and activity has been incredible. There are now millions of people that are on this network that are using it. And a lot of your audience may know a bit about Nostr already, but

Noster is an acronym. It's usually written with a capital N, but it's actually an acronym. It stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relays. And notes and other stuff is a pretty vague description. It really is a very generalized protocol. And it's a protocol just for publishing events that are just little blobs of JavaScript, basically. And you can put whatever you want in there. And these events are published to relays, which are very easy to set up. Anyone can set up and manage a relay, and these events are published and then later consumed by clients. And again, anyone can build a client. And from a back end perspective, both of these things are extremely easy to do. What starts getting a lot more complicated is as you work towards the user experience

and what the app is actually going to look like, how easily can you set up an account or create a key to get started. And so I've seen the most activity so far on the client side with Noster, but more and more there are people who are focused on the relays and different ways to use relays, to monetize relays. And, you know, Nostr itself can be used for almost anything, right? You're just publishing this little piece of text to the relay. It just so happens that the first use case for Nostr that has really exploded is social media, is effectively a Twitter replacement. And so that is where you're seeing the vast majority of the activity today. And when people talk about Nostr, that's probably what they mean. But there are so many different ways that you can use Noster.

Could be telegram style, just sort of chats. It could be encrypted, you know, peer-to-peer communications. It could be decentralized data storage or something that's not actually even meant to be social in some way. It all just depends on how you can develop the use cases and how you can monetize it. So there's a lot that's happening in this space right now. There's currently a conference that's going on down in Costa Rica that, you know, I think a lot of exciting things will come out of. And Wolf is also sponsoring a hackathon that's going on at the moment. It's a short two-week hackathon run by the team at bolt. fun and it coincides with the conference in Costa Rica. But interest in this has been incredible. I believe there are about 40 projects that are registered,

which for something, a short two-week thing like this on a relatively early technology shows there's a tremendous amount of demand. And the reason why it's in scope here and why we're talking about it here and why Wolf is so interested in it is that even though Nostr is not a Bitcoin technology per se, a lot of the developers who are focused on Noster are Bitcoin developers. And Bitcoin and Lightning are deeply integrated into the user experience and have been from the outset. And so for many of the apps that you might use on the social media side for Noster, it's very easy to send payments directly between two people on the platform. Like if you and I are just connected directly on Nostr, we can just send each other some payments.

And increasingly, apps are integrating what they're calling Zaps, which are basically lightning payments that can happen just by clicking a button. You know, instead of liking a post and just giving it a thumbs up, you can actually send someone 10 Satoshis and have that happen automatically. And the volume of these payments is just hockey sticking. Do you think it's actually this sort of overlap and relationship with the Bitcoin and Lightning community that is differentiating Noster from other attempts we've seen at decentralized social media? I do think so. I think it sort of planted the seed with just an existing community that is already very connected with each other, already very passionate about what they're doing.

And that made it much easier to get started. You didn't have to figure out what it was that it was going to attract your first couple of users. So yes, I think that's been extraordinarily helpful. And now, of course, I think we see it growing well beyond that in terms of its interest. But yes, I do think that that has given it a big leg up over other attempts at this type of implementation. I also think that just the simplicity of the protocol has helped a lot. It just is very, very easy to build things and to set up things like relays more so than with a lot of the other allegedly decentralized protocols. I think it's super interesting.

I mean, I'm sort of a student in a lot of ways of all of these various attempts to start new social networks over the years. And that doesn't include just the sort of Web 3 and decentralized versions of them, but also, you know, Web 2 startups who tried to start things. Like I remember trying to get Yo a deal with Coca-Cola in like, you know, 2000, whatever it was, these silly sort of different Web 2 projects. And the one thing that is super clear, if you look across, the social networks that end up being stickier, social, you know, kind of network type experiences

that end up being sticky, is there's always some feature differentiation. It's not just, like, Instagram, you know, had these sort of filters, which everyone then copied, but they were hugely differentiating. And architecting the entire thing around a photo was different. You know, Snapchat obviously had expiring things. TikTok obliterated the idea in many ways of who you follow for just figuring out what you like. And they also kind of used music as meme or sound as meme, which no one else had. And I think that there's, it's too early to tell, but there's an interesting question of whether truly sort of from the base integrated payments are one of those sort of fundamental feature differentiations that people have tried to graft on to other networks,

but designing it integrally into the protocol from the get-go is something different. I definitely agree. I also think the data that comes out of that will be extremely useful. Just looking at the data that you can gather around payments, around, you know, once you start voting with your money around things, instead of just voting with your click and the thumbs up, it can incentivize a lot of very interesting things, but also provide a lot of interesting data you can mine. And so I think that will be a huge component of it as well that I could see a couple of companies focusing on. And in general, I think this will be a very big thing for Bitcoin in developed markets in general,

or at least it has the opportunity to be. We know some of the obvious use cases in emerging markets and frontier markets for Bitcoin. For a lot of people who are not big enthusiasts today, who are in the U.S. or all their developed markets, they say, like, why do I need Bitcoin? Do I really need Bitcoin? And we know a lot about the decentralization argument, but also here I think there's just a whole new experience that it can deliver and ways that you can interact with people all over the world that weren't possible before that it can incentivize. And so I think that'll be interesting to watch as well. Absolutely. All right. So our fifth and final Bitcoin building theme for today at least is one that

has obviously committed a huge amount of discussion in the community for the last couple months. It's ordinals. Talk to me about ordinals, how you guys are thinking about them specifically and kind of what's interesting to you. Yeah, this is another reminder, as are many of the others, of just how fast things move in Bitcoin and in the startup world in general. Applications for the first cohort for Wolf closed at the end of the year, at the end of December, which was not that long ago, you know, two and a half months ago. And ordinals and inscriptions were around but had not really gotten any notoriety at all at that point. It wasn't until mid-January or so that that really took off.

And so it has been amazing to see all of the activity that's occurred around this just over a short eight to 10 weeks or so. It's definitely, as you said, probably the most divisive topic that we're talking about today. And I know you've covered that a bit on your show. I personally, and at Wolf, we are very excited about ordinals and inscriptions. I think that both finding creative ways to fit things into the Bitcoin protocol and finding ways to excite and attract developers to Bitcoin are both great things and are both going to be net positive for Bitcoin, even for its initial primary use case. And, you know, so far, most of what's been inscribed have been images. I know not all of it is, but, you know, NFTs and specifically images are the thing that

has probably gotten the most coverage so far. But you have a few megabytes of space into which you can inscribe, you know, kind of whatever you want. And so I see some really interesting opportunities to inscribe all sorts of things, important documents that might be personally important to you, literature, intellectual property that you're worried about governments or others censoring or confiscating, or maybe even you can just inscribe a cryptographic proof of some sort for something that you ultimately publish elsewhere, like maybe even on Noster or in some other decentralized storage platform. And so I think the creativity that this will allow, that this will enable is very exciting from the perspective of startups and from an entrepreneurial perspective.

And I don't want to discount the art and NFT angle here. I do think there will continue to be a lot of excitement around NFT as an art on Bitcoin, which I personally am very excited about. But I think the use cases are going to be much broader than that. It's something that I've been watching closely, I think is super interesting. I'm not ready to talk too much about it yet, but there's sort of a community ordinance project that I have in mind for the breakdown community that I'm excited to talk about at some point.

And I was telling you a little bit about. I think that, you know, undeniably it has brought a ton of energy in a very different way to the space and to the conversation. And I think that almost regardless of what happens with that, that in and of itself is positive. So I'm excited to hear you guys thinking about it. And I do think that there's going to be a lot of interesting experiments to come over the next few months and years, hopefully. Yes, I think what we are the most excited about across all five of these topics is that, you know, we think all of them in aggregate have brought a ton of energy to Bitcoin and reinvigorated Bitcoin in ways that we wouldn't have

even imagined a year ago. And so I am extremely excited for the technology itself, but also for the teams and the companies and entrepreneurs that are focused on this space. I think there are some amazing things to come in the next couple of years. We are now sitting a year out from the next having experience in living through our very own banking crisis that is raising some major questions, even from non-bitcoinsers about the structure of the system, watching far, far more entrepreneurial and creative energy than there's ever been poor into Bitcoin. And that's a pretty exciting combination of things when taking an aggregate. So Kelly, awesome to have you on the show, super excited about what you guys are building at Wolf and excited to hear about this first cohort and

who starts applying next. Thanks too much. Thank you for having me. All right, cheers. All right, guys, back to NLW here for just a quick wrap up. One of the really interesting things that happens sometimes in different technologies is this inflection point moment where you go from a long, slow, steady build to a punctuated equilibrium moment where it seems like there is just a flurry and explosion of activity. In many ways, the themes that we talked about today kind of fit on either side of that categorization. You have these things that have been brewing and building for quite some time. Lightning infrastructure, defy on Bitcoin even. I think that you can see roots of these things being built over the past few years. And in many cases, often by just

a small handful of teams. However, over the last few months, we've had not one but two real punctuated equilibrium type of moments. We're just an absolute flood of developers, creatives, and just regular plebs have poured into some new opportunity surrounding or connected to Bitcoin. Those two moments are, of course, around Noster and around Ordinals, and I think more than their specifics, the fact that those are happening at the same time is really showing what a sort of Cambrian explosion moment we're in for Bitcoin development and for Bitcoin building. For each of these five themes I discussed today with Kelly, we could have gone and done entire shows, and I hope to have more space to do that in the future.

For now, I hope you enjoyed this little preview about how this awesome new program and Wolf is thinking about Bitcoin building, and I'm excited to follow along their journey as more startups dig into that program. Thanks, as always for listening, and I hope you guys are headed to a great weekend. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.