The Wolf Of All Streets - Top VCs Expose Their Strategies | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

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I think you're putting your hand up. The space hasn't even started. The music hasn't started yet. How are you? Can you hear me, Arthur? I dropped out. I think it was glitchy. He put his hand up. Let's kick it off. Preston, how you doing, man? Preston, can you hear me? I'm not sure if it's glitching because I know someone dropped off earlier. Can you hear me, Alan? Can you hear me? Can anyone hear me? Yep, I can hear you. Good morning. I'm closing. I think it's glitching for some of the speakers how are you man doing well thanks for uh thanks for having me on yeah good time it was enjoyable yesterday i enjoyed the discussion um let me just make sure that the mic is working for the others preston i'm not sure if the mic is working for you uh uh let me know if it is um otherwise evan alex and uh we got carl here as well as we're working for you guys. Good to be here, brother.

One, two, three, four. Oh, beautiful. We're finding Evan's having issues as well. He'd be good for this discussion. For anyone that doesn't know Evan, he used to be my de-gen go-to person last cycle. I think he's less de-gen-ish now, but he used to be very de-gen-ish in the last cycle. So it'll be good to ask him a few questions today. But let's get into the discussion.

Alex, how are you doing? Being great, brother. Super. Before we kick off the discussion, today I'm going to dig into the kind of the state. I just got to talk to a bunch of VCs, something I like to do that Scott doesn't do much, who doesn't invest as much, but just talking to different VCs about what their strategies are. I think it's going to be really enjoyable where they're investing, where they're deploying capital, if at all, what their sentiment is like.

But you know, you're a regular on the show. What are your thoughts on the markets in general? I know you've been in the last few spaces as well. Kind of talking about when I went on to the team, something like an agenda and use agenda every day when we do crypto town hall, the first thing on there first, second thing was like everyone's just waiting for the elections as well. It's your thoughts on where things are at right now um especially on the political side like today i've got an interview with matt taibi and uh another journalist i feel bad i forgot name

who's exposed uh british interference in the american elections if anyone hasn't seen it they literally had on their agenda to kill elon's ex that's literally on their agenda to kill Elon's ex. That's literally on their agenda, to kill Twitter, who's obviously very right-leaning, through advertisers. And they also, I think everyone saw the post by the operations manager, I think, for the Labour Party in the UK, bragging about sending 100 volunteers to help Kamala's campaign. She deleted that post. Trump, I think, is suing the Labour Party today.

He either sent a letter or is already suing them in the UK. And then I've also got an interview tomorrow with the Texas Attorney General talking about his concerns when it comes to unregistered voters, people that are not eligible to vote

and potentially getting ballots. So he's suing the Kamala campaign for this. There's just so much happening. I'm interviewing him tomorrow. On the political front, it's just starting to feel like everyone in crypto, before we kick off the discussion with VCs, everyone in crypto is just waiting to see what happens November 5th before they make decisions.

And to be honest, I'm one of those. Yeah, absolutely. So I think these are some really good points, Mario. So what I've been doing recently is just for my own sanity, I've been walking around most of the big conferences, whether it's the Binance parties, the sweep ad, and asking the most intelligent people a simple question of, do you think the crypto market will pump or just traditional financial markets will start having a more risk on mentality. And will we see a surge in terms of price? Right.

And long story short, Mario, like everyone says that there's no issue with regardless with regards to the actual winner of the elections, because they're saying that, of course, the Fed and central banks, they tend to have a four year cycle, simply because that's how the economy has worked and always worked. And therefore, Bitcoin also has these four year cycles, right? Because that's, you know, it's long enough to plan ahead of time. But it's also short enough to be reactionary, you know, depending on how economic movements are. So I would say Mario right now, like a lot of people have a consensus that if Trump is elected, we'll see that giant green candle on the day of the election. If Kamala, maybe we won't see that giant candle. But just because we're moving into easing that, you know, by nature of traditional financial markets, we will see some

upswings regardless of the candidate. Yeah. When it comes to first, I think the impact that Trump or Kamala presidency will have is going to be significantly more. I've always dismissed how important a presidency is to an economy and just in general, especially when it comes to democracy like the US. And it's a lot of the things that will happen to the US dollar to the economy are going to be um have already been baked in you know because any decision that's made whether it's the printing of the money or the interest rate decisions um regulation takes years to to to have an effect or to have visible effect and what we're going to see now is the effect of decisions made years ago but i but i think in this case it's just i think we're in a position especially when it comes to crypto that whose president will play a pretty key role and the sec being one um one way of doing that but also just the the general clarity when it comes to regulations for crypto and whether the us

become a an innovator again in the industry or continue being a laggard but um you know moving away from politics not sure if preston's i want to get Preston's thoughts on this, but I think his mic is not working. I'm going to kind of dig into more of a VC discussion with Carl and Alan. Preston, is your mic working? I don't know. Is it? It is, man. Finally. How are you? Did you hear the back and forth just now? Yes, I did. Sorry about that.

I was offline getting set up. I would love your general thoughts on the discussion. I haven't had, I'm not sure if you've been on with Scott, but at least I haven't chatted to you in a while. Just your general thoughts on the discussion i haven't had that i'm sure if you've been on with scott but at least i haven't chatted to you in a while just your general thoughts on how where things are at especially with the focus on crypto and then anything important on the regulatory front as well in the last few days yeah i was i was out of the uh i was off the radar for a few weeks because i got married and uh so i had to tell your your booking manager thank you very much uh so um so i had to tell your booking manager I wasn't free because as

much as I love crypto town hall, I think that, you know, from a hotel room in the south of France, my fiancee now wife would have had some objections, to say the least. I mean, I think from a legal point of view, this is correct. Everybody's sitting back and waiting to see what happens because the big question for crypto is is the United States going to get Market structure regulation that normalizes crypto and allows it to operate within the you know the the the same parameters that you might have in the European Union or the United Kingdom or anywhere else where you can actually apply for a license comply with the terms and get the license um the issue that we've had to date is that,

and we've seen this recently, crypto.com just got a Wells notice from the SEC, Kraken's been sued, Coinbase has been sued, Binance has been sued, Gemini's been sued. So everybody's getting sued for engaging in activity, which is perfectly legal in the rest of the world with a license. And there's no licensing regime in the United States, which allows them to operate lawfully. Like you can, you can take every license under the sun, review them all and crypto can't be crypto in the US. So the obviously fit 21 was the bill that was passed with bipartisan support through the House of Representatives in the United States earlier this year. The companion bill in the Senate to fit 21 was sponsored by a senator, a certain senator from Ohio named JD Vance, who's now of course, Trump's running mate. So I think the

expectation is that if Trump should win on November 5, the likelihood that we get market structure legislation in the US within six months, pretty high, the likelihood that the SEC gets gutted within the next year and they have a change in direction and start settling their cases with Coinbase and others is not high, but it's certainly not improbable. And that'll be a really significant change in direction because it means that you'll be able to operate

in the United States without paying hundreds of millions of dollars of legal fees and trying to run out the clock on the Biden administration. So that's the big question. Like, are we going to get that law or something a lot like it in the next six to 12 months? I think if Trump wins, the answer is a fairly resounding yes, I think that's going to happen. If Harris wins, I think the answer is very likely no, it's not going to happen. So it's everyone sitting back and waiting. And the minute that, you know, the minute that you know the minute that we know i can tell you uh

people will be making very definite immediate moves uh back towards the us uh in the expectation that the us is going to be open for business within six to 12 months and do you think the question of um um in the markets response on who's president will it be how much of an impact do you think we'll have got a more direct question how much do you think you'll have on the cycle itself of reaching all time highs next year? Do you know the same thing will happen on the camera just take a bit longer. And because a lot of people are a lot more optimistic about a Kamala presidency when it comes to crypto. Difficult to be as optimistic as a Trump

presidency, of course. When I say crypto, I mean, the entire industry, not just Bitcoin. I think I mean, the industry is a global one so if there's a global trend uh that and the us is just left out uh then that's that i think the us has more capital it has more liquidity it has more money than anywhere else so any any upswing in the markets would be blunted pretty considerably if the united states were unable uh to participate in it query how how much lack of participation there would be given that all of the exchanges who've been sued by the SEC are not choosing to fold but rather they're choosing to fight and so Americans are going to be able to

continue to access the market regardless but I think um you know I I'm a lawyer if I knew which way the markets were going I'd probably be on a beach at Tahiti instead of at my desk this morning, practicing law for my many brilliant and wonderful clients. But that's a really good question. I don't know the answer to it. But I think it's reason, judging from what I'm seeing behind the scenes, a Trump win is going to lead to some very major business decisions being made that will benefit the United States, that will benefit the crypto economy in the United States, that will result in significant investments in the United States and increases of high paid employment in the United States. And this is across the board. This is with everybody. So if we elect Trump, all that will

happen basically immediately. If we elect Harris, it's likely that there will be no change from present, which is that companies will continue to have to do things like GOIP block all Americans from accessing their platform, not hire in the United States, not hold any events in the United States, not conduct any marketing in the United States. So we stand to lose big if Harris wins. Side note, not sure if you saw the news unrelated to crypto, that the EU has a special task force right now, I think they call it the Trump task force, to prepare to deal with Trump's potential tariffs on the EU in general. So that should be an exciting showdown.

But let's get back to crypto. And before talking to one of my favorite panelists, Roby's here with us. I saw Gareth jump up from coin telegraph gareth how are you sir hey guys i'm very well sorry i'm i'm very late i was supposed to join you earlier um i am in dubai uh i've been running around between conferences and uh are you at that event okay you have echo can you take off your blue check off your bluetooth yeah i did beautiful oh thank you so much yeah thank you so much no you didn't then i said let me uh let me try that again all right i'll just turn off bluetooth on the phone it should work i think you dropped out that will since gareth oh no he's muted gareth you're there before i go to robbie just want to get like a headlines of the week um and brother anyone that's in the

there's an event in dubai and i was going to speak there but uh i've stopped doing speaking gigs but there's one in dubai called the future summit i think it's called so if you're there just definitely let us know in the comments say gareth you did all right yeah yeah beautiful i love it love it yeah are you at the future what is it called i think it's called the future summit the dubai event uh that's coming up i was at uh blockchain life today uh tomorrow sorry that's the one i'm referring to the blockchain life one yeah yeah yeah pretty good event uh pretty good speakers um i was on stage with uh paul from psg um and the gentleman from uh socios as well And we were chatting all things fan tokens. And tomorrow got Cardano Life

and then Cointelegraph has an event on Friday evening, a second edition of Longitude. So we're here for that. And then Binance Blockchain Week next week. So pretty busy itinerary. Okay. Can you tell me more about fan tokens? I know they were getting a lot of traction not long ago.

How are fan tokens doing? What structure is working right now? And maybe explain to the audience what fan tokens are just for the because what i want this discussion to be and i was going to ask you about headlines but just general interesting things in crypto as we prepare for the bull market or at least for the potential bull market i call it inevitable market but even though we are in a bull market but talking about um all-time high bull market but yeah so maybe tell us more about fan tokens uh gary yeah well the panel today was kind of just discussing

the lack of chat about fan tokens for me most of the year. It was pretty interesting. Alexandra Dreyfus, who's the founder of Chili's, which obviously is the blockchain that a lot of the big international football clubs use for their fan tokens. And essentially fan tokens allow football clubs and sports entities to launch tokens. Fans essentially, fan tokens allow football clubs and sports entities to launch tokens. Fans

can acquire these tokens and allows them to use the tokens to vote in all sorts of DAO-related things. So let's imagine you wanted to vote for what Arsenal's next season's jersey is going to look like. You could use fan tokens to facilitate this. It's on blockchain. So everyone has a fairly transparent view of what's happening. And that's the general sort of macro goal for fan tokens is to give big time sports fans the ability to be more involved and feel like they have more control over what their clubs are doing. The conversation today was kind of centered around the state of fan tokens. It hasn't been the biggest narrative this year, but last month the overall transaction volume surpassed $1 billion. So, you know, it's still fair to say that there's a lot of people that are using fan tokens,

they have fun with them. There's different platforms and protocols you can use them on. But I don't think anyone's cracked the code, to be honest, like, and has really brought a big sort of blockchain use case to sport that has taken off and has been as big as things as meme coins. But you could also look at them as kind of like meme coins because they're community based. And yeah, at the end of the day, they're supposed to give people some semblance of ownership and participation that they otherwise don't have in big football clubs other than, you know, being a season ticket holder and maybe having some sort

of extra kind of rights and ability to vote on things. Yeah, exactly. So is it just when it comes to fan tokens, is it just purely about governance? So when you own that token, I know Chiliz is doing really well at trying to bring an adoption to that. But is that simply having governance or are there different utilities being added to those tokens by the clubs? Well, yeah, essentially the main use case is governance.

And the more tokens you have, there's different use cases and different clubs have applied them differently. But some clubs will allow you, if you have enough tokens, to have more weight to vote in favor of certain things. And then, of course, if you're buying NFTs and some fan tokens, you can get sort of exclusive rewards like, you know, VIP tickets to games, fan experiences with the club and players, that kind of stuff. Like I say, I mean, it's not an amazingly well carried out use case yet, but for some people they love it. My only sort of criticism is that it gets lumped in with trading as well, right? Because a lot of these tokens are either ERC20 or in some way interoperable with different blockchains. And that means that you can trade them on exchanges so savvy traders that see arbitrage opportunities and that sort of thing buy tokens and use them just to trade so you've got a mix of people that actually want to use the tokens to participate in their club's governance or whatever and then you've just got outright speculators that

are looking to make money on the token so their prices can vary quite uh quite drastically nothing nothing's better nothing's nothing's better for adoption than speculation well exactly um and just kind of going back before digging into different uh different uh narratives in crypto the kind of headlines of the week anything interesting what's getting the most traction of coin telegraph is it all just about politics politics politics and i know once we were talking about kamala versus trump's policies when it comes to crypto and he talked about an article by one of your editors that was kind of making the argument that kamala is more pro crypto than many people make it out to be i'm not sure if you remember that article but has there been anything else on that front yeah look we haven't had too much more out of her um i think there's been a lot of speculation about Ripple's VP,

Chris Larson donating $10 million worth of XRP to her campaign. I don't really understand the end goal there because they've gone and put that money there as a campaign donation. She hasn't said anything about it. The Democrats haven't said anything about it. So, in a way they're probably just trying to help pander to the crypto audience a little bit.

But there was literally no sort of response from Harris or her team. So have they just put $10 million worth of XRP into the Democrats and nothing's really going to come of it for them? I don't know. That was one of the stories that kind of stood out to me this week, sort of politics-wise. I also saw that there was a big headline a couple of hours ago. I've been running around today, so I haven't been focusing too much on what we've been publishing.

But the biggest story today is Nigeria dropping the money laundering charges against Tigran Gambarian in Nigeria. So, obviously, he's been arrested, and he's been in custody in Nigeria for five or six months. Say again? That's the Binance executive? Yes, the Binance executive. So Tigran Gambirian actually used to work for the IRS,

the Internal Revenue Service, for 10 years. So he's actually someone who served the United States government and was part of their law enforcement for a very long time. He joined Binance's security team and obviously was part of their enforcement team and making sure that they were doing their best to meet regulatory standards worldwide. Obviously, Binance had some issues in Nigeria and they sent Tigran and a team of executives early in 2024 to go and meet with the Nigerian government. Long story short, they were detained. Tigran Gambirian was charged and he was put in jail. And today is really a landmark ruling because he's been in jail for about five or six months where a lot of people are saying he was unlawfully detained. And there's been a lot of political pressure on the Nigerian government

to release him on humanitarian grounds because he's been in really bad health. He's got malaria. Yeah, he had malaria twice. He's got a bad back injury as well. There was footage that surfaced of him in court about six weeks ago, and he looked absolutely terrible. He was, you know,

screaming at the press that were in attendance on video, kind of saying, you guys need to help me. You know, I'm basically being abused here. So we'd been making quite a lot of noise about this at coin telegraph in the past two months on our weekly editors choice video. And I'd kind of been imploring,

you know, authorities that could do something to try and help Tigran get out of custody there. And I think it's just really great news for the industry in general because it sets a really bad precedent if countries are detaining executives where they don't exactly have enough evidence or reason to put them behind bars. Imagine any mainstream company is operating in a place like Nigeria and they suspect an executive has done something wrong and then they detain them and they put them in jail with no sense of recourse. It just sets a dangerous precedent. It's something that Richard Ting has spoken about a lot in recent months.

So to me, that's the big story of the day. What do you think is the reason that they put him in jail for so long? What was the initial reason? It wasn't generally money laundering. It was just the anti-crypto crackdown or making him zap a lot? Well, yeah. Anti-crypto crackdown. We wrote quite a few stories about it. And essentially one of the big gripes that the Nigerian government had was Binance's over-the-counter offering in Nigeria was actually having an impact on the Naira. So they were seeing some devaluing of the Naira

because it was so easy for Nigerians to use Binance's over-the-counter offering to do business and exchange money using stable coins and BNB coins. So it was, to a large extent, Mario, it was kind of destabilizing the naira and they were really trying hard to do something about that you know i mean this is not something that binance intended i guess it's a sort of a symptom of free market economics there's probably panelists on here that can speak a lot better to the point than i can but essentially that was a

big gripe that the nigerian government had And I think they wanted to make an example out of Tigran and kind of make Binance take it seriously that they want them out and they don't want them operating in the country if it's going to impact the way the local fiat currency is operating. So yeah, long story short, Tigran had been detained, mostly unlawfully. And I think today's news is probably some of the best news I've seen for the cryptocurrency ecosystem from a regulatory perspective this year, you know, to get to see someone who doesn't deserve to be in jail, who worked for the US government for 10 years to be released. It's good stuff. Preston, have you looked into that case?

I'm obviously familiar with the case. This is something you actually see not just in you mentioned Elon and having his free speech issues with the UK as being a problem. You saw the story from yesterday, yeah? Oh, yeah. I've known about this. That was insane. Well, I mean, it's insane if you're just learning about it, but they've been doing this stuff for seven, eight years where they send bogus legal demands or attempt to get companies. So Germany, for example, is like Brazil in that they require people to establish, they require US social media companies, not all of them, but just the ones that they care about, to set up a local office and hire people and employ people within the jurisdiction. The people who work in those jurisdictions,

when they say you must set up a representative office here, even if you have no operations here, even if you have no business here, but you must employ people here, is to create hostages, where they can go after people and arrest them or fine them or various other things. And the company then feels a sense of obligation to go protect them. There's the same thing in Brazil where they've threatened Elon and X's local representatives with imprisonment, which is why they shut down in the country pulled out and then had that giant kerfuffle with the Brazilian Supreme Court. So this

is something which countries that aren't the United States and the other I mean, the other thing is just like as a general principle of legal fairness is if a company commits a crime, right, you can't impute liability for that crime, you can't impose it on someone who's working for the company when they didn't have any direct involvement in it. And in Tigran Gimbran's case, he was a risk officer, right? He was dealing with financial crimes enforcement. This is not someone who's making executive decisions about whether or not to comply with particular financial regulatory rules in particular jurisdictions.

So it doesn't really... Nigeria, it was a very bad look for Nigeria in terms of presenting itself as a safe jurisdiction for technology businesses to operate in the future. We've seen other countries like Brazil and Germany doing this. Pavel Durov, of course, was arrested in France for a range of different things there. We're seeing the rest of the world start. The US is, of course, racing ahead in all kinds of technologies. AI, we've got reusable rockets, we've got self-driving cars, all that jazz. Instead of turning around and saying, gee, how can we emulate the Americans and be more like them and have economies that benefit from these technologies?

You know, the political classes in these places are making short term decisions or short, really decisions that have only the short term in mind. And they're saying, how can we crack down to bend people to our regulations? So I just have a question real quick. He's just Michael let me comment

quickly on the Brazil and Germany and the UK and I'll give you the mic to ask a question by the way I brought you up first time on stage Michael but I saw your background I saw your profile description so I'll bring you up but just before I give you the mic Preston it's really interesting

you talked about Brazil X was banned and recently unbanned a couple weeks ago in Brazil not sure if you know but Mike, at Preston's, it's just really interesting. You talked about Brazil. X was banned and recently unbanned a couple of weeks ago in Brazil. Not sure if you know, but there was a federal investigation in Brazil into Elon. And not only Elon, and they've also threatened the employees. I was part of the investigation because I did a whole space. Elon came on and a few other journalists that were banned came on. So they added my name in that investigation as well. So Brazil is one of the countries I'm too worried to go to. And in the UK,

I had Tommy Robinson, Lava Mahadev. He was on the show two days ago, I think, or last night, I can't remember. I think it was two days ago. He was on my show and he's just hours before he went back to the UK expecting to be arrested. He should be arrested in the next few days just because of some of the things he said and what we're seeing in the UK and the crackdown on free speech and law in that country is pretty extraordinary. And it's not directly related to crypto, but we're talking about the issue in Nigeria. And lastly, there's also the kill Twitter,

the CC, what is it? The Department of something against hate. The company was called the CDCC or whatever. The CCDH. The Center for Countering Digital Hate is an NGO.

And they turned around and their internal minutes were leaked. And they're a non-profit in the United States, so they're not supposed to be engaged in naked political lobbying. But apparently, their top priority on all of their little agendas for weeks on end was kill Elon's ex word for word. And there I mean, CCDH is part of this weird and crypto, there's a

risk that crypto will get caught up in this because crypto is fundamentally a liberation technology that allows people to opt out and exit from state regimes, right? So CCDH is a good example of a playbook that'sbook that used to be very popular from like 2018 to 2022. And when Elon took over Twitter, it fell apart. There were all kinds of organizations just like it in the United States. Grafica is one that was a nonprofit that's funded by Facebook. There's another, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which is a bunch of academics out in Stanford. Basically, it's people with PhDs who are terminally online and need to sort of academify their terminal online habits and turn

it into a professional discipline. And all of these organizations, what they do is they look at social media websites, they then scrape the websites. And with a website like Twitter, you're getting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of statements being made per second by humans, by bots, by any, you know, any other reason that people want to make them. And then they select, they selectively present that data to present a narrative. So if you, for example, had, you know, I had one client who had, you know, some nasty stuff was being said on his website. And I then went and searched for the identical content on Twitter. And this was like 2020 era Twitter. And it was 100 times worse on Twitter. So you look at now, but Twitter at the time, of course, had a huge moderation team,

which was principally staffed by academics and people who had liberal arts degrees coming out of Georgetown working in their policy team. And are the people that elon fired when he took over the company but back then that was basically an insurance policy all those people all those right thinking good people who attended the right dinner parties in the beltway area those were the kind of folks who worked for it and so as a consequence they didn't take any heat because these ngos said well we know people there we there are people we know who are high up in positions of influence at that company. So if we really needed to, we can get them on the horn and we can have them censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.

We can have them censor this. We can have them permit this statement, right? So they knew that it was capable of being influenced. The minute that all those people left, lo and behold, Twitter suddenly became a target for all these organizations because all of these people left. So I think for crypto's purposes, right, like like we have not been we've not had our moment our cultural moment where crypto has become so relevant to something which is politically unpopular by the people who run the world um and that's that people who run the world i mean you know the political

elites in respective different countries that tend to you, kind of adhere to the post-war political consensus that, you know, crypto hasn't been a target for that. But when it happens, right, there will be organizations like the CCDH, which are created, which say crypto is bad because, you know, these 10 transactions were used by terrorists. So this transaction was used by someone who's racist. And this transaction was used by a Trump supporter. And look at all these bad transactions. And it'll be a very tiny sliver of a fraction of all of the available transactions that have ever occurred on the platform in question, because they want to deplatform it. They want to kill it. They want to do this and that. So CZDH is-

But Preston, can I ask you a question? Shoot. You're a very intellectually sound lawyer. I'm sure you know about Bernstein versus the US in the late 90s, where encryption was effectively equated to free speech. Why is that never in the conversation right now? It is in the conversation, but it usually happens at a lower level of analysis. Bernstein versus United States was about the publication of code, which permits encryption, and the protection of that code is expressive conduct. We tend to see the free speech arguments come up when you have a developer getting arrested, for example, in the

tornado cash case. I think there are some distinguishing factors when you say, okay, well, what's expression? And then what's some other type of non-expressive conduct, which the government can more easily restrain, for example, monetizing this product, providing support for the product, you know, counseling people on how to use the product. That's the kind of stuff where you might have something which deviates in the first amendment. So Bernstein's everywhere. You think about it, you know, as a lawyer practicing in this space and advising people in particular who are developing software for publication. You think about it all the time, right? But the question is, most people don't want to just say, okay, I've spun up a GitHub repo. I published this code and I've licensed it. And then that's it. I'm going to go move on to

something else. They want to create a business. They want to help people use it. They want to market it. They want to do various other things. And that's where you tend to stray out of first amendment territory and into more commercial activity, which is more easily regulated. So if anyone is investing versus the US is the, I think it's a ruling where cryptography cannot, it's considered free speech, and you cannot be held liable for code. Is that right, Preston? And I'm probably simplifying it um you can generally speaking expressive conduct can't be restrained unless there's a compelling government interest uh to restrain it and there is a narrowly tailored rule which is no more expansive than required uh which is

passed to do it and you can't con you can't target content based on the content of it right you can't say for example this guy's code is left-wing code for a left-wing purpose. So we're going to ban that, but we're not going to ban something else. But generally speaking in the US, if you're just publishing code, there are very few and nothing else.

There are very few circumstances where the government's going to be able to tell you you can't. Let me go to Michael. I know you had a question before going to Robbie. Do you have a quick question for Preston? I think it was.

Yeah, it was for Gareth. I wanted to see if he was actually out of uh prison yet and then like already home because there might be some information that i know that i don't think you guys have yet um but before i say it i want to make sure that he's safe first uh i i actually have to double check to be honest um As far as I understand, the news just broke and we have a direct line to the representatives in Nigeria that have been releasing statements from their family. I've checked and I haven't received anything from them. So I would err on the side of caution here, but feel free to drop me a DM and we can chat directly. All right, perfect. Sorry if I derail the conversation, but yeah, I just wanted to make portion here but uh feel free to drop me a dm and we can we can chat directly all right perfect

sorry if i derail the conversation but yeah i just wanted to make sure that you know any any information that i oh sorry i'll see myself this whole time hold on i was just talking to my talent myself this whole time i was just saying that i read online that he has not the court has ruled that he should be released released by a nigerian court so i don't know that means he's walking out free, but obviously just don't take the risk. I was trying to read about it more now, but that'll let you guys connect offline and Corey Telegram can break that

new story for Michael. Robbie, how are you, sir? I'm good. Thank you. I'm actually somewhere in the same room as Gareth at the blockchain life. Oh, actually in the same room or close to him? Well, same room. close to him uh oh well same room we're at the venue somewhere at the venue venue okay me and me and scott talking 2049 in dubai in the space from the same actual same room um yes so so uh robbie i always like to have that discussion

with you every few months see where you guys are at an amoka anything new that's interesting the last time we chatted um was a while ago I know you kind of don't pay attention to a lot of the anything you know all these you know weekly news and political discussions but last time we chatted and we're talking about various things you're investing in we talked about OTC tokens as well and something that we're both doing considering how depressed a lot of these prices are for altcoins um that's something we shared in common but what's the what's the latest on the mocha what's changed over the last few months have you guys kind of tripled down on on otc deals and obviously gaming is gaming but what else is interesting to you and and obviously what is uninteresting less less interesting for whatever

reason so i think um you know the trends of the summer obviously we're still doing a lot of stuff in the telegram ecosystem um you know we launched our own mocha token for our mochaverse community and i think actually if you want to talk about just the last week or so i think one of the big stories of course is the resurgence of a point because with the ape fest that just happened in lisbon i think the community was really energized, as they always are, around their IRL events that they do once a year. But at the same time, I think the launch of ApeChain and a lot of new applications on ApeChain got the ApeCoin community and the wider sort of BAYC community quite excited. And so we can see ApeCoin is up 70% this week, I think. And I think it's a great testament to the fact that there is continued innovation in that community and that that community actually has quite strong core foundations.

You know, obviously, people who wanted to take profit on their apes did so back in 2023 and exited the community because maybe they were just in it for the flip of the NFT or something like that. But there is a very durable, sizable community that's in there that are NFT holders, that are token holders, et cetera, and are still actively supporting and promoting that ecosystem. So I think it's a great example. And as you know, Mario, we were closely involved with Yuga and the launch of the ApeCoin to begin with've always been you know big supporters of the project yeah so one thing is also that um i've been following the ape uh that bought a ecosystem much but can you give me just a general overview of where the ecosystem is that there's two things that i know number one is three things number one is board eight four

but it's really bad the price went down significantly a few months back and recovered slightly as number two number three is that um the eight chain launched a pumped up fun arrival similar to what tron did um and we had justin sun talk about it a few months ago on our show and now eight change kind of following suit and getting meme coins onto a chain to get liquidity there and number four is i know that the ape pumped. I don't know much more than that. I know that the volume on the ApeChain pumped up fund competitors, ApeChain meme coins is relatively low. But can you just kind of fill me in on what else is happening in that ecosystem as a whole

in the last couple of months? Sure. So I think you've summarized most of the key points, but I think the thing that's great about it is don't forget that this is, let's call it an OG product, a project in the space, because it's a true web3 native ip and one of the sort of big innovations that yuga had at the beginning was this idea that people would own the individual commercialization rights the ip rights to their individual apes as a result it's always been quite a decentralized project for the most part and so you have a very active community of builders that are building on you know on on top of the ip all the time so i think one of the things about ipcoin in particular is the ipcoin dow is one of the more mature and active dows in the space and i think frankly is

a testament to you know dow functionality um and shows that you know they vote they have weekly meetings and they vote on stuff. They have a treasury that's worth billions of dollars and they approve things, they fund things, and they operate as a functioning organization, a foundation or quasi-government style entity. So I think that's a real testament to the ability of a community to come together in a decentralized fashion and actually achieve quite a lot of stuff and that should be a kind of a role model for the rest of us in web3 and if you look at it from a value perspective you can actually see that reflected in the innovation because obviously

there is you know some impact on the price of acorn as a result what happened with their metaverse i know they were focusing heavily on their metaverse a while ago, they launched more NFT collections. Have they? So I know that the prices are well but significantly from the 10 $15 level to the dollar or whatever today. Yeah, so for the for the other side metaverse, I think the biggest challenge was that it was very, very ambitious. And as we all know, building a triple A game, which a metaverse is similar to, takes a tremendous

amount of investment of both time and money. And I think one of the challenges for Yugo was that they really focused on building the other side and building gaming properties over the last couple of years, which I think were spearheaded by the management at the time um but were perhaps not a hundred percent core to what uh to the brand of the of the core native community um and i think so once garga came in and took over and sort of reached the helm of the business i think he's refocused kind of the brand identity to double down on what it is that the community likes about it. And you could see that actually there's much more positive feedback on what's going on with regard to ApeChain and, you know, their version of Hump.Fun, etc., which are more, let's call it, quote unquote, degen activities than, you know, the more traditional style gaming offerings they had. Obviously, they had Doofy Dash, which was very successful.

But I think in trying to make more ambitious gaming projects, they found that it was difficult to resonate with the community based on the expectations. Alex, before I ask Robbie, just his thoughts on meme coins, considering we talked about meme coins on ApeChain, and digging into other things that Anamok has focused on. You had your hand up? Go ahead, man. Well, Alex, you got a meme coin.

Yeah, I'd love to come in, Mario. So I just wanted to like kind of stress a few of Robbie's points, because I think he made some really, really good points. And we think about the strategy for the upcoming cycle. As we talked about before, right, Mario, everything is about liquidity. And liquidity can be divided into two separate categories, in my humble opinion. It's global liquidity, which we talked about, comes from lowering interest rates, increasing the money supply, and hopefully stimulus checks for retail. But then there's a crypto liquidity. And the current liquidity, as you guys know, from the $100 billion plus that was lost through

FTX, 3AC, UST and all these crazy black swans is really, really hurt. Now, how do we bring in the new liquidity? And I think Robbie mentioned that we need some sort of innovative technological advancements for us to create some sort of innovative technological advancements for us to create some sort of new use cases. But also, I think we need to create new bubbles, new asset classes and trends, so that we can attract that liquidity. And I think gaming, as we talked about last week, was which was the best performing asset class, and not even taking into consideration what we're talking about ApeChain. So, you know, once we have that A plus B, you know,

these are the particular moments where we can go to the moon. And I personally think, and by the way, the A16Z last investment report, they're fully aligned with SwissBorg, where we believe the three bubbles will come from AI5, because we know that we need the combination of AI and trustless networks with the scalable agents is a very, very important tool for efficiency, for transforming dumb data into smart, actionable data. DeFi, of course, as I talked about before, because we have all the TVL that will inflow with all these sexy yields as these interest rates lower. But I think gaming still has a massive, massive play for us to start triggering this super cycle hmm I should probably do a whole

space on that and recent a 60 season for Z report I mean they do it once every how many months Alex it once a year or once every six months yeah I believe it once a year Mario yeah I'll probably ask you a few questions on it as well. David. And Robbie, before going to David, thoughts on meme coins, and we touched on it in our last discussion. And I know that we had Murat who's coming on the show soon, who did a presentation that everyone probably watched in token 2049 talking about comparing meme coins and utility tokens, and talking about a meme coin

super cycle. And we'd love to get your thoughts on that narrative, Robbie, whether you guys discussed it internally at anamoka uh yeah so i think um i mean i love meme coins i think they're fun i think meme coins should be viewed as ugc as user generated content um and i think it's interesting to note that there are now meme coin communities who are starting to launch nft collections which is a little bit the tail wagging the dog, I guess. But I think meme coins are not dissimilar, for example, to telegram minigames in that they're an opportunity to build a user acquisition funnel and to connect with an audience through a sort of hyper-casual experience. And that once you can build an audience through that meme coin, then you can kind of bring them up to the food chain to higher value product

offerings. So I think that's, you know, that's my personal. And any other industries that you're investing in at Anamoka and anything that you're moving away from a bit more? I think lately we've been looking at a lot of deep end, because we like that sector a lot. And of course, education, you know, it's bubbling in the background, because we really believe in education in the long term, and think that there's a lot of value we've created there with with rituals.

Appreciate it. David, how are you? So? Good, Mario. How are you? Good, good. I was going to read the report a few days ago. I probably should do that before doing a whole space on it. But kind of a TLDR, your key nuggets from that report from Andreessen Horowitz. Has that impacted your strategy in any way? Is there anything surprising in there? And for anyone that doesn't know, it's like I think a yearly report yearly report that Anderson always puts out, just talking about general state of crypto. I mean, at the end of the day, they do a fantastic job. And a shout out to Chris Dixon,

to Ariana Simpson and the entire team there. They do a fantastic job with this. At the end of the day, you know, there's a few different takeaways. One, they specifically call out that the infrastructure is maturing. They talk about how value is flowing between interoperable blockchains. Back in the day, many years ago, I remember we were all talking about how if we're sending an email via Hotmail and I was receiving it via Gmail, that in the back end we never see it, but there is interoperability happening there that makes that happen. We all take it for granted. And at the end of the day, if we believed that blockchains were going to create new sectors,

specifically also with gaming, as Robbie knows, that there may be games on Solana that are also trying to be interoperable with things on, you know, say, Avalanche or other different blockchains. And so that interoperability behind the scenes is something that over the last few years has, you know, from an infrastructure perspective, has been funded very well from the venture community, as I know, as Carl knows, and others that are on, you know, right now on your panel. And so that was one that was big. I think another one is that stablecoins, they call out stablecoins. As we saw just this week, one of the things that was not brought up in terms of the highlights

is that Stripe is acquiring or has acquired Bridge. bridge. And bridge, for all intents and purposes, is a conduit to create stable coins in the API layer, if you will, for some of the things in terms of swappation, in terms of a lot of the interoperability as well, too. And so that was a billion dollar acquisition. And so this is, I think, incredibly important also as it relates to the future of stable coins. You know, I think Andreessen calls it out that stable coins are a way that allow for the transition of things like, you know, multinational corporations, you know, doing kind of cross-border payments between each other. So if I'm a company in California and I'm trying to buy 5,000 televisions from maybe Korea, in normal parlance, that wire would probably take

upwards of a week to two weeks to clear. And in usage of stablecoins, now that that can actually happen within minutes, if not less. And so the ability to kind of, you know, really cut the time from supply and demand logistics is something that I think is called out here. Of course, I also call out, you know, the political landscape, as we were talking about, with, you know, with some of the folks here as well. That is obviously, you know, an 800-pound gorilla in the room here in the United States as it relates to which kind of party. I think this is very interesting is that so many people are focused on the nominees being between the Democratic and Republican Party. I think what's worth noting, if you do look, is that one party, specifically not the nominee, but one party

over the last few years has been more at the forefront of positive regulation for the industry versus the other, specifically the Republicans in terms of Tom Emmer, Cincinnati Lumas, and Patrick McHenry have been at the forefront of things like SAB 121, repealing that, FIT 21, and some of the other positive regulations in terms of stablecoin regulation kind of creation. And so I think that's very interesting to see from a political discussion in terms of which party in aggregate has been more positive towards the space versus the nominee. So they did call out that too. So there's a number of different things, but they also talk about mobile wallets hitting record highs in places,

believe it or not, and you just alluded to it, like Nigeria, India, and Argentina. We saw some data from Celo, the blockchain, a few weeks ago where they have an active integration with Opera, the mobile explorer that is directly into users' phones in the region down there. And so they've seen some growth from that integration directly into the browser. So they talked about that. Yeah, there's a lot there. And so for those that have not worked for Andreessen, but I would say it is a great report that they put out with a lot of information. Yeah, and they talked a lot about AI as well,

talking about how the importance of blockchain for crypto to solve different issues. That's an area that we care quite a lot about, for sure. Yeah, tell me more about your thoughts on what they said there, especially the problems of the IP protection and centralization in general. And of course, I always have to say this, nothing here is investment advice. So obviously, you do your own research and obviously speak to your people. But for us, AI is really the interesting kind of conduit between crypto and AI. I've been looking at this specifically from a few different angles.

If you look at Midjourney, which is a very popular LLM that most people can use these days to create images, they've already produced about over a billion images since last year alone. And so it's a place where you're seeing explosive growth. If you see ChatGBT, they have over 200 million users on there now. And so you're seeing that these interfaces have really become quite adopted by the consumer out there because they give them some sort of a value. They get them some sort of a return of their time. And so what we're seeing, however, is that these are very intensive in terms of their use of data, in terms of human

trainable data, especially too. Anytime you may go to Amazon, you buy something and you have an issue with it, you're going to be interacting with an AI agent right away. Anytime that you go fly, for instance, I was on Delta a few weeks ago, and I had an issue with that. You deal with an AI agent right away before you actually get to a human. So these agents are becoming immersed in our daily lives and they need to get better at what they do. And so this area right here in terms of trainable data is something that we think is very interesting in terms of this interaction between digital assets and crypto and AI, where humans have experience, have knowledge, have subsects of capabilities that can train these agents, these LLMs. But obviously in a way where there needs to be some sort of an economic incentive alignment.

You know, we're not just going to do it for free per se. And so this is an area we think has a lot of interest in terms of capabilities. We also see that in terms of the compute side of things, these are highly intensive on the computational side. And so there's a way where we can use a lot of the decentralized computation that we've been creating with Filecoin and storage and all the other different players over the last few years. So there's ways to do that. Another area that we're very interested in right now is this idea of angenic payment. This is AI agents that are basically working with each other and basically trying to figure out how to actually create a resolution to a query that we may have. For instance, Mario might be looking for a great recipe for brownies, and he uses OpenAI to find something like that.

That's a very simplistic kind of request an AI agent would basically try to pull down, versus, say, maybe Carl or myself or somebody else on the panel here is looking to do a very complex financial statement or a kind of model for a company that we're looking at. That's a very complex, heavily computational request. And so the AI agents that are basically fulfilling these things have to do all of the work, and they have to be paid in some mannerisms to be able to do that. And so the way that we currently have it set up with Stripe and some of the other kind of legacy payments, it's not necessarily advantageous. It's bulk payments.

It's not prioritized in terms of the actual pull-down of information. And so we're looking at this as a way maybe to potentially create more systematic improvements to the AI agent-human relationship that's out there. So we think that it's got a huge kind of growth in terms of... Why would that improve it, David? And I've got a separate question kind of linking back to an OG coin called IOTA. But why would that improve it david so and i've got a separate question kind of linking back to an og coin called iota but why would that improve it is that just because it's going to be more efficient and quicker than than than payments like stripe yeah for instance you know again you know you you might actually you know for use of these things like mid journey you know i think you know i was testing after a while, and I think they were charging like $10 or $14 a month. I might use that maybe once a month to kind of mess around

and create a meme or something like that, but I'm paying in bulk. I'm not actually paying per kind of pull-down of image. And so these bulk payments are not necessarily in alignment with the way that we use these things. Okay, yeah, yeah. Are they more for micropayments these things okay yeah yeah are there more for micro payments type things got more granular payments for different yeah there's this idea there's this idea of actually kind of product it's it's called tokenization we're not talking about rwas but like product tokenization where you actually are almost from a skew level of a

request of a pull down you're actually almost like tokenizing or really kind of very linearly kind of trying to figure out how much that actual pull-down request is going to cost. It's more like the compute power-based compensation? Right. Interesting. And do you think it's a whole different discussion because I've just been fascinating geeking out over AI and the speed in which it's evolving has been faceted. I've

had a two hour discussion with chat GPT, you know, when you're able to talk about a talk back and forth with tragedy. But if you haven't used that feature, I don't know what you're thinking. But I remember when Iota launch, it was meant to be like a payment, transfer value among a formal payment among the internet of things among machines and back then their vision was like machines would be able to pay each other and i completely forgot about it completely faded the way ahead of their time not sure if the token even exists

anymore so i'm gonna check it what was it was way ahead of its time really way ahead of its time i remember writing a full feature for coin telegraph i think it was uh 2018 2019 and um the the technology just the you know the yeah the internet of things and all these devices being able to speak to each other and make payments between each other like one of the one of the really interesting things that they wanted to do was use iota to um let's say your dish your washing machine has run out of detergent or something like that it'll go and and you know make the payments and make the order and do it all by talking to your your cell phone which talks to the supplier and orders the thing and it gets delivered to your address and everything like the use case is crazy and i think you're right mario

they were well ahead of their time. And I think there's been a few instances where people have done things. I know there's one or two DeFi projects that were like one or two years ahead of what Aave and Uniswap and everyone else did that just didn't take off then. And then two years later, other people did it and then it exploded. So I think this is definitely a case of being way too early. What's happening with IOTA now? Is there any other successful projects that are doing the same thing? I'll be honest with you.

I haven't even considered looking at IOTA in years now. In terms of Internet of Things, man, you've caught me blank here. I think there are quite a few different projects that are looking to do this. But this was a big enterprise use case three or four or five years ago, and it's kind of faded away a bit. But I stand to be corrected. Maybe someone else has their finger on the pulse. And again, full disclosure, our firm, ARCA, has been invested in this. So again, do your own research.

This is not investment advice. But BitTensor has been one of the bigger shout-outs over the last year or so. That's a protocol, basically a self-contained market called subnets that basically their job is the completion of tasks to produce machine intelligence. And so this is a direct linkage to kind of the learning aspect of machines that, you know, the subnets on BitTensor is responsible for. So that's one, and, you know, that is a direct into that kind of space. You know, I obviously remember IOTA from the past, and, you know, there is a world, Maria, where you're absolutely correct. You know, the machine-to-machine kind of payments idea was very early. But, you know, today,

for instance, you know, if you look, there's actually something called DEVIN, D-E-V-I-N, from Cognition. This is actually the first AI software engineer where it's actually an AI agent that can create code for you. And so we've seen this rapid escalation after OpenAI became so prevalent in society that many different companies and many different organizations are looking at the application of AI agents to figure out what they can do. Just today today I started playing with a site that actually has all of these different AI agents that can do things from marketing to finding me deal flow and some other different things. And so IOTA, you know, when they came out, as you rightly said, you know, again, you

know, it was years before any of this really came out. But there are a new crop of folks in the crypto space and digital asset space that are definitely tackling this from different components. Yeah, I'm just seeing through my WhatsApp number, David, because I've just got so much more that I want to ask you, or probably too much for this space. But yeah, I'm looking at Devin now, Devin AI.

Oh, so they're decentralized. They've got their own token as well. Is that right? No, Devin is coming from a company called Cognition. Cognition is, this is not necessarily associated with digital assets and crypto, but what it is, again, is a AI company that has created the first AI software engineer. And so you can actually use this AI software to help build out code base that you may be looking to do. We have seen kind of experiments with AI agents and machine learning in the States. One of the

projects we saw a few years ago, we didn't do anything with it but you know back in the day it was called aletheia uh where you actually had the ability to train these ai agents uh and there were some kind of quirky experiments with like training the agent to be like uh elon musk or nikola tesla or name some you know amazing you know it's you know entrepreneur or kind of inventor. So we have seen some experimentation with it, but I think this new kind of landscape that we're seeing with AI agents has really started to move the market much faster and how the interplay between crypto and AI can play between each other. Let me go to Alan and Carl. How are you guys?

Good, good. Fantastic. play between color let me go to alan and carl how are you guys good good fantastic yeah just obviously we went pretty deep in the ai world anything else has been interesting to you right now um could be as dgen as meme coin or or as as boring as l2s or l1s without speaking to anything directly or specific i i think there's a lot of alpha to be found in some of the hackathons that are going on now um salon is big on them but other other ecosystems are big on them as well there's a lot of good infrastructure going around uh the teams that that run these hackathons um and the funding that sort of comes out of them so i think like a place to kind of spend some time is getting involved with some of those hackathons.

They're always looking for advisors or, or even just assistance on things like judging. I think there can be a lot found there and sort of like the earlier stage of deals. It's not specifically AI or any other vertical, but that's where a lot of good teams are building right now. Yeah. I was going through the audience as well, seeing some pretty cool projects, just followed one of them.

Maxbit seems really cool and about to follow another one as well. And in terms of anything else that's interesting to you, Alan, and also not sure how involved are you in meme coins, because I think I want to have that discussion again. It's been a while where I haven't discussed it but the whole meme coin super cycle narrative whether I think

and I would never ask that question to David because I don't want to get grilled but where do you stand on this presentation that went viral by what's his name Murad

can you repeat that again where do I stand on the what on the presentation by I think it was Murad Murad the one that went viral on talk of 2049 that got the whole meme coin super cycle discussion going. Well, Murad is a little stuck right now.

Unfortunately, when you become the main character and all of your wallets get exposed, everyone's watching for you to make any sort of transaction. Exactly. Yeah, that's an exact activity called that as well. He can't dump a single coin. Yeah, and it's not just that, actually. You're absolutely right. He can't dump a single coin. Yeah, and it's not just that, actually. You're absolutely right. He can't. But he also can't transfer any coin between any wallet

because people will assume what that means. So he's essentially on all these meme coins, and he can't sell them because then it goes against the whole narrative he said about meme coin supercycle. So ZachXBT put him on the spot because he's exposed his wallet. So now he has to either hold them and stand by his word about the whole meme concept or sell them and face the consequences from a reputational perspective.

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. And unfortunately for him, the, the meme coin attention is really on like AI and, and go probably leaning the majority or leading the majority of that. I'm happy to talk about that if,

if interested, but I think like where he got stuck is um maybe not the best spot right now and he can't really rotate which is maybe what he's done in the past yeah um and by the way we should probably do a whole space on this let me go to uh plasma good to have you as well let me go to carlos carl anything else interesting i know we've gone through a lot but anything you personally or six-man ventures as well that you're investing in yeah so as six-man ventures we've been investing at the application for for the application layer for years which has really i think given us a good framework to underwrite a lot of these deals

and i think a lot of investors now are interested in consumer and the application layer but historically most investors have an infrastructure focused um So we have a couple of investments in the meme coin space broadly that are not announced yet, but we're extremely excited by. And generally, the way I view meme coins is they're primarily attention markets. And so just like memes have existed since the beginning of the internet, if not before, I think the financialization of memes in the form of pictures, videos, coins, etc. is just, we're just at the early stages. So I think we kind of forget that memes have been going on for a long time before Murad, I think his piece just really up leveled the conversation and created a new way to focus

on, let's say, a, underexplored space. So we're very excited about that. I think it's, it's only going to grow over time. That doesn't mean by the way that some meme coins go down. I think what people forget is that if it's an attention market, fundamentally, just like when something's gaining an attention,

you expect it to go up. The people forget that like certain memes come and go over time, certain things are funny. And then, you know, six months later, they're not culturally relevant. And so likewise, you should expect those to become less popular and go down in price over time. So I think I would always look at these at attention markets.

And as attention is peaking, you know, that's when I would be looking at, hey, is this the right opportunity to start, you know, taking some out if I expect the attention is going to go down over time. An area we've been really exploring a lot of market type consumer market products. So I think Polymarket was a great product for crypto. I think there's going to be many derivatives, both that we've seen, and I'm sure some that we haven't seen yet, that are going to proliferate. I think unlike Polymarket, they're going to be much more social in nature, they're going to have much faster lifecycle of markets. So rather than people investing in an event that's going to be much more social in nature. They're going to have much faster life cycle of markets.

So rather than people investing in an event that's going to take place in four months and kind of just holding a position, I think you're going to see a lot more daily markets that are more engaging to people and get a lot higher capital turnover. I'm actually releasing an op-ed this week. That's actually interesting. Hold on. Can you expand on that? Yeah, go ahead. Monomark is betting on advanced presidential election.

Two, four, six, 8, 20 weeks. Or maybe 6, 8, 12, 14. I don't know how long it's been for the election, how long they've had it up. Weeks away. But you're saying that there could be similar platforms for micro events that happen on a daily basis. Exactly.

Whether that's the price of coins, whether it's related to people's opinions. Let me give you an example. I'm going to write an op-ed coming up here on opinion markets as the next frontier. And the general thesis is prediction markets are fundamentally, you need an oracle to actually settle those markets. You need something to say who won the election, you know, et cetera. Any of the markets that are being built, you need some sort of or Oracle to settle that. That can be either costly or contentious. We saw with DJT where all of a sudden you have these

arbiters trying to settle the market when it's a pretty blurry line between some of the markets that can be created. I think what's really cool about opinion markets is it's not like what will happen, it's what should happen. And all of a sudden, now you can settle these markets recursively because you don't need any sort of Oracle that settles it. And so now you can create infinite content. Everything from markets around, imagine it's like, hey, I'm going on a date. What dress should I wear? Who should the Philadelphia Eagles trade in the off season? So it's more so like what should happen rather than what will happen. And because of that, you literally can have infinite content rather than being constrained by needing an oracle to actually settle the market at its conclusion. So I think we're

going to see an explosion of markets. Any projects, any interesting projects that are doing this already? So unfortunately, I haven't seen too many. And so part of this op-ed is a call to developers saying, hey, the polymarket was a great thing for crypto, but there's such a wider space that's vastly underexplored. So I really, if you are building this technology or these types of markets, let us know. But again, I think they're going to be highly social. They're going to be relevant. And the reason I think they're going to be super engaging to people is because people

understand it. You know, the hard part is the stock market is the largest opinion market in the world. And the reason I think they're going to be super engaging to people is because people understand it. You know, the hard part is the stock market is the largest opinion market in the world. But unless you have six screens and like, you know, a hedge fund trader, it's going to be hard to win over the long term repeatedly. But I think if it's things that are culturally relevant to where you live, for example, I live in Manhattan. You can imagine what's the best French restaurant in New York. I have a differentiated point of view on that relevant to everyone else.

And so there should be a way for me to actually participate in that market and wager my social credibility and or some sort of economic stake and actually have a way to win in that market because I have a differentiated point of view. And so I think there's just going to be the explosion where, again, people understand where they live. They understand certain other, let's say, subcategories they're big fans of. And I think that just really opens up the market landscape. So that's one thing we're really excited about is all these new types of markets and wagering products that are going to grow.

Carl, the main protocol that's used, at least on Plymarket, I believe exclusively, someone can correct me if i'm wrong and they use multiple is is uma do you see do you see something like uma be able to pivot and offer multiple products or do they conflict um i so look i'm not an expert in a new i'm not an investor in numa so i don't i i think at the end of the day the beauty about opinion markets is you don't need any Oracle. It's not like, can we make the Oracle better? Can we make the Oracle have new types of data feeds? It's like the market settles itself based on the types of capital that's put in and any sort of prioritization or bias you give towards people who might be more experts than not.

And so I think you have all these new fundamental ways to settle markets. And what's really exciting too is you'll have like AI agents using this. So for example, if you're, let's say planning a trip and you're looking for the best, again, the best French restaurant in New York as an example, sure, you can go look at Google Maps reviews, Yelp reviews, you can kind of build this data yourself,

but that might be expensive to get to. Or you just simply say, hey, what's the best restaurant in this neighborhood for this type of cuisine? And have experts provide their opinion in, let's say, like a 10-minute rapid turnover market. And then you've returned that result to the AI agent the, you know, to the AI agent itself. So AI agents can actually start using these to get quick sentiment rather than

needing to build complex models on ingesting all this different data. So that's one example. Carl, what do you think about the experts though? Cause verification of the inputs to the outputs is something that I know we all talk about a lot of that. So what are, what are your thoughts on that? Cause I think it's interesting for everyone. Yeah, I think so. There's there's like, it's actually academic research. I've been digging a lot into this recently, academic research. And an expert is really somebody who understands what the market is going to say

relative to what actually the more correct answer is. So for example, I live in New York. If somebody said, again, this is more of a prediction market or an actual fact versus an opinion, but imagine it's like, hey, what is the capital of New York state? Most people, if you're not an expert or from New York, are going to say, oh, it's New York city. But if you happen to answer, actually it's Albany, and I bet 80% of the market is going to say it's New York City. All of a sudden, you not only understand your own point of view, but you also know where the market is. And the greater that gap between those two on some sort of Gaussian distribution is actually a way to go ahead and determine how right or knowledgeable this person is. Because not only understand directionally what's correct,

they also understand the culture and what the culture says thinks is going to be the right answer. So to be honest, it's like really underexplored and there's a lot of opportunity. But right now people get this information via polls, but polls are subject to spam and they're like not fun. Like nobody goes retweets, oh, I did this poll and it was so much fun.

But if you're betting in a market on an opinion, you might share that and engage with your friends. And it's all a new level of hyper-engagement that businesses can use to solicit opinions from customers. It's a pretty big opportunity. But I can't answer your question specifically yet. I think we need some really good builders to flush this out and experiment. Yeah, let me get some final thoughts. Plasma, good to have you as well. Just kind of final thoughts on anything that you're interested in

that we haven't discussed or anything we've discussed already. Okay, I will try to be short. It's mostly for meme coins. And the way I see it, can I... So... Yeah, can you what? Can I talk about what I think about meme coins? Yeah, of course you can!

I think the days of meme coins being taboo are over a long time ago. You've got billions of dollars that would say otherwise. When I got into crypto, it was like 10 years ago, it was Bitcoin. And I think a lot of us had the same thought we liked gold we wanted to have limited supply asset that we control and we wanted to be early on something new and we saw bitcoin as the the new digital gold right and there were some other tokens that were coming out like hundreds of them people were looking at the tokenomics mostly then dogecoin came out and people uh think that dogecoin was popular because it was the first meme coin but i don't think that

was the case it was because of the tokenomics initially all the supply was going to be mined out in one year and that was the fixed supply there was not going to be any inflation and that's why people bought it the halvenings were once a month and then we moved on to the vc error then we moved to ethereum to team allocations people forgot all that and we had two maybe three cycles of vc coins and now we were back to what crypto was initially just people having the option to choose which asset which form of money they want to own. Back then it was Bitcoin. Now people have memes they relate with all of them are fixed supply. Some of them have no team allocations. Sadly, most of them do. But I think the best ones will be the ones that are decentralized,

fair, without team allocations. And yeah, that's my thoughts. No, I appreciate it. Yeah, we probably should do a whole space on this. Talking about unpopular things, we do have something that I am very passionate about that I wanted to discuss. Now, Brian, I brought you up personally because I saw you requesting. I didn't know you're the head of Youthiverse, but I saw your profile.

I'm like, well, not many people still have Metaverse in their bio. And I love that. I love how the hype's completely died down for the Metaverse. Everyone's still building Metaverses by calling them Web3 games. So before getting into Youthiverse us maybe just kind of your thoughts on the general state of the of the metaverse industry it got a lot of love a lot of hype and then died down after facebook's rebranding what is the state of the metaverse today what do you think it needs to get adoption and let's dig into your background and what use of versus

sure thank you i'm happy to be here. I think the state of the metaverse outside of otherverse is that it has done what metaverse has done in every cycle. And when I'm talking about cycles, I'm talking about metaverse cycles, the first one really being in the late 90s, which is it went through a lot of hype as people imagined what it could be in the future as it materialized. And then people were disappointed with these sort of cardboard cutouts of, you know, what they imagined the future metaverses would look like. And they fall into disarray. So we saw this with, in this latest cycle,

obviously Meta putting a huge amount of money into Metaverse and just realizing it was way too complicated. Decentraland, the sandbox, trying to follow sort of in the footsteps of Second Life, replicating that business model poorly, and that fell away and so metaverse of course has gotten a lot of black eyes particularly in the last crypto cycle i'm very very disheartening to somebody like me who has been in the internet since before it was a commercial medium and

been working on in the metaverse space for really the last 20 years, really developed the metaverse space. Seeing things come out sort of half-baked always is going to create problems. But that's not to cast an aspersion on the whole space. Obviously, when it's done right, I mean, listened to what the uh guy from animoka was saying it is complicated to build a triple a quality uh metaverse um metaverse is much more complicated than just a game of course uh really it's an internet of games it's an internet of it really should be a recapitulation of the Internet, meaning anybody can build into your metaverse. They have complete decentralization, decentralized control.

They have all of the tools that they need to create their own flavor of metaverse, all of it interconnecting and hyperlinking. And that is what that's what I think most people think of when they think of a true metaverse. Of course, metaverse also incorporating AI, it's really the best use case for AI, it's the best use for crypto. And that's what we've engineered to have designed, have built, We've built three prior generations and very excited that we've actually rolled out our fourth generation, which just absolutely blows everything away

and actually does this. Yeah, but what do you think of, I know you talked about previous cycles, you've been around in the metaverse world for two decades. I think the metaverse term is being used very loosely, but what do you define the whole concept of a web three metaverse world for two decades. I think the metaverse term is being used very loosely. But what do you define the whole concept of a Web3 metaverse? And then what got you to launch Otherverse, especially at a time like this when,

I know you've been working on it for a while, for a very long time, but why launch it now? And what do you think the space needs to get adoption, start getting users? Yeah, well, I mean, I guess that sort of goes to, maybe if you can yeah well i mean i guess you know that sort of goes to maybe uh if you can indulge me a little bit about my history on the internet um i started on the internet before it was a commercial medium and uh you know was introduced to it back when i was studying uh mass communications at ucla in the early 90s. I developed and introduced advertising to the internet.

I put together one of the very first commercial internet companies. My company went from just me basically in my apartment near UCLA to in 18 months, we were doing $10 million a month and advertisement was all over the internet those ads were all being run by my company so my company stood up and was the first major successful internet company we developed a lot of the core underpinning technologies that that drive the internet today a lot of the architecture and infrastructure a lot of the protocols um that are in use everywhere including uh web 2 social media which we developed uh a lot of the architecture and infrastructure, a lot of the protocols that are in use everywhere, including Web2 social media, which we developed a lot of the underpinnings, a lot of the underpinnings

for search engines and algorithms. All of that is part of our massive patent portfolio. We, you know, I personally have about 100 and more than 110 U.S.-issued patents. My companies have had issued, I guess we're closing it on 300. All of that to say, I've been in this space a long time. I saw how the Internet itself was tilted up. And I've got a lot of very interesting stories that have never been have never been heard before about you know what really caused the crash of 2000 that is not um uh what anybody thinks happened the the crash of 2000 was actually instigated um by um the credit card companies uh in basically what i would say is in a conspiracy with the banks and with the Federal Trade Commission.

A very interesting story about how they sucked out all of the actual revenue that was being generated on the Internet back in 1999, which caused a cascading collapse. But after that collapse, I turned my attention with my late business partner to, you know, what was the future of the Internet going to look like? You know, we had done Web 1. We had really developed the commercial web. We did Web 2, which was social media. And we, you know, developed the technologies, which later became Twitter and became Reddit. And I have the patents on those.

I mean, I sold them, but I'm the named inventor on them. And ultimately we say, you know, what is the final iteration of the internet going to look like? And how do we get from here in the year 2000, 2001? How do we get from here to there? And the answer was fully immersive virtual reality, augmented reality metaverse, in conjunction with artificial intelligence and all these pieces. I mean, we really designed this out very well in the early 2000s.

And so we set out at that point to design what would this look like. We launched out a proof of concept, which we were calling the virtual world web. We launched that out in 2004. It met with commercial success. We developed a second generation metaverse, which we now call Otherverse Classic. And Otherverse Classic has been in continuous operation since 2005 with more than 50 million users. We've done a $20 billion economy. We introduced really the first token, which was called Raise, before Bitcoin. And so, you know, I saw Bitcoin come around,

you know, immediately understood that when the credit card companies, when the banks can essentially crash an entire industry. And, you know, I'd love to spend some time and discuss that because it really is a fascinating story about what really happened back then. But I immediately grew to hate the banks, to hate the credit card companies. You know, I was trying to do a Bitcoin back then, but I did not have the inspiration and genius that Satoshi did. I introduced RAISE as a centralized token currency back before there was decentralization and blockchain. And it's still quite successful.

But it got me to recognize that there are huge problems with the finance industry and with payments in general. immediately understood the implications moving forward for what this would mean for decentralization and democratization of the internet. Saw huge success with Otherverse Classic, but it was limited as our second generation platform, so we started to work on what would be the final version of metaverse. And so I mean, I think you can hear from the story that our interest in metaverse, our development of metaverse goes back, really 20 years, we have about 85 core patterns.

But my brother, why not? But that goes by like, why now? Like, I think we talked about IOTA earlier about being way ahead of its time. The concept made a lot of sense. Do you feel like the whole concept of a metaverse,

even though I'm the guy that's extremely bullish on the whole concept and I've been talking about it for a long time, I know Yat,

we had Anaboka earlier, been very vocal on it, the virtual immersive world where you can actually own your identity. It's kind of a

digital replication of the physical world just without physics pretty much um but do you think that we're there like why isn't it not getting the love it was getting a year well well because it's because all of those have been um horrible iterations of metaverse so the to shortly briefly answer your question, why now? Because after $50 million that I put in, it is now ready to launch. So we're launching it. It is next generation metaverse. Nobody's ever seen anything like this. It's a full on AAA quality game.

It's a AAA quality virtual world web. We use the Xeon browser. It feels like a very familiar web browser, but it browses to metaverses. It's all interoperable, interconnected metaverses. Users can create their own metaverse. They can create their own user interface. The Xeon browser is designed to be able to browse both metaverse and flat web, which is the existing two-dimensional web.

And after years and years of development, my team, I've had hundreds of developers working on this, the platform is ready to launch. So we just released into open beta, into public beta a few days ago. We're doing a massive upgrade today. And, you know, the way that I look at it is we spent all of this time, essentially, the analogy would be essentially building the operating system, if you were to think of it as a phone. And I've had teams building apps that would sit on the operating system for years and years. So the operating system is now complete.

We just finished it, and we're starting to tie in the apps. The apps all need to be tied in. That's my analogy. Xeon is complete. The infrastructure is complete. But then how do you – when you say Xeon, that's the name of the actual metaverse? That's the name of the browser. The browser, okay.

Every metaverse will have its own name, its own domain. We're authoritative for the... Yeah, Brian, I'm just going through your site. If you do have... By the way, the visuals are great, but then how do you get users? How do you get people to start using those metaverses? I think that's the main issue that most metaverses are facing. Right.

I mean, most metaverses do not understand really what it takes. I mean, the way you get users is by figuring out what users want. And I could spend, literally, I could spend two days discussing all of the mistakes that these other metaverses have made. You need to have a critical mass. You need to have a density. You need to have population centers. You need to have a critical mass, you need to have a density, you know, you need to have population centers, you need to have it can't be event to event, this needs to be community driven. So, you know, with having had 50 million users, the idea is you bring communities in, you have ongoing 24 hour-day activity, which is largely, you know, initially it's social activity.

So it's activities like people getting together and meeting each other. It's dating. It's making friends. It's doing things like this. We do spaces. It almost gets hard for me to do uh twitter spaces anymore because they're so poor uh there's it's such a poor proxy for what spaces really should look like which are these metaverse meetups um so we do podcasts and uh film screenings um fashion shows karaoke there's

you know karaoke um multiple times uh a week just kind of replicating so essentially your strategy is replicating like physical world events into a virtual world that's like the first the first onboarding strategy that's the first step um socialization so it's really a hybrid of of web 3 and web 2 right there's um uh you have a we've got a social network that's tied in. And, you know, let's let's be serious. It's it's it's having fun at, you know, comedy clubs and strip clubs. There's just, you know, put another way. I mean, you know, hard, hard to reiterate the entire marketing strategy.

But we just finished up our eighth annual virtual con, which is a convention. We had hundreds of booths on the trade show floor within the software. We had speaking tracks. There was a Web3 speaking track with some amazing Web3 projects and speakers. And, you know, meet and greets afterwards, DJs, dance party, three days of convention plus award show. So, you know, and opening this up to users to be able to generate this type of content. Once you have the community, the community is self-sustaining. It's not rocket science. flat web, it was just academics and educational institutions. By aggregating tens of thousands of websites together into a massive banner ad program,

I was able to highlight what these features of the internet, why people should actually use the internet to general public. And I personally was bringing in two, three million people a month to the internet, which is what caused the internet to actually gain traction and become a viable business model. And that brought in websites. And we're doing the same thing. I'm focusing millions of users into the metaverse right now. We're launching it out with, there's play to earn now

because, of course, we've launched our token. So we've got... You've launched your token, by the way, just on a DEX and you've just launched all of it 100% float without anything locked up, correct? Well, no. So we've done really what Bitcoin has done. We are doing ongoing minting um until we reach

capacity which is the the total of three billion tokens um this is designed so that we can continually market with token um market to add community so airdrops for new users coming in when we reach certain thresholds of users all all users get airdrops of the token. There's affiliate marketing designed to bring in new users. And every mint, just like as Bitcoin mints with each block designed to increase the hash rate of the network. So each block brings in more hash rate, in theory, than the block costs in terms of dilution of Bitcoin. We've designed a social platform under the same paradigm,

trying to slice out this segment of segment of money which is medium of exchange whereas bitcoin is you know store of value really bitcoin's not great medium of exchange so metaverse is is fantastic when it comes to theory of money metaverse is fantastic for producing a new economy if you have a sufficient size user base as the users scale so the economy scales and you you're not adding computing hash rate it's really analogous as a social hash rate each new user you add increases transactions increases velocity of money inside the network and with a properly designed metaverse, which of course, Otherverse Xeon is a very well, I mean, it's the best designed metaverse.

As you add users, it increases the value. And thus, us doing monthly new mint, rather than every 10 minutes, because we're not computers, we're people. Monthly new mints to increase because we're not computers we're people um monthly new mints to increase what we're calling social hash rate uh is designed to always increase the value of the token in excess of the new um the newly increased uh supply from the mint um and that gives us perpetual growth i got it right um i got it yeah i know it's getting a bit too technical

for the audience i got no look if anyone wants to check it out, Otherverse, and I know we should probably talk more about the Metaverse. It's not because – it shouldn't stop just because it's not getting the attention it used to get. But anyone that wants to check out Otherverse, it's otherverse.io. You can check out the profiles on stage as well. Have a look at them. I think, as I said before, I think the Metaverse is highly underappreciated.

Gaming is getting a lot of attention, but I kind of put the metaverse into two buckets that are intertwined, gaming and social. I mean, the same way games became social platforms unintentionally many years ago, now we're going to see a lot of these gaming metaverses become social platforms as well, become social metaverses and vice versa. But Brian, you know, you've been in this space for 20 years. Really appreciate you coming on congratulations with launching other verse and having us in the cap table for everyone else i hope you enjoyed the discussion today talking with a bunch of vcs earlier today and having that discussion with other verse a project that's just launched a few days ago i think um and uh yeah i think we'll see you again

tomorrow morning same time as always not sure what we'll be talking about but i'm sure something will come up otherwise really appreciate you appreciate you, everyone. Thanks, Southern Verse. Thanks a lot, everyone. We'll see you again soon. I think Scott will be back. If anyone's wondering as well, Scott will be back tomorrow. I think after tomorrow. But yeah, that's it. I appreciate everyone. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.