The Wolf Of All Streets - Money Flooding Bitcoin Market | Altcoins Doomed? Crypto Town Hall With Brian D. Evans, Hany Rashwan, Josh Goodbody & Others

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

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All right, let's kick this off. Brian, how are you? Doing great, man. Are we in a bull market? I think so. I think so. I think we saw a little pullback here, but I think we're heading towards the bull market. Cool, but how's the sentiment of people around you, man? Are they generally positive? Is it moving towards greed? Or you think people are still skeptical of the bounce back that we've had? No, I don't think we're moving towards greed just yet. I think we've got a long ways to go. People are still skeptical, so that's why i think there's a lot more to go

the the sentiment is definitely it's moving in that direction but it's you know uh people are still at it then for sure okay that's a good thing and if we see greed that early that'll be concerning is it too but the the positive sentiment, is it towards altcoins or purely Bitcoin? Just considering Gary Gensler's love for crypto. Yeah, I think it's more towards Bitcoin at the moment and people are scared of alt. It's just the regular narrative of money's going to, you know,

as Bitcoin pumps out, everything else is going to bleed and people are a little scared with alts and NFTs and things like that. But we are seeing some interesting things on that side too, but yeah, I think people are a little scared. They're kind of more focused on Bitcoin East, you know, sort of

the majors. Cool, man. I've sent out all the invites. Josh, I've sent you an invite. Paddy, good to have you. Hany as well. Scott is there and he'll be with us shortly. Dave, how are you? Dave, can you hear me oh while waiting for dave to come on paddy how you doing man hey mario good thanks man thanks for having me goodbye good so just a quick question for you when are you changing uh

your pfp uh not saying sell it keep, but when are you changing it on Twitter? Never. What do you want me to change it to? What? What? Oh, your face. Now, are you doxxed? No, I'm not doxxed. Ah, cool, man. Just DM me your details. See how much you trust me.

Whenever someone says to me I'm not doxxed, to see if they house and see there how much they trust me, I ask them to DM me their details. So, I thought, well, shit, respect. So, then you got no choice but to keep your PFP. much they trust me i asked them to dm me their details so uh i thought well shit respect so then you got you got no choice but to keep your pfb yeah i've been left with no choice i built the brand around it so we're gonna stick with that for now how's that your question look i've built i'll build my brand around the punk um and then i i kept saying to myself i'll stick with it i'll stick with it until i got to a place where i just couldn't stick with it anymore so so uh yeah i had to change it so uh i um like because i was doing all these political shows and then talking about the ukraine war or the the mutiny in russia or what i call coup or mutiny and discussing all these very so covid all these sensitive topics and yet i've got this this

smiling ugly picture that many people don't even know it's an nft and uh it just became such a uh not i would say liability of such a headache that i had to change it that makes complete sense i mean you've expanded obviously into different areas you're not just you're not just talking about crypto so i think to have a punk or any sort of you know nft NFT is probably not the wisest choice. Yeah, while warming up the space, so Ryan will be joining us in a bit and Scott is here with us.

He'll be able to speak in a bit as well. But I want to, and we'll kick off the show in a bit. But the question to you, Paddy, is how are NFTs doing, man? Yeah, so I think obviously depends on the ecosystem. We've seen over the last week or two that each NFT has had a bit of a capitulation, a lot of liquidations.

Your blue chips, your board apes, your Azuki is honestly dropping immensely in full price. When was that? Are you talking over the last few months or are you just talking recently in the last few days or weeks? In particular in the last few days and weeks.

What happened? Why that? Because i'm just seeing all these headlines pop up in these different spaces talking about bloodbath but what triggered it especially with the blue chips sure i think it's uh obviously there was a lot of azuki fud um so i think that that was a bit of an isolated one if you're looking at azuki's full price drop, they released a new collection and they raised, I think, $40 million. There was a lot of kickback from the community. The art was very similar to the original NFTs. With the Bored Apes and all the other collections, to be honest, I think it's just a complete shift at the moment obviously where the market is not really such a you know it's that that sort of nft boom i think has come to to an end the bubble popped um i think we saw i saw an interesting graph

about rolex and particularly prices also having dropped a lot since november 2021 well hold on why is that is that just because the... I would say that... Actually, I'm not going to try to guess. These assets are just completely luxury things. I suppose you can call them an investment,

but at the end of the day, I think there's just less of an appetite for that sort of an asset. So you see, less of an appetite. Is that just because the general economic situation

that we're facing? I would say so, yeah. But then wouldn't you, and I know this is unrelated to the agenda, we'll kick off the agenda shortly, just waiting for Rand to pop in, but wouldn't watches and those assets, to an extent, a bit more recession-proof? Because these are only owned by the wealthy, and the wealthy tend to be okay even during recessions yeah i suppose so but you must remember that obviously you're

sort of middle class and maybe pricing priced out at this point they're not they're not as successful out doing so well so maybe your new entrance into the markets are are diminishing you know i would look at it like that and. And then we also saw the punks. It's been a while now that the punks flipped the apes. And I know we're kind of digging deeper to NFTs. And how are the other, last question I have for you, man, is how are the other ecosystems doing? How are Solana NFTs doing?

Also, did they also bleed? But D-Guards is still leading there, I think. No, so D-Guards moved over to Ethereum. Oh, yeah, they did. Yes, I forgot. I forgot. Interestingly, Solana NFTs have actually been growing over the last couple months.

So that's been interesting to see the activity on Sol increasing while the activity on Ethereum is decreasing. I think it's because Solana is basically at the moment primarily an NFT chain. I think most of the users there are playing

around with NFTs, trading NFTs and in that NFT fire space as opposed to the DeFi space which I think is sort of where Ethereum is a bit hotter. And then is there still the hype around ordinals or we're done with that? Yeah, I think there is.

The volume is still pretty good on ordinals. I think the issue with ordinals I've noticed is that you know it's the new mints are coming very quick obviously everyone's trying to jump on board and there's a lot

of cash grabs so I think it's quite difficult to play the market as a trader but I don't think the hype is dead there at all and i think it will continue to grow and what do you think of when and rand is here so i'm gonna ask him to give us a daily update because he just comes from his uh shitty youtube show to come do this great twitter space so i'd get a come to give us a quick update on on his show but um patty one thing rand was

talking about yesterday is that he doesn't i don't think think he owns, he doesn't own many NFTs and he's more bullish on NFT marketplace tokens as a better way to get exposure to the space rather than specific elections and blue chips. Do you think it's a smart strategy? I do. I do, especially if you're not interested in owning and trading NFTs themselves. I think everyone should have exposure to NFTs in some way because I myself and many you have to remember you have to remember that Paddy has to watch what he says here because he's one of our he's one of our researchers so you've got to be careful no wonder he's here man I was I was I swear to you he's speaking and I knew there's something happening because he's speaking in your same accent your your your weird South African accent so I knew him like I was gonna was gonna say like are you here because ryan invited you because you guys are gonna have

the same accent because i've never seen him on stage before there's not normally yeah you you invited that you hired the guy one of mine patty's one of my what do you mean i had the guy sits in my office next door means man he's uh now he's one of our best researchers now i'm so sorry patty shit you see you say the same office as Ran, man, with Fred as well. Yeah, Fred's a bit more tolerable. Yeah, Fred is incredible, but me and Fred were talking about

being in the same office as Ran. So, man, my heart is with you. So you can't disagree with him. Well, Ran, I won't ask him that question anymore because he's too biased. Tell us about your show, man. What did you talk about today? How are the markets looking? look is a daily interview you'll be um you'll be excited to know that i did

my show based on a sentence that you said yesterday um yesterday you spoke about the previous bull market and tokens that are going to survive and today i made a show about the only five tokens that are going to survive this next attack. And I think there's only going to be five, and I made a show around the tokens that are going to survive. What I did was I went to 2017, and I looked at the bull market of 2017, and I looked at the top 200 coins

on the days where Bitcoin Cash was the third biggest altcoin, or the third biggest coin it was bitcoin ethereum bitcoin cash iota was number seven dash was number eight nem was number nine bitcoin gold was the number 11. and then i tracked those tokens to where we are today and which token actually hit an all-time high after the 2017 bull market. Now, I only found 27 tokens in total that hit a higher price that were around in 2017 and actually broke an all-time high in 2021. That's what we did. 20, hold on, 27 tokens, because I think you or Scott mentioned it yesterday. You're saying 27 tokens in total hadn't broke new all-time highs?

We identified 27. I'm sure there were more because there were about 20,000 tokens. But I mean... I'm talking 27 and let's say I assume you look at like let's say

the top couple of hundred. Yeah, top couple of hundred. So Bitcoin had an all-time high. Ethereum had an all-time high. Sandbox had an all-time high. Doge had an all-time high. Cardano did.

So, you know, I just went to all those tokens to see which ones of them actually had all- time highs again. And it's not a lot. It's like 0.1% or 0.01% of tokens

actually all time high. And I think the message that I gave the community today, and it's one of the most important shows that I've ever done, is to say, look, let's put this bullshit

of communities aside. Let's put this bullshit of Twitter, of Twitter communities and Twitter shillers aside. Let's put this bullshit of Twitter communities and Twitter shillers aside. Let's put this bullshit of I'm part of a community and I support the community aside and actually just ask six very simple questions to decide whether or not we should be holding the tokens that we can hold. And I'll talk to you about the questions in a second. But more importantly, the sooner you do this, the better. Because i was very scared to do this

for my portfolio why because doing this means that i have to own up and take the losses so like you know you're looking i'm sure a lot of people that are listening here are holding a lot of tokens that they they are trying to convince themselves will recover are trying to convince themselves that will one day have a use case are try to convince themselves that we'll one day have a use case. I try to convince themselves that they will recover and get to the all-time high. The reality is that 0.01% of them are going to do that. And the rest are actually going to bleed out while the good quality tokens actually recover. So it took me a long time to do it. I wish I would have done it a long time ago, but one day I actually sat down and I faced my fears and I looked at my portfolio with an analytical eye and I said, okay, now it's time to clean this shit up. And I made a model to clean up my portfolio. And I'll

talk you through the model in a second. I think it's very interesting how I did what the model was. And then I took it and I took losses on 80% of my portfolio. 80% of the tokens in my portfolio, I cut and I took losses on. Now, you got to think about looking at your portfolio and on one day, removing 80% of your portfolio and actually facing...

Taking losses, are you talking about just zeroed those 80% or just they're at a loss but you still hold them? I cut them. I was at a loss but you still hold them? I cut them. I was at a loss and I cut the loss and I moved on. Oh, okay.

So you liquidated that 80% you mean? I liquidated 80% of my portfolio and I restructured my portfolio. Now, it sounds like a simple exercise to do, but I guarantee you that a lot of people that are sitting here today, and maybe let us know in the comments, but a lot of people that are sitting here today are holding a lot of tokens and they just don't want to sell them because they think that they may actually one day recover and they try and look for ways to convince themselves that they're going to actually one day recover and like guys it's not going to recover i hope

but what's the what's the what's the learning lesson because this is the this is the you probably know this already i guess but this is what we're going to discuss today is that you know the the what we expect to see over the next few months and how the next cycle will look like and it's going to start out with with etf potentially triggering a bitcoin bull run and then eventually money flowing into outpoints but then considering that 95 of outpoints will go to zero how do we determine that five percent so that's kind of the agenda in a in a in in in five seconds but uh maybe you can kick it off for my sub run yeah i don't want to i don't want to show my show but today i'm going to show my show because i just think it was such a like it was a it was such an honest show that you got to watch it and maybe i said if you could just write a tweet mario put it okay so here's the thesis the thesis is that

we're in a raging bull market. I mean, when I say raging bull market, we're going to get some pullbacks when there's too much leverage, et cetera. We're in a raging bull market in most of the other markets. We are going to be in a raging, we are in a raging bull market with crypto too. Bitcoin's up 80% this year.

You can deny whatever you want to deny. We are where we are. 80% in the first six months of the year is a raging bull market by anyone's standards. This time, the bull market is driven by institutions. You can see that because the options trading is up, the futures trading is up. This is not a retail-driven bull market.

This is a slightly different bull market. You can see it in the institutions. But it's going to be a very different bull market and only a few tokens are going to survive. Maybe five, maybe 10, maybe 15. That's it. So I asked seven questions. And I'm quickly going to give the questions.

And if you want to hear the whole methodology, just go watch the show. I asked the following question. Number one, does the token really have network effect? And when I say network effect, more users means adding value to the network exponentially. If the answer is yes, tick. Does the token have a real community? And when I say a real community, I don't mean the community that screams and shouts. Yo, hold on.

You just said, yeah, exactly. Because you just said, and I'm going to call you out for it. You just said bullshit. The bullshit of communities, which I was going to call you out on. I'm saying a real community. And when I say, the question is very specific. It says, does the token have a real community? When I say real community, I don't mean people that are paid to show the token on Twitter

and are never going to be arrogant. And I don't mean investors that have $20 in the token because they think that the token is going to do a thousand next because some shiller has told them and i don't mean the community that follow the the leader blindly i'm not going to want to allude to any communities here then the next question that's question number two question number three does the protocol have real users using the protocol for what it is intended to do okay so does the protocol have real users now just because there's a lot of trade because people are speculating on the price of a protocol doesn't mean it has real users doing what the protocol is intended to do so like there's a difference between people just speculating on the price of solana versus people

buying nfts on solana which is what the protocol is doing at the moment. The question is, does it have real users doing what the protocol is designed to do? Question number four, is the protocol decentralized? Really decentralized. Okay, now why do I say that? Because a lot of the protocols that we invested in are actually businesses that sell tokens in place of equity and those ones will eventually get wiped out if it's not by the sec it's going to be wiped out because the teams are just going to run away with the money you're going to make bad decisions um so is the protocol really decentralized i came here for decentralization and i'm starting to trade out of any token that is not decentralized today or have a real plan. Okay, have a real plan.

Okay, so that makes sense. I was going to say, like, you're having, I'd like a wrap up the final two points because I want to start, you know, digging into these points and getting some more points. So we got four so far. Well, I've got the second one's community. The third one's protocol. Does it really have real users? The first one as well. One, is there a network effect?

Two, does it have a real community? Three, are there real users? Four, is the protocol decentralized? Five, is the token going to survive the regulators? Big question that you've got to ask. Is this token actually going to survive an attack by the regulators? Probably, if it is decentralized, it may do that. But ask yourself the regulators. Probably if it is decentralized, it may do that. But ask yourself

the question, because if you're invested in a protocol that's not going to survive regulation, and we know that this bull market is going to be the bull market of regulation, and as things get more regulated, the stuff that's regulated is going to do better than the stuff that isn't regulated, then that's going to be amazing. But a lot of tokens are going to die in the battle, and you're going to make sure that you're not part of the tokens that are going to die in the battle. Next question, second last question, is the protocol actually making money? Is it generating fees? When I look at protocols like Ethereum, it's generating fees. Uniswap is generating fees. Bitcoin is generating fees. GMX is generating fees. GNS is generating fees. But there are a lot of tokens

that just aren't generating any fees. And are they going to be around? Because ultimately, if they're not generating fees, you know, bullshit. And then lastly, if I made a model, I posted a spreadsheet,

but the last thing that I said is, there's one time when you can throw a question one, two, three, four, five, and six out of the window. And that is if this is a brand new concept that may actually improve or disrupt what we're currently doing. And I use a very cool example here. The example is Layer Zero and Stargate, which revolutionized cross-chain protocols. It was a new concept. So even if it wasn't decentralized or didn't have network effect or didn't have real community or didn't have users it's probably worth putting some money in because you you are investing in something

that is an experiment that might actually change the world and that's so that's basically so so i want to i want to dig into the first there's a lot of things you said and i'll get the panel to comment on them and get different different different takes of this but the the and and i want to discuss i want the discussion to slowly shift. And Brian, I'll go to you first and then go to Josh and Hany. But Brian, the question here is that what are some narratives

you think will gain, will be the focus of the next bull run? Obviously, the AI will be the more obvious one. So maybe I want you to touch on different narratives we've seen in the past bull run that still make sense

so they still haven't had their time to shine. And whether they tick the boxes, like one, for example, gaming. Does it tick the boxes of having a community, having real users? Is it really decentralized? Will they survive regulation? We'd love to get your thoughts, Brian. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm very bullish on Web3 gaming, I think everyone.

I think entertainment in a broader sense could be a big one. For example, there's a group doing some basically movie platforms I think entertainment in a broader sense could be a big one. For example, there's a group doing some movie platforms with IP rights assigned to characters in the movies and things like that. Which could be quite interesting, owning a piece of the movies. Not necessarily NFT, but it could be NFT related with entertainment more broadly. But gaming, I think, just hasn't fully been realized yet. I think people don't understand. I mean I've told this story before but Vitalik literally was playing World of Warcraft before he created

Ethereum and a lot of the concepts from games made it to Ethereum. There's literally something called soulbound tokens in games. There's soulbound NFTs and things like that that made it to Ethereum. So there's a lot of real it was basically designed in a way that could be used for gaming. We're seeing player agency though that's a focus for a lot of real... It was basically designed in a way that could be used for gaming.

So we're seeing player agency, though, that's a focus for a lot of Web2 game developers are focusing on player agency, which basically just means interactive experiences which tie in closely to AI. You can customize your experience, and basically the AI can interact with you, even from a player perspective.

AI is starting to take the shine away from it, but I think it's way underrated in terms of users and use cases way underrated it makes the most sense i don't think it takes the shine away because i was looking at a tool just recently and imagine this with ai now for game developers it actually democratizes game creation because as you know gate making a game is super expensive with ai now i can draw a level like a five-year-old would just drawing kind of with my finger in the air kind now, I can draw a level like a five-year-old would, just drawing with my finger in the air, kind of very floppy, draw a window, draw a door here, draw the pathway, et cetera. And the AI can then just fill it in and create the level just like that.

So it's actually going to make it so we're going to see probably a lot more games on the market very soon. But will it also make the experience, Hany, I'm just going to invite Paddy as well. Will it make the experience more interesting though? I think it can because the player agency that I was just getting into, with interactivity with the game,

you can actually customize your experience to the incident level with games now, with AI. So you could literally, you could talk to it and it could learn about you and create the game in a way that you, Mario, would be interested in based on your online profile. But then, Ryan, I've never actually ran. Interestingly, I've never heard you talk about gaming.

Does it fit the criteria? If you look at the questions you sent and I've got them written down. So I've got, is there a network effect? Yes. I think gaming and network effects makes, you know, that that's probably the easiest argument to make. Does it have a community where a game is all about building a community? Is it a protocol? Does it have a community where a game is all about building a community? Is it a protocol?

Does it have real users? Obviously, otherwise, why would anyone be on a game unless it's played to earn, unless they're to make money, which is not sustainable. Is it decentralized? I think the concept of decentralized gaming will take time to be completely decentralized. But at least is there a path towards decentralization?

Generally, games do have that. Will they survive regulation? Again, that's not my area of expertise, but if I had to guess, I'd say it should. Generally, because it's decentralized, generally, if they're really decentralized, then probably they've got a higher chance of surviving regulation. If they're not decentralized, if probably they've got a higher chance of surviving regulation.

If they're not decentralized, if they're centralized companies that have done the token instead of equity, then they... We can see what the future holds. When you talk about generating fees or monetization, I think monetization in gaming is, again, an easy argument

to make. So I would say gaming fits your entire criteria. Yeah, I never hear you talk about it. Yeah. No, no, I'm a big fan. As I said to you yesterday, I'm a very big fan of gaming, but I'm not a big fan of individual games.

Why? Because I think one in a thousand games will actually become successful. You can make that argument about anything. Exactly, which is why instead of investing in the actual project, I'll invest in the protocols, I'll invest in the exchanges, or I'll invest because I think that trying to choose a winning game,

it's much easier to pick a studio where I know a studio in its lifetime will make 10 games, then all of a sudden I've got a 1 in 10 chance of actually capitalizing on it. So for me, when I look at a game, I very rarely invest in in games now but if you come to me with a gaming studio with smart people and say look we're looking to build a play to earn gaming nft gaming or whatever else generally i'll take a very very very serious look at that all right cool i've just i'm just pinning all the tweets by the way in the ah tell your boy fred is sending me your uh your uh a tweet about the five coins that survived multiple cycles you got btc xrp litecoin doge and eth and then it's

got a link to your youtube video and so that's for anyone listening and i've pinned let me let me say your calls but i've pinned all the tweets at the top. So we got a few tweets there. The first two is if you want to sponsor the show, come on as a sponsor and I'll talk about today's sponsor or work with Ancubator. There's an email in the pinned tweets above. That's the best way to contact us.

You can also DM us as well, me and Ran, and the team will attend to it on Twitter. But preferable is to just hit us up via on um uh on uh on via email and then another pinterest today's sponsor who's our sponsor you don't know you don't know mel mel you didn't look into them i did okay okay yeah yeah that's pretty cheesy i think i think i'm an investor i haven't had time to check i'm almost certain we invested i'll have to check with the team but they're really cool guys yeah i've been speaking to them i've been speaking to them i had to actually chat to them today

um the concept that they're doing is i think i mean you know what they are is a regulated bank in lithuania but what it's a non-custodial bank so you hold your money in your own non-custodial wallet but you get banking services through a regulated bank so it's like it sounds to me like it's the best of both worlds because you've got a a regulated bank on the one side but you never give them custody of your assets you've always got custody of your assets because they they linked in through a um uh uh a crypto wallet. So to me, it sounds like a groundbreaking concept. I actually, I asked a lot of tough questions because I wanted to make sure that, you know,

this thing could actually work. And it's actually quite interesting. It's not functional yet. So people can only sign up for the waiting list, which is, yeah, I mean, I signed up for the waiting list because I want to just be one of the first people that actually tests it and you can get an airdrop as well. But the concept of a bank that is completely decentralized where you have custody of your own assets is...

It's a use case. It's a use case that makes sense. And I think they've got their own layer one as well, no? Yeah, they've got a layer one, which is an Avalanche subnet, which is, I also questioned the guys as to why they needed to have their own layer one. And a ever launch subnet um which is i also questioned the guys as to why they needed to have their own layer one they explained to me i think uh yeah very very we've got we've got ourselves on the way we've got we're going to be asking them a few questions

one of them is i want to understand the concept of having a layer one focus on d5 or when you have a a purpose specific layer one and what advantages it it has. So that's probably the first question that came to mind. But for anyone that wants to check him out, it's the pinned tweet above. The name is Meld, M-E-L-D. Definitely check him out. But let's go back to the point is that we've talked about Web3 Gaming, Brian.

I do want to go to, we've got Hany and Josh here as well. Guys, I'll go to you, Josh, first. What are some other narratives that are interesting to you? You know, gaming is one, and that's somewhere I'm deploying a lot of capital. AI is an easy one, so I want you to avoid it because it's too easy.

What else comes to mind? You know, are layer ones still something worth exploring or has that ship sailed? It's too many big guys, and it's too difficult for layer ones to make it, for new layer ones to make it? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I'm just looking back at something I read earlier this week, which was a research piece from Binance. And credit to Binance, they've got a pretty decent

research arm. And in this paper that they released, they were asking institutional investors, where are you going to be putting your money over the next year? So dollar for dollar, where are you going to be putting your money? And next year? So dollar for dollar, where are you going to be putting your money? And over 50% of them said that they're going to be putting money into infrastructure. And that was over layer ones, over layer twos, over DeFi, over gaming. But then they drilled into more specifics. And they said that over 50% of them were looking at wallet and custody innovation as a particular niche to investing. And then following that,

the next biggest niche was 25% of them were looking at zero knowledge in some capacity as an area of investment for them. And so, you know, I would make big bets on those areas. I may be biased because we are very much in the infrastructure wallet and custody game. But if you boil down, you know, to everything that's gone wrong in the space over the last however many years, but particularly in this year, it's all come down to the problem of trust. And so anyone that's building anything that is removing trust from that conundrum. So you don't have to trust the service provider. You don't have to trust the application to do what it says you're doing. You don't need to trust the yield generating app that says it's doing X when in fact it's lending your funds out to Y. And we've seen the practical complications and implications of getting trust wrong this year.

And whether it's FTX, whether it's Celsius, there's just so many examples of lack of transparency, too much trust being put into service providers. And so anyone building something that is trying to solve that problem, I think it's a really solid bet to be making if you're seeing that kind of product suite being built at this specific time in the market so you're going back to kind of the foundation of what made crypto interesting you know blockchain solves the byzantine generals problem and that's something that kind of we've kind of forgotten about this solution but looking at a criteria that you'd follow to be able to

determine which projects are worth paying attention to, is there anything specific that Ran mentioned that he missed or anything that he mentioned that you disagree with? You know what? Ran and I were in Texas a couple of months ago, and this is kind of the stuff that we spoke about when we were speaking primarily about what we're doing at credo right which is building on-chain trustless infrastructure and all of the trust points that that ran is talking about here all of the things that are important are i think are absolutely spot on and we talk a lot about community but in reality what we're talking about is users is there a use case for this thing and will the the use case scale? And if it does scale, does the benefit of the additional usage accrue to the token? And can it actually be decentralized as a use case over the long term? So,

you know, at the risk of agreeing too much with Ran, I think his points are really, really spot on because, you know, people are looking for, or they're looking past the buzzwords. They're looking past people pretending to be decentralized that actually aren't. They're looking past projects that just raise a token for the sake of raising a token. Does the token value to your product? Does it do something that you couldn't do if you didn't have that token? And so I think really those categories that Ran outlined are pretty much spot on in many respects. But I very much would also overlay some particular kind of themes or verticals in the crypto space, whether it's infrastructure or zero knowledge, as particular directional areas of investment.

Because that's where the future is being built. I think that every investor is going to come in and going to look for the verticals that interest them. And you mentioned some very good verticals. I don't know if you mentioned it was a survey or whatever it was, but I imagine that where you got that information from was from a survey of institutional investors. Because what it sounded like is that it was institutional investors trying to solve the problems that they face or that they experienced when entering our industry, right? Right. And so I think that ultimately every investor is going to come in with their thesis.

Some investors are going to come in with the institutional thesis like you mentioned. Some are going to come in with a gaming thesis. Some are going to come in with an entertainment thesis. Some are going to come in because they just want better money. Regardless of what they're coming in for, I think that the questions remain the same. Does it have metric effect? Does it have a real community? Does it have real users using the protocol for what it's designed to do? Is it going to be decentralized or is it already really decentralized? Will it survive the regulators? There's one point you're all ignoring, and Hany,

you guys build a lot of products that have real use cases, is the regulatory aspect of it. With Gensler doing what he's doing, with the SEC's initial ambiguity and now their aggressive nature of what is considered a security, how

can a project determine, or how can an investor determine if a project ticks the regulatory box? Well, they can do the determine or how can an investor determine if a project ticks the regulatory box well they can do the best that they can now obviously one of my theses for the end of the cycle is that gary games lose out at some point but regardless you know you've got to look at your at the token that you bought and be quite critical and say you know like if it's decentralized the sec is going to have a harder time to to attack it if it's decentralized, the SEC is going to have a harder time to attack it. If it's proof of work and it doesn't have yield, staking yield,

the SEC is going to have a harder time attacking it. If it didn't do an ICO, the SEC is going to, or an IDO, then the SEC is going to have a harder time attacking it. There's no perfect project, but you've got to ask yourself a question. Actually, sorry, there is a perfect project. It's called Bitcoin.

The second one is Ethereum. But you've got to ask yourself a question and say, look, you know, am I reasonably comfortable that my token can survive a regulatory attack? Now, I know that 80% of the tokens that I invested in in this last bull market are not going to survive a real regulatory attack. And that's why I sold them. Tiny, I see you on mute. Jump in, man. I think it's a very, very wide world. So for background, we have products all over the place. We have them from Australia and the Middle East and Europe. We're obviously working on products in the United States. And regulators are different. The US is such a public process, which is very unlike most regulators in the world. All of these ETF applications have gates that are public.

The public gets to comment. And so the normal public average investors get to see the regulatory process much more in detail in America than elsewhere. But I can tell you that behind the scenes, it's all the same. It has taken a very, very long time for numerous regulators to get across the line. I remember certain regulators, China being the very, very, very big example of this, where they were incredibly negative a couple of years ago. Now they've turned. Britain, the UK, with the FCA seems to be doing the same thing. And so you're not going to, especially with a global product, really be able to tick all the boxes in all of the jurisdictions. And that's okay. I think it takes some time to get there. One of the things

that we think a lot about is there are different products that are appropriate for different kinds of customers. So we're the largest issuer of crypto ETFs globally. But something that people don't know is that we also do tokens. Because at the end of the day, we don't think people wake up in the morning and want to buy a DeFi index ETF. They want to buy at exposure to decentralized finance. But perhaps that's better available to you through a Solana program in your Phantom or an ERC-20 token in your MetaMask or an ETF, an ETN, an ETP, etc. And so given that, I think it's best to just take a step back and think about these products more in terms of accessibility on a region by region basis can sometimes lend itself to different product forms.

And so not everyone needs an ETF. Some people would rather have a token. And on the regulatory front, it's constantly moving, constantly in change in the US and elsewhere. And we see a lot of those kinds of updates happening behind the scenes more. Sorry, not Rand. Hany, and by the way, Scott, just to answer your question on who the hell is Paddy. Paddy is Rand's researcher. I know he doesn't have a profile picture that you approve of, Scott, but this is how he got on stage. I'm 100% doxxed here. I love his profile picture. It's the best picture ever.

You want to hear a very cool story? I like how when Ran wants to say something, he'll repeat it until you give him the chance. Like, you want to hear, you want to hear, you want to hear, you want to hear. Wouldn't stop until you give him the chance. I'm giving everyone's mic you can't mute me bro by the way but go ahead i don't film you i used to look at paddy pirate tweets and think to myself wow this guy's so smart like and i used to tell my team please

invite him to our research group like let's let's hire the guy let's get him into our research group and the whole team kept it completely quiet from me that Paddy is Paddy, right? Because obviously he's the real name of my Paddy. If you mean him, he looks like anything but some kind of Irish Paddy. And one day, one of the guys walked in and whispered to me,

and he said, you know that Paddy is that guy sitting in the office. I'm like, bullshit. How can you be so smart on Twitter and so dumb in the office? Ouch. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

I didn't say that. I was being funny. No, he's very smart. Very, very smart. But the irony is that I was trying so hard to get him to come work for us because his tweets are so bloody good. Turns out he's sitting in the office next to me. He's actually one of my researchers. He just didn't want us to know what they're talking about.

Well, I just followed I've just I've actually I followed I thought I followed him before because I follow all the speakers we invite but I just unfollowed him Just now Patty Patty just say a question for you and I will go back to honey question for you It's a different narrative your your your rands researcher Which already kind of discredits a lot of what you're saying but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt what are some narratives you're interested in now is it you know something we talked about yesterday and and if you're the guy behind yeah go ahead patty go ahead right go ahead bro ready bro give your speech i'll tell

you my favorite narrative is is the dex narrative i think it ticks a lot of the boxes that Ron's been speaking about. In particular, the making money box. Obviously, many of these DEXs are generating huge fees. I have a trad pie background. So when I look at investing in tokens, I think of it as if I'm investing in a business. So the most important thing for me is, do they generate revenue? Are they generating fees? And I think that the DEX narrative is being underlooked a bit.

There's a lot of DEX tokens on the market that are very undervalued if you compare the fees that they're generating to their FDVs. I wrote a tweet on that today. I also think it's an interesting one for the regulation box because obviously we're seeing these centralized exchanges like Bybit, KuCoin in the last week come out and they're coming out with stricter KYC policies. And I believe that this will lead to a lot of crypto traders moving to these dexes and whether or not how long this lasts like how long these is but we don't but

patty patty we don't have enough dexes like because one thing that ran didn't add is that how could but how red or blue is the ocean and And I was asking Hany, I'm like, hey, I think it was Hany or Jones, like layer one, there's already a lot out there. It's just really difficult for layer one to come in now versus six years ago. Can't a similar argument be made for DEXs? I think so, definitely. What I think though is that there's a lot of opportunity. It may not be long term, maybe not like in a five-year outlook but certainly leading into the next bull market um i mean your gmx's your gains

there's a product can i can i add something here yeah let me add something here i think that by nature crypto is made to be traded so like if you think about generally what we're talking about is we're talking about different types of currencies. Like every one of these crypto is actually a different type of currency. Now, ultimately, I think the trading use case in crypto is always going to be there because it's just the trading of different types of currency. So I think at its core, you need the chains. But then the layer above that is the trading, because ultimately that's what we do all day in crypto. It's not only speculating it's actually even even when you think about use cases you're trading one token for

another token you need a layer two tokens you'll trade a layer one token etc so i don't think that that use case is ever going away which is why my portfolio now is is very very very heavily weighted because of patty to the dexes correct i love i love i love the DEX argument. I love, love, love the DEX arguments. And you see it because the problem isn't just with Bybit. It's that Binance... And just for the audience, DEX is a decentralized exchange. So Binance is centralized.

You've got something like Uniswap is a decentralized version of Binance. Go ahead, Annie. And if you look at the... Mark, if DEX is a decentralized exchange, tell me about SICK. What's a centralized exchange? No.

Well, guys, what about a hybrid exchange? And I'm not going to hijack it right now, but I've got a slightly contrarian view in the long term on what exchanges will look like. I totally agree with you guys that in the medium term, DEXs are the hot area. People love to trade.

They want to trade in permissionless ways. But there is a new future emerging, and that is a hybrid exchange. And I'm happy to talk about that in a second. But I think it will take time to get there. If you open the Uniswap app on your phone, it looks and feels almost like a wallet. So a lot of the talks on infrastructure investments

and wallets and things like that, DEXs are really an interesting position right now. In addition to that, Binance, Coinbase, other big, big exchanges are getting attacked and we're seeing a lot of that volume start flowing over to DEXs. And I agree completely. I think they're undervalued. I think people don't realize just how much traffic and how much use and how much revenues all of the DEXs are doing. But from an accessibility perspective, they're available to anyone with a mobile phone, anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world. And that's a very, very powerful thing. The one thing that I think we sort of touched but didn't

cover because I think it's a deeper problem. I'm a big fan of all the different layer ones and what they're capable of doing. I'm a big fan of everything else. One of the major issues that we have yet to solve that causes an intense amount of friction against growth in this space is the fact that every single blockchain that we have, every single product that we have is a completely different ecosystem. They do not speak to each other in very easy ways. Bridging is incredibly difficult.

It's prone to hacks. And when we throw out Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, that's four different systems that actually completely live in silos on a pragmatic basis. Because again, no one, bridges are difficult. People have trust issues with these kinds of things, et cetera. And I think that's one of the biggest problems when everyone has a MetaMask wallet, but MetaMask only exists for the Ethereum ecosystem versus everything else. Annie, I agree with you. And I think I would have shared the same thesis as you but have you ever used layer zero and stargate have you ever like have you ever used the the layer zero protocol I'm not I'm not

just to be clear I'm not invested in layer zero I do hold some tokens in stargate because I believe in the thesis but I think stargate changes the game and I'll tell you why I think stargate changes the game so can I say one caveat and then I'll I will let go I just want to I am I'm going to change this again. So can I say one caveat and then I will let go? I just want to, I'm a D-gen myself. I'm very, very comfortable with all of this. I deal with a lot of normal, regular users where oftentimes we are their first introduction to crypto. So when I say a lot of what I say, I'm talking about an average person

because that's actually what we need. My thesis is, and what I spend every day thinking about is, how do we get crypto to a billion users? And so there's a lot of the usability things that I think about, and we're absolutely not there yet. I think we get there with racked assets. I think we get there with better UI and UX. And that's where I'm coming from,

not me personally or my personal views or what I do. I think that there's three phases to this revolution. So I'm going to agree with you that we're nowhere near the ability for the regular user to use protocols like Uniswap, Stargate, or even MetaMask. You tell a normal user to use MetaMask, it's like, what are you talking about? It's crazy. Even what I consider sophisticated users can't use MetaMask. I think that this revolution happens in three phases.

First one is centralized. Centralization, I think that's where we are today. That is just getting used to the idea of crypto assets and getting people to migrate from the traditional financial system onto a Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, whatever it is. The next phase is getting semi-decentralized. And I think somebody, i didn't know who it was i was interjecting but he said it's a hybrid world and i think i was uh josh god yeah and then very much in the future i think what happens is we land up going to a decentralized

world now i think that we have a long time a lot of building left to do before we get the total totally decentralized world i think that uh credo is a great example of that like credo is building stuff that i don't know i don't know how far they are in the roadmap so please forgive me if i say it wrong but when their stuff is ready it brings everything that we get in the centralized world to the decentralized world and as easy to use i don't know how far they are you know they can comment about i'm just saying i think the revolution happens in three phases and even though we we've been here for, give or take 12 years or 11 years, however long you want to say, I think only now we're really starting to build at a fast enough

rate for adoption. And there's a long way left to go before we can actually get adoption of decentralized protocols. You need a PhD to be able to use some of these decentralized protocols. And the problem is that if you make a mistake, you lose too much money. So, yeah, that's the problem. Ran, I was going to say, go ahead. Sorry, I was going to say, I mean, for me even personally, I'm pretty far down this rabbit hole. I've never touched 99% of this stuff because even for me,

I just don't feel like it's ready and I'm disinterested. So if I don't care about Layer 0 and Stargate, which I've literally never heard of Stargate, no offense, then that's a pretty good sign of what the mainstream probably... And back to the decentralized exchange conversation, I think that a lot of value will go to DEX, as you said, and a lot of volume, but that doesn't mean that they're investable. And I'm not saying that they're not, but the tokenomics have to be perfect for actual value to accrue to the tokens and for you to want to hold those tokens as an investment, which goes back to your point that, you know, 99% of this market, as you know, I believe, and you do too, you said they're currencies. I would

say it's just a bunch of casino chips and we're hoping that a lot of people still want to come to the casino. And so like, I think that DEXs will grow in volume, but that doesn't mean that there's money to be made investing in them. That's the challenge. Well, I think I disagree with that. I disagree with that completely. I think if you believe that, then you must also believe that Coinbase and Binance

are not good revenue generating companies. If you don't think investing in the centralized exchanges is a good money-making investment, then the same would translate to DEX as a good one. But, Hany, do you view Coinbase stock as a good corollary from BNB token?

Investable? No, because BNB is a good corollary to Binance plus Ethereum plus a bunch of other things. I don't think they're the same thing at all. Come on, guys. just for two minutes just look it's it's 12 minutes past just until 14 minutes past wherever the whatever the hour is wherever you are can we just for two minutes just be really honest with ourselves you have the two minutes isitseth is a casino 100%

Stock markets are a casino There's no difference between DraftKings Or I don't know who the big casino company is Caesars Palace and the Nasdaq Other than what they get you To believe that you're playing There's no difference come on it's all casinos

You know are you going to tell me that people invest in companies because they think they're going to make a PE of 100? It's a casino. I mean, I deal with a lot of family offices and institutional investors who aren't looking to gamble, who are actually holding some of these tokens for the long term. And they do a lot of research. They're not touching 99.99% of it yeah hedging is not gambling like it's a preservation of wealth is very different to creation of wealth so i think it's mostly a casino but yeah mostly a casino is very different from it's all a casino look at stable coins look at the functions that they actually serve look at what what people are actually doing. I mean, all the exchanges are casinos. They allow us to take bets on certain things.

What's the difference between an exchange and a casino? Again, if it's a casino, then Schwab is a casino as well. Interactive Brokers and Fidelity are casinos as well. Then that's a different definition of casino. Because what ends up happening is, no, not everyone is losing the money. The house does not make money off a few. There's very, very different things here where I absolutely am not gambling when I'm buying Bitcoin on Coinbase. I'm making something that I believe in for the long term and I'm comfortable holding that. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying, I mean, listen, if we've seen massive volume spike, let's say theoretically on Uniswap, in theory, Uniswap token should go up as a function of that

business improving. But Uniswap goes down as a function of the entire crypto market dropping, which does happen with stocks as well. It can be a baby with the bath water situation. But I'm just saying that depending on how these tokens are structured and what the supply is and such, I believe a decentralized exchange could do exceptionally well while its token could still trend down indefinitely. I want to touch on the hybrid exchange. And before that, I just want to remind the audience as well. MELD, the founders, are about to come up on stage.

I've pinned their tweet. So they're a Lithuanian bank, as Rand said, but they're not just a pure bank. We're talking about a hybrid model. So they're a bank with self-custody as well. They've got their own layer one. They've got their own wallet as well. So the founder, the CEO, will be coming up on stage shortly i've pinned their tweet check them out

meld finance and then if you want to similar to meld if you want to come on the show and chat to us um or work with our incubator so come on as a sponsor or as a client uh check the pin tweets for the email or just dm us uh to come up on stage but josh uh since we're talking about hybrids um you know the concept of hybrid protocols that's a hybrid exchange isman absolutely i think for a long time we've looked at venues or exchanges as binary right you're either a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange and what what we've done and when i say we we are a credo we're the incubators and builders of Ankex. And Ankex is a fully hybrid, non-custodial derivatives exchange.

What that means in practice is that we get the best of both worlds. You get the high volume. But the concept is you can't judge us. I want to take a step back without getting a bit deep. So when you talk about something being a hybrid and getting the best of both worlds, is that just more of a step towards decentralization? So we live in a centralized world. Blockchain introduces the concept of both worlds. Is that just more of a step towards decentralization? So we live in a centralized world. Blockchain introduces the concept of decentralization and hybrid is pure.

It's another way of saying transitioning. So anything that when you say hybrid in web three, it just means it's centralized, but it's slowly decentralizing. Is that a fair way of explaining whatever hybrid project or hybrid protocol is? Sometimes, but in the case of an exchange, no. So the hybrid essence of it is essential. Why is that? Why would we want a centralized order book and all of the exchange infrastructure to be centralized? Because it is low latency.

It is easy to trade against. It can be co-located. So, you know, simply simply put you can have professional traders with the best infrastructure trading at speed and at scale that's what you get from a centralized exchange stack but this is the important part why is it hybrid if you make the entire thing non-custodial if you say you can connect your crypto wallet to it you never have to deposit your assets on the exchange and get worried about what they're doing with them. That piece can be decentralized. So all the settlement, all of the custody, all of the collateral management can take place on-chain. So you've got...

So the example I gave of MELD being a centralized bank with self-custody, would you consider that to be a hybrid model? Absolutely. Yeah. So if you're leveraging some centralized solution or service that MELD would be providing, but you're able to access it with your wallet, that's, again, the theme of the best of both worlds. Something centralized can be accessed through a decentralized piece of infrastructure, i.e. your wallet. And that, I think, is going to be the future for a long time for many use cases, because not everything can be decentralized, right? Some services create enormous benefits for users when they are provided as a service to end users. And that could be the banking model that Melt have, the non-custodial

derivatives model that Ankex has. So this hybrid model is, at the end of the day, it's a big benefit to users. And it may may in some business cases like exchanges or banking having this hybrid model is just the reality of the nature of the service that they can provide yeah john can we're talking about this as a theoretical first of all this is exists a lot of people don't realize edx markets which is the much discussed exchange presented by Schwab, Fidelity, and Citadel. It's a non-custodial wallet. It effectively is this, and that's what's coming from Wall Street. They're not custody assets.

It's non-custodial. Well, Ken, we're talking about MELD, and we're talking about you and the concept of hybrid models. We'd love to get your thoughts on what's been discussed so far before we dig into MELD. Sure, sure. I mean, I think certain parts of hybrid models are important, but I think that if you come from the DeFi space, if you come from crypto, then certain parts of that should have a line in the sand. So the non-custodial part should be a line in the sand. You might want to be able to connect your wallet to something and be able to sort of transact or get some sort of benefit out of being centralized for speed, but you always want to maintain custody of your asset

as much as is humanly possible so handing off that custody i think is where the line should be drawn in regards to allowing other entities or other protocols to handle your assets can't can't look i i you're gonna like this it's gonna be a very simple question because i'm in i i fucking hate defy why because i just don't understand it's going to be a very simple question because I'm in I fucking hate DeFi why? because I just don't understand it's not an area I'm very passionate about unlike Scott

Scott for some reason really enjoys it but Rand seems to be a big fan of you guys and I was just looking at your website I was trying to understand what MELD is

so for anyone in the audience just go to meld.fi or just check the pinned tweet above they're a sponsor for today and first I think I don't know if we invested or not.

I have a company called IBC. So you can tell me maybe afterwards if we invested because I have a really strong feeling we did. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. So I'm wrong. All right. So I'm just having a look at what you guys do.

And I know that you guys raised a lot of money. So congratulations. And essentially, the elevator pitch that Rand said is it's a bank with self-custody as well as a built-in DeFi protocol. I added the second part in. Is that a good elevator pitch? That's one perspective. That's the kind of DeFi or the TradFi perspective that you would see into it.

So MELD started out as a lending and borrowing protocol where we wanted to make it so that you could take your assets, lock them up into a smart contract, stay non-custodial, and then borrow fiat against it as opposed to borrowing crypto against it. So today you can go into Aave, you can take your asset, you can borrow a stable coin against it, take it into Coinbase, and then take that out into your bank account. You can do that. Good luck in trying to explain that that's actually debt to the IRS. It's not going to happen. So what we're trying to

do is we're trying to make all of that fluid process where you keep all the DeFi side. So you can lock your asset up into a smart contract. You can borrow, you can get some liquidity out of your asset in a safe way, and then you're able to bring it onto the banking side. So we started out lending and borrowing, but we saw that none of the fiat providers would touch us because we were a DeFi protocol and we were focused on non-custodial and sort of decentralized. So we had to follow the path to get our own electronic money license to be able to achieve this. And it also helps in the sense that when you go through this process, you then have your money in the banking system. And life is just a whole lot easier when you want to move stuff around when you're already in the banking system.

Going from bank account to bank account, it's easier. So the starting point, DeFi. Then we moved into the fiat side of things. But if you're interested in the fiat side as your kind of like gateway into the crypto world, then it would work like that. But we started from crypto and then moved into finance. I know Ryan and Scott will probably jump in. So I'll ask my second question relatively quickly. One of the points that Ryan mentioned

was surviving regulation. And that's something that's a lot more, a lot higher on any investor's criteria after what we saw in the last couple of weeks. How are you guys surviving regulation or how will you survive regulation? So regulation, there's two ways you can approach regulation. You can approach it from a legal opinion or you can approach it from legal precedence. And a legal opinion is an uphill battle. Legal precedence gives you a bit better sort of foothold.

And so we wanted to go through the process and we started in Europe because we were able to move into an electronic money license and it sort of followed our set of values because it's kind of non-custodial. And we went with the way of having an existing license that has legal precedent for doing this.

So the license that we're operating on is a license that currently does this, and the central bank is familiar with it. They know that it's happening. They're comfortable with the activities. They're comfortable with how it's being operated today. So we wanted to start from this legal precedence perspective. Outside of that, I i mean when you're talking about the u.s the u.s is a is a completely different animal i think that um you know the sec

and treasury are on a war path and i think that if you want to go up against them then you better have some insanely deep pockets though right now we're not offering we're not planning on offering um in the u.s the rest of the world is ready to jump in front of the US for this stuff. Okay, so when you talk about the use case of self custody is a really easy one to explain now, especially what we saw with banks in the last few months. But how do you how do you explain to the average Joe, you know, if they're looking at well at meld now, what are things they could do today, just for

the average user? What are things they could do today? Just for the average user, what are things they could do today that they could relate to? This Meld solves a major problem for people that have crypto currently. So it's not a problem. It's not solving a problem for people that are not using crypto. What we provide is we provide one, the ability for you to get liquidity out of your assets into the real world. And two, we provide predictable, cheap method of moving your assets between crypto and fiat. So we charge a half a percent for all crypto to fiat. How does that compare to other exchanges? Other exchanges, I think it's similar to some other exchanges like Binance and Coinbase because they're actually padding the actual spot price as opposed to getting the best spot price and then putting a specific transaction on top of it.

If you're talking about something like Moonpay, then we're like 4% or 5% cheaper. Holy shit. Okay, continue. So yeah, the point here is that non-custodial it's imperative you have to control your own assets your coins your keys we wanted to follow this thesis started it back two years ago and it's been proven because of the fd app yeah that's okay so so so can i want to i want to i want to take um rand's six simple questions when looking at a project. Let's play the game now.

Sounds good. So first one is, is there a network effect? Is that something that would apply with Mel? Because you've ticked the box, which I think is the most important one. You've ticked the box of having real users. In terms of having a community, I looked at your socials. You've ticked that box

and you're working on it as well. The decentralized box, I would say you kind of tick the box in terms of being a hybrid model where self-custody is the concept of decentralization. You've got your own layer one. So you've ticked that decentralized box. Generating fees, you've ticked that box as well. And that's an easy one to explain. So the one that I would ask you for, and I'll give you the mic is, are you building somehow, building a network effect within MELD?

But there's two points there, and before your answers, before your answers, I mean, the question is whether we're talking about investing in the product or using the product. Now in this case, I'm not gonna comment. This is the question for as an investor. I'm the investor. It's an awful, selfish question. But if it's using the product... You don't want to comment, man. You don't want the SEC to reach you in South Africa.

So, Ken, this is for me. I'm in Dubai. I'm chill. So, in terms of, is there a network effect? Please, go ahead. Yeah. So, the network effect is effectively threefold. I can talk about two of them first is we are lending and borrowing protocol to start with so we are liquidity we're a liquidity pool infrastructure provider similar to compound and and and uh abe so the network effect happens through the lending and borrowing process where you have three actors right you have people that are supplying you have people that are borrowing your people are liquidating there is the opportunity everybody makes money along the way, and our job is to harmonize the

network and harmonize the protocol. The second is when you have your own blockchain and you can do a very, very low cost set of transactions, you can provide other types of services and other types of features. We want to be able to provide staking and be able to provide ways of yielding. I know some people have a problem with yielding these days in the US because they've been burnt so many times. But I think yielding is a key component to what we're talking about, both yielding now in traditional L1s, things like Ethereum, Avalanche, etc. And also secondary structured products, things like this, more sophisticated instruments for people that are much less risk averse. So this ability for you to be able to invest in these different types of assets and at the same time have the basic components of being able to sort of lend, borrow, transact.

This is the network effect. This ability for you to be able to transact cheaply between different people and be able to lend and borrow between different people. And then the question I have next is something I've read, and that's more of a compliment to you guys, man. Are you the largest Avalanche subnet right now by Validate account? Correct. We are. Oh, shit. Decentralization is super important.

Decentralization. Good for you, bro. All right, well, you double-ticked that box. And then the other thing I want to ask you about is about the airdrop that you guys announced. You said I'm looking at your Twitter and I think it's yesterday. Let me see the date. Yeah, you've announced yesterday.

Can you tell us about the airdrop that you have? Yeah. So this is in combination to getting the word out. So we want to make sure that everybody knows about the MELD neobank. We want to get as many early access signups as we possibly can. So as part of that, we decided to do as many early access signups as we possibly can so as part of that we decided to do a meld airdrop so we're making it possible for people that are going to sign up for the bank getting early access that will give you a boost in regards to getting from getting

assets getting meld tokens in the airdrop usually doing on-chain activities doing social activities all of these will give you boosts in regards to getting mail from the airdrop. And if this sort of spills over into getting more customers for the bank, that's the sort of important thing. Like I was saying earlier, there's a network effect here. If you have a bank account, you have the debit card and you're using it, other people are going to see that, they're going to know that, and they're going to be able to sign up as

well. So, Ran. Let me do your for ken um ran you said at the beginning of the show that you spoke to meld and you're a big fan of the project you went on the waiting list as well because you can't use the product yet you've just got a waiting list and ask ken when the product will be ready what do you like most about meld well again i say i'm not I'm not, you know, around the token, I have no views. I haven't researched the token. I don't even know what the token does. But in terms of the concept of having a non-custodial wallet linked to a regulated bank account

where I can start doing fiat banking using proceeds from my non-custodial wallet, that for me is a game changer. Just think about being able to transact as freely with your crypto as you can transact with your fiat, not without actually knowing the difference. Imagine being able to just take whatever fiat you have, quickly move it into stablecoins, have it generate a yield while you're not using it, and then when you need it, you can move it back into fiat. When is your product going to be ready? And then I'm going to ask you a selfish question about the bear market. I'm going to move away from the product and then start asking questions.

Yeah, so we'll go into early access in August. We're expecting to get our license approved in September. And the lending and borrowing protocol goes into testnet in September. So everything should be put together and be live out of testnet or early access in October. And how many people do you have on your waiting list? How much have you raised? Give us some numbers.

Impress the audience. So we have around 25,000 people signed up already. When it comes to the raise... Hold on, you've got 25,000 people signed up already um when it comes to the raise so 25 hold on you got 25 000 people signed up already yeah yeah they signed up to use the platform everybody how do you use okay this is you know who where can you get this i mean all of our competitors have died on the vine all of our c5 competitors block fi celsius voyager not true yes everybody's gone right your signature is gone you know signature's gone.

Have you launched... Hold on, you've got to mute. You've got to hold the mic, man. Have you done the whole... Did you do a whole campaign on trust is dead in CeFi and time now for DeFi solutions to what happened last year? Have you done an aggressive

campaign to put this in people's face? Not yet. So I'm actually in the middle of writing an article about this right now, as a result of Prime Trust, where we can actually say, you know, the thesis has been proven over the past year and a half, all of this idea of centralization and CFI is just a horrible idea. So we will be talking about this and we will be going into you got to be so aggressive you got to be quick and be aggressive about it man be very aggressive the time is now um and and the next question i have is uh sorry not question first uh it keep keep giving us some things to impress the audience it's all about 20 000 people signed up to how

much did you raise you raised money in the bull market didn't you you raised money in the bull market through two ways we had a private token sale where we raised from just private individuals we raised 35 million and then we also invented a new method of funding for crypto projects so it's called an ispo where you do an initial stake pool offering so we were the first to do this and you basically set up a bunch of stake pools on a proof of stake blockchain. And then you keep the block rewards and in exchange for a fixed amount, you then give your token in exchange for those block rewards. So we did that. And when we did it, we got 100 million staked on the validators in the first 24 hours. And after three months, we peaked at $1.3 billion staked.

And we raised $14 million out of that. How much did you raise total? $45 million. Jesus fucking Christ. You guys raised $45 million? Yep. Man. Well, we demonstrated, right?

We demonstrated that we could do financial innovation. So we created a new method of being able to do... Rad, did you know this? Did you know they raised $45 million, Rad? I noticed because I spoke to the team this afternoon, but not before that, no. That's fucking mental. We don't advertise it.

We don't advertise it. You don't advertise. You should advertise a lot more. This is such a big... It's a beautiful flex. Who's on stage? Who's using your account now? Who did I bring up?

So head of marketing is on the... What's head of marketing's name? His name is Yusuf. Yusuf, can you hear me? You can speak, man. Don't be shy, bro. It's not Yusuf. It's Josh.

Ah, Josh. Are you in marketing as well? I'm the head of community. Ah, sick, man. All right. Well, Josh, are you in marketing as well? I'm the head of community. Ah, sick, man. All right, well, congratulations on having a community. Tell Yusuf, man, to flex the hat out of what you guys are doing on how much you raise, but also how you've innovated with your raise and how you're a solution to all the centralized solutions

that died over the last 12 months. Yeah. All right, go ahead. No, I'll finish my sentence, man. I'm just telling Josh to tell Yusuf to not listen to Ken Yeah, I should go ahead. No, I'll finish my sentence, man. I'm just telling Josh to tell Yusuf to not listen to Ken and just go aggressive with marketing because that's pretty cool. We can ask Ken a question, actually, because, Ken, something you said was so interesting to me.

I think everybody saw, obviously, the collapses of Voyager, BlockFi, Celsius, FTX, those centralized, obviously, authorities and platforms. But you hinted at the fact that you're writing something about prime trust which i think has gone wildly sort of underreported and discussed but the fact that that was a custodian so so much bigger than all of those right because the custodian has one job yeah right and there was no yield explosion there was no grief there was just literal stupidity and fraud to cover it up obviously it's something that we discussed very closely here but i want you to can you give us a bit of what you're writing about there because i'm so interested in

that story yeah i mean there's two parts to it one is custodians like you said they have one job they should not screw this up um but the point is when something like a custodian goes down, they take down so many other organizations with them. So the remnants and those sort of the small players and the organizations that are kind of trying to do some of what we're trying to do when it comes to lending and borrowing, they're using these types of custodians.

They're running into these types of problems. So the custodian is actually worse. It's more like an FTX in the sense that it's got so many tentacles into so many other projects that when it goes down, it takes so much else with it. So this is where- These platforms dodged that bullet and people don't realize how close it came to affecting so many more consumer-facing platforms. I mean, everybody's praising, obviously, a number of them for switching from Prime to, I mean, Fortress may have problems

too, I don't even know, but switching from Prime to others. But the real story there is they were a month away from potentially being insolvent. Yeah. And it just ties back into this basic idea, take control of your assets. Stop expecting a license to sort of mean something that people are actually going to sort of trust that people should be trusting in what they have but you have but but but uh can you have solutions for the the the the flaws in self-custody is there decentralized ways to be able to quote-unquote reset your password? Yeah, so this is something that we started. We were working on something like this right when the Ledger debacle came out,

and then we saw the community reaction to Ledger. We decided to kind of take a step back from the cliff and say, hang on, let's do a bit more work on this. I'm not very technical, but is there centralized ways of doing what Ledger's doing? Ledger's finding a partially centralized solution. If you're dividing your asset up into three centralized entities, then it's a centralized solution. The challenge here is that it's a high-risk thing because if you're giving your keys to, even if you're dividing up, you're giving them to a regulated entity.

That regulated entity, there's a jurisdiction, there's a governance body that sits on top of them that can demand those assets you saw it today with crack it they don't they were demanded they demanded the user data the irs demanded user data from crack it so what it needs to be is it needs to be the same kind of mechanics that you saw with ledger but it has to be in a fully decentralized manner it has to be to be in a way where nobody can get access to it. That's what we're working on. Man, I forgot you're a sponsor because we started just chatting and kind of got carried away.

But yeah, man, I appreciate your sponsoring. So what do you think of the chat? Do you like the structure that we do this, how we do an AMA at the end? I think it's great. I think that I would actually like to see even more sort of challenging questions and sort of hot topics. I think there's would actually like to see even more sort of challenging questions and

sort of hot topics. I think there's a lot of problems that are happening and there's a lot of things that are the root cause of what you guys talk about. Things like the war in Ukraine, the fact that the central bank of Russia had their assets stolen from them or taken from them. These types of topics have kind of rocked the financial world. And they're also causing the SEC and Treasury to behave in a unique way. So it's all connected. And I think it's cool that you guys are actually asking these really, really hard questions. Yeah. If I was a bigger DeFi expert like Scott, if I was as boring as Scott, I'll be able to ask some tougher questions. But I had a few there, but you seem to have a good answer for all of them, including the, well, I kind of put you on the spot with the,

you talk about the advantages of self-custody, but there's obviously one big disadvantage, but at least you guys are working towards solving it. So that's probably the best answer you could give. Well, I mean, think about it this way, right? When celsius went down when ftx went down you know what do you think people would were there's no way there's no recourse there's no there's no way you can you can get your assets back there's no way for you to do anything about it when at least when you have self-custody you have the opportunity to make decisions you know you decide okay i'm going to take this i'm going to put this in a safe or a safe deposit box, or I'm going to make copies of it and give it to my family or however you're going to handle your self-custody.

You have a choice. When it comes to centralized, you have no choice. You don't know what your assets are going to be used for. You don't know how they're going to be held. You have no choice at all. So I think that the ability to have choice is much, much more valuable than zero choice. All right, well, Ken, I'm going to ask the audience, give us your thoughts in the comments, bottom right corner. I don't think you'll have enough time because when I end the space, you can't comment anymore. But give us your thoughts on the discussion with Ken and what you think of MELD. Any tougher questions I could have asked, put them in the comments, bottom right corner. Otherwise, if you want to come on stage similar to how ken was here just hit us up um check the

pin tweet and email us or dm me or ran and if you want to check out meld we brought up josh who's running meld's account it's that red circle and the other red circle with the ugly logo is a crypto town hall account so you can check that follow it because that's where we're going to start hosting the shows on the red circle called Crypto Town Hall, the ugly logo of a mic. Otherwise, yeah, we'll see you all tomorrow morning.