The Wolf Of All Streets - Can Aptos Survive The FTX Crash? | Mo Shaikh, CEO & Co-Founder Of Aptos

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

►► Sponsored by PRIME XBT! Sign up for a new trading account using the link below & receive up to a $7,000 deposit bonus with “wolfofallstreets” promo code.  https://u.primexbt.com/WolfOfAllStreets ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  #Bitcoin #Crypto #aptos  Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:00 Launching Aptos 8:00 Was delaying the project considered? 12:00 Plans for 2023  16:00 Network effects 21:00 Multichain 26:00 Aptos programming language Move 29:00 Regulation 32:00 the Year 2022 36:00 Unlocked tokens that belong to FTX The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

One of the most exciting tokens launches projects blockchains of 2022, of course, is Aptos, which launched just a few months ago. Unfortunately, they were inextricably tied to the FTX collapse like everyone else. But Sam Bateman Freed was an investor in the project, like everyone else, seemingly not much to differentiate here. But listen, we like to separate fact from fiction here, FUD from fiction to a large degree. So of course, that means we bring on the people who actually know what's going on. I've got Mo Shaikh today, the founder, CEO of Aptos, formerly, of course, of Meta, which was formerly of Facebook, right? And Aptos, we're going to get into the history of it,

but largely came out of the Libra, or I guess DM, formerly known as Libra, for doing the formerly known as things. One of the first projects to launch using that technology. Very exciting blockchain and worth talking about. Also, for those of you who are listening to this on Spotify and Apple, this is a recording of today's live stream from YouTube, which is different than the long form podcast. You guys do not want to miss this one today.

Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and gently caress the like button with your right ring finger. Do it however you want. I don't really care how you touch the like button. Once again, I don't actually care if you like me.

But there's no unlike button, so sorry. If you've got a problem, you have really no way to express that except for in very angry comments that nobody's going to read under the video. Does anybody actually read YouTube comments or is it just people with my face telling you to hit them up on WhatsApp to improve your trading? I don't know. But I have definitely found that the comments on effectively all social media at this point are largely spam and scam and hugely avoidable. But that's not what you're here to talk about. First of all, I'm going to tell

you, of course, that we are sponsored by PrimeXBT. I will remind you once again, it's an amazing place for trading, but no exchange is an amazing place to custody your assets or for a bank account. But if you are looking for a place to trade, they offer basically everything you could possibly need, including up to a $7,000 bonus. Now, moving on to what you all actually showed up for today, I'm going to go ahead and bring on Mo. Mo, man, thank you so much for waking up extremely early to come talk to me today. No problem at all, man. I appreciate you having me on the show, Scott. It's a pleasure. So listen, I, you know, you're no different than anyone else in this industry, which is that you're pulling a Neo from the matrix and dodging bullets left and right. Like I think the rest of us certainly, but could you just give me the very brief history on Aptos,

what it is, why it's important, why you founded it, where it came from. Yeah, I think you touched on it on your formerly known as chain intro. It started off pretty much four and a half years ago. Facebook at the time was interested in how do you scale Web3 blockchain and crypto and all the benefits that it brings to billions of people. And myself and Avery were working on that project. Avery, my co-founder, was the technical leader of that project. I led our go-to-market. And fast forward, we realized we're having a pretty difficult time getting that project out in market, but we still believed in a lot of the technology that had been built, whether it was move, the smart contract programming language, and then the blockchain itself. And so all that innovation we thought should not live within just four walls of an organization. And we're very

fortunate to have the opportunity to continue to build that project outside of Meta, formerly known as Facebook. And fast forward, here we are. We raised a good amount of capital for some very awesome investors and partners. We've launched four different test nets in 2022, which is kind of unheard of. And we launched Mainnet. So that was about nine weeks ago. So it's certainly been an interesting journey. The blockchain is live. It's working flawlessly.

No downtime. Performance greater than most L1s and L2s out there in market, actually all L1s and L2s out in market. And we're just getting started. So very excited about the year ahead of us. I mean, in theory, you guys can process 150,000 transactions per second, correct? I mean, that's a pretty astounding number. Yeah. So with things like BlockSTM, a novel innovation, around 120,000 to 150,000 transactions can be processed per second. We're doing a bunch of work in the background, and I won't bore everyone with the details, but everything from consensus mechanism all the way down to how we think about storage will be all upgraded to get us there over time. So that's all extremely positive, but we obviously have to talk about the negative,

especially in this market. As you touched on, I think there's some misinformation. My understanding is that you had a huge first raise, which had nothing to do with SBF or FTX. So they actually contributed to your second raise. Is that correct? They were a very small check in our first round, but yeah, very large investor in our second round. Yeah. So how has that collapse affected the project? Would you say it affected you personally? Because I think a lot of us obviously are still reeling from the image that we had of him to what he turned out to be, myself included. I've had him on this show more times than in retrospect, I would probably like to admit. You know, and do you think that it's fair for people to sort of, you know, project the issues with FTX onto Aptos? Yeah, it's a very

loaded question. I'll try to break it down. I mean, I'll start personally. You know, first of all, my heart goes out to everyone that's been impacted in this with the FTX scenario. It's certainly disheartening. And, you know, we're all trying to get over it together as an industry. And I think there's a lot of positivity that's going to come out of it. In fact, we're seeing a lot of positivity come out of it already. And we'll maybe we'll touch on that. As far as Aptos, you know, we thought about things very conservatively. You know, we're very fortunate to have all our cash custodied with institutional custodians. We're not

impacted there at all. We had no treasury on FTX. Knock on wood, we prescribed to the tenants of Web3 and crypto. Luckily, none of our treasury was impacted from a token perspective

either. So, you know, Aptos is in a really good position. And we're, you know, excited about actually moving forward into 2023. Despite, you know, everything that's happened with FTX. When FTX invested, was it in FTT? No, no, we got all our all our cash, Scott. That's awesome. You did better than most um right so so obviously listen i can i know you can't discuss the price action i just want to show the chart for people to see and listen i said this to mo before i've seen a lot of people comment on individual projects, individual markets, how far they've dumped. It's down about 70% from the top, but not from the launch, which actually is in line with the Bitcoins and the Ethereums of the world.

So not as terrible as it looks. And I think that if you look at any crypto chart, it looks like this. But we do know that obviously you had a very hyped launch right in the middle of a horrible bear market and then only bad news since. Did you ever consider delaying the launch or was it the coin price really not particularly relevant and the technology was ready? So this is a good time to test everything. Man, it's an interesting point to think about. Delaying for us was not necessarily an option that we considered. In fact, a lot of our amazing team had been building this for a very long time. And given four years of that development, we just wanted to get it out in market. And, you know, we thought it would be, you know, very well received from a technology perspective. People were really excited about move and get getting their hands dirty with code. Entrepreneurs and builders were building. And so, you know, it never really crossed our mind to try to time markets. In fact, I think you're a smart person. You know that market timing is not

something that, you know, the smart people want to play around with. And so for us, it was all about the technology and getting it into the hands of builders. And so, and our team was, again, incredibly excited and anxious of getting it to get our product out. So the delay never really crossed our mind. We did, we were paying attention to what was going on in the world. I mean, you'd be foolish not to. And the way we think about it is, you know, if people only look at prices in this space, then, you know, we're not doing a good job. People really need to start focusing on where the products are, where the use cases are, how what does NFT adoption look like? What does actual utility look like for NFTs? And those are the signals that we were seeing and happy to go into some of those, into some of the partners that we're working with. And so we could not afford to delay. We needed to get our product out in market. And so although prices are always something folks pay

attention to, that noise, it was something we put in the background to get our product out of market. Yeah. I mean, although it's become a bit of a meme, almost every founder, builder, programmer, developer that I've talked to says, I love the bear market. It's a great time to build. Right. And I think that one could even argue that if we were in a ripping bull market and Bitcoin was 65,000, everyone was focused on price. You guys would probably have a lot of distractions that would make product less of a focus and much harder to focus on because everybody would be watching, you know, the price and maybe you would be overwhelmed with the network and launches

and all of these things. Yeah, it's an excellent point. I mean, yeah, but when prices are soaring, you know, people are run to those assets and get excited about them. And, you know, it does have a psychological impact. I kind of heard you talk about it on your show uh so yeah i mean we are in a sense lucky to be able to build in a bear market and so if you dissect what does that really mean it means people aren't um not only distracted but they're looking at what is the difference between technology a and technology b you you know, a platform A and platform B or, you know, an NFT marketplace product versus kind of some kind of, you know, wallet use case. And so, you know, that discipline, we think is really important because that's the approach that we've taken while building Aptos as a blockchain and working with some of the

entrepreneurs that have launched amazing use cases and products on top of our network. So, you know, yes, it is very cliche and memetic. Building in a bear market is the thing to focus on, but it's really that discipline that we really, that we get excited about at Aptos and we're starting to see that, you know, that turn into some very positive stuff for us. All right. So now you've deployed it and it's working and you have your differentiation from other layer ones. Of course, there's excitement. So this is the time to talk now about what's being built and what you're excited about and what's happening. Because I think that people have lost sight of the forest through the trees, so to speak, about blockchain and crypto.

I think that a lot of the things people were very excited about when the price goes down, they cease to be excited. But nothing has really changed. So what is being built? people were very excited about when the price goes down, they cease to be excited, but nothing has really changed. So what is being built? What are you excited about? What do you see for next year, you know, really starting to take off? Oh, man, there's so much being built. It's kind of hard to keep track of everything. We launched our testnet in May of this year.

And the reason we did that is we wanted to get all the early Web3 builders a taste of what move is like. And we ended up having so many projects just get started very quickly. And they were building along the journey of us getting our mainnet ready to launch. And so when mainnet launched a few weeks ago, a bunch of these projects ended up coming to market live as well. So you had an NFT marketplace like Topaz. You had different wallets like Martian, a wallet called Petra, which is our wallet that was built, and a bunch of NFT projects and creators that were excited about how they can actually reach millions of people. And so all that was

happening in the background and all those projects ended up launching with us within days. And so all that's happening at the same time, you know, we're looking at what is the technological difference. So with things like parallel transaction processing on Aptos and things like move smart contract languages, which basically allows you to, you know, launch a smart contract in an environment in a safe way and going through a formal verification engine called the move prover, instead of just pushing some smart contract code out there in market and leaving things for chance. That safety has really started to take off in a lot of the financial use cases that we've seen Web3 get excited about. So there's some really cool DeFi stuff that's going to be coming live soon that takes advantage of not only things like Move, but also parallel transaction processing. So, you know, central limit order

books, AMMs, DEXs, all these things will be really cool things to keep an eye out on Aptos. That'll be step changes and innovation relative to everything that we've seen in the previous generation of blockchain. So we're looking forward to all of that. The other thing that we were focused on was, well, it was kind of frustrating to hear the large companies talk about Web3, but not really do anything. And partly that was because, well, we're going to do a little pilot and do some testing here. But we know that this stuff doesn't really work for millions of people. And so we're not risking bringing all our users to these L2s or L1s. And so we went back in our early days of meta.

We were building principally for billions of people. So we had taken that approach to protect three plus billion users. And so when we started having conversations with folks like Google and folks like NPixel, which is a AAA gaming studio in Korea that has over 10 million users, those folks saw what Aptos can do for their users and actually innovate inside of their organization. So all those folks have started building on top of Aptos. And, you know, we've made some interesting announcements and happy to dive into those. But, you know, Web3 users are building new innovative products on Aptos, things that they could not do on the blockchains that were out before. And large entities and enterprises that were

sitting and excited about Web3, but weren't comfortable are now building on Web3 in a meaningful way. And we're excited to see all those use cases now come to life in 2023. Perhaps the most important question, how many people like myself have butchered the name and said Aptos instead of Aptos? Tomato, tomato, tomato, Scott. There's absolutely no judgment on how people pronounce things. You know, Aptos is a Ohlone word that means, it's a Native American word that means the people. And so, you know, the people have different ways of speaking. And so whether you say Aptos or Aptos, it's cool with us, but the people of Aptos pronounce it Aptos. So you just totally let me off the hook and it's much appreciated. I definitely needed that.

So interestingly, what you described as the future use cases or the things that are being built, it's sort of the same that we've seen in the previous cycles, DeFi, NFTs, Metaverse, all of these things. Is there anything that we haven't heard about on this side that's completely new that might be buildable on Aptos that's not elsewhere because you do have that scale and speed to a billion people? I've often made sort of the criticism or I've laughed at the fact that people talk about scaling

to a billion, but then you launch an NFT product and the whole blockchain is frozen or goes offline or gas fees go to 3000, right? Which is like, we've had our zero to one moment, but getting from one to 10 requires scale, which you're offering. So is there anything that sort of you guys have opened the door to that maybe wouldn't have been possible before? And you've raised so many different points that are problems that we've been trying to solve. I mean, yeah, it's kind of interesting, right? Like people get really excited about blockchain And you've raised so many different points that are problems that we've been trying to solve. I mean, yeah, it's kind of interesting, right?

Like people get really excited about blockchain potential. They all go flock to this L1 or L2. And the moment they do that, the network comes crashing down or gas fees go up. And that's so counter, it completely counteracts the network effects that people want to form. And I mean, we're a network, right, after all. So it's certainly been disappointing to see that. And when we think about Aptos, we want to solve both of those problems. And so I'll kind of start with the network stability and reliability perspective. You know, just having the network be up over the last nine weeks since launch, we've had

no outage, no downtime. And so, you know, if millions of people come and use our network, we're not going to see any issues. And in fact, we're actually looking forward to seeing more and more people use the network and they're starting to, and we've had no performance degradation. More importantly, we haven't had cost degradation in gas fees. I actually transacted last night just to test the network out. And it was a fraction of a cent to execute an NFT purchase. And that's really important when we think about billions of people. Billions of people across the world are not going to be buying only one of one NFTs. As NFTs become ubiquitous

with using the internet, whether that is in a form of a new age cookie or in the form of just, hey, playing within a game, it's not going to be feasible for us to continue to pay large amounts of transaction fees. So, you know, gas fees are really low on our network. And we want to do that by design to make sure that billions of people across the world can use this network and not be left out. And so, you know, when we think about what's new that can be created, think about, you know, where the metaverse is today. I mean, we all like to debate on what is

the metaverse. You know, my very simple definition of that is it's a digital immersive experience. It doesn't have to be fully AR. I mean, you got your headphones on. If you got your headphones on and you're playing a Fortnite game and talking to me while you're playing, that can be a metaverse-like experience. Now, if you wanted to share an asset with me within Fortnite and you're in New York, I'm in Thailand, for example, I don't want to have to pay high transaction fees. I don't want to wait for a network to settle that transaction. And those are implications that really matter in a metaverse experience. So

performance becomes really integral to that metaverse interaction. And so what you can do on Aptos with the metaverse is unparalleled in terms of the performance that you have today relative to what you would have had in other experiences. So things like Npixel are going to take advantage of this. We're speaking with a bunch of other metaverse or gaming studios that are building things. And we're excited for them to showcase the performance of our network rather than us only being able to talk about it. And so why does this really matter? And this is the last point I'll kind of end on is, well, imagine you're in a metaverse and sharing assets with each other. Scott and Mo are playing a Fortnite game. And now Scott's like, you know what? I'm moving on from Fortnite. I want to go in a different metaverse. I want to take my assets

with me. And so that portability is something we can actually allow. In fact, those are standards that we're building into our NFT asset class. But more importantly, maybe you don't want to take your assets with you. Maybe you want to leave them behind. Maybe you want to cash out. And so that's really cool because now the millions, or I'm reaching here, maybe the hundreds of hours you spent in a metaverse, you want to be able to monetize on that. You can do that. Whereas before you're just kind of, all right, well, I'm done with game A, I'm moving on. Now you actually have economic opportunity.

And this is going to open up an entire world of innovation and economic participation globally where you were not able to do before in the world of Web2. And, you know, we think that's going to have some really cool outcomes of being powered on Aptos. You talk about the portability of assets between different games and different metaverses. I personally believe we'll end up in a multi-chain world. Maybe Aptos becomes the chain and everything is built on it, but I don't see the others going anywhere. If you can port between one game and another, that means you probably are going to have to be able to port from one blockchain to another.

They're going to have to become interoperable. So what plans does Aptos have to be interoperable with other chains, especially in light of us seeing bridge hacks? And I mean, let's be real. Going between chains is where a lot of the exploits and hacks have happened, right? So once you go off your chain, which you've built to be secure and you're comfortable with, how do you guarantee the security when you're leaving or coming in?

Man, those two points you raised, uh, work really well together. So it's a, it's a, it's a great question. Um, um, yeah, I mean, we don't, I don't know if we're going to have a multi-chain future, but we definitely have a multi-chain present today, right? You have all these L1s, L2s, and I guess L3s, uh, 4, 5, 6, 7. Yeah, we're getting there. Yeah. And, and, and yeah, so it's a multi-chain present. And yeah, right now they're kind of pieced together in this like wobbly, you know, Jenga stack in a way, right? And if one of those things like a bridge doesn't work well or one smart contract written poorly is out there, you're exposed to a lot of the network risk across different ecosystems. And that's not great for users.

And so, you know, how do we think about it and how do we guarantee that? You know, we want to work very closely and establish the best industry standards possible. And that starts with looking at ourselves first. And so move as a smart contract language has built a lot of that safety right into the programming language itself. And when Scott writes a smart contract and puts it out for a DeFi use case or an NFT, well, I mean, your users are going to be protected or whoever ends up engaging with that smart contract. Now, the problem that you highlighted is, well, I want to go from network A to network B. The question is, you know, why do you want to do that? Is there a much larger ecosystem out there?

Chances are maybe, but probably not. And so if there is a compelling use case, then you might want to go through a bridge. And so Wormhole and Layer Zero bridges are live, and we're excited about both of those. But yeah, we've all acknowledged some of the hacks that have taken place in the past. And so we're going to work as closely as we can with people that are building these interoperability portals or features or bridges to make sure that they can be best in class. There's a lot of work that still needs to be done. This is where, you know, I think industry leaders need to come together. L1 builders need to come together. Community needs to come together and establish, well, why are we going from L1 to L1? Is there a real viable use case?

If so, what's the safest way we can go there as an entrepreneur, as a builder to make sure that our users aren't exposed? And so we are seeing some of those improvements take place. I think both of those organizations that have built bridges are doing a great job of solving some of the issues of the past and continue to harden those bridges. And maybe we'll see consolidation take place within a network where you don't have to go from network A to network B. You can stay within a safer environment. And we think that is probably the best way to control and protect users so that they can have a better experience versus exposing them to risk.

So Aptos can be the one ring to rule them all, right? I mean, we kind of joke about, I said, I believe we'll have a multi-chain future. And you sort of hinted, well, that's the present, but not necessarily the future. So you do believe that you guys could effectively become the blockchain for all these things. And by the way, I bet you wouldn't be the first founder that I've had on here who said that. I asked Anatoly from Solana, he said, no, we're going to have everything, right? Listen, it hasn't played out in their favor so far, but that doesn't, you know, I wouldn't count them dead yet. But you do believe that all this could be done on Aptos and you could never leave. You know, it's, I love your reading between the lines. I, you know,

the way I think about it is over time efficiencies gain, efficiencies are sort of gained to a particular environment. If people are building in environment A, then more people will want to go to that environment and continue to build because the tooling will be there. The community will be there. It'll be easy to launch products there. And the closest analogy that we have to that, if you look at, you know, history is what cloud did, right? And so, you know, there were hundreds, if not thousands of cloud providers, and now there's really only two to three, maybe depending on how you really count things. So, you know, if we follow that same analogy, we do think there'll be efficiencies within certain environments. Our

goal is to make it as easy as possible for someone like Scott, who's trying to deploy an application, to do it in the most efficient way possible. And if we do that, then we do think there'll be consolidation in builder communities and in user communities. And we're starting to see signs of that for sure. And so we're excited about it from Aptos' perspective, obviously, to potentially be one of those chains. And we're going to work really hard to make sure that we make it the safest

and easiest environment for a developer to build and a user to come use their network. So we do think consolidation will likely take place. And we're very hopeful, but we're going to work really damn hard to make sure that the users have the best experience possible when they come and use an Aptos product. You've mentioned that you have your own programming language, Move, which I believe is based on Rust. How difficult has it been for developers and programmers to understand and learn the language if they're coming from Solidity or one of the others that have been, I guess, around longer and more popular?

Yeah. So Move is a deterministic, hermetic language. It makes it really easy for you to deploy not only a smart contract into market, but to do it in a way that it's safe. And so, you know, we have been building this for a long time. And to be honest, you know, we were a little nervous about putting it out in the world for the reasons that you mentioned. And so we said, well, heck, let's give it a shot. And when we launched Testnet in May, we invited a bunch of developers all over the world to come and build with us. In fact, in our office here in Palo Alto,

which was a fun time for us to say the least, but we were worried. We thought that we weren't sure how people would react. We had developers come from Stanford and Berkeley, young women who were just going through their CS courses. We had a developer who taught himself how to code, who lives in middle America, and he was a former army veteran. We had a lawyer who taught himself how to code, who was interested in learning Mood. And so they all came, they all ended up joining and forming teams. And within 36 hours, those folks deployed applications on our testnet, not knowing a

single line of move code when they started. And so, you know, some of them actually were building on Rust before. And so, you know, the analogies that we heard were, you know, this feels like chewing cotton candy. This feels like I'm playing a video game when I'm learning Move. And so that was just really enlightening for us to hear. It gave us a lot of confidence and comfort. And now we're really building an amazing foundation around Move, whether it's smart contract language support at Aptos, but the community is building some great

documentation around it as well. So we found people have loved Move. They've taken it on and welcomed it. People are actually, that have been building using Solidity and Rust are abandoning those languages and saying, we're only using Move going forward. And that's obviously music to our ears. And we're going to continue to help people get up to speed on Move very, very quickly. So it's been quite the opposite of our fear. And Move has been kind of a firestorm in a very, very positive way. And we're going to continue to enhance that momentum for the Move community. Right. You're obviously in California, as you hinted. How concerned are you with the regulatory environment in the United

States? Because progressively, all we've heard is I'm getting the hell out of here. I'm going to go build somewhere else. I'm going to go somewhere where at least I have some clarity or a little less fear. I mean, you guys are obviously building based in California, in the United States. You've launched a token, all of those things. Are you concerned with it? Does it affect the way that you build and you progress forward? Or you basically just, you know, keep plowing through and hope for the best? Yeah, I mean, I'm a first generation immigrant. In fact, I, my parents immigrated, they moved to New York, they moved right to Brooklyn in this area called Brighton Beach. Mine too. Oh, wow. I love it. I love it. We got to share some New York stories. And now I do live in California and I do live in Silicon Valley. And so it's very different. But I think the one thing

that I've noticed is people are heads down building. And what I think this, what this country has done an amazing job of is creating a safe environment for innovation and entrepreneurs to continue to build. Now, do we get it right all the time? Probably not. But are we willing to listen to our entrepreneurs and our builders? Absolutely. And I think what we're starting to see in regulation is a perspective of, well, not only do we want to make sure that builders continue to build, and this is a great place to do that in the US, but also to protect our users. And regulation does help support that. And I think the recent events have shed light on what happens if you do not have the

proper safeguards in place. And so we don't know what regulation is going to look like, but I, for one, am optimistic that we are going to eventually get it right. And we think that this is the best country to continue to build. You know, when we were forming Aptos, we didn't say, hey, we're going to go out and form some entity, some in some acetone part of the world.

We wanted to be based here because we felt that the best builders are here. Innovation starts here. And we do think long-term regulation will get it right. And so the only thing that we can really do is help educate. And so we do welcome that dialogue. I'm sure people tune into your show to get smart on the space. Hopefully they can reach out to the folks that are building and continue to learn and get smart and put regulation out there that does solve not only for protecting users, but also allows for innovation to flourish. And that's the most optimism that I want to go into 2023 with. And so, you know, we're actually excited and

continue to engage with folks that we need to. Right. Because even when we were in the FOMO and excitement of the bull market, or at least a lot more optimism, I think around the space and Facebook at the time proposed Libra and then DM, I don't think I've, it's a different environment to be fair. I think legislators understand and regulators more, but I've never seen so much pushback on an idea from Congress. It was very jarring, actually. Yeah, it was an interesting time for sure. I think large organizations often have to bear the tip of the spear, and that's a hard thing to do. I think, yes, everything you said is true, but I think the other thing is people were really excited when Libra came out. Web3 was, you know, they were singing the praises, right? Because, you know, this was an opportunity to have a dialogue with serious builders that do have the potential of moving

Web3 forward in a very big way. And so, you know, I do think we have to commend the metas and the Googles of the world for trying. And yes, they do bear a lot of the pressure, again, at the starting point. But coming out of those difficult conversations are some beautiful and amazing builders and projects. And Aptos is certainly one of those. So we hope to carry on some of that potential that that's been paved and the cost that's been bore by by other entities. I mean, I think I know the answer, but has anything that's happened this year dampened your excitement or sort of minimize in your mind the chances for success of blockchain in general or what you're building? Or do you think that it's largely noise? I think there's, I'll try to answer that question as diplomatically and as scientifically as possible. I think, again, you cannot ignore

everything that's happened in 22. There's certainly been a lot of, you know, challenges, but within those challenges, you're seeing the resiliency of this space stand up in a very, very good way, right? So builders are still deploying applications. In fact, communities are actually only strengthening in this time. And so that noise is actually turning into really good conversation now. That dialogue is forcing us to think about really good first principles, first principles that were overlooked in hype markets, right? Because everyone's just paying attention to price. And so this is why I think having platforms like yourself

and venues to have that difficult dialogue, whether it's on the wolf of all streets or in a Twitter space, I think the conversations are changing to those first principles and good tenants. And that to me is a very, very healthy sign of what's to come in 23. People are going to be deploying applications that are built principally sound, that actually have product market fit signals, products that actually bring real utility versus just

speculation. And so to me, I couldn't be more bullish than ever. I'm really looking forward to 2023. I'm looking forward to all the applications that are being built on Aptos and that are going to be coming live within the Web3 world. And, you know, it's not just only entrepreneurs. It's really large organizations that are now diving in in a much bigger way. Yeah, I mean, we just saw, I believe the news came yesterday about Fidelity's filings, you know, in the NFT and metaverse space, huge companies are still pouring in. And frankly,

I mean, VCs are sitting on billions of dollars that have to be deployed, right? So there's no doubt that the building will continue. I just hope that if 2023 ends up being bad, that they are still funded enough to continue into 24 and 25. Yeah, I think the VC environment is going to be different. I think investors are going to be more prudent. They're going to look in deeper than they did in times of past. And the valuations will be different than the times of past. But yeah, you said it well. There's going to be, you know, people still will be building.

People will be deploying applications. And I think, yeah, the Fidelity's of the world, the BlackRock's of the world, they're still here. In fact, they're deepening their roots. I mean, you saw Goldman put out their statement, right? BlackRock is now moving towards supporting things like Circle and USDC. And so this is just a very, very healthy sign that, you know, folks that large institutions that operate with those first principles that now Web3 is also taking into account. They're they're here. They're going deeper. And so that's a very strong sign, I think, for builders and communities. I'm very curious to see where Fidelity goes with

some of their NFT stuff. But yeah, there's so much happening behind the scenes that I think you have to be excited and bullish for what's to come. I actually have a question here that maybe you can answer. Can we talk more about FTX? What's going to happen with unlocked APT tokens that belong to FTX? Yeah. So unlocked tokens that belong to FTX. It's a good question. You know, we don't know. You know, we're actually paying attention. I would imagine that depends on the bankruptcy courts. Yeah. Yeah. The way bankruptcy proceedings work has been a very interesting educational item for me this year and for all of us. Yes. Everybody's tracking at least one of them very closely if you're in crypto many of us. Yes. Everybody's tracking at least one of

them very closely if you're in crypto at this point. Yes. Yeah. At least one of them. But we're watching and seeing just like everyone else. You know, obviously, we're going to take the best position possible for our community. But yeah, you know, unfortunately, the way bankruptcy proceedings work is, you know, we have to watch and wait and see just like everyone else. And so that's what we're doing. Is there anything that I've missed here as we kind of come to the end? Anything that you want to touch on that you're building for 2023?

Any gems of advice you could tell us the meaning of life you can choose? I don't know if I can go as deep as the meaning of life, but I think for all the builders in this space and a lot of people that have been participating in the space, I think we've gone through two very interesting generations, right? We had the Bitcoin generation, which has really got everyone introduced to what does decentralized

economic value really look like? And that's been very powerful for this world. Not just people incited about crypto. Ethereum and other protocols have built on top of that in the second generation with things like... Sorry about that. My Siri is kicking in. But yeah, the second generation was all about bringing utility to that decentralization and economic value share with smart contracts. And now as we enter this next generation of building for this space, Web 2 is also evolving finally. And so, you know, we don't know what's going to happen when Web 3 and Web 2 kind of meet together in this next generation and this next evolution. But I think the possibilities are sort of endless, especially when you talk about how Mo and Scott can interact in a metaverse around, you know, where the two of us are in different ends of the world and we can share knowledge and we can benefit economically

from that sharing of knowledge. And so to me, Web3 sits at the epicenter of that. And so I'm very, very optimistic and very hopeful for 23. I think Web3 is no longer going to be building in a silo. In fact, we're going to be building together with everyone else that has been building shoulder to shoulder. And so, you know, we don't know what's going to come to market in the next year. But, you know, I think we're really all coming in with open eyes and open arms. And I really want to lead, you know, all of us to leave with that kind of message, right? You know, it's no longer just us by ourselves. In fact, it's all of us together.

And so, you know, I'm very hopeful and optimistic. And I think, you know, that's the one message that I'll leave with. And, you know, we're obviously excited, you know, for Aptos being that particular venue that people can build on. But, you know But we certainly need to lead in with a sense of positivity and optimism. And I think that'll lead to, again, just really good outcomes. I think that's an incredible message. I commend you for sticking to your plan and launching regardless of the market and for all that you've built in that time.

And frankly, I just really enjoyed talking to you, man. Honestly, you're a great interviewer. You should be out everywhere evangelizing for the crypto space, I would say. And you're welcome back anytime. Guys, where can everybody follow you, by the way, and check out everything that Aptos is doing, especially developers, programmers, people looking to learn the language?

Yeah, I would say the best place to get started is just go onto Aptos Networks, log onto our site, dig into the documentation. Everything is available. It's super easy to use. Follow us on Twitter. We're available there.

You can follow me on Twitter and we're always commenting and we're actually very active and participate in a lot of documentation. So feel free to reach out to us either on Discord, on Twitter, or just jump right in and start building. But also, thank you, Scott, for the kind words. I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for creating such an awesome space for this community to build and for us to share our voices with each other.

We're all going to make it, man. We're all going to make it, man. We're all going to make it. Thank you once again, Mo. Everybody else, I will be back tomorrow, of course, at 9.30 a.m. with the weekly Thursday roundtable. And once again, for anyone who's listening, this can be listened to later this afternoon on Spotify, Apple, everywhere else that we do audio.

Huge thanks to Mo for being here, man. Thank you once again. Everyone else, we will see you tomorrow. Thanks, man. Peace. Cheers.