The Pomp Podcast - #1061 Alyse Killeen On Investing In Bitcoin’s Layer 3

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Alyse Killeen is a Founding Managing Partner at Stillmark, A Bitcoin focused Venture Capital fund. In this conversation, we discuss the erosion of institutions, investments that Stillmark is making in the Bitcoin space, Taro and why it could be a Trojan Horse for mass adoption of the Lightning Network, and why Bitcoin Layer 3 is so important. ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem.Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money.   Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA.They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account.   There are no setup or account fees, and it’s all you need to do to invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that again:You can invest in crypto tax free.   So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more.   Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Since 2018 Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development.   From award winning custody solutions, to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services, in lock-step with a rapidly changing world.    No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets, across as many exchanges, with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world’s largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co   Copper - the unfair advantage. =======================

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 Alto IRA.

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Since 2018, Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development. From award-winning custody solutions to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services in lockstep with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets across as many exchanges with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world's largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co. Again, copper, the unfair advantage. Check them out at copper.co today. 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. This podcast is for informational purposes only. We've got Elise Killeen from Stillmark who's joining us. Elise, how are you? I'm good. How are you, Punk? I'm doing very well.

There's a lot of weird stuff going on in the world that we're trying to figure out. We don't have all the answers, but we are slowly but surely, I think, watching the degradation of trust in institutions accelerate. Like we saw trust in institutions going down, and now it is only getting worse. And it's an interesting response from institutions. Like they can either just shoot people straight. You know, we've talked recently about the Federal Reserve or the Treasury. If they just came out and said, hey, we're likely to have a recession, it's a different recession than, you know, 2008, 2009 because we're essentially creating the recession.

and uh by the way you know consumer spending is still strong employment is still strong and so there's like some positives in here but like bear with us we got to get inflation down and so you know we're gonna do what we got to do i think a lot of people would be like okay got it right and like nobody wants to be in a recession but like if they just explained it and were straight with people they'd be like okay i understand instead it's kind of like the um uh streisand effect when you say like, Hey, let me change the definition of recession. Like now everyone and their mom is like, they definitely know what a recession is and they know it's coming. What do you think about, uh, kind of some of the talk that we've seen and, and, uh, maybe the way that

they're handling it? Well, so I like how you led into this by saying that there's a lot, we know a lot, we don't know. And the most important thing of course is, um, you know, frankly, to know what you don't know, and then to know how to go about, um, discerning, you know, the facts from the And I think you were talking a lot about the stories that are being told to the population and, you know, and then perhaps questions around the motivation around that story. The great thing, though, about today is that there's an opportunity for folks in developed markets to choose to opt out. Same is true for folks in emerging markets, of course, but, you know, Bitcoin is still something easier to access and to store if you're someone of privilege. And we know that entrepreneurs and developers are working to expand that and to make ease of access very broad. But going back to your original point about trust for institutions eroding, that was the whole premise of the introduction of Bitcoin, wasn't it?

And with the white paper in 2008, and then with the protocol, the software in 2009. So Satoshi introduced Bitcoin as a way to give people a choice to opt out of institutional control, frankly, and intermediaries sort of gating who can access financial tools and services, and also, frankly, who can access or even understand, discern the rules of the system. And what we're talking about today with the definition of recession, and are we in a recession? Are we not? Are we heading into something different? Is it a new form of recession? I suppose that he who controls the dictionary here, or the meaning of the terms is going to decide that for us. And unfortunately, it's going to affect us all. The idea of Bitcoin is to do

something completely different, which is to set rules that are software enforced, that are not changeable, are not subject to the redefinition of key points. And of course, that are knowable and fixed, that these are hard promises that the software makes. And we sort of know the game on the field and can choose to play or not. It's very different from what we're seeing elsewhere. I could not agree more. Let's talk a little bit about Bitcoin and some of the more nuanced aspects. We were kind of preparing for this and Stillmark cooler talk or water cooler talk, I think is a great way to kind of think about, you know, inside of a Bitcoin focused venture firm, what you all are excited about, what you're thinking about. And one of

those themes is that tarot based stablecoin. So tarot obviously is the proposed protocol built on top of the Lightning Network, kind of a layer three, if you will. And stable coins is one of the things that people believe will be able to be built there, would be this like Trojan horse to getting more Lightning wallets adopted in certain geographies. Explain this idea a little bit more and like, what are you seeing already? Or what are you all anticipating happening here? So this goes back to the point that I made just a second ago around who can access Bitcoin and the ease with which someone can participate in the Bitcoin or Lightning Network. I think that, you know, to take on the entrepreneurial perspective on a problem, the challenge for

entrepreneurs always is to really empathize with their end users and to sort of understand the population that the product is built for, both in terms of the needs of those people and in terms of the constraints. And so, you know, for example, what I said a couple minutes ago was that Bitcoin is much easier to access in developed markets or for people of higher means. And it's more difficult for people of lower socioeconomic status. And what I really meant by that is that when we look at what it takes to use Bitcoin today, one of the things we have to acknowledge is that it takes the ability to tolerate Bitcoin's volatility for whatever term you're planning to hold Bitcoin. So for folks that are wealthy enough to have savings, Bitcoin is a fantastic

option because Bitcoin over the long term is an appreciating asset. Now, for folks that don't have the means to accrue savings or to accrue meaningful savings in terms of the amount that they're saving relative to their monthly income, it's just harder to access and really use Bitcoin in a meaningful way if you're going to be holding or counting on the value to be maintained in the short term. And so Taro is, I think, something that makes Bitcoin more accessible for people of lower socioeconomic status in a way that really expands TAM for Bitcoin. So that's sort of water cooler chat for Stillmark. So what we've been talking about is what does it mean when Bitcoin technologies can be accessed by a much broader market, not just people of means to hold

savings. And I think that what it means, frankly, is that we can start to really have a fire behind the push to further monetize Bitcoin by seeing Bitcoin used as a means of payment. So within developed markets, Bitcoin has really been used as a means of saving or by speculators hoping that it will appreciate. In emerging markets where folks are either less able or less interested to speculate or to save simply because of their family situation and the amount of money that they have versus the amount of money that they need to spend each month, what they still need to do is have access to the global economy so that they can spend, so that they can attain resources for their family.

And that coincides with exactly what Bitcoiners have been hoping and promoting, which is the further monetization of Bitcoin through seeing Bitcoins as a means of exchange. So Taro sort of paves the path for that to happen. Lightning paves the path for that to happen broadly, but Taro paves the path for that to happen in emerging markets and where people have lower household incomes. And so not just does it sort of expand TAM, but it also helps, I believe will help advance Bitcoin's monetization life cycle. Now, the other thing that it does is that it sort of puts us in a place where we can have a broader design space for experimentation and start to really build apps and infrastructure that are purely targeting this Bitcoin as a means of exchange theme.

And so we're starting to see that happen too. When you think about this, obviously tons of people now have access to financial services, banking services because of Bitcoin. How much education needs to be done to explain why they should use financial services? Like I think a lot about – use a Greece's example. There are individuals – I was actually one of them. I didn't have a credit card until I was like 26 or 27 years old. I was like, why do I need a credit card? No one ever told me.

right and then one day i was sitting with some friends and they were like yeah what's your credit score now what's a credit score and then they were like dude you're an idiot like get a credit card build credit get a credit score and like they explained to me and i was like oh like that makes complete sense and i went and i got one and it was like kind of like a starter credit card or whatever right and then i was off to the races and i started learning about it whatever but it took someone to tell me that i was literally sitting in the middle of san francisco when that happened right like i couldn't be in a better place to learn about credit and money and like all the all these financial services. If you're living in a developing nation, who tells you, like who

educates you, who shows you the power of these different financial services? How does that work right now? This is such a great question. And it really shows also how you are so orientated towards taking on the perspective of the end user. So this relates to our prior discussion. So when we're entrepreneurs are thinking about how to empathize with end users that they're targeting. So it's about what do you need to adopt Bitcoin? What do you need to know? And how do you need to be positioned? What tools should you be surrounded by? When will you be ready to adopt Bitcoin? And a large component of that is the what do you need to know, which is the education piece that you just mentioned. So what do you need to know? First

off, I think you need to know that Bitcoin is there for you. So it doesn't it's it's an opt in network. And the opt in network is includes you. That's the first thing. And I think that while that seems really obvious to folks that have spent years in the space that Bitcoin is for everyone, it's really not obvious for folks that are newer coming in. Now, there's this secondary problem that I think doesn't get enough attention, which is that there's so much noise that finding the signal, if you're someone that's curious about Bitcoin,

is really difficult. And just to give an example of this, and I loved your credit card example, to give an example of my experience of coming into Bitcoin in 2013, if in 2013 or 2014, you went onto YouTube and you Googled Bitcoin, what you were going to find was videos

from Adam Back or Andreas Antonopoulos explaining the technology and the ramifications, like the utility of the technology. But today, if you go onto YouTube and you search for Bitcoin, of course, you're going to find something entirely different, including folks pitching altcoins or things that might be actually categorically different from Bitcoin, but both sort of confusing for newbies and so can be seen as the same. Now, when Bitcoiners are thinking about education, I think that the thing that has really advanced for folks in our community is an understanding that education needs to suit a person's circumstances. And so what I mean by that is, is that if we're talking in the

U.S. about Bitcoin being part of a diversified portfolio, it might make sense to talk about it a bit differently. For instance, Bitcoin being a payments network. If we're talking to folks that are unbanked in an emerging market, or even in communities in the US. And so education really has to suit the end user. Something exciting that started happening this year, well, happening this year in force is that we're seeing these sort of localized educational pushes with a plan for how to scale it. So for example, we've seen these community banking applications and infrastructure launch in emerging markets. And so now I'm talking about companies like Galois or Fediment that are looking at what community banking through Bitcoin means in our non-domestic

markets, so outside of the US. And what they've seen to both come to is a realization that community education is going to need to match the introduction of this technology. And so we're seeing this really ground up teaching of what Bitcoin is. And that's curated towards exactly what folks in that geography and that community need it to be. And Bitcoin is many things, different things to everyone. So finding the right angle where it's approachable and actually meaningful to solve an existing problem for folks is going to be important. As you see these services, is there a way – like when I think of a bank, right? A bank gets you to deposit money and then they sell you financial services around it. The promise of Bitcoin is that we don't need banks, right? Or at least you will have a lower dependence on banks, specifically around your digital assets. How then does that mechanism work where if I put in fiat system, I put my dollars into the bank.

They give me a credit card. They give me a loan. they give me uh interest they give me kind of all these services is it now shifting the owner onus i guess from the bank providing me the services to now me as an individual i have to go and seek those out i have to evaluate uh the service providers and decide which ones i want so i get more personal um uh kind of control but also puts a responsibility on me and that means i have to educate myself more and i have to do kind of more work up front in order to be able to get to the same end state with the advantages of self-sovereignty and kind of no trusted third

party? Yeah, that's a great question. So this is actually, so this is something that we can answer from the perspective of the deal flow, the opportunity pipeline that we have at Stillmark. So one of the trends in entrepreneurship and innovation right now in the Bitcoin space is sort of a rebundling of banking services so that rather than an app offering to new Bitcoiners or to Bitcoiners in general, a specific service, we're seeing people look at how to extend from their product base. And so what I mean by that is that we're seeing, you know, really a sort of maturation of neobanking in Bitcoin. And so it's looking at a consumer's financial needs more holistically and seeing what makes sense to include that insight under the umbrella

of one company. And so my expectation is that we'll see companies launch to provide fuller financial services through Bitcoin. But then, of course, also, we should expect at some point to see some consolidation in the space through acquisition. And so larger players that are providing one element of Bitcoin banking may acquire smaller players that are offering new novel features to their products so that they can really serve consumers more broadly. Now, what's important here, both in traditional fintech or traditional finance, as well as in the Bitcoin space, is brand. And so I don't think that that's going to be any different in Bitcoin than it is in

traditional finance. It's still going to be important to build a brand that consumers feel that they can relate to and that they trust. And trust is built sort of more rigorously in the Bitcoin space. And consumers, I believe, have been and will continue to be really benefited by that. So we hear a lot about, at least on Twitter, in this little echo chamber of Twitter, we hear a lot about Bitcoiners being sort of toxic and their criticism of both traditional finance altcoins, which are more similar, I think, to traditional finance than they are to Bitcoin, but also critical of things happening in the Bitcoin space. And how I would think about that is that Bitcoiners are really asking for sort of rigorous thought and rigorous, you know, sort of evaluation of both, you know, someone's hypotheses and what they built to happen before consumers are asked to trust it. And so I think there's this really lovely, actually, in terms of outcome expectation in the Bitcoin community that you're going to think comprehensively about the impact of your product and not just in the short term, but in the long term. And so with that community work happening with the expectation from this engaged community that a product will be launched to be valuable in both the short and long term in a way that benefits consumers and doesn't take advantage of them.

My hope is that the companies stand to gain from that and that the work they do will sort of build up this brand equity for them and that consumers will be able to trust them in the short and long term. And so as these products develop and increase the breadth of utility that they offer and build brands, we're going to see, I believe, a redefinition of what financial incumbents are in the space. And I believe that Bitcoin companies are going to, you know, take over some of those spots of financial incumbents from folks that have, you know, really taken advantage of the position they've held prior. When you think about Taro, and we were talking earlier about kind of the stable coins built on top of it being this like Trojan horse. How will people, in your opinion, interact with stable coins built on top of Bitcoin and then Bitcoin itself? Like, is that a ones for spending, ones for savings? Is that depending on the retailer, maybe I use a different asset? How do you see those two kind of coexisting in the future? Yeah, this is a great question. A good follow, a good non-Bitcoin follow on Twitter, I think, someone that really talks about this question from the entrepreneur's perspective is Aaron Levy of Vox. So Aaron's been talking a lot lately on Twitter about, you know, sort of just the fundamentals of startup building and growth, which is that consumers will adopt the products that meet their needs in the simplest way possible.

So the bells and whistles and sort of the complexity that we see in some products, and especially I'd say in the altcoin and DeFi space, doesn't lend itself to sustainable user growth, nor does it lend itself, as I think we've talked about before, to being able to iterate your product. So on the other hand, when you're introducing a product that just simply solves a pain point that an end user has, that's a way to sort of both wedge your brand and your company into that consumer's day-to-day experience. And it's a way to introduce these new technologies. And so we talked before about education needing to fit and empathize with the end consumer's point of view. The same is true with the product. So we're talking now about Taro and Taro as a Trojan horse to Bitcoin. The way that that would work here is that end users in emerging markets, potential end users, your addressable market, has a pain in that they're underbanked and can't access a global economy in the same way that you and I can with a credit or debit card. And they even have trouble at times banking in their local brick and mortars. There's more friction and it's more expensive. What Taro says is that with lightning infrastructure and with the adoption of lightning infrastructure in a community or globally online, a user is now effectively banked.

They don't need the credit card that you picked up, you know, thanks to your friends prodding in your 20s. They won't need that. They'll be able to leapfrog what you did, Pomp, and simply just have a digital USD wallet on their phone that allows them to engage with e-commerce and with brick and mortars that have adopted the tech. Now, they may see it, of course, as a digital USD wallet, but really we know what it will be is a lightning wallet. And so what that will mean for those end users is that as they begin to trust the technology and the app that they're using to make these payments, that they'll be able to sort of eventually do more. And part of the, you know, the impetus to do more will be trusting, having a good experience with Tarot, trusting that they can use digital dollars in a way that's easy, won't get them in trouble, won't cause them trouble. And also it will be their experience with the brand, right? And so from there, then we have lightning on an end user's mobile phone as an experience of, you know, their their first sort of more fully banked life and livelihood.

And when they're ready and perhaps with education and from the company that they've come to trust, they can then begin to stack stacks and they won't have to adopt a new, you know, scary app or or even new terminology. Frankly, all they'll need to do is to just, you know, sort of indulge their curiosity fostered through education, perhaps by the company or through just general knowledge, growing knowledge of Bitcoin as Bitcoin adoption increases. They'll already have the app and infrastructure access. And so there will be a much lower hurdle to adopting Bitcoin because they've had hopefully a great experience with tarot and digital dollars on lightning. The last thing I want to talk about, which I find fascinating, I've seen some people trying, some people in the Bitcoin community, some people outside the Bitcoin community and kind of other crypto ecosystems, on-chain credit worthiness, which seems like if you're doing on-chain lending, which is one of the financial services people are talking about here, but you want to preserve pseudonymity. you want to preserve other aspects. You could even see through some technologies. Maybe you just tell me, hey, yes, this person is credit worthy, but I don't actually need to see the information itself. You know, ZK Snarks, things like that. But how are you all thinking about on-chain credit worthiness? We know how it works in the legacy system. Is this something that is

important or is it like, oh, we can make the tech do it and it'll look cool, but it actually doesn't have real world applications? We're thinking a lot about credit worthiness. And the reason why is we're thinking about the financialization of BTC, the asset. So if you're holding BTC, what else do you need to do with it? In a similar way as, you know, your needs would be fulfilled in a USD or fiat based system. And one of the things we do with USD is we prove our credit worthiness. We prove our resources as someone that's able to manage and pay down debt. And the same can happen in Bitcoin, actually, and without really getting too novel in the approach. And so because we're thinking about credit worthiness and because, frankly, we're seeing incredible

entrepreneurial activity around the space, our most recent investment, as you probably know, comp was in a company coming out of Fidelity called Hoseki. And what Hoseki says is that if you're holding the world's most valuable asset, the world's, you know, potentially most secure when managed properly asset, then you should be able to get the full value of that asset. And that includes having that asset be able to sort of vouch for your credit worthiness. So that's what Hoseki is doing. And it's doing that not just for individuals like you or I or our friends that might be seeking to open a credit card or to secure a mortgage, say, or to secure a car loan or a lease, but also allows for, frankly, some of the institutions that exist in the space

to prove their value and trustworthiness back to us in proving that they hold these reserves. Now, I'm sure that there's more sort of esoteric ways for credit worthiness to be validated through different sorts of activities that are dissimilar from the traditional finance space. But the approach that is, I think, simplest, most straightforward, and, you know, most stable to replicate at scale is generally the approach that wins. And so that's the approach that we tend to favor while being open, of course, always to be wrong and to be sort of influenced by entrepreneurs

building other things. But from a starting point, we're excited to back Hoseki as just one of the bricks that need to be added to the foundation of Bitcoin so that people can really engage with Bitcoin as sort of a full solution to their financial needs. Yeah, it's fascinating when you start to understand it's not just about the tech itself,

it's also about kind of the information, the entire ecosystem that gets built around it. You mentioned Hoseki. Are there any other companies, this is like a softball for you, I can't believe I'm asking this. Are there any other companies that you're excited about kind of in this space?

I'm sure you've invested in a number of them, but like what other companies should people go and look at the technology they're building or the products that they can try out for themselves? Well, in terms of financializing BTC, the asset, what we're excited about right now is the basic building blocks. And so what that means for us

is custody and credit worthiness. On the custody side, we've backed Kaza, which is a solution, a be your own bank solution, where you can access bank level security through Kaza software while still maintaining full custody of your Bitcoin, not your keys, not your coins. And then, as I said just a moment ago, of course, for creditworthiness, we're believers that Sam Abassi and his team is going to build a really smooth and frictionless product that make it easy for folks generally to be able to prove that they hold the BTC that they hold,

so that they can make use of that BTC in securing a mortgage or another form of debt. Now, just to push the boundaries a little bit in terms of the question that you're asking, I'd say when we're thinking about BTC, the asset, we're also thinking about mining and we're thinking about retail access to mining. And I know that we spoke about this very briefly last week, but Bitcoin is energy-backed money. And so in the financialization of Bitcoin as an asset, we have to also talk about mining. And so we're thinking a lot about that, too, and how access to mining will fit into someone's diversified portfolio.

And in that category right now, we're backing Satoshi Energy as the only mining company in Stillmark's portfolio with hope to back more. And Satoshi Energy has sort of been such an excellent first choice because they're such responsible and ambitious executors. And so what we're seeing through companies like Satoshi Energy is a greater proliferation of mining and sort of almost like making mining more common, making mining more common for energy producers, for institutions and for individuals so that folks, you know, begin to feel that access to mining or participation in mining is something that is approachable for them. And so, you know, when thinking about Bitcoin, the asset, we're sort of, you know, thinking that broadly. And then the next step is, as we talked about before, is Bitcoin moving from store of value to means of exchange. And this is when we start to get to these sort of moonshot, really, you know, big and exciting and, you know, still esoteric ideas around what it means for us to have access to instant and free global payments. It makes complete sense. Where can we send people to find you or find Stillmark if they want to reach out if they're raising capital or building anything interesting? They can find us at stillmark.com. And we have a link on stillmark.com to a founder's email. And then hello at stillmark.com is just our general email address. And it's been really lovely to get emails there from folks that watch your show and really trust you in thinking through deeply and critically about what Bitcoin presents and how it can be a tool and, you know, sort of catalyze a new era.

new financial system and, you know, a new era. So that's what we're here to do. And that's how you can reach us. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. I enjoy these conversations and we'll definitely do it again. Have a great week. All right. Bye. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training

program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.