The Wolf Of All Streets - Mainstream Adoption Of Crypto Is Here W/ @moshaikhs | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading 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.

What's up, everybody? Happy Tuesday morning. Hope you're all having a good day. Getting everybody up on stage right now as we speak. Actually, we have a bit of breaking news and Carlo happens to be here. So before I dive in with Mo, I just want to address that because Carlo, I know you just wrote a whole thread on this. We have breaking news. Crypto.com sues SEC over crypto asset regulation after receiving Wells notice. More SEC and crypto news. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, Carlo, in your mind at this point? Man, it's just another day in crypto. They go after every major exchange and every major exchange

is pushing back and crypto.com, which incidentally, I reported just last week that crypto.com announced that they are relocating their US headquarters to my hometown where I office, Tyler, Texas. And then on the heels of that announcement, crypto.com is now filed for declaratory relief, asking a court to determine whether secondary sales of certain select tokens, including Solana and ADA, are in fact investment contracts. They believe they are not and they should not be subject to SEC regulation. So this is pretty similar to what we've been seeing. Just another iteration of the same arguments. It's kind of jumping on the back of the ripple argument regarding secondary sales that should not be considered investment contracts.

And we'll see if the court takes the bait on this one. I don't know. Right. So just to put this in context, I guess it's once again, they're effectively have sent a Wells notice, which is not an enforcement action, but it's basically saying there could be an enforcement action coming. Correct. And saying that it's for crypto asset securities, once again, basically saying that these things are unregistered securities at crypto.com has been selling this echoes the Coinbase case, obviously Kraken, a number of others. And I think the industry thought that maybe these would end when the Ripple decision originally came down saying that secondary sales were not securities offerings. But we now know that as of last week, the SEC is appealing that and is continuing sort of down this path of going after each exchange. I mean,

is that a pretty decent summary? Yeah, exactly. And in response to the Wells notice, you're seeing sort of the same playbook. They dropped the lawsuit this morning, filed a complaint against Gensler and the SEC seeking declaratory relief. So they're not waiting for the SEC to follow through on the Wells notice and file an enforcement action. They're taking the proactive stance of firing back and attacking directly. And we saw, was it consensus? The Ethereum Foundation consensus did the same thing, literally like within moments of getting the Wells notice, they filed suit.

Yep. Yeah. And this is sort of the new the new strategy here. And, you know, now we just need a court to actually, you know, consider this as opposed to waiting for enforcement action to come down. Because what they're seeking is they're seeking sort of a front run. They want a court to make a declaratory relief. They want a court to chime in on this and settle the score on whether these tokens are in fact on secondary marketplace trading securities or not. So more of the same. Zach, you're a lawyer as well. Just any quick takes here before we move on? Yeah, I agree. This is the new trend. I think honestly, a lot of this was sparked by the grayscale ETF win, that people realize that the SEC is not acting in good faith. And if you want

change, you have to bring your own affirmative lawsuits. I think we're going to see more of that over time. And maybe that will be a good tactical move. I think aside from the legal tactics, especially in cases where the SEC is coming after people for securities law violations, it's just good optics to say, rather than sitting back and waiting to be called a bad actor and violating the law to say, listen, we are filing this lawsuit because it's unclear. And now every time they're asked about the lawsuit, it's not that they're breaking the law. It's not that they're listing unregistered securities on their exchange. It's that they are litigating against the SEC on this issue. And so I think there are a bunch of reasons why they would do this. Makes a bunch of sense. So obviously,

that was not necessarily on the docket, but it broke basically right as we were sort of starting the show here. And definitely worth highlighting as breaking news, which we obviously do here. So you guys may remember that in the earlier days of this show, which we've been doing now for years, it's pretty crazy that every day, 10, 15am Eastern Standard Time on weekdays, we've been doing this now for that long. But not only did we do sort of new shows or topical shows, but we would take the time to focus on some of our favorite people in the space. Michael Saylor being on or Raoul Pal and Mo is one of my absolute favorites. And it gives us an opportunity, I think when the news cycle is a bit slower to focus in on more specific topics, more specific ecosystems, and have much longer and sort of deeper conversations about what's happening there.

And that's something that we as a team have been talking about doing a lot more of. And so we will have a lot more of these on the docket to give you more variety and more insight. And I wanted to invite Mo specifically. We spent a lot of time together in Singapore and well, and quite a few conferences now. I actually was lucky enough that they offered me a corner in their space to shoot a bunch of podcasts, which was awesome. And Mo and I spoke there. But we've seen this sort of narrative shift i think in the crypto space right now obviously it was first bitcoin and we had the ico eras of ethereum and then we have competitive you know layer one blockchains a topic that mo and i have spoken about quite a bit was that in the past it

was in there was not enough block space how are we gonna fill it with all the demand and now we have a lot of chains and a lot of block space. And now we need the killer apps to bring that mainstream adoption and to fill it up. But of late, we've seen Aptos, I would say Sui, some of the new layer ones really start to catch a bid from a trading perspective, but also try to start to catch fire with actual adoption. And so I want to bring Mo on to kind of talk about all those things that are happening at Aptos because, first of all, you killed me with the cards because I wasn't aware of it until we sat down, Mo. So maybe we should start there. But I want to talk about what you're doing in Japan. I think you're literally physically there working on that now. And then also beyond that, Franklin Templeton. So quite a few things happening right now in Aptos

that I think are driving this excitement. It's a pleasure to be here. Can you guys hear me okay? Hey, sound great. Amazing. And that's right, Scott. I'm here in Osaka, Japan. It's 11.25 p.m. here,

but I want to say good morning to your crowd. And well, you have a very global crowd so it's a pleasure to connect with everyone and excited to talk talk about not only kind of the next generation of l1 um uh and aptos kind of leading the way but all the use cases that i think are we're we're all really excited about so thanks for having me on the show today yeah for sure so listen to title here mainstream adoption of crypto right You and I have had this conversation, I think, now for years. What's going to be the next killer app? How are we going to get the next billion people?

I think those have literally been topics of our podcast in the past. And here we are kind of cycling up into the next cycle. And I think a lot of people are still asking that question, right? They'll say we have Bitcoin, we have stable coins. But when are these other things going to finally see meaningful adoption? But there's a lot of things that you are building that I know you believe could be that next sort of use case. I mean, maybe we should start with the card. Let's do it.

And just a quick recap for those who are new to Aptos. We've been at this for a very long time. And my journey personally started off in traditional finance. I was on Wall Street, working at places like BlackRock and thinking through a lot of the problems that we are trying to solve today. Fast forward, I ended up joining a company called ConsenSys very early on, where there was a core focus on how things like MetaMask, Truffle, and Infura could bring on people into Web3 beyond Bitcoin. And after working on that project, I realized we can go way beyond things like CryptoKitties. And in 2017, I built a product called Meridio, where we were trying to tokenize real estate, real world assets.

And the reason we were trying to do that is because there was a real value for that. You know, if you can own a piece of your own property, there can be much better outcomes for and from an economical perspective. You know, how many people actually ever get to own a piece of a place where they live in, let alone the entire place and so we wanted to start with that but it was a very challenging environment um you didn't have stable coins in in 2017 you didn't have qualified custodians and so it's a very and we've come a very long way um that company ended up getting fully acquired by consensus and

i started thinking well you know how is this infrastructure actually going to evolve? And a company called Facebook was building their own blockchain. And it was called the Libra or the DM project, as many of you might know. But the problem was very simple, but very powerful. It was all around how can you make money accessible globally? If you're sending a text to someone in WhatsApp, why can't you send them money across the world, right? Why can't Scott send money from New York to Japan instantly, just like a message floats? And so that problem was a very real problem. And if you look at money supply today, or just look at M2, you're talking about trillions of dollars of value that are moving. In fact, $5 trillion of value moves on a daily basis. And that's a very valuable problem for us to solve.

Of course, how do you actually get to that point? You have to have infrastructure that works. And so despite the challenges that we had inside of Facebook, we had built technology that was incredibly powerful for 4 billion people. We were able to leverage a lot of that technology and advance on it. That became Aptos. And fast forward two years later, we're coming in on our two-year anniversary in a couple of weeks here, having 99.99% uptime. You have incredibly reliable infrastructure. You have lightning fast infrastructure where you have end-to-end

sub-second latency. So Scott, when you send me that text, it moves within a second. This money on Aptos would also settle within one second. And transaction fees that are a thousand of a penny, essentially free. And so now you can actually have a network. Not only does it move as fast as text messages, but it rivals folks like Visa, MasterCard, ACH, DTCC. So real networks that are moving, again, trillions of dollars of value collectively on a daily basis. And that's a use case that we're incredibly excited about solving. In fact, you brought up folks like Franklin Templeton. We're making some of that happen with some of about solving. In fact, you brought up folks like Franklin Templeton. We're making some of that happen

with some of the world's largest companies, and I'm happy to dive into that too. Yeah, let's talk about that. So the news there, Franklin Templeton's FOBXX fund goes live on Aptos. This is about a week ago, right? Five days ago, maybe? That's right.

If you can say that five five times i think i got um yeah so you know what when we came across franklin templeton yeah there were no stranger um or no newcomer to blockchains and they had been looking really hard at which protocols can actually bring their vision to life a money market fund that allows for treasury yield to basically be accessible globally. How do you make that happen? And they had a product called Benji. The challenge was, how do you scale Benji to rival the existing networks that are out

there? And when they started to dive into Aptos and saw, well, now you finally have a network that's going to have the reliability that Franklin Templeton needs. You're going to have a network that's incredibly fast. You're going to have a network that is cheaper than any other payment or money movement network out there. And we're not talking about other blockchains. We're at the point now where we're competing with the biggest money networks out there in the world, the largest financial institution on trusted networks. So they ended up picking Aptos and we're really excited to have launched that money market fund.

And it shows you kind of two things now, right? Like one is you have a financial institution, a grade A product out there in market that is accessible globally, as long as you're able to do KYC. And when you do that, you get access to yields that are backed by financial institutions. And so that is incredibly powerful. That's a real use case that billions of people would love to get behind. And together with Franklin Templeton, that's not something that's coming in years from now. That's here today. And that is something that I think we can all be excited about when it comes to Web3 adoption. A hundred percent.

So I want to still talk about the card more. Because we kind of played with it and we handed it back and forth. Like on a day-to-day basis for your average retail person, this is an actual product that they can use every single day, right? That improves their experience with transactions and custom. That's right. That's right. So, you know, how do you go beyond, you know, now just having money in a Web3 wallet? We think wallets are powerful. They've done a great job of giving access to people. But so many of us are used to having a card where there with a company called Arculus. Arculus is the same company that creates the American Express Black Card and Platinum Card. And they created cold storage that allows you to put your APT or your stable coins right on that card.

It's a nice metal card. And when you tap that card against your NFC device or your phone, you can pair that card, that cold storage, right alongside your Web3 wallet. So you have your crypto with you exactly where you want to take it. And of course, you know, if we wanted to push that to make sure that if you're paying for coffee one day very soon. If you're accepting, if you're tapping at a small merchant business's iPhone to check out, you can pay directly with USDT, APT, or future stable coins. And that's really cool because all those assets on Aptos are now moving so damn fast, but are now available just like your regular credit card. And that card is going to be in your pocket. And it's going to make all your other cards very uncomfortable because this card has crypto backing it.

Right. And we've seen a lot of crypto credit cards in the past, but that's completely different. Right? Exactly. Exactly. This is not a credit card. This is, it's your crypto that you own in your available right there on your card itself. And so, you know, if you wanted to down the road, we can start to think about new forms of credit against that asset or different assets that you might be holding. But that'll be the beauty of this card, right? Like you have proof that you basically have these assets and you can even have real-time credit being extended to you through credit companies. And so we see the world of consumer financing

evolving very quickly. In fact, people forgot Visa and MasterCard, these companies, they haven't been around for as long as people think. And they were there to serve a particular demand of, well, if I'm not carrying a big suitcase of money and I want to be able to check out and I want to be able to pay, well, you eventually started off by writing in a cashier register and saying, I owe you. That eventually moved to a credit card,

working over telephone cables. Today, different technologies have come to market. And we see credit and consumer financing evolving with this new technology that's available. And so that's going to be super cool. And it's a great point that you that you called out. Yeah. So how do people get their hands on them, start to use them, start to actually put this into practice? And what assets can you actually spend using it? experience three weeks ago at our conference. And so they flew off the shelves. The first 500 cards were gone so quickly. And anyone that actually got a card that day, they got a randomized amount of either APT or USDT. And they're using that money today. We're opening that up very soon. So keep an eye out. In fact, if you're following and part of Scott's tribe, you'll get a code soon where you can apply for that card.

And we're going to make that available to your community. And that card will be coming very soon to a much larger group. But it's here, right? We're no longer talking about payments and having to worry about checking out with a Web3 clunky wallet experience in a browser. We're now going to have this card available for anyone so they can tap and pay with their Aptos assets.

And to your point on what kind of assets can you check out with, any asset that is on the Aptos network? What does that be? Stable coins. And we can we can talk a little bit about that and how they're evolving to, you know, you heard you heard your boy Elon and Cuban, right? They're going to be they're excited about Dogecoin. Right. So if you have Dogecoin wrapped on the Aptos network and that can be available through layer zero and wormhole bridges today. If that asset is accepted, you can pay with it. And so pretty much any asset, any Web3 asset that's out there in market, as long as it's accepted by people, you'll be able to use this card to check out with it.

You just brought up stablecoins. Obviously, that's one of the assets you'll be able to use. I think we all agree that that's been sort of a killer app for crypto in general. I mean, you highlighted and said you wanted to dig into it. So let's dig, I think, more into stable coins. It doesn't really have to be Aptos specific, obviously. But I think that it's one of the most compelling still use cases and is growing just at a tremendous rate. So still one of the main, I think, paths to mainstream adoption is digitized dollars. That's right. That's right.

And it's a good reminder for Aptos, we're focused on the globally connected economy. But how do economies run to your point? You got to have money. You need to be able to think about the backbone of how these economies run. And that is, you know, it's either your local currency or it's the US dollar. And so the thing that we're laser focused on is making sure the best form of money is available first. Once you get that right, the world is your oyster.

And so stablecoins that we've seen it, the early days of seeing things evolve from Tether to new forms of stablecoins like Ando, where we have USDY, to central bank digital currencies now being issued on-chain. And we're participating in all these different variants. Tether, excuse me, Tether, in fact, has been spending a lot of time digging deep into our technology. Think about how much money Tether moves across the world already from a Web3 perspective. Largest by far. They realized they need more reliable infrastructure to be able to scale their business and make more USDT available more efficiently, faster, cheaper.

And they chose Aptos to scale to their next sort of billion people. They're going to be going live very soon. And we're excited about USDT being available on Aptos in a few weeks or so. They're finishing up some of their final touches. But the cool thing about that is USDT, when it goes live on Aptos, will be the fastest moving dollar in the world. So we're not even talking like you can forget about Visa and MasterCard. You can forget about Swift and ACH. USDT on Aptos will be the fastest and most efficient moving dollar in the world.

That's a game changer. Yeah, there was news this week, actually, which I thought was huge, for better or for worse, that Swift has now gone past their testing phase, basically, of this technology, and they will also be utilizing blockchain to move assets. I mean, the largest incumbents in the world. We know that Visa and MasterCard both at certain levels are trying to adopt or explore, but is this one of those situations where they're starting to realize that it's either be the disruptor themselves or try to catch up or get disrupted and become sort of, you know, blockbuster to Netflix?

Oh man, you always steal my lines. That's right. I mean, Blockbuster, they were trying to figure it out. They just couldn't move fast enough. Netflix came and, I mean, they ate the video content creation distribution industry alive, right? They win more Oscars than anybody else today. So think about what they did to the entire entertainment industry. We're focused with a laser precision on money exactly. And you best believe ACH and Swift, DTCC, and all of these folks that people may not have heard of are now giants that are being woken up and forced to think about, okay, well, what do I do next?

The good thing is we're way ahead of the curve. They're all asking us questions, trying to figure out how they catch up in this space. And so this is where Aptos, of course, we want to disrupt the industry. But I think you probably know this, Blockbuster tried to acquire Netflix. It didn't work out. We're more collaborative for partners with a lot of these companies and similar to the work that we're doing, Franklin Templeton, you know, we're speaking with a lot of other large financial institutions and, uh, helping them

evolve and make sure that they stay relevant as well. Um, and if you think about Swift, like you can go, you can go take a look at their, uh, um, their latest reports. It's, it's pretty transparent on, you know, we, when we look at TVL and, it's pretty transparent. When we look at TVL as a metric in Web3, we count things in billions, right? And not even double-digit billions. If you look at how much money moves on one day with Swift, just one network alone, $5 trillion. They're talking about trillions of dollars moving one day on their network. We're counting pennies here in Web3. And so we better wake up and get laser focused on this.

And so this is exactly what we saw in our early days of Facebook. And it's the same thing that we're focused on in a much bigger and better way. And everyone is getting so excited about Aptos' vision and the technology finally being here to really challenge not only... You can forget about Ethereum and Solana. We're going after the sky now. We're going straight for the moon right now it's interesting my knee-jerk reaction to the swift news was this is huge for the technology but most likely just by the nature of swift they'll like use some private proprietary blockchain proprietary blockchain something like that i mean do you think that things like this will continue like you've done with Franklin Templeton to actually be opportunities for crypto incumbents, you know,

like crypto natives who have built this stuff before where these companies will just, at some point say, listen, like it's already built, it's already fast. What the hell are we doing? Trying to reinvent the wheel. Or do you think that because this is so disruptive to them, they'll try to gatekeep it and, you know, cause they still want their, their toll, right. They still want their their toll right they still want to be the third party in control so it's kind of a strange you know when they're maybe they're adopting the technology but they're gonna do it behind you know gatecaps

it's a it's a really good question and i think you know the world has come so far and even if you look at um you know regulators across the world and even you know the world has come so far. And even if you look at regulators across the world and even the world's largest financial institutions, Franklin Templeton has a trillion dollars of assets under management. They're not saying, oh, we're going to create our own blockchain or our own network. We've been there. We've been through the world of the intranet where everyone has their own private networks. And those private networks are very clunky. They were very expensive to maintain, and they're very difficult to continue to improve on. And when we designed, again,

going back to our Facebook days, when we designed this network, we designed it in a way that anyone could eventually use it. And now that's live. And so if you want safety, security, if you want to have all the kind of robustness of a private network, those things are available right here on Aptos public mainnet. You can have, you know, things like asset controls that, you know, someone like Swift might want, or Franklin Templeton might want, or USDT might want. And so you don't need to create your own network. You can use the best damn network out there in the market today. And, you know, we, we have a lot of exciting stuff coming up in the future that all that are sort of paved the way out there. And, you know, like the simplest,

the second point to your question is an interesting one. Like, you know, will they still try to gatekeep? I think everyone loves to to gatekeep but you just can't deny better tech at the end of it right like imagine you had you know scott uh well you know let's say mo had a two-lane highway that he operates in his city right and he charges a toll to get on that highway but let's say scott comes along with his his you know wolf street gang and they're much better highway builders they can build more efficient highways they get concrete cheaper they know how to properly design the roads and next thing you know right next to moe's road or swiss road let's call it you got a five lane or 10 lane or 20 lane super highway where there's no tolls it's absolutely

free all right and which which Highway are you going to take I'm I'm picking the I'm picking the Aptos Highway all day right and so you could you could try to gatekeep but when you have better highways out there everyone knows the everyone flocks to to the most efficient solution out there as long as they just don't start throwing like a bunch of like road blocks and burning cars on our highway to try to stop us they can but that's why you got 20 lanes you get around it no matter what and so like listen we talked about the fact obviously now i mean you guys have had so many announcements in the last week, I don't even know what to talk about here. But you're in Japan right now.

Like you said, it's like, you know, 1145 at night. Aptos Labs enters Japan through hash palette acquisition. So another one. What does this mean? Man, the hits keep coming. It means we've been working goddamn hard. That's what it means. But we spent a lot of time, to your point, right?

Like we're late. We're really trying to think through, where are the mainstream adoption users? And we started spending some time with Hash Palette through one of our relationships. And we discovered that they're actually the designated, the exclusive blockchain for the Osaka World Expoo and we were scratching our head like how did that happen right and so and they're looking at a blockchain thinking how the hell did you guys build this

network that's like so powerful and so you know we started talking to each other sharing thoughts um yeah showing showing, showing features that we have. They were talking about how they want it to be completely seamless for the 2025 world expo. And maybe I'll just pause there for a second. Not that many people know about the 2025 world expo. People know about the Olympics, um, that happens every four years, but the world expo happens every five years. And this year it's happening in Osaka. Sorry, next year it's happening in Osaka. There's 28 million people that are expected to roll through the Expo next year, coming from all over the world. And that's a multiple of what we saw

for something like the Olympics. And all of these people are going to be experiencing the local Japanese markets. They're going to be going to restaurants. They're going to be going to different experiences. There's NBC Universal theme park here in Osaka. People might want to go there. And so you can imagine all these things people will do. How are they going to pay for things? How are they going to capture their moments and their experiences?

And so Hash Palette was designing the wallet as part of that for these people. They needed help. And once we started sharing each other's strengths, we knew we had to work closely with them. In fact, we ended up realizing Hash Palette could potentially get acquired by us and we can take on this challenge for them. And so to your point on the announcement, a couple of days ago, a few days ago, we announced that we are going to be entering the Japanese market in a very big way by acquiring this network, making Aptos the exclusive blockchain for the wallet of the World 2025 Expo. So those 28 million people, when they're going to be capturing their coupons, their checkouts.

In fact, I just ate at a restaurant that's part of the World Expo. And you get an unbelievably seamless experience where you don't even have to remember any seed phrase or worry about the clunkiness of Web3, all powered by Aptos on the backend. And that'll be going live in April when the World Expo kicks off. I'm reading the point. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. And I was going to say on that point, I don't think anyone's ever pulled this off, acquiring another blockchain. And so we had to say on that point, I don't think anyone's ever pulled this off acquiring another blockchain. And so we had to do a lot of work, spend a lot of time with regulators, a lot of time really thinking about how hash palette token holders will look at APT. And so there's going to be a conversion process where anyone that owns PLT, which is their native token, will soon have Aptos, and they're very excited about that.

And so it's kind of been an amazing sort of blast off into Japan for us. We really love all the energy from the Japanese market. And we think that's a very powerful market that continues to extend us beyond Korea, beyond Singapore and some of the work that we've been doing deeply in these markets and continuing to march forward in what we think will be a very large market for crypto. In fact, there was recent clarity on regulation. We're getting even more clarity in Japan around more beneficial tax structures for crypto. And you're seeing governments really see the opportunity. And we're right there in Japan and super happy about the HashPilot acquisition. So when you read it, this on Cointelegraph, it describes HashPilot as a Japanese non-fungible

token service provider. So I have to ask you about, I guess, NFTs in general. I mean, I think it probably could extrapolate to Aptos, but like, do you think that we're going to see another sort of hype cycle and some actual real usage and adoption of NFTs moving forward here? And I knew you're going to ask me this question. I had a feeling it was coming. I mean, the NFT hype cycle, it always comes roaring back when we see crypto markets sort of bubble up. And I think it's just always in a different form. We don't know what that form is going to look like for this next cycle, but we're absolutely

going to be enabling NFTs in a much more powerful way where, you know, in the past, if you had to trade your NFT on Ethereum, you had to pay a pretty significant fee if everyone else is doing it. And it was very slow. Similarly, when you're in the Solana ecosystem, you're getting significant failure rates when you're trying to push those things through. And we saw an amazing meme culture really bubble up. So the future, I mean, we're going to be enabling NFTs in a much more powerful way. And NFTs will have a lot, I mean,

they already have a lot of utility on Aptos today. So if you think about, you know, if Scott goes to a restaurant and has a meal, he might get a commemorative NFT for eating at this particular restaurant. That NFT can be, you know be maybe tradable with the restaurant itself for a discount in the future. Maybe there are affiliate restaurants that are also open to accepting. And maybe Scott was just in Japan for a couple of days, and now his boy Mo is coming through.

He can send those NFTs directly to Mo and Mo can take advantage. And so NFTs are so powerful. They change the world of previous old day cookies and trying to figure out what your provisioning will look like. Now you can have much more robust experiences with NFTs in your wallet that show true consumer behavior, but you share that consumer behavior with the people you trust, the people you know, and even the brands and the partners that you want to continue to work with. And so it's a much smarter evolution beyond the world of cookies. And we think NFs are going to become really powerful um in uh in this next wave is this like a 2025 thing or are we like kind of early

still i mean i know it's we're gonna see it uh in practice i just you know we mainstream adoption of crypto with motion right that's our title so like uh is this uh you know we're gonna see like tens or hundreds of millions of people using this, you know, are we going to see like tens or hundreds of millions of people using these things, you know, in the coming two years? Yep. Here. Sorry, I think I lost you there for a second.

Nope, I'm back. Can you hear me? Yeah, just trying to figure out like, I mean, I know we're terrible at timelines, but you know, I think I'm trying to parse what's going to be real now and what's in a five, 10 year process. I think it's all a timeline. But, you know, which of these things are we going to be screaming about in 2025? Yeah, I think it kind of happens slowly and then suddenly. And, you know, we really won't even know once the infrastructure changes. It'll just, it'll just be here and it'll feel very similar and it'll feel very familiar. And

if you think about, you know, where we went from, you know, entering our credit card information manually to, you know, Apple or Android, please remember my credit card information and never ask me about it ever again. Like that happened pretty, pretty damn quick. And we see a similar cycle happening for NFTs. And the funny thing is like, we're testing this stuff in very smart and very quiet and powerful ways. In fact, last year we did, we launched two movies with NBCUniversal.

And what we did basically there was if you came and played a game for Renfield or for The Exorcist, you played a game and you got a prize. And that prize happened to be an NFT. That NFT was a signal to NBC that you like Renfield, that you like The Exorcist, or more categorically, you like horror movies. And so now, if you're willing to share that info with NBC, maybe NBC is willing to give you a discount on movies or popcorn, or give you a sneak peek or first access to the next horror movie. In fact, maybe if you're rolling through Osaka, Japan, where they happen to have a universal theme fact, maybe if you're rolling through Osaka, Japan, where they happen to have a universal theme park, maybe you get to go to Halloween horror nights when no one else does because it's a highly sought after ticket. So you get exclusive access. And so it's not a tomorrow thing or 2025 thing. This is stuff that we're doing already today.

And it's going to turn around into mass adoption with some of the largest brands in the world without anyone even noticing. And so we're super, super focused on that. But this brings us back to the same point, like real use cases, real consumer adoption, and working with some of the world's largest companies to make that actually happen. And so whether that be starting with things like money and then going up to things like loyalty um and uh and more uh interesting consumer uh or consumption uh type products as well hey fam i know it's like midnight there so i really like it i'm gonna let you go but anything i might have missed here that's uh's worth discussing here in this last couple of minutes.

No, I think I appreciate you, uh, you covering us Scott and get giving us a shout out. And also I just want to give a special shout out to the, to the community. I think the app toss community has been phenomenal, but most importantly, I love, uh, the, the, the Scott Melker community. And, uh, so, uh, I hate him to say that. No, not well, well, I mean, of the Scott Melker community. And so I'm still waiting for us to get on the basketball court. Yeah. Our next space is about basketball. Or DJing. I want to get into both of those topics next time.

Yeah, for sure. People don't realize that Mo was a world-class baller in Brooklyn before all of this. They think you're just a casual yoga guy with cool hair. I appreciate that. We'll do the next one on video on the basketball court. Yeah, go ahead. Someone jumping in. Go ahead, Alex. I'm not sure, Alex. Can you hear me? Dude, Alex, we can't hear you you got a terrible connection

bring it down bring it back up don't know what's going on all right cool all right thank you very much I know Mario is about to jump on right now but really appreciate the time and staying up late for this I'm happy we had this conversation I hope we can get more updates in the future.

My pleasure. I'll leave it to you, Scott. See you, Mario. Thanks, man. Mario, what up? Hey, man. How are you? I'm good.

How are you? Good, man. Good, good. You ready for the hurricane? I know. I'm leaving right now to go start really heavily prepping. Has it eased up or no? They're expecting it to go, uh, start, uh, really heavily prepping. Has it eased up or no? Oh, they're expecting it to go up and down. As of yesterday,

it was like effectively the third most, uh, intense hurricane ever recorded. Um, it had gusts over 200 miles per hour, but it's chilled out by like 20, 20, 25 miles per hour. Now it has this exceptionally small like eye of the hurricane, only 3.8 miles wide. So it's kind of one of those things where wherever it does hit, it's going to get absolutely annihilated. But outside of the more immediate area, actually, for everyone else, it might be a little less

intense. So I think people are just really focused on where it's going to make land. We're a bit inland, so we're going to get a shit ton of a big storm. But people are actually evacuating to where I am, like all of our families coming up and just really focused on where it's going to make land. We're a bit inland, so we're going to get a shit ton of a big storm. But, you know, people are actually evacuating to where I am, like all of our families coming up and staying with us. They're all arriving now. Yeah, so essentially what happens,

so there's two factors you're watching for now, where it lands and the strength because that fluctuates as well. So, you know, if we're going to be optimistic, it could get weaker and obviously it could get worse as well. We don't correct yeah i mean that that's about as strong as a hurricane can possibly be mathematically at that point in these waters so i think the prognosis is that it probably gets better weakens a bit before it hits and then yeah i think most people are just you're hoping it doesn't just plow directly into like the most populated area. It could, which would be, you know, kind of Tampa Bay, St. Pete. Like Helene was obviously awful, but if you take a silver lining, it didn't, when it made land, you know, at the most strong, at the strongest point,

when the high hit, it was in a less populated area. The big problem here is that why there's so many evacuations and so much panic is that Tampa Bay just flooded and right now could get literally like the direct hit. So that like four or five, six miles swath and obviously, you know, maybe 20 or 30 could just get, you know, absolutely devastated. And like all these people are still reeling from the last one. I mean, their furniture from the last flood is sitting out on their yard and those are all like projectiles and the city hasn't even been able to clean up the last one it's really a crazy situation so we're just helping everyone get the hell out of there and and uh hoping for the best year obviously so like uh certainly i may not be here tomorrow thursday friday depending

on power and internet and such yeah all good i got you um you. Good luck. Keep us posted. Yeah, good job now. Thank you, guys. All right, Jem, are you there? Jem, guys, are you there? Hey, guys. Can you hear me? Yeah, your audio is really bad. I hope you can fix it. Let me check it. Oh, it's good now.

Yeah, it is. Where are you based? I'm right now in Indonesia So that's why it can be a little bit of a problem with connection It's also quite a midnight for myself Yeah I'm sorry it's midnight But the connection is really bad man So you got to fix it

By the way Bali is incredible If anyone hasn't been, Bali is an incredible city. And spend time. And I went there for three weeks. I've been there years ago. Went there for three weeks. One of the most incredible places to spend time. And I met a lot of people from Bali when I went to talk in 2049

because Singapore is close by. But yeah, man, is your connection fixed? Because obviously that's a requirement. We have to be able to speak. You there, man? Wait a required you know we have to be able to speak yeah man oh wait a sec maybe right now is better yeah man yeah we'll give it a shot yeah we'll give it a shot if it doesn't work we'll have we'll have to redo it another time but yeah man so uh i'm actually pretty excited for this because obviously we're pretty big in gaming that still hasn't gotten the love that it deserves. But how would you describe GEM? Because the way I look at it,

it's a platform that makes it easier to build Web3 games and for players as well to interact with Web3 games. That's how I understood it, but maybe I understood it wrong. Can you explain what GEM is? Yeah, so basically, first of all, guys, really happy to have everyone today. Happy for being here. Mario, thanks a lot for having time. Scott, I think, already dropped off, but really hope he's going to be okay with devastated hurricanes coming up for his place. Talking about our platform, so we kind of like, you know, you can describe us as a team for Web3. And the main idea of what we want to bring to the space

is that right now, I think we need to admit that the pie of gamers in Web3 is not growing as fast as we want. We got 3.2 billion players worldwide, and we don't even have 1% of them playing Web3 games. And the main problem is that we don't know how to acquire them, we don't know how to drive them to Web3 games. And the main problem is that we don't know how to acquire them. We don't know how to drive them to Web3 games because the level of entry barrier is such high. We don't know what to do. People don't want to go where they start to play. What we are doing is that we are lowering the barrier of going to our space as much as possible. And we finally built an

infrastructure that's supposed to be in Web3. So we're building the rules, how it's supposed to be in Web2 gaming world. So you get a launcher, you get exposure, you got the infrastructure platform, you got everything you want as a game developer. And as a gamer, you know where to find games and you got all proper user journey in terms of doing that. If you're not on the launcher, you're not on the market so that's what we're trying to bring to the space and finally be in this situation that's interesting so essentially make it easier to build a web 3 game because i'm actually going to be asking you a lot how you can integrate web 2 and web 3 elements i want to understand how the token works and all this i've got a few questions but high level you're essentially a platform like

steve for steam for web 3 games where you allow anybody to create to build their own web3 games and then you make it easier for players to find the game of their choice correct yeah exactly so basically like you know we can integrate your game to our platform and from that point a gamer would wouldn't have any problems of uh you're going to uh buying someone nfts buying some crypto you can do everything from one platform no problems with doing and doing wallets how is also like you know a very big problem for a web to player web to player because i don't want to do anything with crypto we're doing with custodial wallet system when it got automatic registration automatic sort of wallet creation so in this case you're doing with custodial wallet system when you got automatic registration automatic sort of wallet creation so in this case you're doing everything super smoothly like you're in web to

where away in the world okay and then how would the token fit into all this so in this kind of like you know i would say two main iterations so like two main signs so we're like a tokens of the games yeah and they're right talking about platform so we're talking about talking uh talks of the game it's very simple you can buy and sell tokens uh throughout platform yeah super easy uh and getting them on the wallets of our launcher but if we're talking about our uh talking it's a little bit more complicated it's kind of like a bloodstream of a platform we're using it for engaging and entertainment of the players so you got your token self dj for different types of uh events tournaments quests and so on for example one of the things that we're creating

is going to be live in november it's sdk for in-game quests so you're doing something in the game for example q100 monsters and immediately you got your token rewards in your wallet. So in this case, we eliminated the sense to do and to place these games anywhere except our launcher. And the main point over here is that these tokens give you different status on the platform. So if you've got a certain amount of tokens, you've got status, you've got additional bonuses bonuses additional events uh some access to close and uh else's and badges of the games and a lot a lot of

different bonuses for yourself so it's kind of a way to decide from the place so essentially to use the platform as a whole so for gamers to be able to use your tools they need to use the token correct for no game is for game developers and then for gamers also to be able to leverage the platform and get all these different perks that they have to hold the token yeah i'm guessing stake the token for that yeah yeah yeah exactly so we kind of like you know doing this demand supply stuff in our mind but also entertaining in terms of hey guys we got like a plane element over here get our talking token, get bonuses. Don't have token, no bonuses. Sorry for that.

Okay. And then I want to go back a step. How do you, so how does it work when you integrate Web2 and Web3 elements in those games? Like what are the hurdles that Web3 game developers face? And then how can your platform help them with the tokenomics so they can figure it out because i think building web 3 games is very complex especially when you have to integrate web 2 and web 3 elements yeah exactly so the one of the main thing like we're doing with the games right

now is uh full synchronization with the launcher so for example when you go in for uh some game like you know and if the game is on a Aptos, yeah, Aptos chain, or immutable chain, or other chain, and so on and so forth. You all the time need different tokens, you need different wallets and so on and so forth. What we are doing, we're creating one custodial wallet with a synchronization to all of these games. So, synchronizing, you're doing with that, and then you don't need to use another wallet, in this case, to enter the game. And it helps a lot in terms of game developers just from the sense, hey guys, right now, gamers can easily come to your game driven from web to space because right now you don't

have barriers just to try to play the game. Because you know, current gamer, he don't want to spend more than five minutes to understand how to start to play a game okay but so but can you expand a bit further on me so it's a bit of a selfish question like what are the challenges so someone if someone's building a game a web 2 game i know it's a lot more difficult to integrate web 3 elements into it what's the process like obviously how you guys help them but more probably like what's the process like obviously how you guys help them but more like what's the process like and what are the hurdles that you'd face because you have you have you know one way of doing it is like to slowly integrate web three elements but then another this is like two theories one of them is you build a web to your game and you slowly integrate nft you slowly integrated

tokenomics um structure um and then the other method would be to have a Web3 game from the foundation built as a Web3 game. And there's arguments being made for both for the for the first one where you have a Web2 game, you integrate Web3 elements, the argument is that it's very difficult to integrate Web3 elements when you don't build from the foundation Web3 game or Web3 ecosystem. And then the counter argument, when you don't build from the foundation web3 game a web3 ecosystem and then the counter argument when you build something web3 from the beginning if you up the tokenomics

there's no way going back so that's the then then the entire game is flawed and i used to use the example a few years ago i think yeah talked about it or however we talked about it there's a game that was um that had like a glitch within it it's a web 3 game but because it was built directly on the blockchain the game became useless because the glitch was like the horses there was a glitch that allowed horses to slip and when they slip they die and when they die they die like they keep dying infinity they keep slipping oh my god and then all the horses started slipping eventually and then the game if i remember correctly and then the game just wouldn't work anymore. So that's kind of a flaw within building something Web3 from the foundation. But I want to get your thoughts. What's better? Having

a Web2 game and integrating it to Web3 or starting from the get-go as Web3? You know, it's a very tricky question because I would say if you're building from a foundation and you're building from the scratch and you understand, yeah, I want to be in a Web3 space, of course, you need to be on a Web3 or root, I would say. But there is also interesting, I would say, case right now, what is happening in the space. For example, Square Enix, one of the biggest game developers in Japan, what they're doing right now, they're driving their old titles and old games and

integrating Web3 elements inside of their games to give them new life in the space. Yeah, and to drive more attention again to the games. And I would say that it's also an interesting way to revive old titles, give them additional attention and drive new players to that. So kind of, I would say, I would try to be on both sides. Firstly, say, if you're doing from the scratch, yeah, foundation of Web3 is better. If you want to revive your own title

or you want to give a new exposure, of course, you can go with additional elements. So you're saying both models work. So if there's a Web3 game listening now, they want to come on your platform. Can you just give us an idea of why, why your platform, like sell it to us? Like who are your investors? How many games you have on there as well? Is there any metrics, any backers, any team members that'd be like, Hey, we got to check these guys out. Yeah. So, uh, in terms of like, you know, right now we got the route,

I would say it's a moment 45 games from the launchers is to like, you know, we got around, I would say, at the moment, 45 games from the launchers. It's to this current date. Basically, we're adding around five, six, seven games every week. So I hope it will be... And how do you incentivize them? Just like, hey, we have users on the platform. That's how you get users. Give them exposure.

Yeah. One of the main things over here this first of all of course exposure marketing is in terms of that second one is technical basics so for example uh if a game is coming to us and saying hey guys we got a lot of teeth to do right now we got a lot of things to develop we're saying hey guys we can cover some parts of you you can use our wallet you can use our marketplace you can use all make it easier can use our marketplace, you can use all of the... To make it easier for the man. Here, here, here, here. Yeah, because they don't need to develop it from scratch right now. They can use our infrastructure, like for example, Web2 games doing for Steam. They come in for Steam and they send, hey, I can use these iterations and this part

and don't need to develop by myself. For example, like, you know, just to update the game because we're doing this for you. Another part is that what we are doing, we're driving community to you and giving you attention. For example, we've mentioned this in-game quest. So we're saying to a gamer, hey, we got a daily quest happening in this game that's right now new on our launcher. You can try it out. And the person is going just to have a daily reward from tokens. But then he's trying out the game and saying, hey, I like it very much. I want to try it more. And then he's coming back to play in the game,

not because of our daily reward, but because he loves the game generally. But maybe in other cases, he wouldn't try it. Okay. Just going back to the question again, who are your backers? Who are your investors? And when is your token launching?

Yeah. So right now we got one of our main backers who are your investors and um when is your token launching yeah so right now we got uh one of our main makers is uh our first accelerator your hub right now our second accelerator with like you know program we're helping with is uh brink we got gta capital on board we got one of our games by the way against the kish is our bakery capital sorry who did you say gga or gda doctor gd oh gda capital zach and um fuck i forgot zach and my michael yeah i know michael really well zach i don't know i know both of them really well but michael i see him a lot more okay nice all right cool uh i know gda really well and uh so any other investors and then do you have an exchange and launchpad like i just wanted to get some names on who's involved yes right now we go we got mexican firm right now we passed some due diligence on kucoin hope we're gonna finger cross we're gonna answer that on uh day

or two uh and also we got confirmed with our lunch pass is uh game five and we started we got this parallel location got around 15 inquiries of going to this rest of the location. I wouldn't say there's a lot of, pretty much space right now and a big competition for that public location. So we're going to see who we're going to give it, but it's kind of a first right now for a bit. Do you have a launch date yet? We're going in, we didn't find like, you know,

the proper launch date because we're going on Verichain right now. We are also waiting on mainnet announcement on Verichain, but we are expecting to go in the end of Q4. So this year, so the next two months, two and a half months. Exactly. Yeah. Have you spoken to any exchanges yet or is it a bit too early? Just to mention that we're spoken right now with KuCoin and also started to spoken with Bybit and OKeeks. Alright, man. Well, really cool.

I think it's a really cool update. I appreciate you having us on the cap table. I love what you guys are building. I think what you guys are doing is something that's needed in this space. If you play your cards right, I think you do really really well curious if you look into the metrics a bit more like i think the the most important metrics i think one thing in crypto um there's like one foundational metric that every like a game or or any any startup should really focus on for example if you're a, daily active users and retention rate

are the most important metrics. The most, most important ones daily active users. And then you walk up, you walk on the way up because if retention rate is useless without users.

So it's like that one thing, you know, going back to whatever his name, Peter Thiel's book, the one thing. And I think you guys, the one thing you guys

need to focus on is having a community of gamers. Once you have the gamers, the games will flock. So I think if you put all your focus on gamers coming to your platform because your platform is fucking sick, but obviously then you'd kill it.

But there's always a chicken and egg problem. Gamers want to come because there's games. Games want to come because there's gamers. So you got to kind of bring gamers, games, gamers, games. You got to bring them simultaneously. One will come with the other. And then what you got to do is one thing you can really do,

a lot of games have their own communities. get games, like make it a requirement. If they come on your platform and you can give them perks, games have to promote you to their community. I think if you do that as well, if you ask games, Hey, to come on a platform, you have to promote us to your community. You'll get an even higher success rate. But I think that's what you need to do, man. I think you guys are on it. I don't know how many gamers you have on your platform. I think we know about games, you're getting about 67. Make sure you focus heavily on the gamers

and everything else will follow because you'll get organic demand for your token that way. Exchanges will just line up to come after you. Don't worry about getting too many exchanges at the beginning, wasting money on that. Just focus on that one metric and i think you guys would kill it but i'm really glad to be on your cap table to be part of the journey if i come back to bali which i'm seriously considering um i'll definitely hit you up and um yeah i'll give you my whatsapp number do you have pen and paper uh yeah you can i guess what's up you can write in uh

it's my number is plus my number is plus nine seven one four four eight two three five five five i'm joking i'm joking it's not my number my number but i'll send it to you via dm and then you could uh we could chat uh private i'll get my team to send it to you, but then we could chat privately and I'll, I'll hit you up when I'm in Bali, but otherwise love what you guys are building. Really glad to be on your cap table. Thanks for coming on the show. And for everyone else, we'll see you again tomorrow for another show. And depending on the hurricane, we'll see if Scott will join us tomorrow, but it's, um, yeah, it's a pretty crazy time time for, for all of us,

anyone in the middle East and obviously now anyone in Florida. Good luck to you all and we'll see you again tomorrow. Thanks a lot. What was your name, sorry sir? My name is Nick Geiss. I'm the CEO of the company and thanks a lot for having attention to my speech today for our product. Thanks a lot Mario and really take care of you in these very turbulent times in all ways. My team is messaging me right now. She's like, Mario, we're all freaking out on the back channel

because my team listens to the space from a technical perspective to make sure everything is good. They were all freaking out and giving my number on the air. They think I'm that stupid. I'm pretty upset my team thinks I'm that dumb of a person.

All right, cool. I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much, everyone. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye. See you. Bye-bye. Thank you a lot, guys.