The Pomp Podcast - #1039 Alyse Killeen On If Bitcoin Maximalism Good For Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

Alyse Killeen is a Founding Managing Partner at Stillmark, A Bitcoin focused Venture Capital fund. In this conversation, we discuss investing in Bitcoin, if Bitcoin maximalism is a net postive or net ...negative, the current market crash, and where Alyse is seeing some of the biggest opportunities in Bitcoin right now. ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: That’s right, Unstoppable Domains and Blockchain.com partnered to create NFT domain names ending in .Blockchain. It’s the perfect ending to show that you’re a believer in a decentralized future. The Blockchain.com community can get one, for free by signing up for the waitlist here. Free NFT domains provide all the benefits of premium Unstoppable Domains, including fee-free, lifelong ownership. Don’t have a Blockchain.com wallet? No worries, these new domains are available to everyone for as low as $5. Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp =======================

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Elise Killeen is the founding managing partner at Stillmark, a Bitcoin-focused venture capital fund. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, mining, the development around the protocol, and what is the current state of venture funding and entrepreneurship in Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation with Elise, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by FTX US.
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Starting point is 00:02:29 US dollar, euro, and yen. They also allow you over the internet to execute your crypto trading strategy with precision. LMAX Digital, you may never heard of them. It's because they only serve institutions, but they're secure, they're liquid, and they're trusted. You can learn more at lmaxdigital.com slash Pomp. Again, check it out at lmaxdigital.com slash Pomp. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion.
Starting point is 00:03:09 This podcast is for informational purposes only. Elyse, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. I'm very excited to be doing this every Wednesday with you. Likewise. I figured the place where we could start first seems to be the topic du jour across Bitcoin. Bitcoin maximalism. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it a religion? Is it not a religion? What's your general take on maximalism and kind of how do you look at maybe the pros and cons
Starting point is 00:03:36 of something like that, which is really the culture that surrounds the technology that we spend so much time talking about? Well, first let's define it, right? So can you, I think people mean different things when they say Bitcoin maximalism. So what do you mean when you say it? I think that it's just people who believe that Bitcoin is the asset that has all of the value and they are maximalists, hence the name, right? In that they think that that ends up sucking up all of the value of everything else uh into that one asset now there's nuance of like does that mean also other traditional assets like the stock market goes away real estate goes away or whatever or are they just talking about it in the sense of the crypto market and kind of
Starting point is 00:04:16 everything other than bitcoin in the crypto market is a zero but i think that's generally the thought process what about you okay so i suppose um when i hear people talk about bitcoin maximalism or when I refer to someone in my circle, maybe by that term, what I'm thinking about is someone that is adherent and passionate about the core values of Bitcoin. And that doesn't necessarily need to be to the exclusion of anything else, but it would be a person that's a Bitcoin maximalist would be someone that finds value and critical importance in decentralization, thinks deeply about what decentralization means places value on stability of the network the financial network that is bitcoin the payments network that is lightning network and optimizes
Starting point is 00:05:03 or hopes wants developers to optimize for security and for the hard promises that bitcoin makes and so in the value of that in their valuing of that and in their acknowledgement of those being critical things for a global financial infrastructure, folks can sometimes be less excited about projects that are shiny to others. And so I think that's what I hear when I hear people talking about Bitcoin maximalism. So I think that there's a very strong argument that some of the biggest Bitcoin proponents, that's the strategy that they basically take is, look, I'm focused on Bitcoin. There's other things. It's not even worth my time because focus is important. And if you go and I always try to lay it back on to like the legacy financial system
Starting point is 00:05:54 and kind of the centuries of history that we have there, there's plenty of people who say I'm a SAS investor. What happens in consumer tech or in hardware or anything else? Like that's just not my thing, right? Like SAS is my specialty. It's what I'm most interested in. It's a thing where I feel like I know the most, I'm intellectually stimulated, and I want to go focus on that. And so I think that that would be a really strong argument of like, hey, I'm focused on Bitcoin, everything else, I don't really have an opinion. I think the piece that enters the conversation is that you can't put these general labels on entire groups of people, right? It's kind of just like politics. You couldn't say all Democrats are one way, all Republicans are one way,
Starting point is 00:06:34 All independents are one way. It's a group made up of individuals. And those individuals obviously have various, uh, um, uh, kind of thought processes and, and, uh, extremism on both sides of their viewpoint. When it comes to Bitcoin maximalism, it feels like, uh, the smallest portion of that group is the loudest online, which, okay. I mean, that is true of most groups. uh but they're the ones who also almost take pride in the toxicity and uh uh kind of the the things that may not be so much bitcoin focus as much as it becomes more uh i call it like hate marketing where it's like attack everything attack everything attack everything else and i always wonder like is that actually pushing bitcoin forward to accomplish those goals because
Starting point is 00:07:22 what you laid out i think almost everyone who holds bitcoin is like yeah that thing i believe in. And it's actually the other components of people who spend all their time on Bitcoin. That's where the questions come in. So like, how do you think about the like, focus on our thing and let's push our thing forward versus the like, let's talk about other things or attack other things? Right. So here's the thing. We're talking about a technology that's governed by, you know, the laws of science, you know, the laws of nature, mathematics, and some things are just are the way they are. And so, you know, I suppose that we're reliant on facts and less on feelings. And for that reason, it does make sense often to take a hard line stance that actually there's a
Starting point is 00:08:08 way that this technology works. There's known ways to break these technologies. And then on top of that, of course, it's a technology that has an incentive system layered on top of it, which is bound by the rules or sort of dynamics of social psychology and of communities. And so there's certain things that are just inherent truths and facts. And I'm not sure that I think that pointing those out or the lack of that sort of standard out in other ecosystems is a negative. You know, I suppose that there's a lot of value in the delivery of a message. But I think if we look at what's happened over the past couple of weeks, you see the value of reminding people or letting people know that may have less time to dedicate to the coin or to the cryptocurrency
Starting point is 00:08:55 space, letting them know the types of questions they should be asking before participating in other protocols or certain financial schemes. Yeah. It's interesting too, because, and again, I'm playing a little bit of devil's advocate here, because I think it's a thread worth pulling on uh, to, to get people to understand the pros and cons of just the discourse in general. Um, I think that there's many critics I've seen them tweeted online saying, Oh, the Bitcoiners are taking victory laps because they pointed out a or B failed, but they have like a 1% batting average. Cause they also said a hundred other things were going to fail that didn't fail. Now, how do you think about, um, in one area it's like, okay, there's a 1% batting average. Let's
Starting point is 00:09:40 just say we'll use the extreme example. But on the other hand, like just because the other things haven't failed doesn't mean they're not going to fail in the future. Like kind of how do you think about that? The timeline is important, of course. So I think the unfortunate thing, so I acknowledge what you're saying, but I have to, you know, push back a little bit because frankly, what I see is really toxic are the promises and sort of descriptions of, you know, unicorns and rainbows that we see in other spaces. So for instance, the topic of the past few weeks has been around this black box yield that was produced both by particular companies or by protocols that users that aren't spending 24-7 in cryptocurrency or Bitcoin were relying on or were playing around
Starting point is 00:10:27 with, were tinkering with. And it was clear that sort of putting money into a black box, hoping that more people will put more money into that black box so that you could then pull out your money plus theirs, it was clear that that wasn't, you know, sustainable at scale. And so I'm not sure that pointing that out was toxic. I think what I would, what I would suggest is much more toxic, toxic and malevolent is actually creating that structure and suggesting to people that that's something that they could depend on would be secure and would be scalable and sustainable over the long term. You know, so maybe this is a difference of opinion, but on my side, what I'm excited about is seeing people sort of try to pass along a better
Starting point is 00:11:10 understanding of the tech, develop stronger narratives so that those stories can be repeated. And I would agree with you that some of that can be done perhaps in a more compelling way if it's done empathetically. But I also think that people are trying to speak to their own audience. And so narratives will be different across different sorts of groups. Yeah, you're very interesting in kind of the ecosystem because you spend majority, if not all of your time focused on entrepreneurs building in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Right. And so many of those companies, some I think we've co-invested in, many we've looked at, you know, at the same time is a lot of those founders take pride in what I would call like a Bitcoin only approach. Right. We are Bitcoin only. We don't support other tokens. We do all this. And some of these businesses have become incredibly valuable. And it's very obvious. At the same time, I've heard many people make the argument that some of the centralized exchanges that support a ton of different tokens have actually driven incredible adoption of Bitcoin. And so when you start to think about like infrastructure being Bitcoin only versus some of the other stuff, how do you think as somebody who's focused on pushing Bitcoin forward, like, is there a framework that you evaluate either investments or even just like what's quote unquote good for Bitcoin when it comes to like Bitcoin only versus things that help Bitcoin, but they also may do other things as well? So here's the thing. We have to be Bitcoin only because there's so much going on that to do really good work in Bitcoin, you have to be entirely focused on it. To be anything less than 24-7, you're going to miss things. I said recently that I know that we see several hundred companies a year. We spend most of each day talking to Bitcoin founders. And I know that we are still missing stuff because there's so much activity in the space. So we have to be focused.
Starting point is 00:12:59 You also pointed out that founders, you know, a certain group of founders in the Bitcoin and Lightning space are mission driven. We are in part. Of course, that's not how the venture capital firm is organized. We're organized to make a return for our investors and to help propel founders forward to achieve what they want to achieve on hopefully a quicker timescale. times scale excuse me um but you know there's a there's a large group of founders in this ecosystem that are missionary based they believe that they're changing the world and we see that in what they do we hope that we're doing the same actually that that's a consequence of our work and so those types of founders do care who they're paired up with who they're in a portfolio with and we're mindful of that when we make a new investment um you know it's i'm always hopeful
Starting point is 00:13:50 that the rest of our portfolio companies will be excited to be in league with the new team. And that's been the reception that we've received so far. But beyond that, because Bitcoin is scaling so quickly and adoption is growing so quickly and the nuances of what's happening is important, I think that the really heads down and dedicated teams to this particular technology and set of values are advantaged. They're advantaged by missing less and also by being in dialogue with folks that are doing the same sort of work that they will depend on to sort of collaboratively build with. So what I mean by that is that in the Bitcoin ecosystem, of course, companies are in collaboration with a group of open source devs. Those are the folks that are
Starting point is 00:14:35 building Bitcoin's core blockchain or the Lightning Network or other open protocols based on Bitcoin. And of course, you don't control those teams, but your work is in some ways shaped by it, right? Because we're at where, you know, the guardrails are what the protocol can allow us to do. And at the same time, excuse me, at the same time, we're also impacted by other stakeholders in the ecosystem. And so an example of that historically is that we've seen adoption grow when on and off ramps, localized on and off ramps develop in different geographies. That's true today.
Starting point is 00:15:13 And so to get all of that signal, to understand how all of that is happening, how it affects your business, how it advances the ecosystem, you really have to be heads down here. When you understand kind of what founders are doing right now, talk to me about trends that you're seeing. Obviously, across early stage startups and even growth stage startups, we've seen valuations come down quite a bit. We've seen funding dry up a little bit for technology startups right now. a lot of that's macro market and kind of macro economy driven. Obviously, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitcoin itself has drawn down. What are you seeing from like funding trends right now for founders building in Bitcoin? Okay, so pump, this is interesting. Here's what we're seeing. So we know that in a bear market and in crypto bear market, there's a flight to security and
Starting point is 00:16:02 safety. And at the same time, there's this pressure on BTC as the most liquid asset, right? So we have the price of BTC under pressure as folks liquidate BTC to cover debt. But on the flip side, there's an acknowledgement of Bitcoin as the more mature technology, the more secure technology, and the one that's sort of proven itself historically and most likely to continue for the duration. And so in the venture capital world, actually what we've seen is two things. So first, we've there we haven't seen a markdown in valuations because frankly bitcoin companies are already traded at a discount right a discount to their crypto peers because we don't have these really hot competitive rounds driven by multiple multi-billion dollar funds that are competing for
Starting point is 00:16:48 limited space this is something maybe we can dig into later or in another episode um but the the other thing we're seeing in addition to that stability is that we're seeing generalist VCs want to pay more attention to the Bitcoin side. So since news of the recession hit in the past six to eight weeks, I've been fielding inbound calls for more information about some of our portfolio companies. So I probably shouldn't say more than that, but there's been, I think that in a bear market, you know, the things that glitter and shine or that are marketed really well become less appealing. And people really want to go for the tech that has been built robustly. And that's Bitcoin. So there's an opportunity here for Bitcoin founders.
Starting point is 00:17:37 And what can I flip the question to you? What do you think? I think that I see a lot of founders who, as things went up, kind of got high on their own supply a little bit. And this is not just Bitcoin. This is like across the entire market. uh and naturally if uh you got high on your own supply and you think that your company is amazing and all these things it's really hard to then switch around and be like hey i gotta be really critical about my business right like what like the market has changed and so this stuff changes uh the good news is that i think we're now at a point over the last six weeks that founders have kind of come to that realization and i would say majority if not all of them are like okay things
Starting point is 00:18:12 have changed i need to change um but like that's a hard process and there's a lot of investors that I've spoken to, they're like, man, you know, we might've been thinking about this three months ago and it took a while to kind of get founders to see it as well. And I wish it would have happened earlier. Can't go back and change the past, but I think we're now at a, at a point where it's very obvious that the market has changed. Another thing that I've started to see is I've started to see the early signs, not a ton, but enough where I think it's going to become a trend. Many technical folks, engineers and people kind of involved in the development process at larger companies starting to leave under the premise of, I'm thinking about building a company.
Starting point is 00:18:56 And so naturally in bad times, people start saying to themselves, well, like maybe I should just kind of go out on my own. And so if we're already seeing that, you know, it's somewhat early in this, my guess is the next six months, we're going to see a ton of technical talent kind of shuffle around. And a number of them will start companies that end up being funded and kind of become the next crop of companies over the, you know, next two to three years? Yeah, we're seeing that too. In addition to people leaving big shops, we're also seeing people, excuse me, to start their own thing. We're also seeing them do that to join teams. And so it doesn't feel like there's any, you know, like halting of progression. And in fact,
Starting point is 00:19:35 it feels opposite. And I think that's due to what we talked about last time, which is the tailwinds that Bitcoin and tech innovation in general can appreciate now from the development of Lightning Network and the soon-to-be introduction of Tarot. It's catalytic to people's imagination. So when people turn inward and reflect on what they're doing during a recession or in a bear market, the things that matter are the meaning of your work, not just how fast you're building or how much money you're making. And so the meaning of your work is, I think, always really clear on the Bitcoin side. And so I'm hopeful for that. I think that a bear market is not only a time to build, but also a time that signal becomes clearer. And of course, that's
Starting point is 00:20:20 always what we're looking for. So, you know, I anticipate bear markets with excitement because of those things. When you start looking at the industry right now, what are the things that people are trying to build? Like, where do you see the biggest opportunity? So somebody's watching this and they say, Hey, I want to go build a company. Where are you like, man, if somebody figures this out, that's going to be a massive business opportunity. Okay. Well, one thing that people have started building that I imagine could be a massive opportunity is the sort of browser extension access for lightning across the web. There's a few great teams taking a shot at that. And I think that that will be, could accrue incredible value and drive adoption, of course.
Starting point is 00:21:02 And in Bitcoin, it's great that those things are linked, right? It gives us a chance to do really well while doing good work. And so that will be an opportunity. There's a ton of them. So some of the things, you know, that are current from just the last week, in addition to the sort of accessibility piece and apps or infrastructure that will drive that has been, you know, some kind of deep in the weeds technical stuff like middleware in the lightning space. And so, you know, it's still, we're still in the state of the ecosystem where infrastructure is key and where things are really developing in a way that will define Bitcoin and Lightning for users. And so it's very varied, but it's, you know, the core protocols are mature enough that strong technical founders can build upon them. and we're starting to see the ecosystem reap the rewards of that, at least in the very earliest stages in terms of the talent that's coming in to build. And so that was one of the themes of our last week. Maybe to circle back to a point we kind of like skimmed the surface on, Pomp, around deploying capital in a cryptocurrency space or a Bitcoin space. Would that be interesting to chat about for a second? I would love to do that. I feel like people are confused. So that's why I
Starting point is 00:22:21 wanted to bring it up. So one of the things that I've seen floating around on social lately is this question of, you know, how much capital can you deploy in crypto versus Bitcoin? And so I wanted to just point out one of the sort of fundamental truths of the space, which is that, you know, Bitcoin investing is based on equity and a company's equity value or ultimately their enterprise value. And that's the same as tech. It's the same as traditional venture capital. And so the amount of money you can deploy in, say, the cloud network ecosystem or the cybersecurity ecosystem or Bitcoin is going to be capped. And that's because it's based on, you know, sort of the total equity value that existed any one time in a snapshot. Now, if we flip over to cryptocurrency, we know that that's that's not true.
Starting point is 00:23:09 There's been several people that have taken stabs at explaining this. But basically, long story short, is that you can deploy more capital in the cryptocurrency space because these tokens are not attached to equity. They're not attached to a company's enterprise value. And so there's no sort of limit in terms of what you can achieve because you're not constrained by, you know, sort of like the parameters of that. What you're constrained by is how much excitement you can generate in these various communities. And we've seen this just past bull market that you can generate a lot of excitement, especially with promises based on sort of weak premises, which gets us all the way back to the first topic we talked about, which was, you know, is it toxic to point out some of those false premises in these challenger texts? But, you know, all of that said, I think the thing that gets really confused is whether Bitcoin is even competing or in the same space as other cryptocurrencies. And from my perspective, I think that they're almost entirely different.
Starting point is 00:24:13 I don't know. I would love to spend less time thinking about Bitcoin maximalism or toxic maximalism just because of the fact that I think that these categories are just so entirely different, that it should be that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are grouped together much less. And I hope that in the going forward, as things diverge, that that will be true. And I think we'll all be benefited by that. How do you think about stable coins? Like one of the things that I find fascinating about all of this, and I truly try to like remove myself for a second of like my own bias and just think of, um, it's very obvious that there's a, I don't know, 150 million people. I think at this point is the estimate, uh, that hold Bitcoin, um, and, uh, kind of our Bitcoiners, whether they identify that as not, they, they have Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:25:05 Uh, and it seems like the only other asset in the market that, uh, maybe half or more seem to be okay with or kind of hold their nose and say like, all right, that's fine, is stable coins. Now, we talked last time about the idea of potentially building stable coins on top of Lightning via Taro and all of that. But like, how do you think about stable coins fitting into this? And is stable coins part of the Bitcoin story? Or is it something like that gets bifurcated away over time? So we think about the separation or the existence of two things in Bitcoin, which is BTC, the asset, and then this stack of protocols that make up the financial network of BTC, of Bitcoin. And so to give people access to that financial network,
Starting point is 00:25:50 to Bitcoin Core or to Lightning Network, the payments network, in a way that suits their needs, I think is really important. It's nonjudgmental. It allows more people to participate and it doesn't demand of them that they fit a certain mold. And so I think in that sense that stable coins on Lightning or in a Bitcoin environment really fit with the Bitcoin ethos, you know, all the way back into the very earliest sort of formation of what Bitcoin ethos was and how Satoshi, you know, proposed to the Cypherpunks forum, you know, it would be used. And so while in 2009, it was probably hard to imagine stable coins and I haven't read the chats in a long time, although when I started in Bitcoin, that's where I started. But I don't
Starting point is 00:26:34 think that there were reference to stable coins on Bitcoin in the chats, but I imagine if there were that they would have been well received because the mission of Bitcoin was to have as many people across the world, including in a free and fair financial system. And so stable coins are a path to that. Of course, stable coins are different than Bitcoin in that there's a centralized agency that acts as an issuer. And so I understand some folks having hesitancy around that. And of course, if you're comparing it to a pristine asset like Bitcoin, it makes sense to have hesitancy for sure. But I think when you're living in an emerging market and your options are using cash locally on the street and that cash could be declining in terms of its
Starting point is 00:27:22 purchasing power or using USD, which is more stable than many emerging market currencies, using USD on Lightning, then the trade-offs of using something that relies on a centralized issuer versus BTC that has volatility, I think for that family, those trade-offs are going to be defined in a different way. And I wouldn't want to impose my own values on that or my own decisions on that. I would leave that to each family to do themselves. And I'm happy that they'll have those decisions to make soon. When you start to think about where we go from here, is it exactly like past bear markets? Does builders put your heads down, build, the bear market will pass and, you know, kind of all will be good in the world? Or you have a different
Starting point is 00:28:11 message for the founders that are in your portfolio or the founders that you talk to on a day-to-day basis? So here's the behind the scenes of how we talk to founders in general. So it's not just in the bear market that you have to be critical about your growth, right? So when there's a bull market, metrics are going to look great up and to the right, even if there's things that are fundamentally not right in the company of the product. And so it's always important to evaluate growth and adoption of your own products from the perspective of where the market's at and adjust accordingly. And so what I mean by that specifically is that in a bull market, real growth means beating the growth of the market and in a bear market it's the same so in a bear market real
Starting point is 00:28:54 growth is showing greater engagement with your current user base for example or continuing to grow but at a slower cadence than you did when the market was um you know flat and bouncing around or when it was a bull market and so it's it's really about being close to the metrics and being able to interpret them um well that advantages companies so if there's something different about this bear market, I would say it's just that we, you know, have the advantage of having more maturity and lightning network and a roadmap that is really promising for entrepreneurs. And so my hope is that the bear market sort of gives people space to be heads down and build without having to sort of, you know, rush things for the sake of, you know, catching bull market adoption trends,
Starting point is 00:29:44 if that makes sense, Paul. It makes a ton of sense. Um, when, where can we send people to find you on the internet, uh, whether on Twitter or, uh, or find out more about Stillmark? Sure. Well, so, you know, founders should email us and they have been, so stillmark.com has various ways for founders to reach out, but we're at founders. We have a special email for, which is just founders at stillmark.com. And I'm on Twitter too, but probably, you know, less than most. But nonetheless, we see stuff, we meet founders on Twitter, and we're really excited about what's going on. We're definitely, we're still deploying capital. We don't see any slowdown from our peers or from the investors that we work with. And like I said, in fact,
Starting point is 00:30:26 we, you know, we sort of, we see the opposite because folks that have been distracted by other stuff are paying more attention to Bitcoin. And so what I would say to investors that are interested in Bitcoin companies, is that, you know, now is the time to really sort of understand why Bitcoin thrives when other spaces, you know, can be can be more challenging. And getting those core values in the bear market, as you know, comp is the easiest time. I think that you're on to something here. And your Twitter bio is perfect. Just nice and clean explains exactly what you're here for, which I which I appreciate. Awesome. Elise, thank you so much for for taking the time to do this. And we'll talk to you again next Wednesday. Thanks, Pomp. Have a good week.
Starting point is 00:31:09 See you later. You too. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.

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