The Wolf Of All Streets - The Hottest Crypto Trends To Watch In 2025, Straight From Coinbase | Hoolie Tejwani

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

Join us on The Wolf Of All Streets as we dive into an inspiring conversation with Hoolie Tejwani, Head of Coinbase Ventures. We discuss the future of crypto and AI, stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi), and the intersection of traditional finance and blockchain. Discover how Coinbase Ventures is fostering innovation and pushing boundaries to bring billions of users and trillions in assets on-chain. Don't miss this deep dive into the long-term vision for the crypto economy! Hoolie Tejwani: https://x.com/HoolieG ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://archpublic.com/  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #investments  Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:17 2025 Predictions 3:53 Stablecoins' Future 5:30 Bitcoin as Strategic Asset 7:31 Regulatory Optimism 10:15 US as Innovation Hub 12:34 Global Crypto Development 14:11 Filtering Builders in Cycles 16:29 Crypto and AI Convergence 19:42 Agent Economy's Future 23:01 DeFi and Adoption 26:18 Middle Ground of Finance 27:45 Tokenizing Global Assets 30:53 Long-Term Vision for Crypto 33:33 Meme Coins and Creativity 36:19 Coinbase Ventures Philosophy 40:12 Bitcoin’s Expanding Use Cases 41:45 Interoperability Challenges 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.

That's the internet. You're on the internet, folks. This is what happens. If you even have to get a MetaMask wallet, you've already lost. Crypto, DeFi, it's awesome for the edge curves of the barbell for users and money. I think Telegram is really interesting. They're not done until we've got billions of people on chain and trillions and trillions of assets on chain.

No company has been more pivotal in pushing crypto forward than Coinbase. One arm of crypto is Coinbase Ventures led by huli tajwani we had an amazing conversation about all of the things that are being built in crypto when we actually may see them come to fruition and what it's going to take to get to mainstream adoption you don't want to miss this the most exciting topics first. What's exciting you right now in crypto? Where to begin? I think 2025 is going to be a pretty epic year across everything in crypto. A couple of areas. So one, stablecoins. Whenever someone asks me, what's the use case

for crypto? I kind of just laugh and say, go talk to someone in Kenya who's moving through a tremendous amount of friction to get access for stablecoins. I think that we're at a point where it's very clear that is a 10 to 100x penetration wave we're going to be riding. We were investors in Bridge, which is acquired by Stripe. We recently announced investment in BVNK. And so the original thesis around crypto starting to eat in traditional financial, the financial system, it's happening.

So that's a big area. Second where I'm spending a lot of time and the team's spending a lot of time is around intersection of crypto and AI. AI is just a massive paradigm shift that's going to engulf everything. But we're already seeing, if you go to that truism of where where the really smart hackers and builders spending their nights and weekends, a lot of them are focused on this intersection point. It's going to be wonderful and weird.

It's hard to predict how it's all going to shape out, but that's one big area. And then third, I'd say we're finally at a point if we think about these crypto cycles, the kind of Carletta Peretz framework of you have the big speculative runs where a lot of infrastructure gets built out up and down. We've gotten through all these waves now where all the pieces of the stack for truly internet scale blockchain applications are here. We're at that convergence point.

And so the design space around on-chain consumer applications, whether it's gaming or social fi, there's a lot of really interesting experimentation there. So I think we'll see a bunch of breakout kind of viral apps in that. So those are kind of like three big buckets, but plenty more. Yeah, that's been one of the sort of paradigm shifts of the last few years that I noticed as well is that we had this panic in 18, 19, 20, 21 even, where we said, there's so many things that are being built, there's not enough block space. Now it seems like we have infinite block space and chains and need to actually fill them with some, you know,

apps that are actually adopted by the mainstream or gain some traction. So I guess you mentioned a few sort of verticals there. I think we all know DeFi will happen in some, you know, maybe on one chain will be a DeFi chain. I don't know. NFTs I'm sure will happen. I'm sure the metaverse will come back around. We know that AI, we have all these different verticals. Which ones do you think may actually see some meaningful traction if we're assuming this four-year cycle exists? But in this cycle, in the coming two to three years, let's call it. Yeah, I kind of bring it back to someone's earlier point. So on the stablecoin, like traditional payments side of things, I think by the end of the cycle, we're going to see a lot of applications where people

are interacting. They don't even know that blockchain and crypto is in the back and will just penetrate whatever amount of GDP in the world is going through. Stripe and like traditional pen and paper payment systems, we're already seeing real traction there. It'll continue to scale. It's hard to put a finger on particular use cases beyond that defy for sure continual continue to go uh and with the cheaper block space and what the friction points

that have kind of held it back in the past are are being alleviated uh there's a clear clear use case there um i came to krypton and around bitcoin i think the story value thesis is as sound as ever uh this i think this will be the year where we start going increasing institutional adoption uh but also the sovereign uh like the sovereign game theoretic side of bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset has has like likes. A couple of ideas. I'm curious what you think. Yeah, well, I definitely think on the Bitcoin side that we've kind of reached exit velocity

as far as adoption, right? That's the first. And the game theory, as you mentioned, if we get a strategic Bitcoin reserve in the United States or even continue to have the rhetoric of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, I think people are underestimating. Just if the United States puts it on the balance sheet, everybody literally has to put it on the

balance sheet. So I don't even know what a world of Bitcoin price looks like if that happens. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was a very rapid trip to a million bucks, right? And I don't think that's as hyperbolic as it sounds, but it depends on that happening. I have always said, just like you did, that stable coins are the killer app for crypto. Bitcoiners hate that because I think there's some irony in dollarized and tokenized dollars being the thing that we use when you're supposed to buy Bitcoin as a hedge against the dollar. deeper thoughts, especially sort of with the regulatory regime likely changing, legislation being more likely with the incoming administration, because it felt for a while like Tether might end up on the outs in the United States. But hell, let Nick's an owner of Tether and is the secretary of commerce. So I think that's less likely. So I just don't know who wins or how many stable coins we can have. It seems like now we're getting stable coins launched on a weekly basis. And that hype is kind of confusing to me.

I mean, I think they'll be used, but I think there'll be one or two massive stable coins that dominate the world, you know? Yeah, it's definitely like an interesting kind of even strategic question to think about how the stablecoin landscape moves forward um there's something to be said about the power of liquidity and you know liquidity begets liquidity and so there will be a couple standards there's also a world where these things are fungible in their programmatic and every merchant can launch their own uh launcher on like white label stablecoin and we see thousands billions of them uh in different flavors and formats um with like pending regulatory uh like clarity i think things around how you can do like on-chain treasuries and some of the rwa side of things start becoming

interesting that's pretty gated right now until that uh until that side clears up how optimistic are you that our pie in the sky vision of what the world's going to look like in the United States as far as legislation regulation is actually going to play out? Because I think that there's many who think we're so optimistic that we're going to end up disappointed. That maybe because we're in our echo chamber, it feels like the most important thing that's going to be legislated. But we might get sort of left out on the sidelines in that first hundred days yeah i think brian rco is a quote that i've really internalized it's never as good as it seems it's never as bad as it seems uh and you go through

these phases of euphoria and despair and it's like a elastic band that you lose all the elastic and just stays down through it. I'd say I'm optimistic things are going to be much more constructive. I mean, we're coming out of a period where we had this not principled regulation by enforcement, basically like gaslighting is not a workable regulatory strategy period. And crypto has persisted, right? It's not, yes, we've seen developers like shift from the US offshore. There's like pretty convincing data around that. But it can only get better.

I think all we need is just like constructive engagement and clear rules of the road. No one is saying don't regulate the space. It's just provide constructive regulation that can actually, you know, deter bad actors, enable good actors and innovation. I don't, you know, with DC and, and politics, like I try not to over index on like, what will get done, what can't get done. There's such a process there. But the tone is certainly much more constructive. I was going to say, I think that that's actually what matters, right? I mean, the feeling that you can actually do things when you didn't think you could before is all that matters because all those companies that were afraid to do anything in the

United States maybe won't be for a while and we'll start to sort of see innovation come back. I just interviewed Raoul Pal. And he had a really interesting take on the election. He basically said it wasn't as much Democrat as Republican as it looked, but it was actually the technologists finally stepped in and won. Like there was this just huge wave

of anti-entrepreneurship and anti-tech in the United States. And Brian, Coinbase and others were forced to step in and do their part and win and make sure that, you know, America remains ahead. You're at Coinbase Ventures, obviously, right? So this meaningfully impacts you, I would imagine. As an investor, you know, I'm assuming working with and consulting the startups that you invest in, having an active role in how they proceed, this seems like the biggest shift there could be, regardless of, like I said, what those actual laws end up being, the fact that people aren't even scared to talk to you anymore. Yeah, it definitely impacts in a very positive way. Ultimately, we're doing early stage venture and we're driven by great exceptional founders and the technology. And if you have an environment where the talent is deterred from working on the technology, that is a big limiting reagent, having that flip to the other side where we're already seeing like quality, really high quality builders and engineers who would have been kind of staying away from crypto because of just the narrative around it, especially coming out of

like kind of that post FTX period are warming back up and it's a safe place to build. And that just catalyzes the formation rate and how many opportunities, how many ideas are being pursued. And yet folks don't need to think about domiciling and other geographies and can build in the US. But zooming out, crypto is so global and candidly other jurisdictions like the us is behind like there are other hubs that are are ahead of just ahead uh so i think that the genius on the bottle the progress is going to continue uh now hopefully we're in a place where the us can catch up a bit and and play the it should play, which is like be the home for the innovators and attract the attractability, have all the economic output and value here in our tax base.

I have no idea how much you travel, but in the context of how many things aren't being built in the United States, I would imagine you spend quite a bit of time in Dubai, Singapore and other friendlier jurisdictions that you're alluding to. Maybe you'll get to travel less now. we'll just get to stay home and take meetings around the country. Yeah. Fortunately, post-COVID, we can do a lot with the norms on a Zoom like this. But we're happy to invest wherever the builders are. Like India has a tremendous amount of like incredible Web3 or on-chain talent. I'll get on a call with anyone, anywhere, any time zone, but happy to have coffee with someone down the street too. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm curious how much deal flow you're seeing, how many projects are pitching you on a regular basis and how much that's fluctuated through the more bullish and bearish cycles over the past few years. A lot of people actually sort of joke that actually everything's built in the bear market and all the builders love the bear market because you're not influenced by price and community and hype. You can just put your head down and then that all gets lost in the bull market when tokens start popping hundred X's left and right. It's a great question that I think about a lot. I think about it as we're looking for missionaries, not mercenaries.

When we're in the euphoric phases, that ratio skews for sure. Volume, you know, volume on pipeline and deal flow, I would say right now is feeling kind of where it was going into 2021. So, you know, mark to mark of where we are in the cycle. In the bears, it's just much easier to spot the missionaries because they're the folks who stick around and have big ideas. Because they're actually there. They exist. And you can filter on who's, it comes down to intrinsic motivations.

Like, are you doing this because intrinsically it's a get-rich-quick motivation or are you trying to build something that's going to change the world and millions of people are going to use it and we're going to move trillions of dollars of capital? So yeah, some of our investments are great. we've had great performing investments across all cycles. It's just, it's easier to filter in the bears.

You just got to keep the signal to noise filter being much more, just a higher filter engine in the euphoric times. But numbers, sheer quantity, 100 projects projects a month, a thousand projects a month. I mean, yeah, I can't even imagine if you count all the random DMs on X or, you know, I see them, you know, that like just how many there are and how you filter them, what the process is, where something finally reaches your desk

and you take a serious look at it. Yeah, yeah. I don't have like really strong i just anecdotally like we're in those hundred thousands like zones for sure there in terms of how like we think about filtering one there's just like certain categories that we're more excited about or less excited about um a lot of it comes out to idea too. There's incremental things, which is like, okay, the next nth derivative of this primitive that's already been done. But a lot of it's founder. A lot of it's just the talent founder base and getting to know the folks, even if they're anonymous devs that I can only talk to through a JPEG. What have they done before? Why are they

doing this? And that motivation piece is like a huge filter. I want to go back to the intersection between crypto and AI. I think you guys are relatively outspoken that that's a key focus. And you said that sort of first in the beginning after stablecoins. This is one of those where it seems like there's a lot of hype and a lot of nonsense. It almost feels like when, you know, Long Island blockchain ice tea, you know, like just put AI in the name and your token can go up 50x even if it's not very key part of crypto cycles. But you obviously believe that there's something deeper that's there and being built. Curious where the signal is and how we cut through the noise, because most of what I've

seen actually pop off when people are looking at prices has been noise, in my opinion. Yeah, that's a great question. I think kind of the benefit of my seat is I honestly don't look at prices like I'm thinking in like five, 10 year time horizon. So what the latest meta or the latest kind of like crypto Twitter narrative is, I can kind of ignore a lot of that. And it's Fartcoin in case you were wondering as we speak, it's Fartcoin. I imagine it's going to go up in a lot of a lot of Christmas table conversations. But it's like it's it's definitely experimentation zone.

The way I think about it is there's one side of it. If if this agentic kind of path to general AGI, we all believe we're on that crypto and blockchain is like just a very natural complement to how that's actually gets delivered and scaled to the world in a way that we actually want to consume it like do we want a single central point owning controlling every single aspect of our lives in terms of our data or do we want users to have like self-sovereignty over their data do we want all these like the the the ai side technology is so centralizing and uh as like a force that it needs this natural compliment in terms of delivery. We're going to need and all these unsolved problems like we're going to pretty soon need like a proof of humanity capability.

Right. Like, how do I know I'm even talking to you right now versus your your avatar? Yeah, I'm deep faking you. Yeah. Well, maybe I signed maybe I signed before I got on here on my phone, and you know that a human with this thumbprint is actually who you're talking to. So those are like, and then actually delivering the compute, delivering these AI models in like different ways. And then where all that, you know, kind of the narrative energy right now is like, okay, now we've got these like really

smart ai agents and they're acting on chain and back to your early question like wow where's where's the block space demand going to come from like i think 99 of it is actually be agentic and ai driven uh in in not too too short of a time um uh so but it's, but there's really like really interesting things happening. I think both sides have like long-term durability, like, but it's early. Let me make clear. It's like, it's like very early. Yeah. The agents, I'm not quite sold yet.

I know that that is absolutely the future. I agree with you, but this first iteration seems like it's just a guy behind a keyboard trolling us on X through his agent. Right. And maybe that's not the case, but that's sort of what it feels like. At least they're kind of a remote control car, you know, that somebody is behind and pulling the strings. But to your point, I mean, if we all have agents that are going to effectively manage our lives and do everything for us. They're going to need to transact with one another. And so that seems like the most natural one to me. And then the one you said, which is proof of humanity. Right. And I think there's actually some interesting protocols that are doing real things there.

I don't know if they're just the first iteration or if there will be others. But those seem like the most natural fits. But I'm sure there's exponentially more that I'm not even thinking about. Yeah. And you raise a really good point around this agentic economy. So I believe a meaningful amount of GDP is going to be flowing and being bartered through agent systems and agent networks. And if that is true, it makes sense that internet native money, blockchain, everything we've done in crypto is the substrate

for that to happen. Like an agent cannot go through KYC and get a bank account, but it can hit an API that is hitting open. And I don't want them with my American express card and like open access without a cap, right? So. Right. But then once you give agents wallets in their own, like, it's like, how much agency does

the agent have? If the agent can make financial decisions and has different optimization functions. This is like back to like the wonderful and weird world where a lot of interesting experimentation happening. I think stablecoins, crypto, the blockchain rails are going to be a big part of it. Maybe not all of it, but it just makes sense that that agentic GDP is flowing on chain. How is TradFi going to deal with agents? Let's say even outside of crypto existing and proving humanity and transacting and the things we know that are coming with it, if that did not exist and AI was still obviously

proliferating and becoming, I don't even understand how this would work with traditional rails. They've got to be terrified. And I think that's why you see a lot of kind of, we've got through in the crypto space, we've got through our like regulatory challenges and education challenges, and you see the same kind of reflex reaction from the powers of be around AI because it's going to be very disruptive. It's going to challenge a lot of the assumptions and gatekeeping systems. I don't have an answer on how they're going to handle it, but I suspect cybersecurity departments in every institution that we interact with are going to be very, very busy and critical places. It's been interesting to me seeing the rise of AI and how much the narratives, the negative narratives echo those that we heard in the earlier days in

Bitcoin and not even that long ago, but boiling the oceans and using as much electricity as all of Venezuela or Argentina or whatever it is. It's almost like they've boiler plated the same stories that they had to try to kill Bitcoin in the early days for AI now. But maybe that's less of a topic with this new regime coming in than it would have been, I guess, if the old administration had continued, Because it seemed like there was a whole arm of that administration that was anti-Alt-tech, but certainly anything advancing like this, crypto and AI. Yeah. On the human level, on balance, I get it. Change is scary. And the idea of Bitcoin, originally, it's threatening to powers that be. And the idea of Bitcoin originally, it's very it's

threatening to powers that be and the idea of AI is is threatening if you are in the control structure, thinking through how you're going to adjust, if your impulses to control, and there's this technology that is going to reduce your control. I get I get the psychology around it um but the first principle it just comes out of first principles thinking and uh i'm a you know i don't know how you want to label the techno progressive i just i just believe we're on these secular technology change curves and you can't put the genie back in the bottle you can't stop it yeah i'd rather reason through how does

it uh manifest in like a way as productive for society versus that impulse of it's threatening to me i'm gonna try to you know squash it you can't uh and so obviously defy another area that you guys have historically been very active in i think uniswap ave right i mean the the biggest sort of protocols that have existed, you were very early on and behind. Do you think that those are going to be the ones that continue to win and build their new cycles? Or do you think that we're going to see sort of replacements, especially? I was pitched an AI exchange somebody was telling me about this week that said everybody has their agent, they're in there, there's full order books and liquidity, and we never trade again, right?

I mean, that's DeFi to some degree, right? The things that I'm hearing could happen are crazy, but you also see a massive sort of more volume and interest coming to the dinosaurs. Yeah. I love DeFi because it's just like the best experimentation zone it's hard to it's there is i think like an incumbency advantage for once you're an established protocol you've been bulletproof tested um you've gone through all like the smart contract attack vectors etc and you've just kind of become the platform um but there's constant innovation like one of one of our investors moonwell is doing super interesting things.

And I think UX and usability is a big thing for this cycle. My Moonwell card is great. I don't want to sell my Bitcoin, but I want to be able to borrow against it for debit and pay. That flow for a real user,

I can finally see my brother-in-law can get value out of this and it's not the small pool of on-chain hardcore folks. But that said, the amount of capital in DeFi, it's still in the global scale. Rocket bucket. It's a niche kind of hobbyist world. As the institutional big pools of capital can unlock and get on, that's where there'll be an incumbency advantage, but there's still just a ton of opportunity

for shaping that and being the pipes and rails for that. I think people view DeFi through somewhat different lenses, right? They're kind of the original people that said wholesale replace TradFi. You know, like there would be no more TradFi. Everything will be on chain, decentralized. Then I think there's maybe a more pragmatic view that it'll sort of be a parallel system for those who maybe are a little more willing to take risk or who just don't have access to that system at all.

I mean, you talked about at the beginning, even just with stable coins. I mean, good luck sending somebody five bucks in Nigeria from here, right? You're not going to wire it to them and pay $15 and wait three weeks for the banks to clear it. I mean, do you think that what's being built in DeFi now, I guess, how do you take that view? Do you think that it eventually does replace the existing view? Do you think that it eventually does replace the existing systems? Do you think that it becomes a tool that they use? Or do you think that it becomes

sort of a separate parallel system? I think it's that middle lane where you've got a crypto economy, you've got a traditional like pre-crypto economy. And I don't think everything on one side goes all over to crypto, but there's the nexus point of the two just grows and grows and grows. Yeah, definitely.

Definitely on that middle lane. Like there's always going to be a biology student who's our it was our CTO and I joined he had this really good framework of like crypto defi. It's it's awesome for the edge curves of the barbell for users of money. So like power users of money. This is 10 Xx 100x better the dis like disenfranchised you're not served by the financial system this is 10x better now it's like the the shape of that curve is like converging so you're getting more and more into

the like the 80 zone of the bell curve where it's like okay this is 5x better because uh then the replacement but that's that's how i think about it like is this 5 is 5x better than the replacement. But that's how I think about it. Is this 5x or 10x better than the alternative? And how much of that surface area are we progressing towards? And it's a forward progression. I don't think it's ever going to be like 100%. There will be certain things that just don't make sense to do in DeFi and on-chain. But it's going to be a bigger area of the curve.

It is pretty wild to hear Larry Fink talking about tokenizing all assets, though. Right. Because it's accelerated faster than I anticipated, I guess, in this cycle. I would say, actually, at the beginning, it was slower than I thought. Right. Which is, I think, a natural human tendency. You think everything is going to happen. But once it does, I think we also underestimate how parabolic it can go.

That's right. I mean, it's been now over a year since, you know, BlackRock's paper where everybody focused on the Bitcoin side, but the other side that nobody talks about was literally tokenizing everything. They're tokenizing Biddle. I mean, it's actually happening. It hasn't gained any sort of, you know, meaningful traction, a few billion dollars, again, a drop in the bucket. But these are the largest financial institutions in the world that are playing in this sandbox now. Right. And that's what feels so different this cycle than last cycle is that that audience was

either disengaged or just skeptical. And now there's every day more believers and they see the potential, they see the benefit, they're getting involved um and again it will keep looping back onto regulatory but as there are more clear workable regulatory frameworks around all this uh that just becomes a huge huge unlocking catalyst like the the interest is there corporates adding they're going to balance sheet like that's happening. Like it's all there. It's hard for me to predict when does the parabolic moves happen, but the potential is there

once some of those gates are restricted or moved off. Specifically at Coinbase Ventures, it seems like you have sort of a different mandate than a lot of other VCs. I mean, obviously like there's a widespread of how VCs approach this market from those who are pretty much just want to see, you know, crypto and blockchain proliferate and be successful and are willing to sort of take it on the chin no matter what they need to do to make that happen.

And then there's the other side that's just taking as many tokens they can, not helping the project at all and dumping immediately on every single unlock. Right. So I'm assuming there's a sliding scale uh in between but it seems to me at least from the outside that coinbase ventures has been a bit more concerned with pushing forward an open financial system than with immediate profit is that a fair framing uh yeah it comes back to time horizon like we're long-term greedy uh not not playing the short-term games uh and yeah it's helpful just kind of step through the origin of history. Coinbase Venture Start really is an experiment.

It was a blog post that Emily put out. About half a dozen folks around the company were just working on it, like nights and weekends, kind of volunteering. And the whole mandate was just backgrade builders who are pushing the state of the art

for the crypto economy forward. And we've just kept that ethos from the beginning. We are operating with financial ROI mindset, but on a venture scale time horizon. And so we're helping seed the ecosystem i'd say the ecosystem now has been seeded and is uh much more mature and uh from from when we started um but yeah we're not we're not playing short-term games like and it's a very like non-zero-sum mindset we've really broad mandate we'll invest in things that from the outside and people will be like i get questions like isn't that competitive of course i'm like great uh that that's that's the point we're people would be like, I get questions like, isn't that competitive? I'm just like, great. That's the point.

We're trying to build an entire ecosystem here. That was actually... Short-term games. Completely my next question direction that I want to go in. So I'm glad that you said that, right? I think, I mean, anyone who's in technology knows that eventually you'll get disrupted, right? We all know what the top 20 companies in the world were in 2000, not the same as 2024, right? So anyone who doesn't innovate eventually dies. But you guys have been very quick to disrupt yourselves. Not necessarily Coinbase Ventures,

but Coinbase, right, launching base and pushing towards decentralization and Web3 wallets, really walking the walk of using the technology. But obviously, the core business, you're still custodying the ETFs and you still have spot trading by the billions a day. I guess that aligns with what you're saying about Coinbase Ventures is that you're willing to disrupt yourselves to push this forward. It's a really interesting place to be, I think, as a company. Yeah. And I really credit Brian, Fred, all

the OGs at Coinbase that had instilled this DNA of we're not playing the zero-sum game, and we've got this broader kind of abundance-y mindset. Rising

tide lifts all boats. Coinbase is I think a lot of very key decisions in how the company's been built. We've always taken a longer term approach. We're going to go work with regulators, be trusted, be compliant, not optimized for the short term win. And so when you've got that, I feel like feel like i'm part of building like a generational platform and company and so when you've got that uh that type of like stewardship mindset then it's then you can it's not that hard to make the next leap of okay if this entire ecosystem grows and benefits we don't know how it's all going to work out like uh base started

as like i was around when jesse was first first kind of thinking through the ideas and from where it started to where it ended. Like it was an experiment. Same thing with USDC. So the rate of change is so fast that if you take like the Harvard Business School, like this is your strategy playbook and apply all of that stuff. Just lean into the innovator's dilemma. You know you're going to have to disrupt yourself. And part of that is like, yeah, invest in things that could be disruptive to you. I'm thinking back to the launch of BASE.

I wasn't that involved. But I remember that you couldn't really get money in and out. It was sort of like an experiment. And there was this meme coin called Bald that was going crazy based on Brian's head. I mean, crypto is so ridiculous, right? You're building something very serious. But of course, that's the way that the interest is peaked in the community. That's, you know, an open permissionless platform.

It's going to bring a lot of irreverence and it comes back to that control function. But I view all that stuff as like, it's awesome to bring a lot of irreverence and it comes back to that control function and but i view all that stuff as like it's awesome it's creativity like people you know the internet gaming culture meme culture uh it's it's expressions of creativity and uh yeah i try not to play like place like any value judgments on uh this is on brand this is off brand like we're building this for for everyone and if folks want to do a bulk, you know, I joke with my team, we have like an internal goal. And like, if we hit it this year, like I'm gotta be bald to be based.

So I'm gonna shave my head. Like it just becomes part of the culture too. And like the story. I mean, how do you frame this absolute explosion in meme coins then? Because it really has, there was almost this moment here for the last year where there's plenty of things being built, but it felt like it was a Bitcoin and meme coin barbell and there was kind of nothing in between.

Digital gold on one side, full speculation on the other, and nobody interested in anything in between. Yeah, yeah. You know, I can really like over into like, well, a couple ways to break it down. First of all, why is this happening? What's new and what's different? I think memes have been around as long as humans have been around. Internet memes have been around as long as the internet's been around. Meme coins have been around as long as Doge, this is just like human behavior and what we what happens what why this

cycle there's been so much more mean point activity couple drivers one the enabling infrastructure has made it so it's just basically zero cost to launch a coin right and it's basically uh infinite user generated. It's inherently social. It's like a social money game. People are playing with their friends and it goes viral. It has that capability built in. And then on the flip, because of the regulatory environment,

it was like, okay, this is what... Not a security. It's totally, it makes no sense, but yeah, this is what you can do. I view it as like, again, it comes back to like that creativity, like user generated content expression mode where it's like a new form of like monetized attention

and it's irreverent and things will come and things will go. And yeah, I i'm gonna have to ask answer thanksgiving questions about far coin which i don't really want to do but that's like that's the internet like you're on the internet folks this is what happens i agree with that do you have a traditional vc background uh i have i do have traditional vc i've kind of a crazy mixed background. I've spent some time in Hollywood. We've worked in a traditional VC. I was at a baiting company.

I would say that counts. Yeah. But I got orange-pilled relatively early and have been pretty focused on crypto for a while. But just sounds like the way that you frame Coinbase Ventures is more how a traditional VC would look at their investments than a crypto VC would look at their investments, which is this may take 10 years till we even are liquid. Right. So it just seems like that's the approach. Yeah. Long term mindset. We're not a hedge fund, we're not a trading shop. We're not merc hedge fund, we're not a trading shop. We're not mercenary about it. And that's kind of benefit of the setup and then kind of having long-term capital to deploy. Maybe AI is one of the answers,

but is there anything that you're seeing really early iterations of that we may not know that could be the narratives of a few years down the road or that could be the next cycle thing? I mean, in crypto, we always have this thing where you get really excited about something, and then it really happens three years later, right? But is there anything that you're seeing that might not be on people's radar that you're excited about? So a couple. So you hit it on AI. I do think there's going to be like an AI influencer that every kind of creator, just like a character that millions and

billions of people are interacting with. And it's that expression of like the TikTok ice cream so good thing, but to the next level. I think Telegram is really interesting. And what Telegram is a distribution platform, Tom blockchain, especially I'm always, I'm us based. I'm always challenging like the us centric mindset. And so then when you go talk to folks in other other geos, like that's just an interesting substrate for where like developer activity is happening. And then gaming, like there's gaming is real. Like I, so one of my teams like really hooked on uh off the grid which is

like i think the like triple a game that godzilla is amazing it finally happened like yeah it's not getting as much attention as i think it should but last cycle we were sort of like we either need a triple game a triple a game that kind of has crypto in it and nobody knows about it or we need fortnite to add n NFTs or something. It happened. This is a blockchain native game that is fully AAA, amazing, and when you play it, you have no idea. Right.

Yeah. And I think it'll be both. But we've now got proof points that both can happen. Peopleplace value judgments on speculation, and speculation can be bad, it can be good. Like I take a view like speculation is just a part of reality and it's how it is just like intrinsic human behavior. This cycle, what I'm looking for is like where can the speculative hook to come in the door translate to some longer, like more enduring if you go through like the seven deadly sin

framework, like where is this hitting pride or greed or like other things so that folks show up and stay engaged and form like daily habits, outsider price go up. That's just a mental framework I have. But yeah, I think we've covered it. I can't predict the future. Our whole mentality is like the founders we're meeting are telling us the future. They're the ones who have it. And so I'm kind of guided by where they're taking us. In your mind, where does building on Bitcoin fit into all of this? Because that has started to actually happen. Is that somewhere you guys are actively looking? Because there's some pretty exciting things that we've seen on other chains really starting to gain some traction on Bitcoin. Yeah, we've made a couple of investments around, I call it BTC expressiveness.

We can go down a technical rabbit hole that I'm probably not the best to defend every point on. There are some fundamental changes that the protocol has to make to really unlock the ... through Opcat and stuff, to really unlock the, you know, through Opcat and stuff for it to really unlock what the design space is there. There's going to be Bitcoin, I'm on the camp of this is like an eternal asset. And so as a substrate for interesting things, we've been playing around with ordinals, runes, like all this stuff. It's just much easier to do the zero to one experimentation on EVM, SVM, like the chains that have been designed from ground up to be developer platforms and port something over. I don't know if something like truly novel can come out of Bitcoin Express into the way it's architected right now, but we'll keep our eyes on it. Yeah, it's sort of like everything else is a

test net for Bitcoin if it ever gets there, you know, to be able to program it and to do it. There's some pretty exciting things happening in layer two, but they remind me of the earlier, you know, moments in other chains. I don't think it's there yet, personally. And I know we only have a couple more minutes. With all of these chains, how do you see interoperability sort of developing? Like you talk about UI and UX and people being able to use it. Well, good luck couple more minutes with all these chains how do you see interoperability sort of developing like you talk about ui and ux and people being able to use it well good luck bridging right yeah we have a lot of debates and can be like philosophical like are we in you in this like infinite different blockchain l1 world what's the reason for that i think it it's already progressed so far. Like if you look at super chain with OP

and like things being interoperable from the ground up, there's still too much friction, but I think a lot of it gets just solved on the UX side. And like the end user should not care what chain they're on. You shouldn't know. You shouldn't know, you shouldn't know, shouldn't care. There do need to be different chains that optimize for different things and different use cases but uh you know we've seen a lot of the security issues and stuff around trying to solve it it's

a lot better now it's not fully solved but i think a lot of it is it's kind of you look at coinbase right like give that web to experience in the front abstract. Like you don't need to know which chain you're on or you're moving here, there in the back. That's where I'm really excited about what the Coinbase product team is working on with stuff around base and wallet is like continue to get this down to like, this is two clicks and done, not 15 clicks and you're bridging from here, there, and all that complexity.

It's a trade off between like giving the user like robustness and power and like some users want to like have that level of fidelity. But then there's also the average user that, you know, the Robin Hood user, they don't care. They want to press one or two buttons and go. Yeah, I don't think we reach full mainstream adoption if it's just the power users being focused on. For sure.

It's still, even the sort of most compelling cases, sometimes if you even have to get a MetaMask wallet, you've already, we've already lost. You know, like, yeah, you got to sign up and do the keys and get some ETH in there. That's not an easy process, even if once you get it in there, it is. Right. So I think we're getting there. I agree with you. And I'm really thrilled to see

everything you're building and obviously investing in and the approach that you take, because we need more people who are thinking about what this is going to look like in five and 10 years, unless we're thinking about what meme coin is going to pop in the next five or 10 days. Appreciate the kind words. And yeah, it's okay to have fun on the short term stuff. But I get up every day thinking about what's the 10 year, what's the 10 year goal? We're not done until we've got billions of people on chain and trillions and trillions of assets on chain. It'll happen. I appreciate you guys keeping your eye on the ball for us. Where can everybody keep up with everything you're doing and follow you after this conversation? Yeah. At CB Ventures on Twitter, at Holy G, at CoinbaseVentures.com. We're out there. We're active. And if you're a

founder, you're listening to this and you're thinking about building long-term in crypto, we'd love to chat with you. Thank you so much, man. It's been a pleasure. Speak to you soon. Thanks, Scott.