The Pomp Podcast - #369: Alex Masmej on Personalized Tokens

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Alex Masmej is the creator of the $ALEX token. He is interested in how decentralized computing and smart contracts can significantly change the world. In this conversation, we discuss crypto's low barrier to entry, personalized tokens, Decentralized Finance, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and how athletes and musicians are likely to monetize themselves in the future. =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. =============================== Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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. Let's kick this thing off. Alex Mazmich is the creator of the Alex Token. He is interested in how decentralized computing and smart contracts can significantly change the world. In this conversation, we discuss crypto's low barrier to entry, personalized tokens, decentralized finance, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and how athletes and musicians are likely to monetize themselves in the future. I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Crypto.com.

They've got an awesome URL, but they're also an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, or invest crypto all from one place. That's right. Crypto.com has 1 million users currently using the crypto.com app so you can go download it today and they'll give you 50 us dollars if you use my code pomp 2020 anytime somebody allows for an all-in-one platform where you can buy sell store earn loan or invest you should pay attention so go check out crypto.com like i said great url but that's the place where mass adoption is occurring crypto.com next up is unstoppable domains coinbase wallets normally ask you to include the wallet address when you send crypto to them so that is the long string of letters and numbers when you go to do

it you're literally sweating your heart is palpating it doesn't feel good you're stressed out because you're scared you're going to mess up some of the letters and numbers in that string well now coinbase wallet supports dot crypto and dot zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. What this means is that you can now use something like pomp.crypto as your wallet address. So when people say, where should I send the Bitcoin? You can simply say pomp.crypto. Where should I send the Ether? pomp.crypto. That is what Unstoppable Domains and Coinbase Wallet has created through this partnership. So Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead

of the long bitcoin wallet addresses while you can also store your domain in coinbase's collectible section so they are domains it's just like urls if somebody buys it and you wanted it you can't get it it's first come first served so go to unstoppabledomains.com in your dap browser and go get your domain today before somebody else buys it once they're gone they're gone if you want a specific domain, go get it at unstoppabledomains.com. Go check it out. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right,

let's get into this episode with Alex. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Alex here. What's going on, man? Bang, bang.

Super excited. Thank you so much. Absolutely. All right. We've been meaning to do this for a while now. And you are known for creating the Alex token, which is the first personalized crypto token. The people listening to this, 50% of them are going to think that that's awesome and really exciting and cutting edge. And the other 50% are going to be like, oh, great, another shit coin.

um so we'll get to all that uh in a second but let's start with just you your background and kind of how did you come uh come on to crypto and get so enthralled with it yeah sure um so yeah and indeed like contention is great when 50 50 uh ratio that's the best ratio to get attention so i get i got this right um yeah so my background i spent 0 to 18 year old in paris uh you know high school and everything and then uh studied in the uk learned english for three years business management and then for a year i tried a startup that failed it was about like 3d printing platform but basically my goal in life is to be a founder of tech companies and optimizing for impact and so once this has failed i realized that i need to have the best network

possible in order to succeed in life and then i tried to select an industry because i was just going for 3D printing because of serendipity I guess but I chose like three technologies that I studied for a while which is AI, crypto and AR and VR and like you know X reality and as a young person starting the career crypto has just the lowest barriers of entry and you know this like the internet created the best entrepreneurs in the world and so I thought you know if they were alive today i mean they are alive today um they will choose crypto today and it paid off so far it's going great so i've entered crypto last year 12 months ago and uh i've done a lot of primitives on ethereum so applications in defy dao nft and lately my personal token alex and i can talk about

any of those uh but it's been a such a journey so far and super excited and now like on to my next startup. So yeah, short background. Got it. Let's just dive right into the Alex token. I think that's the one that you're probably known most for. What the hell is this thing? So basically, it's a token that represents my community. And it started off in March when basically COVID happens. I got my only source of income cut off. I'm a founder. I don't have many salaries. And I am scheduled on main stage at a big Ethereum conference to talk about personal tokens because I've had one for a while. I was known as the only one to have it, but I've never done anything with it. And I thought, you know what? This is now or never. Do a small token sale

of $20,000 and announce it on stage. And it got great feedback. And then a month later, I released the documents to participate in the sale. 30 people did. And that's it. In two days, it got sold off and that's where i got a bit of media attention and it's awesome because i will be giving 15 of my income in the next three years to those 30 people and then since the alex token has gone up in value uh i've done like other experiments since and exclusive content to benefit my community got it and so the idea here is um people can buy the tokens right there was a token sale, but can they also buy them elsewhere in order to get part of the tokens that you didn't sell to those original investors to put up the $20,000? Yes. So 10% was reserved for those.

And so the immense majority, which doesn't have any claim on income or whatever, and it's used as a utility for my community, are on Uniswap right now because Uniswap is permissionless. And you've got Bradley from Roll Onboard, which is the creator of MySocialToken. And he always us that the team actually stakes a bit of ETH to create some initial liquidity for my token. Got it. And so when somebody goes and buys the Alex token today, because they weren't part of the token sale, they don't get a claim on your income, right? Only those investors do. What do I get in exchange for buying the Alex token? So you get tons of things. So first, you get access to my Telegram group only group chat. We have like a bot that actually checks if you have

enough alex and kicks you out if you sell the tokens uh also a newsletter so that's the two like exclusive content to get updated with my life and because i have a commitment that i will continue experience with the token that's informal with my community uh if i get more popular which is actually a perfect incentive because successful is different from popular if i get more popular the token should have more fans buying into it for the expense that i'm doing and potentially could go up anyway so um other than this i've done control my life which is a quite clickbait title for personal token voting and so austin griffiths a very famous ethereum developer did this erc20 voting thing and basically people could stake on my daily habit in july and so there

was like solely living off bitcoin or waking up at 6 a.m or running off five miles which i've done and this voted this vote won and the fourth one i don't remember but i think it's like go vegan and uh it's funny like a million tokens were voted there's only four million circulating right now which is such a huge participation rates compared to many like other organization in the space so that was very funny to see and so what you basically did was you said hey there's four things that i may do this month if you're a token holder you get a vote and you're literally going to quote unquote control my life right you're going to basically the crowd's going to decide what i do exactly yeah and so this happened over a week and at the end uh running five miles uh one

and so to prove myself on my alex only telegram group chats i've gone on to publish trava uh like runs every single day i mean five days a week for the whole month of july running five kilometers and that was very fun. Got it. And so extrapolate this out, right? You're the first person to kind of do a lot of these things. I think, again, a lot of people look at it and they say, that's kind of an experiment, but why are you doing this? And then how do you think that this evolves over time? What does this look like in the steady state? Is every human walking around with their own token and we're all controlling each other's lives or how does that play out? so there's so many different things here um but i think the main one and the one i'm probably

gonna use is that a stake in someone's community uh is amazing and the fact that people can support me and have a vehicle to support me so early on in my life and i was in europe so i did not benefit from silicon valley like now i'm connected to people in the bay area and very young you know they can get like a hundred thousand dollars from wealthy people very young to optimize their impact and so I did not get that I was born in Paris and so for me it's like a whole new vehicle uh way better than student loans way better than other alternatives of funding uh than uh you know it exists today so I'm creating this whole new different path it's clunky because I'm never I'm like the only one there pretty much now there's more people there's around 10 of us I think um

and so yeah creating my own path to a little bit of funding but also the fact that I'm pioneering this also got me some attention connections and so so far it's not my full-time thing like i'm still a founder building startups and i've actually got a personal token manager like a month ago which is super weird like 2020 jobs um but uh yeah i'm just keeping this as a side thing because it really interests people and i love experimenting what is a personal token manager so that person is Cooper Tully and he is a talent manager for artists in Los Angeles but he also is one of the biggest contributors to the Defiant which is a new source for Ethereum info and so mixing those two is literally being my agent my agent especially as personal token people probably in the future

will be athletes or entrepreneurs artists and so this is the kind of same vibe where you know if I have some otc deals where people want to buy my token in bulk other than uniswap for voting in my experiment he could handle the deals or he could suggest some experiments and so he has other people under his arm and he just started this like a month ago which for me is fascinating and yeah i'm super glad to be part of it and at the same time just like an artist can focus on music whilst the manager does all the business stuff same for me i can focus on my startup and he's like experimenting with my token on the side got it and so uh you're young how old are you i just am 24 i was playing the young card so long but now it's like yeah listen as somebody who's 32

and still gets called young 24 you got a long way to go before anybody says that you're not young uh talk to me a little bit about uh where does this drive and ambition come from in terms of uh you've met a lot of people you've built a great network you've tinkered with a lot of technology and you're only 24 years old. Like most 24-year-olds are trying to figure out how to go get drunk on the weekend. Like, why are you doing this? I'm doing this because there was like a bug in the matrix

where at like 13, I got so fascinated by Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs is the best, especially compared to my background where I'm not that technical. And Steve Jobs is someone that's pretty much, you know, product and marketing as a tech person. And this is what I'm driving for today. And I seem to be doing well at both of those so far.

And crypto is also the best field to enter because the level of talent isn't still world class. I think Silicon Valley dismisses crypto for now, which is healthy for young entrepreneurs like me to kind of like sharpen the knife in the meantime. So it's like, yeah. So basically, initially, Steve Jobs. I'm just so fascinated. For me, Apple is the best brand in the world. And they actually are anyway by market cap, right? So, yeah.

Got it. And so as you think about these personalized tokens, these community tokens, you mentioned a little bit, you know, you're a young guy who's kind of sharpening the blade, right? Or kind of at the tip of the spear of this. But when you pull that back, it sounds like you think that every musician, every entrepreneur, every athlete, and pretty much anyone in the spotlight is going to have one of these. Is that fair? I think so. just like you know justin khan which is the founder of twitch was a weirdo uh streaming himself and then he created a billion dollar platform called twitch uh i think right now i'm

that weirdo uh monetizing myself but i think every single creator of every type even politicians i can see in the future could rally the community and that would be awesome right i think you know artists uh usually thank fans uh you know by saying i would be nothing without you thank you so much for being there, my day ones, et cetera, but they never thanked them financially. And I think it's long overdue that we do that. Got it. And so as that plays out, is this something where the token structures are like inflationary, you can create more tokens? Is it something where there's just a preset kind of artificial cap, somewhere like a Bitcoin? How do you think about that token structure, especially when you're starting out and you've

got 30 investors but if you were to become you know the next drake or the next lebron james you then could have the potential of millions and millions of people wanting access to this that makes sense so right now uh the model that roll does with me and all the other tokenized people is a 10 million fixed cap uh that's not going to be inflated uh and a token vesting mechanism of 200 000 every single month and so i kind of cheated on it like we unlocked a million tokens for like the investor stuff because that's uh special but it's like still that way and for me it's great fixed supply i can understand because it's only my early fans and you know if i get super famous later does everyone wants to be a token holder of myself maybe not uh maybe

more the super fans so that's fine it's fixed supply to kind of create some scarcity um and then the vesting is great in my opinion because uh as i grow in popularity the token gets a bit more liquid. And if it was all at once, it would not be as exciting. And now we can see growth in all segments. So that's great. Got it. And is the thought process that these people will stop looking for dollars or whatever the fiat currency is, and they'll just want the appreciation of their token? Or is it something where they coexist? So hey, I still want the cash flow, but then I also want the token to appreciate in price too. I think it will coexist. But I do think that if you're a huge fan of someone,

you would love to get as many of their tokens because surely all of their products and services will be linked at least maybe as a loyalty discount scheme. But of course, I think fiat denomination at least is here to stay. It's just so simple. Yeah. And given what you've done already,

you've been doing this for what, six months, give or take, what are the biggest surprises or the things that if you could go back, you wouldn't do? uh biggest surprises uh so yeah people go into two categories either they're like oh my god you're going to lose control of your life this is uninterrupted servitude uh you're going to be uh like enslaved by your shareholders and this is the worst like you have no control and i'm like well no i do have control like this is an experiment like the control my life thing was clickbait because i'm good at marketing but it's not actually controlling my life

and then the second thing is people saying you have too much control this is 2017 ico you are scam you're gonna run off with the money etc and so these two points that are negative towards this experiment kind of contradicts themselves um so it's nice because it feels like i'm still at the middle right now but i can't see both of the sides going wrong and i think i don't have any regrets but i do have some potential things to advise future tokens and future personal tokens which is maybe have some recourse have some trustless you know uh quote unquote um ways to make sure you don't rip off the community i have i haven't done it personally uh because it was so early on but i think we're gonna learn as a space and so far i am trustworthy you know i didn't do

any exit scam i'm a great person so far uh so it's okay and i'm actually willing to enforce myself some rules maybe you know i don't know maybe like a buyback program in the future or something like this uh and or add recourse retroactively so i'm really open to uh keep security high and like keep every investor safe right this is a playground this is not even investors to be honest it's more like shareholders of my community uh so when you say that you're a good person so far are you planning to not be a good person in the future no but like i advertised like you know even for my token sale or anything like i can technically run away with the money this is you know not trustless uh you know it's the opposite of the trustless protocols in d5 for

instance uh where it's like set up on ethereum uh this is just a person that you have to trust but at least my reputation is on the line and most of my career has been on that reputation so i have really no incentive to run away but i just wanted to let know people that i could still turn bad but Of course, I won't. It makes no sense, but I just want to be honest. Got it. And then in terms of you're giving a percentage of your income, I think it's 15% for three years. How do, if I'm one of those token holders that get that income share, how do I know how much money you made? Right. So we discuss this a lot and I won't give my tax return and people will have to believe what I made. Um, and so basically, like, I did it for the first time last month, because it was the first quarter. And I described all my payments I've gone through. And yeah, that's it. Like, I don't know, there was no, there's no trust this way again. And even then, I could perhaps like fake my tax return. Like, I think it's really based on trust. And if you don't trust me or trust that I will do good, you probably should stay away from this.

uh why not give the tax return i think most people would say like oh that would be the easiest way to prove it is it just because it's got sensitive information or what's the the thought process to not share that yeah maybe i'll do it in the future it's just that i haven't filed a tax return for next year so it was by a quarter so like i kind of had to do gross income which is actually more money for the shareholders anyway got it and um in terms of uh those payments and stuff are you publishing that for anyone in the world to see and just the people who hold the tokens get it or is that information that's just shared with the token holders like how do you think about i guess uh like the transparency and uh information sharing versus income sharing

so um the income sharing is public on the ethereum blockchain uh i haven't advertised it i think i've said it on twitter like you know the airdrop has happened etc maybe i put the link but i didn't want to say the amount that i've made too loud i have a newsletter that people have to pay alex for to access it where i disclose it even if you're not one of the investors so if you want to go that route that's fine but i probably i don't want to reveal financial information too publicly on twitter um and yeah i'm i think people if people can dig they can see but actually it's quite hidden because it's in a currency that's not actually pegged one one uh first we thought USDC or stablecoin, but now it's in Alex LP tokens on the newsflaps. So people are

trading liquidity. That's how they pay me. So it's actually a very funny way because although it's public, it's quite hard to reverse engineer how much I made, which I find funny, but people can if they book my newsletter. Got it. And then in terms of how this evolves over time, Do you think that people will have to kind of diverge from the, oh, just trust me model to something that's like on-chain cash flow or some other model where people say, no, I want to be able to verify what your income is? Either for you or for like a big, you know, athlete, musician, whatever. Yeah, for sure. I think, and we saw Spencer Dinwiddie, I think he closed his sale. So he's a NBA player that tokenizes contracts.

He's the first one. he got some pushback from the nba but i think he ended up doing it um i think yeah i think you know i haven't done this properly because this was the first time with a very tiny reasonable amount but i think uh i could see some regulations around it and making it like the kind of new seed investment the new white combinator i can totally see that in action and there will be some rules and enforcements to protect the shareholders what's the craziest thing that somebody's asked you or the craziest uh pushback that you've gotten like i'm fat listen and for those that are listening uh i'm fascinated by this uh because i can't tell how much of this is like complete

bullshit and this is gonna go like you know it's gonna fall off a cliff and then you're gonna call me one day and be like dude that was a fun experiment but like it didn't work at all versus uh like there is this like small glimmer that i see where people have uh kind of income sharing via tokenization or something like that. Now, what platform does it get built on? What's the currency? There's so many questions as to how it actually gets implemented. But the idea of just a simple on-chain cash flow, that's interesting. And so how do you start to incorporate that? Okay, well, if then you can get access to that information, it's easier to... Maybe there's not true corporations. I know that there's companies in, I think, both Bitcoin and Ethereum communities

that say, look, we're not going to go with a traditional legal structure. Instead, we're going to do everything on-chain and like your ownership is basically held on-chain and therefore you have a claim on cash flows and things like that. This feels very similar to that, right? Right, right.

Well, first of all, yeah, let me defend personal tokens because I don't think it's bullshit at all. You know, Kickstarter works. Kickstarter is a model to invest in people before they achieve their potential. uh isa with them that's cool indication for software engineers really work and so we know that if we add like the capitalism speculation and financial aspect that crypto brings so easily it would be great because it would attract more revenue for creators which are typically a persona

that doesn't make enough money and is struggling to monetize right like people spend hours listening to podcast do podcasters really get paid for the amount of time that people consume versus netflix or music and even netflix on music are quite on the page so i think it would be huge to have more monetization for all types of creators athletes entrepreneurs politicians um and so that's that's for my defense uh all right hold on hold on hold on before you continue okay so uh i will buy most of that argument but what does that look like let's say that uh let's take a musician and an athlete so for lebron james and then let's say for drake right is this something where uh they create tokens they uh once they're already a star they then have like a token sale

ico whatever you know whatever the the latest uh you know kind of vocabulary is for this uh but they basically sell the tokens into the market they hold some back maybe there's vesting maybe there's not and then they create like an economy or an ecosystem where you can only use the lebron james token to go to his games or buy things in his store or attend you know maybe movies he produces or stuff like that or is it something that's more of like a loyalty point so it's within this closed ecosystem but all you can really do is maybe win like a cool experience or do something like that like how do you see it actually um in the steady state somebody like lebron james or drake using this stuff so i think it can be either so either the revenue income or the loyalty

discount and maybe the latter is going to be easier legally right because it's just you know 15 off my merch as drake then you know the superstars i don't think unless the first one i think you know the first one will have a premium because it is the first one that is a superstar doing it but i think long term the best people to uh that should do a personal token should be b-list celebrities that have potential to go a-list and so that way the more potential is the more gains for the people who want to invest in that token. Got it. And is the thought process that literally you're like buying a rising star, right? Like similar to buying a stock that is poised to break out, you're basically being able to quote unquote invest in the person before

they break out? Yeah, exactly. That's how I see it because the person has potential, you invest in it. So you've got the early fans now and the speculators who objectively think that the star is going to rise. So that's just momentization. And that's great. I think crypto is about making everything liquid. And this is a fun step towards it. You're either out of your mind or you're dead on. We're going to find out. And look, and I think there's a lot of people who will hear me talking about this stuff, right? And they'll be like, why are you even talking about it? And what's interesting to me is the more that you get it to like, hey, I have a currency, like look at this thing that you can use to pay me and do all that kind of stuff. And probably not as sold on that.

The idea that this is just the next iteration from Kickstarter to ISAs to, you know, tokenization of this person and basically, you know, what's the difference between somebody's parents giving them a loan, right, versus them using this as a way to raise capital, right? It's a new capital markets mechanism for an individual. There's probably all kinds of legal things that need to be figured out. But in terms of like that as a use case, you can see the use cases there. It's just how does it actually get implemented? That probably determines whether it's successful or not. Yeah, for sure. We'll see in the future, to be honest.

Yeah, like we can't know if it's ridiculous or not, but I tend to think the most ridiculous ideas actually end up being trillion dollar companies. That's why I'm saying you're either out of your mind or you're going to be. Yes, but that's the good part. it's like it's very rare to find ideas that look really really dumb and weird but at the same time it's like well i'm not sure if it's going to nothing or to like a massive world-changing thing i uh i think that you also are uh the sense i get from you and you tell me if i'm right or wrong you either think that this is going to end up being very kind of foolish and a toy or this

is going to end up being a trillion dollar thing right like i like i think you have a kind of a binary outcome uh in terms of how this plays out or am i wrong on that oh yeah for sure i think the biggest thing usually started as toy and bitcoin at the same treatment right so and now it's not a toy anymore all right that's fair we're on the same page uh you you um because of all the things that you're doing uh you've been building a bunch on ethereum uh two questions one is just how much of this are you building versus you're leveraging tools and uh platforms that other people have built and then we'll get into talking kind of bitcoin and ethereum but just help people understand like how much of this is reliant on you doing it versus you're able to leverage other

things that are built and they could go do it if they wanted right so uh first since i'm not very technical of course i know basics of coding to be in the space but um if doing means coding no i haven't coded any of my stuff a little bit control my life which is one of my experiments with the alex token uh i've done some front end but that's like very little work uh no i think the huge part about ethereum is composability meaning that people build a smart contract you can build on top of it and so for instance i can give an example so rocket is a lending platform that take nft which is unique items on ethereum and so i've taken like the dao governance so like the way people can decide how to give loans to people like i raised fifty thousand dollars for those

lenders um then give out nft and it's like a transaction to like a multi-sig that holds nft and so i've used all the tools available to me on ethereum and there's so much positive some experiments to be done uh there's not enough people i mean there's so many builders coming to ethereum but the space is still so vague like i remember one of my marketing technique is like to say this is the world's first ever like i said this is the world's first ever domain name as a collateral or the world's first ever uh crypto art piece as a collateral like we took josie bellini she's a famous ethereum artist and we gave a loan against it because we knew it would be valuable long term in our opinion and so yeah uh you know uh building on top of others but it's

still the very first uh you know foundation anyway i think right now ethereum is a bunch of apis and we need the front end for the end user and that's not being built right now but it will in the future all right then you keep saying this uh bitcoin is to ethereum as email is to the internet what the hell does that mean well it's because you know email was the first form of data on the internet and it was the like one of the best and we still use it and email is never going anywhere uh there's superhuman and other companies doing some niches but mostly it's like a free service and it's really awesome that it's decentralized and then there's the internet which is billions of ways to see data and i see the same thing with value right so bitcoin is

one kind of value and that's great and it's not going away because of its brilliant marketing and branding but ethereum which has a less good marketing in its name but the platform will speak for itself because billions of smart contracts will then become startups which will become extremely successful and i think right now it's unstoppable at this point they reach escape velocity. And even if some other competing blockchain builds on top of it, it will be a layer two solution. So I'm extremely bullish on Ethereum and the fact that you can create so many different sources of Bitcoin for each flavor that you want, whether it's lending, insuring, borrowing, any kind of usage of value. I think for me, it's really revolutionary.

So there's a bunch of people who listen to this that are into Bitcoin. There's a bunch of people who listen to this that are into Ethereum. I will put you on the spot. What are the pros and cons of bitcoin first how do you how do you look at bitcoin and what do you say hey these are the good things but and then these are the bad things probably bitcoin as a regulatory edge because i guess you know all the politicians etc are going to look at bitcoin first before ethereum um the cons it's that it's a bit boring like you know there's nothing happening there's like a halving every four years or something like i want exciting stuff to build on i want to be useful like how can i be useful in bitcoin besides being an influencer i'm not sure how can i do anything and so ethereum

you can build so much stuff it's so impressive it's like this is the future this is the internet this is where uh like the next innovations happen this is where the next superstars are born uh so of course ethereum any day you know that you're trolling and you're laughing which i which i respect it's not i'm not trolling like ethereum is so amazing as a platform and you know why but okay hold on hold on we don't trade gold every day but we use the internet every day and so we will maybe have some bitcoin it will be like you know the family treasury if like your dad is a bitcoin you know old addict but like every single person is going to have lending solution based on ethereum what why is it going to be based on ethereum well i mean of course like the like

if tomorrow data says otherwise i will jump off ethereum but right now the data is like obvious it's everywhere it's just working so well and ethereum 2.0 is not even live layer 2 is not even live but is it hold on hold on is ethereum 2.0 ever going to launch well i'm bearish on the timeline maybe it won't be this year as some people say phase zero will but it's gonna happen it's some of the smartest engineers in the world working on this like if it's not them then who okay uh well it could just be nobody right and it could just never launch i i tend to i tend to think that it will launch at some point i'm with you on that timeline is always uh the hard part for everything in uh bitcoin ethereum crypto everything right so not just them um in terms

of Ethereum, what are the pros and cons? So the pros of Ethereum is that it's the next single biggest financial infrastructure of the universe. And then the cons is that it's still a work in progress. It's still slow, expensive, and not scalable. And the UX still sucks. So there's tons to improve. But the fact that despite all of its flaws, it's growing so much especially defy right now so finance under all forms including tokenized bitcoin that's going very fast um makes it really really uh impressive and something to follow so this is just my opinion like i i grew up like listening to your podcast when i started getting into crypto and then i slowly started saying like oh uh anthony is a bit too much into bitcoin yeah listen we've invested

in a lot of things that build on top of Ethereum and are related to the DeFi stuff. So I don't know why people think that I'm necessarily a maximalist as much as I think I'm more of a realist in terms of there's just a lot of... And actually react to this. So what do you think about this? My whole position on the Ethereum and Ether world is that there's a lot of technology being built, but there's not a lot of products being built. And what I mean by that is everyone is saying like oh look at this shiny thing that i made it do and when you show a bunch of other technical people or people who are like really in the weeds like oh that's awesome but then if you go and you try to get any mainstream user to use i would argue almost any defy product there's nobody

outside of like that small technical audience who could figure out how to use it has an interest in using it etc so it's still to me um very kind of uh uh technology being built not necessarily like user-friendly products. Whereas I think Bitcoin was like that at some point, right? So there was a point where, you know, if you, it'd be even before Mt. Gox or even Mt. Gox, like there was just, you know, not the average Joe was going to buy Bitcoin, right? It was always people kind of on the fringes and super technical, all that kind of stuff. But eventually there was products built that now make it really easy, right? And so the thought process is at some point, probably, and hopefully for the DeFi community and Ethereum and all that, you get the products built,

it's just that we're not there yet right so agree or disagree with that oh yeah completely agree with that i would just disagree on the bitcoin part i don't see any product built on bitcoin maybe loli which is you know cash back on bitcoin great company but apart from cash back on bitcoin there is no product none of my friends know how to buy bitcoin apart of the in revolute which is already like a quite next-gen fintech startup um but yeah i do agree like i think defy six months ago was not even $1 billion locked. So that's ridiculously tiny. And so, yeah, like I'm not saying Ethereum is nowhere near yet in terms of products. There's some things going on with Foundation and Zora, which make the design very pretty for artists to tokenize. And it's actually

quite adjacent to personal tokens. But apart from those, yeah, all the lending platform is really hard. And that's actually what I'm trying to focus on in my next startup, which will try to help bring consumers but we're all trying to do this and it's really hard and maybe the hard answer is as long as we don't have if two it's just not scalable and it's like for nerds and it's the netscape of the internet um you are of the belief that silicon valley has kind of dismissed crypto explain that no yeah for sure but this is again just like my last argument uh defy is just way too tiny for silicon value to care uh and so this is why and so bitcoin is probably dismissed as you know it's just for people who hate governments and super libertarian and it's not the uh end

consumer and ethereum is extremely tiny but right now it's growing at a magnificent pace so it's it went from i think 500 million last year to i think right now it's like 10 billion 15 billion i can even keep count but there was this famous video of shamats uh that you got on your podcast the billionaire um he said he didn't know about defy and it's funny because i think it's going to become a household name probably next year maybe not a household name because it's still a geeky term decentralized but i think some defy products will uh cross the chasm very soon and so the reason why silicon valley dismisses it is simply because yeah the the value being exchanged and locked is ridiculous compared to bitcoin which is still ridiculous compared to financial finance

But the rate at which it's growing is enormous. Just like Jeff Bezos, I think he said in the 90s, I started Amazon where the internet was kind of dead, but it was growing at 19,000% a year. And we are at this time. Ethereum is growing at 19,000% a year or something. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it's growing really fast. And this is the reason why it should not be dismissed.

and some amazing, maybe next fang companies are going to be built. Do you want to know the number one thing I think that the Ethereum and DeFi community could do to accelerate all of that? Yeah, please do. Is to say Bitcoin is the first DeFi application, right? Well, it's not really.

Bitcoin has to be custodied by banks and things that you don't control trustlessly. No, Bitcoin is the only thing that is trustworthy. uh, trustless, right. In terms of on Ethereum, it's not encouraged to run a full node on Bitcoin. It is. And from a custody standpoint, Bitcoin is much more secure, much more decentralized, right? So I think the reason why I say that, uh, the DeFi and Ethereum community saying that what it does is it actually allows them to draft off of the market acceptance of Bitcoin, right? There's no confusion or lack of interest when it comes to crypto. Almost everyone talks

about Bitcoin, right? In terms of the people who aren't like the hardcore crypto enthusiast. And so what I think is rather than trying to say, hey, we're different, what you really want to do is you want to basically say, no, look, we're just like Bitcoin and we're smaller. We're going to grow to be that size one day too, right? Because that would represent from a market cap standpoint, When I think, what, Ether's like one-tenth the market cap of Bitcoin? Yeah, but it's going to flip it. Is it? Yeah, of course.

Like, the internet flipped gold ages ago. And, I mean, yeah, I just, it's inevitable to me. But hold on, did the internet flip the global money supply? No, but that's also an Ethereum task. Bitcoin is not global money supply. Bitcoin is digital gold. Why is it not money? um it's not money because you can't spend it every day so that's medium of exchange is that

a requirement for your definition of money but if sorry so i'm going to give you an economics lesson ready if you go down this path bitcoin is used how much more than ethereum every day or ether every day uh i think the ethereum fees flipped the bitcoin fees and actually i think uniswap now equals bitcoin so ethereum not only is equally centralized no no no not not actually now you need to flip to bitcoin as well hold on not exchange volume we're not talking about exchange volume we're talking about actual on-chain transaction volume so not trading right yeah but the fees the gas fees actually outpays bitcoin for uniswap which is just one protocol on ethereum and the crazy part is that uh you know bitcoin wants to rely on block space

value but ethereum has more expensive block space value just imagine the price of block space value that's going to be much more than bitcoin when ethereum flips bitcoin are you making the argument that more people use ether than bitcoin right now uh maybe not but i don't i don't have maybe you have one statistic that would like be against me but no no so if you look at if you go and you use adjusted on-chain transaction you use bitcoin every day i just don't understand like you store bitcoin i guess well hold on hold on a second so there's two pieces first of all a store of value right holding on to it is a use case right same with ether right if ether wants to be a store value and a medium of exchange holding it is a use case fair right yeah but the second piece is the

adjusted on-chain transaction volume. So if you take out all the exchanges and anything going in and out of exchange, wallets, all that kind of stuff. So right, I think it's Coinmetrics has this stat. And you look at Bitcoin's transaction volume on-chain with all that removed. It's called the adjusted on-chain transaction volume. It is more than the amount of volume that's done on PayPal, Venmo, or Apple Pay last year. So 2019, more people used the Bitcoin network for transaction volume that was not going in and out of exchanges or using on exchanges, but actual some sort of transaction. Now what it is, we don't know, right? Same with Ether. Like for a lot of the transactions, we don't actually know what are people sending it for, right? But we do know that they're sending it.

And so I think that the argument here, and this is kind of my point, is like making an argument that Ether is used more than Bitcoin, I think is one, data disproves that. But also two is rather than trying to make the flippening argument. Instead, what ends up happening is Ether and Ethereum is used for something completely different, right? And to your point, like there's things that people can do with Ethereum that you can't do with Bitcoin. Now, people in the Bitcoin community, I think, would argue like that's a good thing, right?

And then there's a reason why that's true. I think people in the Ethereum community would argue, no, the fact that it does something different is a good thing and we should continue to double down. So my whole thing has always been like both communities and products just double down on what they do best, right? Rather than Bitcoin try to be the next ICO platform or capital markets type platform or Ethereum and Ether try to be money, right? It's just like double down on what you're good at. And then that's what ends up actually providing 90 plus percent of the value of that community and that piece of technology. sure yeah i mean the biggest pie is the pie left to eat right so uh bitcoin is still quite tiny compared to the entire traditional course finance system uh and maybe your data disproves that uh ethereum is more valuable and more like often transacted in volume uh but i don't care

about today's data i think in the next few years this is difficult to happen because just because consumers lend they exchange stable coins um they borrow they insure they stake they bet they play like they do so many things and in bitcoin it's like they hold so i think the data is gonna disprove uh your point very very soon how much uh stuff how much value is locked in defy right now do you know i think something like 15 billion dollars and it was 15 1 5 yeah 1 5 yeah Yeah, it's incredible. Last year, it was 800 million, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Was it earlier this year it broke a billion, I think? I think so, yeah. It's insane, the growth. I think we're going to end the year with like 50 billion locked in DeFi. That would be fair. But the thing I always wonder, and I don't know if you know this answer or not, and so whoever's listening to this, if you can figure this out, tweet at both of us, is how much of that is what I call like net new capital inflow?

So I took dollars or I took Bitcoin and like and put it in versus you and I create a token and then we stake it somewhere. Right. And like that's not technically net new capital inflow. That's like we created, you know, half a billion dollars of market cap. And now that counts towards that metric. I don't know the answer, but that would be one of the questions of like, what's the net new capital inflow? So when it goes from a billion to 15, is that literally $14 billion flowing in, right? Ether's market cap, I think, is like $25 billion, if I remember correctly. And so like, what is it? $50 billion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. So it's tens of billions, right?

So like $14 billion of capital, new capital inflow, like maybe, right? Or maybe it's 50-50, you know, whatever it is. To me, that feels like a really important difference because to your point, there's Ether and then there's the stable coins and there's all these other things built on top of Ethereum. And so how you count all that stuff, I think, illuminates not only what is the overall growth of the ecosystem, but also what are the things that are actually driving the growth, right? Because my guess is, let's say that that is $14 billion of growth.

There's probably two or three things where 90% of the growth happens and then everything else is kind of maybe trending slightly upwards but really it's you know uniswap or something like that is driving most of the growth right well uh first of all i think defy pulse which tracks the value locked in defy actually accounts for this but yeah like i think uh platforms like token daily and other blogs have said you know this might be recycling the same old money over and over with new protocols and perhaps but in each bull cycle it starts with a group of degenerate people um you know like the core group and then because of the excitement it brings more money from outside of that see the growth so i think definitely we are very early in this bull

cycle as of august 2020 but i'm sure that uh next year there will be retail and consumers going on for those new uh strategies of investments that are way healthier by the way than the ico in 2017 So I'm super proud of this. Absolutely. Before we do the rapid fire, which I know you're ready to talk about some aliens, help me understand, how do you think of portfolio construction

in terms of, do you own Bitcoin? Do you own Ether? You obviously own Alex tokens. Like, how do you think about kind of your portfolio? Don't tell me amounts, but just like percentage wise. Do you own things other than Bitcoin and Ether and Alex? Like, help me understand that. So I dumped all my Bitcoin for Ethereum last year or something.

And now, like, you talk to the least wise investor ever. 99% of my net worth. No, sorry. Maybe like 90% of my net worth is in Ether, long Ether on the microvolts. And it's insured by Nexus Mutual, which is an insurance solution on Ethereum. And that's basically most of my net worth. And then of course I have Alex, but I don't really count Alex of my net worth because I don't think I will sell Alex on the market. That's quite unethical right now, especially as the market is illiquid.

So yeah, like 90% plus of my liquid net worth is long ETH. Got it. And so you sold all your Bitcoin and then you don't own anything else in terms of like other major crypto assets that people. I own also other DeFi protocols tokens, whether like for marketing campaigns or for like the S DeFi, which is like a basket of all the DeFi coins because I think, you know, like the less liquid a token is

and the better it is, the higher the returns, right? So that's why probably Ethereum is going to have a better bull run than Bitcoin other than having the actual use case, which will be like the DeFi stuff that Bitcoin doesn't have. So yeah, the less liquid it is.

So like DeFi protocols, i think are gonna go like 100x or something at least the great ones i love i love your enthusiasm and and the fact is i know that you that you're enjoying this just as much as i am so that makes me happy yeah um all right so uh last two questions uh what's the most important book that you've ever read um i think steve jobs the biography because he's like my idol like yeah what would you ask steve jobs if you go to dinner with him i don't that's so yeah i would love to like but i don't think i think uh you know the young makes room for the new wait the old makes room for the young uh and so that's fine if i never meet him but i would love to well you can't

meet him he's dead yeah exactly so that's why it's like i am i am relieved because it's fine that's like how time passes and i think that's what the wisdom he wanted to share as well which is like i don't need steve jobs uh he inspired me and that's great and now it's my turn uh to have an impact and to inspire people all right aliens believer or non-believer uh yeah i guess believer statistically like most people but then i read max ted mark lifestyle.o which argues that we might be alone if we consider like the um like distensible universe like uh like the universe that you can go to and it's just impossible because it's just so vast that there probably are some aliens but that's just so far away and we would need either civilization to be at the

speed of light and going towards us full speed uh to we have a chance to meet uh aliens so i don't think probably they are real but we probably won't meet them because we are nothing in the realm of time right so that's why uh yeah aliens exist we might never meet them i actually think that's the most realistic uh perspective is they definitely exist and there's some other life form out there but uh right so we can expect anything from 2020 even aliens absolutely all right you could ask me one question what uh what question you have for me so would you tokenize yourself or when are you going all in on ethereum so i thought you were going to ask me if i would buy some of your alex tokens i thought that's where what you were can you buy alex please no i cannot

so here's the way that i think about this um i would not tokenize myself uh for a whole host of reasons from, uh, I'm an American citizen. Uh, my, I just have a lot of complexity already in terms of investments and all that kind of stuff. Uh, and that would just like, I can imagine sitting down with an accountant and trying to have this conversation. They would just laugh you out of the room. Um, but the, uh, the thing that I am interested in, um, is, uh, I love the collectibles market. I think that that's super interesting. Um, especially when you get digital versions versus the analog versions right um i'm shocked that given the popularity of like the sports trading card world uh that there hasn't been like more you know how do we do digital

trading cards all that kind of stuff um then the other thing i would say is uh i think that um the whole idea of like tokenizing companies in a way to use technology to have a claim on the cash flow right so um i think it's base camp maybe is the company that uh it's like an llc and the two founders uh they let bezos buy into it and he owns like 10 or something and so like at the end of every quarter every year or whatever they just like distribute cash right and so like to me it just feels like um as much as the last couple of decades has driven like complexity and financial engineering and capital markets and like all that kind of stuff this technology just like simplifies things again and starts to automate. So what you end up doing is like one, you reduce accounting

frauds. Two, you end up actually having a much bigger incentive for people from an equity ownership standpoint. And then three is it becomes really interesting when now all of a sudden there's no difference in somebody in the United States, in Europe, in Southeast Asia, in South America, or on the continent of Africa, everyone with an internet connection is quote unquote equal, right? In terms of their ability to participate in financial services and ownership of assets things like that and so i think that's just one of these like inflection points in human history that ends up saying wait a second uh if now i can basically empower people if i can teach them to fish right rather than give them the fish what are humans capable of like who the hell would

have thought that you know a 24 year old sitting in europe was going to go and tokenize himself like nobody right and so it's just like like there's so much more that will happen uh some of it will be good some of it will be bad uh you know literally some of it will be shit coins and some of it will be you know real value but i think that's kind of the encouragement of innovation experimentation drives a lot of this stuff and so like you know you definitely fall in the category of like either you're a genius or you're absolutely lost your mind um but i think that like you're comfortable living in that spectrum right and and the world needs people like you and others like you to go try some of this stuff and like either you're going to figure it out or you're not right

but like if you're comfortable doing that and it's important to you then like knock yourself out right yeah thank you and uh of course yeah you might not need a personal token uh because maybe you're not young enough or maybe or not just that because you're already like a list in your industry and you will grow with the bull market and you already you know master monetization with the old newsletter and everything and so you might not need that extra boost that you know emerging creators need so i totally get that yeah and you have any ethereum no okay can i give you some no no listen here here's uh i mean i've talked about a million times on the podcast but basically my whole thought process is uh it's not just a financial uh evaluation for me right and so if

you think of in a financial market, like this is one thing that I think the Bitcoin community doesn't talk about a lot, but I do think it's intellectually honest. So if you look at in a bear and a bull market, just the asset sizes. So the largest assets are likely to actually go down to go up the least, right, from a volatility standpoint, and the smallest market cap ones in a bull market should go up even more, right? Well, same thing happens when you reverse it in the bear market, right? Is a large cap assets likely to go down the least, a small cap should go down the most, right? Now, there's always outliers. I get it. Stop tweeting at me already about the fact that there's some example that violates that principle. But in general, that is

true. And so when you bring that to crypto, everything is quote unquote small compared to the traditional market, right? But there still should be some spectrum in terms of if the largest cap assets go up 2x, then there's going to be a bunch of these super small assets that go up 8 or 10x, right? That's just the law of market caps. And so I think that there's a lot of people who confuse just the financial returns with other things. And people just have to ask themselves, like, are you here just for the financial return? Well, then you should go 10x leverage and go buy some shit coin that pumps 800 you know and you're good right uh but if you have interest in other things which i think uh you do to some degree right and i think others um then it's evaluating

not just the financial outcomes but also the the kind of non-financial impact right makes sense fair so you're gonna buy some bitcoin no because i'm just it's very fair ethereum will make the world better it will enable collectibles that you like it will enable uh you know investing in cash flow earnings that's like the new wave of defy that's happening right now and it will dominate the bull market so i don't see why but i get it like it has the best branding bitcoin uh and it is great and i would probably be bullish bitcoin if i was maybe having like a older and like more wealth perhaps uh right now i know that if i maximize ethereum it will probably go higher than Bitcoin. And still, it's like auto-rebalancing DeFi basket where it will capture the best

protocol that is on Ethereum. So it's a safe bet. So I don't go too low in terms of liquidity for my returns, but I'm still a bit more aggressive than Bitcoin, but I think it's going to pay off. Awesome. All right. Where can people find you on the internet? On Twitter at AlexMasmej, M-A-S-M-E-J. That's it. How do you pronounce your last name? so it's a cut for my real french name which is mass major and i just said mass marriage on twitter and i it's weird because people think i'm polish now but i'm french um yeah i don't know how to cut my last name if anyone has suggestions

all right man listen i appreciate all the work you're doing thank you so much for doing this and uh i think people will find this fascinating so i'll have to do it again in the future as as you launch other things thank you so much for being a huge fan of your podcast Thank you.