The Pomp Podcast - #560 Felix Hartmann on De-Fi, The Metaverse, DeWeb and Privacy

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Felix Hartmann serves as the Managing Partner of Hartmann Capital, navigating its flagship Hartmann Digital Assets Fund. In this conversation, we discuss yield farming, ponzinomics, rug pulls, fair launches, AMMs, DAOs, metaverse, VR/AR, Aave restricted pool, and buy & burn.  ======================= Did you know nearly 338 million dollars worth of NFTs were sent last year? And in 2021 that number is growing faster than ever. Looking to make your first NFT? Check out NEAR’s fast, scalable, low-cost, open-source platform. Learn why NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation at near.org: https://near.org/?utm_campaign=pomp  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 =======================

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. Felix Hartman serves as the managing partner of Hartman Capital, navigating its flagship Hartman Digital Assets Fund. In this conversation, we discuss yield farming, Ponzinomics, rug polls, fair launches, AMMs, DAOs, the metaverse, VR and AR, the Aave restricted pool, and buy and burns. I really enjoyed this conversation with Felix, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Near. Near is an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized

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in the description. All right, let's get into this episode with Felix. I hope you enjoy this one. 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. all right guys bang bang i've got felix here with me thank you so much for doing this hey man thanks for having me of course let's just jump right into your background what did you do before crypto

yeah so i mean i've been a trader since 2012 um back then was like equities derivatives i did my first bitcoin analysis in like 2014 back then i had some buddies in college that were you know like tell me about this new thing bitcoin that we're trading you know during the whole mont gox hype. And I did my first analysis there. I didn't think much of it. I researched it. And back then, almost anything could find. It was like exchanges getting hacked. And I was like, there's a good chance I can make money, but I will never be able to see the money again. So I kind of kept my hands of it. I really dove into it when I became a CEO of a crowdfunding company. And we were the first to integrate with Coinbase and BitPay. So this was like 2015, 2016, where I regularly back and

forth with Coinbase, BitPay, because we're pretty much... This was when the Jobs Act came through, where you were able to do equity crowdfunding for the first time with normal people. And we had kind of like a dual model where we're both like kind of a Kickstarter, but also equity crowdfunding. And we wanted to accept Bitcoin because there was a lot of like South Americans

that reached out to us like, hey, we love this stuff if we can use Bitcoin. So, and that put crypto on my kind of radar on my front and center. And I dove more into it, started like, you know, watching Andres Tinopolo stuff. And I just, you know, fell down the rabbit hole like everybody.

That kind of coincided with when my co-founders started like suing each other. They like didn't get along. there's some money issues or whatever and then i was like well you know here you're on the sinking ship and then there's this new asset that is just like probably going to change the world and it's just like so mind-bending the more i look into it and by that point it was already like early 2017 and i said you know what let me get off the jumping let me jump off the sinking ship and go all in on crypto let me take that risk so i went all in on crypto early 2017 um you know started

as a full-time trader um because i had some trading experience from equities and derivatives beforehand and you know like many did really well in 2017 but unlike most i didn't pack my bags i said hey there's so much more here this isn't over this is a time when i want to double down instead of leaving the industry yeah and so what did you do to double down when you uh when you decided that yeah so so 2018 i made two decisions one i said hey i want you to get out of my hometown so to say and go somewhere where i can network better which was la at the time so because back then there was a lot of stuff happening in la you know for better or worse eos was happening mostly in la um you know there was like spank chain there was um a repeated just a good ecosystem at

the time and then secondly i launched my first hedge fund um so the way that happened essentially i had a consulting client that wanted blockchain advisory which i was deep in at the time already and i sat down the phone was a multi-billionaire and he told me hey why don't you like trade for me we can start with like 10 million and you know at the time i was like 21 years old and i was like oh shit you know that kind of money exists that's out there that wants to get into the market you're silly not to say yes because before i had like friends and family say hey let me give you 20 000 and i was like no i don't want i don't want to deal with the risk and you know all the paperwork that comes with it but then i was like 10 million you're being stupid next day call it

like you know google how to start a hedge fund you know and i find some attorney numbers call them up get that consultation first guy i liked sent them the wire and off the road we were um sounded a lot easier than it was um there was a lot more that came i'm sorry um and yeah so that's of how it started and i said you know this is a time where i will be building the infrastructure for the next five years the next 10 years so because ultimately i always think that in the bull market kind of rip the fruits and the bear market sets when you really need to sow the seeds just like you did you know with the podcast and newsletters and everything because you know we're all seeing this parabolic growth now but that comes from like you know the hundreds of days

we put in yeah to plant the seeds and where did you come from before you went to l.a um well i was born and raised in germany so i was born and raised in germany and it was kind of interesting too because i got immigrated in 08 which was the financial crisis so i really only got to know america in this uh turnover so to say you know i'm used like the america i got to know was where the strip malls turned to ghost malls where you'd go to strip mall one day and then you go there two months later and half the stores are gone right i mean i remember moving there we had like linens and things was something where we get like our bathware and whatever that was gone chain went bankrupt you know bank blockbuster was still around went bankrupt my first bank bakovia acquired by

Wells Fargo. So that was just such an interesting first experience of that the financial system isn't that stable. I think it very much had an impact on me being a Bitcoiner. I started as a Bitcoiner. I'm very open-minded. So I embrace all digital assets, but that's kind of what really affected me too. Yeah. And so when you decided to start the hedge fund, you structured in a very unique way. Talk to us a little bit about the structure in terms of what you're allowed to do with that structure? Yeah. So because when I first saw the hedge fund, you know, my attorney asked me pretty much, you know, this is important because when you first set it up, that's when you said that the crown rules essentially. And, you know, my attorney asked me like, hey, you know, do you

want to be able to long and short? I'm like, sure, why not? You know, and then like, I also asked for very specific things back then that nobody else asked for. For example, I wanted to run master nodes. Back in 2017, you know, I saw a lot of potential where some running nodes would pay 5%, 6%, 7%, sometimes 20%, right? Like in the early days, in the first year, we ran nodes on stuff like Horizon on VeChain, on NIM, that was like POI. There's many different chains that we run nodes on. And the interesting thing that came out of that is that in my paperwork, I'm allowed to stake, I'm allowed to run nodes and stuff like that, which now staking is hot. Now yield farming is hot, right? But I was kind of like yield farming in the early days before yield farming

was really even a term of popular. And back then it was way more technical. You had to actually work with the clients and set that all up. Yeah. And so when you think about crypto, I think one of the interesting things is you kind of separate like what mainstream audience knows is crypto and then like what the real industry is. So maybe let's first just start with like, what do you think the mainstream audience sees as the crypto industry? Like what is their interface to this? I feel like the, first of all, the mainstream loves to forget about crypto for three years at a time. There's like, they have a blackout, you know, they party to their blackout and then they come back and they got like you know six months of like uh let me go

all in on this with and look quite literally with the financials too they don't invest and then all of a sudden it's like i missed the last three years it's time to go all in where can i get the highest return i missed ethereum i missed bitcoin i even forget about defy i want the thing that can make me a thousand x and what that naturally leads to is people listening to the wrong people like you know like random instagram influencers sometimes even models now like you know give crypto advice. And generally, lately, it's been memes. It's been Dogecoin, ShibaCoin, SafeMoon. So like there's, and I always say that there's the innocent scams, which are like, you know, obvious to anybody with a little bit of intellect will say, okay, well, Dogecoin, there's, you know,

there's infinite inflation. It's just a meme. Okay, there, you know, you know what you're getting into. And then there's the more elaborate, you know, I would say dishonest tokens where there's zero value accrual. Like for example, XRP, you can hold the XRP token, but it does not give you access to any value the XRP network accrues. The team owns like 60% of the supply, might have changed since then, but it's highly centralized, no governance rights, right? But they have good marketing department, right? So there's these tokens that have, or even Cardano. So it's Cardano something I often call out because it might be good technology at some point, but the truth is But right now, it's worth like $60, $70 billion with more or less an idea.

Small contracts on Cardano are not launched until August. So you have nothing being built on Cardano because it literally cannot be built. And sometimes people say, well, you know, people didn't believe in Tesla earlier on either and it went up so much. But I'm like, yes, but it wasn't worth $70 billion at the time. So like, you know, like it's more like a VC investment. Yes, but VCs don't invest at $70 billion, right? So then people invest their money seeing the price ticker saying, oh, it's worth $1.80. cents what if it goes to the price of bitcoin when they don't even understand market caps so

the mass the masses they just you know they they follow tiktok they follow influencers and their perception of crypto is that almost everything is a currency everything is just like you know a cryptocurrency everything's the next bitcoin um and then there's a whole different world which is i think you know what a lot of like the more educated investors in space do and like a lot of the crypto funds where it's literally two completely different worlds, Swan Invest and Doge and Shiba and SafeMoon. And then we have DeFi, Metaverse and so forth, where we look at tokens like MakerDAO or Uniswap, Wi-Fi, where you have protocols that actually make hundreds of millions of dollars in income, which is ironic because one of the

most common pushback I get from critics is that they say these tokens are not backed by anything. It's the bigger fool theory. But the truth is there's so many tokens that literally make fun facts. So right now, MakerDAO makes like $195 million a year in profit. Deutsche Bank makes $680 million in profit a year. So we're getting close to MakerDAO with, I think, a team of a couple dozen is making 33% of the profit off Deutsche Bank. Meanwhile, MakerDAO has 14 billion assets. Deutsche Bank has $1.3 trillion in assets. So there's real stuff.

It's crazy. What I want to do is let's first just – you have four major themes, I think, to your thesis. What are those four themes? Right. So, and these themes have changed. So, folks, I'm on the bear market. I was like very heavy Bitcoin because I figured, you know, in a bear market, you want to be with hard money, right? Because that's when money, well, everything else loses value.

But I think right now, like both macro and in crypto, you know, we're in a bull run. So, generally, this is when I hold much, much less Bitcoin and I want to be in growth assets. So, and the four themes that I'm currently allocating to is one is DeFi. That's the main thesis because DeFi was the first to have that killer application, that really product market fit where, you know, it's harder to sell something on, let's say, a virtual game than you make more interest in with the bank. It's so simple, right? Bank pays you 0.5%. We pay you 10%. Easy.

Sold. Done. So DeFi is the biggest branch. Second is the metaverse, which, you know, can sound very abstract in theory. But, you know, when I, well, let me finish first the four and then I'll go against the metaverse. Third one is D-Web, which is decentralizing the web in and of itself because we can run, you know,

Bitcoin clients and Bitcoin exchange. We can run DeFi, which is all awesome if it's decentralized in the backend. But if the front ends are still run on centralized AWS servers, it just takes a press of a button for some of these sites to get plugged, to get what's called geo-fenced and so forth.

And then while highly techie people can still use them, the average customer will be cut out and that defeats the purpose of this whole industry. And the fourth one is privacy, because while Bitcoin and Ethereum are both pseudonymous, they're not anonymous, which leads to us building just this massive public track record where if I send you money, you can now look at every single transaction I've ever done in the past with that wallet. And whether it's regular consumers being able to see each other's transactions, there's whole companies like Chainalysis that literally do for a living to figure all this out. And once governments, not once, governments already work with companies like Chain Analysis, we just become so transparent. And I think it's important that we fight that early on before it gets too late. So what I want to talk about is with DeFi, that kind of first major theme you have is the business models, right?

So you already mentioned that MakerDAO makes $195 million a year. There's many examples of this. Why do people miss what the actual business model is and that idea of profit or revenue? Is it simply that these are like decentralized systems and it's not flowing to like a traditional centralized P&L in terms of what they're used to evaluating? Or what do you see in terms of why people don't realize just how big these things are, how profitable they are? I think it's just a lack of education right now. I mean, significantly, I've had meetings back in 2019. I did tours where I met with Deutsche Bank, UBS, Commerzbank.

I did like a Europe trip and I talked with the CIOs of some of these banks. And the level of understanding was even so limited where some of people in these higher offices didn't even know that Bitcoin had a fixed supply. So there's a lot of room to go. And even now when I have talks with qualified clients and the question they ask is usually just like Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. And then the pushback is that even Bitcoin, it's not backed by anything. I'm like, okay, but listen, if that's what you're looking for, you should listen about DeFi. But then like, no, no, no, I want to hear about Bitcoin. Funny enough, last week was the first time when one of those, you know, one of my older clients sent me a message asking me, hey, are we in Ethereum?

So like that's slowly happening. But I think it's, you know, we always use the term orange pill, right? Your first orange pill, so I'm with Bitcoin. That's the easiest, it has such an easy narrative to sell. Then you can go down that route. So I think it's a lack of education, but that's why some funds like ours, you know, specialize. And there's more funds popping up more and more and more that literally do what traditional finance used to do, looking at P&Ls, looking at book values, looking at revenues and all that, that allows you to make actually educated decisions. When you think about those business models, is there something specific that you look for with DeFi, regardless of where it's being built?

Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever smart contract platform. Are you looking for like truly decentralized systems where they're sharing some of the revenue, all of the revenue? Are you trying to buy governance tokens? Are you trying to buy something else? Like just walk through when you evaluate a project, like what are you looking for? Well, the biggest question I always ask, and that's what I tell my analysts is,

how does this token accrue value? If the answer is it doesn't, then I'm not really interested. So for example, you know, Uniswap is one of the biggest default protocols. It has amazing volumes to create. I've used it as a product, but the Uniswap token currently

does not generate any value for the token because when you make a trade, you pay 0.3%, but that goes to the liquidity providers. It does not go to unique token holders. Now there's people arguing, well, it's a governance token so they could change their mind any day

and start charging a fee. But I'm not, you know, at this point it's already trading at a 40 billion valuation. I'm not really waiting for that day. There are plenty of protocols where I can see very clearly, like, you know, one of two ways,

either popular ways are buy and burn. So Maker, for example, the profits are used to buy and burn Maker. So number one, buying drives price up, burning reduces supply, inflationary. Explain buy and burn more granularly. So, the way Maker works, it's like the biggest decentralized bank. Right now, they have created close to $5 billion of their own stable currency, right, DAI, that's over-collateralized by RapidCoin, by Ethereum, all kinds of assets. So, there's $14 billion in assets, backing almost $5 billion in stablecoin. And why do people do this?

Well, you have your Bitcoin and you don't want to sell it. You don't want to create a taxable event and maybe you have to pay something or maybe you want to leverage up and buy more Bitcoin, right? That works too. So you can push your wrapped Bitcoin into Maker.

It gives you out maybe 50% or 30% that sum in DAI and you can do with that what you want. Then it charges you 5.5% annual stability fee like an interest rate, right? That the Maker token holders get to set, right? So the actual bank is fully run by the token holders, which is also fascinating.

Now, when you pay that debt off, you say, okay, I'm returning my money. I'm paying off the debt. That interest then is being used to buy Maker. So they will put an auction up. They say, hey, we're looking to buy Maker. Who wants to sell to us? Best price gets it.

They have the Maker and then they send it to a burn address, meaning a dead address on the blockchain that nobody has access to and it's gone forever from the supply. How do you know that nobody has access to the address? Well, you can check usually. So a lot of times you use the CRX0000 address

where like it's just like the depth edge of the blockchain you can also check who's the the key holder got it and so when they send it there by quote-unquote burning it basically they're essentially not destroying it what they're actually doing is they're losing it intentionally right they're sending it somewhere where no one can access it no matter what happens and therefore that's quote-unquote burning it and so if you keep track of this people understand what's been burnt versus not burnt and then therefore that should lead to uh higher price right yeah so you've got deflation i mean that's what makes bitcoin great too right you've like the fixed supply schedule. So with some of these protocols, you might even have a deflationary

cycle. So does buy and burn only work when there's a fixed supply? No. So there's protocols that have inflation, like they have an annual mint and an annual burn. Now, the goal, of course, is to make sure that the burn is higher than the mint. So it could be that the Dow, for example, does an annual mint, which allows them to run operations. So for example, I sit on the enzyme council. So I'm on the Dow for one protocol enzyme, and we have an annual mint. So we have 300,000 MLM that we can use to pay developers, all kinds of stuff. At the same time, when people use the protocol, it generates fees that are then burned. So currently, there's a higher mint than a burn, but the goal over the years is, of course, invest that money well enough where the earnings become

bigger and bigger and bigger and can actually be larger than that. And why buy and burn versus distribute, let's say, for example, transaction fees or revenue or anything to these token holders, like from a business model decision standpoint? It's kind of similar like share buybacks, right? Stock buybacks. The idea that the reason I personally like buy and burn better is because it doesn't cause a taxable event. If you distribute, if you give somebody staking returns,

all you're doing is creating a taxable event. This is why I'm a huge opponent to inflation-based staking returns. It's one of the biggest jokes in the industry, honestly, that people brag, let's for example, Cardano, people brag about, oh, I'm making a 5%, 10%, 15% interest on my Cardano. I'm like, you know where that comes from. they're printing new cardano tokens so your buying power is being decreased you're earning rewards that then per irs you have to pay taxes on because they are you know it's a fiat currency

yeah right it's the whole idea that yes i'm giving you more of the currency or token that you hold but at the same time the ones that you're holding are going down in value because it's inflationary right and so there's no difference between the federal reserve doing this or a crypto project not any specific one but just they're doing it now when they do that is it fair to assume that that's like a marketing cost so they're doing this to acquire users yeah or is this something else that they're doing in terms of creating new currency to then distribute to people and even though those people see it as quote-unquote yield yeah it's not technically yield generated from lending it's yield literally generated by new tokens that are minted by the treasury it's

funny because like i i'm a very conservative guy when it comes to like that investing aspect and i love deflationary tokens, but I kind of had to learn my lesson during DeFi summer, as we call it last year, where there was a lot of these projects having insane inflation rates. They had like 800% inflation rate. They had like, you know, 1000% and so forth, like just mass, huge mints. And I was like that, we call it Ponzi-nomics, you know, because, you know, you're paying somebody to provide liquidity, but that's obviously not going to work out long term. But the irony is it did work out for many of them, where it's just shock because, you know, is, and I ended up writing an article about it where I said, you know what, what this did,

what looked so, you know, scammy at first was actually the thing that solved the chicken and the egg problem. Because when it comes to DeFi, you know, you can't have users without liquidity, but also nobody wants to provide liquidity if there's no users. So all of a sudden, you know, you just like front loaded incentives to the liquidity providers. So there was a ton of liquidity. And then all of a sudden you just realized, well, it's just as easy now to trade on Uniswap as it is on Binance, or maybe even better. And that's what really, like, that's where DeFi Summit kind of blew up because all of a sudden people realized, well, these are fully flush liquid markets where I can get leverage out. I can trade anything I want. In fact, there was

more, every token on Ethereum is listed on Uniswap, unlike Binance. So even though, like, it was sketchy at first to me, I realized, wait, this is actually what, that's what Silicon Valley's been doing for years. They run at a loss in the first few years to get to that tipping point, to get, you know, customer acquisition, get to traction, and then you can always dial it down. And I've seen that with a few project balancer, for example.

I mean, balance had incredible inflation where they just, you know, gave out free ballot tokens to anybody who provided liquidity. Even like teams would literally create their own tokens, matched against Ethereum or something, and get a ton of rewards for their own token, you know, which they create out of thin air.

But hey, at the end of the day, it's become one of the most highly liquid platforms. Yeah. When you think about other things to stay away from as you evaluate projects, is there anything else that kind of sticks out to you? You mentioned Ponzi-nomics, but is there anything else that you think is a red flag or things that you actively avoid? A few things.

Well, first, when it comes to things like yield, I always love to ask, where does that yield come from, right? So staking returns are great, especially if they come from earnings. So, for example, Terra Luna was something I paid attention to in August already because I realized, oh, they have like 1.5 million users in South Korea. And the 9% staking returns they pay are coming from transaction fees. So people are actually paying that. So awesome. But if I see a thousand percent APY coming, I'm like, what does it come from?

Inflation. At some point, there will be a rug pull, right? And what is a rug pull? Oh, yeah, a rug pull. Well, if you stand on a rug, it pulls the rug underneath your feet, you know, you're falling a face. So that usually means that either early investors

or team members are essentially dumping, you know, they create enough momentum, get the price up, get the price up, get the price up. And then at some point, they can either remove liquidity from Uniswap or dump it all if somebody else provided liquidity. and then you're stuck holding back with zero liquidity in the markets.

So that's something else to look out for. It's like when you get into a project, especially when you think, oh, I'm early, look at the order books. Like how many people are providing liquidity? How much liquidity is there? Can you even get out if you wanted to? So I think in general,

like for new retail investors getting into this market, I always say like, you know, first of all, not financial advice, but like start with Bitcoin and Ethereum. And then if you want to get fancy, maybe add the DeFi polls index. So you're indexing into the DeFi. And then just like, again,

always walk your way from like top market cap down rather. But not in terms of investing, but in terms of research, like try to actually understand what these projects are doing. I think decentralization is just as important, that the teams don't own that much. I don't think teams should own more than, I mean, 25% is already a lot. I don't think teams should own more than 20% of token supply. Because then it becomes, and one of the biggest red flags too, is that there shouldn't be a centralized entity behind a token project. Because then I'm asking, well, what's the focus? There's a conf of interest here.

Prime example is Ripple Labs. Are you trying to provide value for Ripple apps, which they're trying to IPO, or are you trying to provide value for Ripple, the token? So I really want teams where their only incentive is the token itself because ultimately, look, everybody's trying to make money. So they'll find a way somehow down the road to bring value accrual back to that token. When you think of a fair launch, what is that? So that's something that people hear all the time is supposed to more kind of align incentives and make sure that it solves some of the problems that you're talking about here. But what exactly is a fair launch? A fair launch is trying to avoid exactly that,

the team allocation. One of the first ones was Wi-Fi, where essentially by contributing to the project, you can earn, like pretty much once it was announced, anybody can earn these tokens at the same rate the founders can, right? So there's nobody pre-mining it. And pre-mining is sometimes misused.

Well, pre-mine can sometimes be that you launch a project in stealth mode, you're the only one mining it, and that's why you're getting all the tokens. or it could be pre-mine also is used when you say like, hey, at ICO, we get 20%. So fair launch is the whole idea is that you find a more fair way

where the team has no advantage over community members and rather everybody earns tokens. So how does it like structurally work though? Structurally launch. Fair launch. Well, so for example, let's say we have, let's say you and I start a new AMM, a new automated market maker or lending protocol, right?

And we say, hey, we're not taking any coins from the beginning. Instead, we're using all the tokens for liquidity incentives. So if you and I want to earn tokens, we have to provide liquidity just like everybody else so that every single token

is earned through official channels. There's no backdoor deals. There's no private sales. There's no advisory contracts. There's no team. But rather, it's very clear where everybody else in the room has the same chances of participating

like you and I do. Because the whole idea of decentralization is to remove a lot of these gatekeepers, but crypto is seeing some of this come back, right? unfortunately, because of the SEC, right? So the SEC shut down ICOs because of all the scams that were happening. What's the end result?

We've got a ton of private sales where, you know, it's only insiders being able to get into rounds because, you know, teams aren't able to sell publicly anymore. Is the fair launch, like, okay with the SEC because they're not actually selling anything to the public for investment?

And so therefore, it isn't considered like a security and it's a completely different thing? Or how does that work? I can't comment because I don't think they've commented yet. So like the fair launch is not something they've looked at

but at the end of the day since they're not selling anything and this is They're not fundraising. Right. They're not fundraising. Yeah.

And that's also like a big shift I see. I made the prediction I said I think by 2030 or 2025 there will be more DAOs decentralized autonomous organizations

than there will be LLCs. I think a lot of startups in the future they will just launch as DAOs where you know they can sell their DAO token memberships

and then the money doesn't go into their bank account it goes into the DAO treasury which is a multi-sig wallet where a few shareholders or everybody in the DAO has voting rights over. And that literally just takes out of the jurisdiction of the government. There's really not that much you can do. Of course, the government can always do something. But at the end of the day, I think it's still a very, very gray space that's also there.

What exactly is a DAO? Explain that to people. So a DAO is kind of like a decentralized LLC, if you want, that's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So there's no jurisdiction really. What a DAO is, it's essentially based on a smart contract where let's say you, me, and let's say three friends, we want to start a company. What we can do is, you know, set up a smart contract where there's five DAO membership tokens. Each of us gets a DAO membership token. And then in order to pass votes, we can use tools like, you know, Gnosis Safe or Aragon. And to pass a vote, we can make the rules in the beginning. You know, do we need supermajority? Do we need unanimous consent? Whatever. Three people vote

for something. Let's say we say we want to send a thousand ETH. That's a lot nowadays. But anyway, We want to send 1,000 ETH through another wallet. Well, three of us vote approve and the money moves. So this way we can really decentralize and automate treasury management, for example. We can automate decision-making protocol upgrades. And that's how a lot of teams are now running. And I think every team should be run with a DAO,

which back in 2017, we didn't have that. Now most projects do. Uniswap is token-based voting. Maker is in the name. MakerDAO is token-based voting. Enzyme, like the one I'm in, it's more like an elected version where we have a council,

people elect the council and then the council has these voting tokens where we make the decisions and we can be vetoed off the council again. So, which is also interesting because the whole crypto space is kind of like a hyperspeed, re-exploring governance, really.

You know, like we're going through thousands of years and figuring out what is the best system because one token, one vote can lead to plutocracy. One wallet, one vote can lead to civil attacks where I just make a thousand wallets, you know, and I vote.

So then what's the solution? And I don't think we have the answer to that yet. One thing before we move on to the metaverse is automated market makers. Explain how these work for people who don't understand. So with DEXs, with decentralized exchanges, it was always the problem when you have the order book model. The order book model that you used to from Coinbase,

from Binance, where you see like price and how much is there, price, how much is there. It's very hard to create good liquidity. So what automated market makers- Real quick, just sorry to interrupt, but basically because you have buyers and sellers are bid and ask, right? You need people to set limit orders, right?

And what people are essentially doing is you may put something forward at $200. I may put forward that I'm willing to sell it at $220. And then literally we've got to continue until somebody moves in either direction until we get a match. And then that's how the order book matches. is that's where this actual transaction.

Yeah. And maybe sometimes you're, you know, especially because, you know, especially in the theorem right now, it's expensive to do transactions. Imagine you have to change your order every single time the market moves. So what- And those orders end up being

a transaction fee every time. Well, actually when you, with CRX, when you set the limit order, you just sign it, it's actually free, but then whoever takes it will have to buy into it and it costs something. But what the AMMs did essentially is you said, hey, instead of us like attracting all these people

that choose individual prices they put that limit or is that like, it's going to take too long. Again, the goal was to solve the chicken and the egg problem and just get liquidity. So I think Uniswap was the first to do it. Although I think they leaned on Bancor where you say, hey, we need, all we need is two assets, you know, BTC, USD, right? So let's say you've wrapped Bitcoin and USDC. So you stuff, literally, let's say you have 100,000 Bitcoin, $100,000 in cash, you put it into the pool. And then the pool has a 50-50 weighing. So the goal is that the pool always has 50-50 of both assets. So let's say somebody goes ahead and says, hey, I'm going to buy $1,000 of Bitcoin.

What happens? Well, now there's $101,000 in USDC in there. And technically, there's only $99,000 in Bitcoin. So what has to happen? The price of Bitcoin will, for that AMM, go up enough where it's worth $101,000. So each AMM, so to say, has its own price. And the price is always determined by the peg ratio. So to say that it's always 50-50. It basically auto-balances. It auto-balances. And the reason why it does that and how it does that is it basically is eliciting liquidity or really kicking liquidity out in some cases, right? And it's able to actually get back to that balance

You always take from one side of the pool, right? So there's just money sitting on both sides. And if you want to buy or sell, you take from either side. And that also leads to like it automatically calculates how much market impact you have, because that means I can't buy all the 100,000 Bitcoin for the current price. No. For me to buy $100,000 of the Bitcoin would really drive the price of Bitcoin up so much because whatever's left has to be worth all the cash on the other side. So when that occurs, if I'm the one who's providing the liquidity, what do I get? Depending on the platform. So like on Balancer, for example, you can set your own fee. So for example, I run several Balancer pools and I can charge whatever one, whatever

What do you charge? Sometimes 0.5, sometimes 6%. So like there's some less liquid altcoins where nobody's providing liquidity, but I say, hey, I believe in them. They're solid, you know? So I'm taking that risk that if they go to zero, of course I lose money on both sides, right?

But I say, hey, because nobody else providing liquidity, let me charge 5%, 6%. And everybody's, every time somebody trades, I make 5% or 6% on that. And how much volume, don't say one of the names, but just like how much volume on these kind of more illiquid assets is there in a given day or a week?

I mean, the APY can turn into, you know, 100%, 150% a year. Yeah. So it's not necessarily a huge volume. No. Right. And it's not also really, really frequent trading, but it's just because you've got to set a 5% or 6%. It adds up.

It adds up. Right. And that's on balance where we can set your own rates. On Uniswap, the base rate is always 0.3%. So it's always 0.3% on Uniswap. and then sometimes there's again incentives like balancer gives you ballot tokens other exchanges give you you know bnt gives you bnt tokens and so forth to further incentivize it what's the metaverse that's one of your big uh one of your big kind of themes or thesis what is that so back

back in 2019 i did you know i did some tours but in bear market a lot more time so i wanted to like kind of like spread the gospel of bitcoin you know and one of the questions i used to ask is you know how much time do you spend online well let me ask you how much time do you spend online too much too much okay in hours what do you think yeah uh a day i don't know between my phone and computer six seven hours eight hours all right we'll set it for eight and let's assume you sleep eight hours i know you sleep way less probably but um that means it would be half a day and the truth like when i ask this usually like even like um you know gen z or young millennials the numbers even higher so the truth is most of us spend 50 to 75 percent of our waking hours in the digital

world so then doesn't stand to reason that we would need a digital form of money aka bitcoin that we need digital infrastructures like for example financial infrastructure infrastructures like defy then we digital governance daos and also and then you get to this point we say well if you have all of this that's digital we kind of approach a point where the digital reality really because you we spend so much time online where our digital identity is almost as big if not bigger than our base reality sounds weird but i realized if the first time really hard when i got hacked one time back in 2018 i was talking about like target crypto hacking attack sim swap and everything and and when i lost all my online profiles my emails everything i was like wow i'm

so cut off from the world i don't even you know i don't even know how to reach people because like i don't even have my mom's email memorized you know so and so what the metaverse is kind of getting into is that hey there is there's more than base reality right we're gonna have we can have multiple identities and the first iteration of that has always been gaming right so people like the gaming industry is huge it blew up during covid and so we've seen this already 10 years ago with second life for example where second life made i think the number was 500 million dollars that had a $500 million a year GDP. So digital goods have real value.

People value the time they spent online, how they spent time online, what they're wearing in the digital world. So, and I always say that, for example, Facebook and Instagram and so forth are a form of virtual reality, just really shitty UI, right? So as we go into the future

and these UIs, UX has become better, we're gonna have probably like digital avatars. Just like we have a MetaMask wall to log in, you're gonna have a digital avatar. and that's where for example nfts also start having value where you say hey um people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for gucci or for rolex and so forth so why wouldn't they do that when in the location they spend 75 of the day so when i think of the metaverse uh i think most people think of like ready player one right like hey i put on a headset and i go into this

like super virtual world whatever your argument is basically rather than the headset the portal is either the phone or the computer you're going into the world you're playing this thing um and it works right and you and i connected in the quote-unquote metaverse in the digital world right and we bring it into the physical world and so how much of this is um kind of evolutionary from where we already are with traditional technology like the googles the facebooks the uh instagrams to no actually it's going to be way more on the other end of the spectrum in the super kind of uh extreme example of the ready player one or kind of what a medicoven might agree with in terms of like uh digital museums or virtual museums and stuff like that like are we headed

on either end of the extreme or maybe in the middle like just like where do you think we're going well that that's why i approach you like this because like when i go with ready player one people think oh that's so far out there that's not going to happen in my lifetime and i'm like no like think 20 years back like even when i grew up like we used to run in the garden you know like we we didn't have smartphones smartphones came out and like you know oh wait right so the we are already this trajectory and this the versions we live in now where that's like the facebook instagrams the video games it's just an early duration like i said the ui ux isn't that great but give it five years and it might look like ready player one um and i just love my turn of

thought uh in terms of the extremes are we going to the end of the extreme of like ready player one is it more like the instagram facebook's and just there's an evolutionary approach or is it somewhere in between well i think it's well it's it's the end game will be ready player one with like headsets or no i mean i think the the headset that's that's funny because like they still lean on like old tech i mean in the future you might have you know if you've ever seen um black mirror you know they've this little thing that they put there you might have lenses you might have brain computer interfaces all you know all that's going to be there i i can't imagine that we have like all these virtual worlds but we still use old clunky headsets i uh i saw a video

online recently of somebody who it looked like they kind of put on glasses and they were trying to simulate like this virtual world and literally they were walking in i think it was a bus or a train and they were kind of walking through the aisle and their seats on both sides and literally there was like screens popping up and seen that video yeah and there was uh kind of blinking lights and all this stuff and it kind of uh in some crazy way reminded me of like a tokyo arcade almost right like you know it's like black like flashing lights and bright colors and like all stuff and uh the person i saw shared it was like i do not want this world right of like oh my god this is like you know literally mental overload uh is that what it's like or is there some like

very watered down version that might be more like augmented reality type stuff not necessarily like this complete virtual world where everything's gamified and it's like points popping up and and all this craziness or you don't know well i mean to an extent i think we might look at this right now and say like oh this is something i don't want um but i think a lot of stuff we have nowadays our grandparents would have said like oh that's something we don't want that's like that's everything's bad right so and i think this the verse the video that you describe is maybe a future where it's centralized and this is why i think it's so so important that that the metaverse has a decentralized space infrastructure because who is the biggest vr producer right now it's

Facebook, Oculus, right? And then also you've got HTC Vive, right? Do you really want the infrastructure of the digital world to be in the hand of Facebook? At least in my opinion, no. All right. You were ex-Google, ex-Facebook. I think most people would say that. Right. And just from a pure, just no one company should have all the power. Absolutely. And so that becomes scary because Facebook, the biggest complaints about Facebook is the advertising, that they target advertising. Now, what if right now we're not actually sitting here, but you and I are at home and we have an Oculus headset on or an Oculus chip in our head or something like that. And really, you know, maybe there's a print on your shirt that's not

actually there, but Facebook projected that projected there because they can, right? Because they literally own the digital world. So, you know, when you understand that, as I said, with that initial question, how much time do we spend online? The digital world is, will literally be more valuable than the base reality because we spend so much time because it's global, it's borderless, then who's going to own that? It can't be private entities. You have to set up decentralized infrastructure on which that can be built. So that means decentralized identity standards, right? Decentralized, just rule, like for example, Decentraland was one of the first products in the space where they created a decentralized world. And in that world,

you have to set up your own rules, you know, because ultimately people think, well, if it's game you can have infinite items but then if everything is infinite there's people that people love a competitive world there has to be rules so for example the way engine which is one of those project goes about is that anytime you mint uh an in-game item you have to what's the word like pretty much mold engine tokens into it so that way like there's a cost to producing in-game items um and so like figuring more of that out so this is like one of the more like you know defy is more mainstream now but like metaverse is definitely more on the cutting edge and it takes a lot of time to just like wrap your head around you know first of all where's this world going

how will such a digital world experientially feel like and what will be important we see the first iteration of that now with like nfts right but people because people can easily wrap their head around i can hang it on the wall it's like a picture i own it great but in the future you know nfts go way beyond just being a picture it can any item like this table can be an nft in your virtual world that you pay for just like a normal table. Why? Again, because we spend most of our time

in the digital world. And I think a time like COVID highlighted more than ever where we're all stuck at home. And now imagine if the UI, the UX was amazing and just like really you can actually feel maybe a whole body suits, right? At that point, I think that's a time when we can actually replace it.

I know that sounds very far out on the spectrum, but if I've learned anything, it's like technology comes way faster than we think. Yeah, of course. Yeah. what do you think is the biggest fear that you have around the metaverse? Centralization.

I think it being in the hands of private entities and that goes a step further too even if we decentralize and has decentralized governance. You don't want, let's say Facebook invests, let's say Facebook's a lead investor or even Andreessen.

I mean, I think Andreessen has good intentions or whatever, right? But I don't want a single entity having let's say 20% of the tokens or like the voting rights over literally like the laws of nature of the digital world essentially so i think it's just very important that right now we're building that base infrastructure on which everything will be built because and that's this is why it's so

unusual because and it's unlike with defi i look at you know balance sheets pnls easy to understand here it's really more so we're literally rebuilding the entire reality entire world from the ground up and on one hand yeah you want it to be value accruing by the same time it also shouldn't turn into just you know where the early investors literally own the entire world So, yeah, it's a lot more abstract, but at the same time, it will likely be bigger than anything else because it literally, the size of the metaverse is multiples of the entire GDP of the entire world right now because we'll have likely higher populations and everybody will participate. Who's going to make the laws in the metaverse? I think DAOs will decide that, right? So, and I think it's very possible.

And this is where, you know, crypto is such a cool early ecosystem of that because when we talk about having different avatars, different identities, look at crypto Twitter, where you have real people with cartoon character personalities with hundreds of thousands of followers that people treat like they're real. You know, you've got the crypto dog, you've got this and that, right? And that's essentially like, again, shitty UI, but that's an early implementation of the metaverse. And then we can decide, you know, like within that land, whether it's infinite or restricted, you have decentralized autonomous organizations that make rules within the boundary. And then you can always, we use the term rage quit. If you say like, hey, I don't agree with the terms of the DAO, you can always leave it and take your assets with you, finding your home. When you talk about centralization, I know that two other themes are the decentralized web or D-Web and privacy. How do those themes play into this?

Right. So with D-Web, I always explain very simply where I say we are, you know, a lot of people started using Uniswap, a lot of people started using all these DeFi protocols. And while they're decentralized on the back end, so to say, you know, like, yes, it's run on Ethereum, but all the front end clients, they're run on AWS. They're all run on, you know, some kind of centralized form where like the platform. And that means that if the government wakes up tomorrow and says, hey, we don't want to allow DeFi. Now, granted, they can't shut down Ethereum. They can't shut down the Uniswap code. So that's true. But they could, you know, ban the front ends, make them unavailable in the U.S., implement geofencing.

So, for example, we actually saw this today where on Aave they had a restricted AML KYC pool that apparently is only for institutional clients, right? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's both. I mean, the good thing is there's institutions that actually start allocating to DeFi, you know, like allocating to DeFi pools, which is fascinating that there's, you know, bigger institutions. The bad thing is that, like, I mean, it lays the groundwork that that might be happening at some more scale in the future, whether it's in the U.S. or some other country. I mean, I'm sure there will be other countries that will reach out to these teams and say, hey, which is why it's important that these teams are decentralized. Because I always say, if you're decentralized, there's a lot less doors you can knock on. Whose door are you going to knock on if there's no LLC, if there's no incorporation, right? But if it's a DAO, it's like everybody can plead the fifth.

So for example, on, you know, well, on some dials that I'm involved in, just for security, you know, we're all like contractors. We're all like arm's length distance, where it's like, there's really nobody that really, like, it's owned by everybody, but nobody. So with D-Web, the idea is that you also then decentralize the front end. So meaning what if we have decentralized broadband? What if we have decentralized hosting, decentralized DNS? having all these different parts that are part of the internet experience and decentralize them

so that no centralized authority can, first of all, take them down, but also then from a security perspective where like, do you actually own your data that's on AWS? Can it disappear? Or all the DNS attacks that have been happening, you know, just like not your keys,

not your crypto, well, not your domain keys, not your domain, right? It's kind of similar. So moving that entire internet experience, but making fully decentralized and, you know, early implementation of that, you know, stuff like, you know,

whether it's Filecoin, Siacoin, where, you know, people like store data on their computers, just like miners mine Bitcoin and they're being rewarded in that native asset for it. And then you can pay people a native asset in order to have it stored, for example.

What about privacy? You keep talking about kind of topics that relate to privacy, but we haven't done deep there. Like what is the fascination with privacy? Well, you know, at first, when you start using Bitcoin and Ethereum, you think, oh, this is private.

I'm anonymous. I can do whatever I want. But, you know, the more time you spend using crypto, the more you realize that, no, you're actually really transparent. Because while it's not anonymous, it's pseudonymous. And while if you have good privacy hygiene, so to say, and you set up a new wallet every time you do something, that's great and all. But ultimately, first of all, even normal people can track what you're doing. So, like, if you sent me money, I now have your public key. Whether it's Bitcoin or Ethereum, I now have a public key.

i can go on the blockchain.com or i can go you know or to ether scan and i find out okay where else have you sent money well how much are you sending and while i don't know necessarily who you're sending it to i do get some information which is almost like anytime you know i swipe my card a restaurant you get my bank statement which is wild um and that's on the harmless side but then on the more intense side there's whole firms like chain analysis whose whole job it is to, you know, really analyze the blockchain and figure out whose wallet belongs to whom. And they're playing a massive game of puzzle

where, you know, today they might have, you know, let's say if it's a big map, like in a video game, you know, they might have like 20% figured out, but given enough time, enough progress and enough KYC transactions where people like kind of like show their cards, you know, in some time in the future, it's almost all going to be public.

And that needs to change. So in order to maintain privacy, you know, there's a few tools either having native private blockchains. And again, I think that's more contrarian take. So like we don't allocate a lot to that, but you know, whether that's, you know, Zcash for example, is pretty much a Bitcoin fork, same supply schedule, but it's based on your knowledge proofs. So it's fully private. Or in terms of Ethereum, you've got secret network formerly called Enigma, which does like smart contracts, but fully private. So then you also have like they've secret c5 secret finance which is um like defy but fully private so that way you

contract the trades you make publicly um and then or if you want to keep it native on bitcoin or ethereum you know there's almost always some layer two solution like um you know on ethereum you've got whether it's tornado cash where you can like you know uh it's a mixer like i sent i sent in 10 ethereum and a thousand other people also in 10 ethereum they all mix up and they come out on the other side nobody knows where it came from if the sample size is that legal that is legal um so the good thing is with these platforms is they do give you the keys to prove origination so like if i get audited i i have the ability to show where it came from so but it's in my uh you know it's my hands got it so basically nobody can know it unless i tell them who it is correct and so

somebody comes and asks me and it's in my best interest to tell them i can correct you still the ability to which is important because otherwise you know you can you know let's say there was some terrorist organization like using that that same pool you don't want to get tied to that you're like hey it wasn't me shows that you know you can prove the transaction okay i'm fine um you know because you know the sad thing with crypto is that unfortunately all too many times people love to use the label of like you know whether it's like money laundering or terrorist financing and that's why crypto bitcoin should die through everything everything's evil but you know there's been studies made on this you probably know the numbers but and i do you know

it's less than like 1%. I mean, it's a fraction. It's a tiny, tiny amount when compared to fiat money or gold or paintings. You know, it doesn't even stack up. So a lot of times people try to use that as a weapon against crypto.

But I don't think that means that we count off privacy because people always say like, hey, you know, oh, you only need privacy trying to hide something, you know? And I think somebody said, somebody made the metaphor once,

like, you know, do you close the shower curtain because you're hiding something? I mean, like, you know, like, yeah, you still want, you know, we windows, you want to have appliance, You want to be able to, like, not because you're killing somebody inside the house, but maybe you want to close the blinds, right? So, and I think some level of privacy is just a natural human right.

And because at the end of the day, it also makes us vulnerable. You know, if, let's say, for example, you do pay for your coffee with Bitcoin, do you really want everybody to know, like, what coffee shop you buy Bitcoin at, at what time? Now they can track your whole day. So anyway, privacy is just something that's unexplored because the only people aware of the lack thereof are the people actually using it. So again, this is something I think to be early on where we say, okay, how can we maintain some level of security

where we, for example, we don't necessarily have to go to layer two. Maybe it's just like an actual native upgrade or, for example, in the sense that we can prove that we didn't do anything illegal, like with Tornado. what is some of the stuff that nobody's talking about yet but you're like hey five years from now this is gonna be really really important but nobody realizes it yet i mean until recently i would have said metaverse now it's been popping up because nfts got hot and now there's a clubhouse rooms talk about metaverse but you know we funny enough we know we made our most recent we we added

metaverse to the deck like a year ago um in fact back even two years ago we just called it like decentralized gaming um because i think you know five years from now um that digital economy will be i mean i i make the comparison that i think defy will be bigger than the nasdaq by 2025 um i would say the metaverse has i mean that's aggressive but i would say the metaverse probably has a bigger gdp than the u.s by 2035 2035 so i was gonna say 2030 but that sounded too ambitious but i may usually it's probably earlier you know um because because ultimately there's already now like really fascinating examples where people,

for example, in the Philippines, they literally play, there's this thing, whole idea of like play to earn where people play these decentralized games like Axies Infinity

and they're earning enough money to literally pay for their mortgages to pay for their life, which is fascinating when you can like really distribute these games so you can decentralize a lot of this online experience

and make that a way to generate income. Yeah. I mean, it replaces the whole idea of the government needing to support you. You can still work

regardless as long as you have an internet connection. Yeah. Right. uh ask everyone the same three questions before we finish up you could ask me one first most important book i'm gonna be go full of a turn here uh atlas shrugged why uh so funny enough i've read it during the uh the pandemic i finished it so i read two books during the pandemic i think one of them actually came from you which was um atlas shrugged and

second one was the fourth turning i read about your newsletter and those two books at that point in time which is extremely impactful um because so much of that is playing out in real time you You know, in Atlas Shrugged, it talks a lot about the politicians that, you know, use the common good as an excuse to alienate a lot of the producers, right? And then you ask, well, are you actually, I think it was a quote by Wells. So the guy that wrote 1984 where he said, you know, a lot of times that it's not the hate of the rich. No, no, sorry. It's not the love for the poor. It's the hate of the rich that motivates a lot of that, right?

and so seeing this reading both those books for turning where people kind of like to you know turn weak and people start turning into like you know the the conflict the cultural conflicts get exacerbated you know and that come it's really played out with covid and then also atlas rock where i saw elon musk leave california right there's this hole where they try to shut down his factory i'm like this is straight up from the book where they try to shut down hangar factories elon musk like no i will stay on the floor of my factory if anybody gets arrested it's me right and seeing that play out and he's like i'm out going to texas we're going to miami going to florida um so i think in the current day and age i think both those books are really important

um to read and yeah sleep schedule from our friends over at eight sleep they have a thermo regulated bed really hot really cold miami when it gets hot obviously having a cold bed is great and helps you sleep deeper i sleep like five six hours and i sleep like eight or nine what's your sleep schedule i used to be horrible sleep schedules i used to sleep like you know five hours i've been taking it serious lately uh i mean i'm because i i train every morning at 8 a.m so i try to be in bed by like you know 11 or midnight and then do get up at seven so like eight hours right because i've i've learned to optimize the hours i'm awake not the hours when i'm asleep uh because you know what do we get paid for having a sharp mind being able to like

make the important decisions um and you lose that if you're always running on e yeah i couldn't agree more i am a full-on convert uh last question is aliens are you a believer or non-believer i think i'm a believer why the universe is too large it's a statistically probable almost that we're alone yeah they might we are alone or not alone it's statistically improbable that we're alone oh improbable correct so there's and i don't think they'll probably look like the way we think they do they're not little green men no they're probably not a little green man well here's the thing there's two options either they're dumber than us and we just find like you know little animals we think they're cute but they're also intelligent life or they're way

smarter than us they already know about us you know and who knows look at these fools look at these fools like arguing with themselves two-party system and you get asked you got money you get asked me one question to finish up what do you got for me um what are you most bullish about about the crypto industry for the next five years i think the number one mispriced thing in the entire market mispriced is DeFi built on top of Bitcoin. And DeFi, meaning decentralized finance, started with Bitcoin itself, decentralized money. Now there's decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending, all this, you know, a lot of stuff we've been talking about. It's built on all kinds of different technological foundations, right? And so this idea of like

almost automated finance is kind of how I talk about it, but specifically built on top of Bitcoin in a way that vertically integrates the decentralized financial applications with the decentralized money i think everyone wrote off right everyone said hey uh you can't do smart contracts on bitcoin let's go build it also that's why ethereum was started many other smart contract platforms there's absolutely market value being created there right there's you know at this point literally tens of billions of dollars locked in total value uh there's all sorts of uh people coming in using this stuff we talked about abe and all stuff uh but i think a mispriced part of the market is that actually now that there's smart contracts on top of bitcoin uh there's

decentralized financial applications happening on bitcoin etc uh there's just a lot of opportunity there that people kind of overlooked and so that is exciting because it usually means there's asymmetry there right and so i'm spending a lot of time kind of trying to figure out what's real what's not and kind of what the the potential value proposition is but that's probably one area of many that i think is really interesting awesome all right where can people find you on the internet uh well for crypto stuff you know always twitter uh at felix or hartman and i'm actually one of the few crypto people that's also very active

on Instagram so Instagram at Felix underscore Hartman I do like you know live streams there like explaining a lot of stuff kind of like we talked here awesome

yeah so Twitter and Instagram yep awesome man well listen thank you so much for doing this I'm glad you're here now in Miami

and we'll have to do it again appreciate you thank you