The Wolf Of All Streets - VCs Debate Strategies | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

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Hey Joe, can you hear me? Yes, sir. How are you? Doing well, my man. How about yourself? Good, man. Good. It's been a while. We haven't chatted. I know. I was excited. VC is discussing strategies in here today. Oh, is that the title? VC's Discuss Strategies. Yeah, I came up with that idea last minute. But let me start with, we should change the title to something else.

But there's nothing else. The market is doing exactly what it did in previous cycles. There's just nothing exciting about it. Like the things you can ask is what the bottom will be, the local bottom will be, what will happen afterwards, how the recovery will look like, and what asset classes will kind of lead that recovery. But when, yeah, so maybe i can ask you those questions you're like how do you think that that uh uh how long do you think will take before the uh

uh we see a bottom and and how would you how would you play the recovery the recovery it's pretty dead right now you know we just posted some stuff out this morning about you know the the kind of local top this year for people mentioning Bitcoin was, you know, January 11th when the ETF was announced. And basically, we've seen kind of a slow bleed of interactions since then, you know, and almost like a low for the year happening like today. So it's just kind of like muted out there, I would say, you know, pretty, pretty bullish news for the sec and ethereum i think that's where you're seeing some things kind of bounce pretty heavily today you

know things were down 20 20 30 but you're seeing you know some some meme coins moving up like something like a brett's up 25 right now um you know phantom up 15 oh wow bit tens are up 18 so it's like you're kind of seeing some things. But I think overall, you know, there's just not a narrative for anyone to latch on to right now. And I think that's kind of like, you know, like the sell in the summer and come back, you're just kind of feeling that and you know, it's deals have slowed a little bit, you know, projects don't want to launch into a market like this although i'm kind of like i'm kind of like against that theory i feel like you should launch into a

bear market and that way you're you know you're launching into a place of you know sustained low and you can actually kind of grow off of that and so if people ever ask me they're like oh man i want to wait it's like why do you want to launch when bitcoin's at like a pure all-time high like are you only trying to launch a token for four months or three months or three weeks? Are you trying to build a business that lasts? And, you know, if they can't answer that immediately, it's like, I'm not here for this. And so I think that's like, you know,

just a piece of this where it's like, hey, if you're building out there and you're building something that you want to last for a long time, like, why wouldn't you launch into a market like this? Yeah, but the counter argument to this, and I was thinking about this earlier today. So it's interesting you mentioned it.

I'm looking at some of the projects we invested in. So we've made probably nearing about 100 investments this year so far. And I'm looking at some of the projects we've invested in that launched. And it's tricky. Like, you know, we're pretty strict, relatively strict, depending who we compare us to, on what type of projects we invest in. We try to focus on quality so none of them are you know we're not talking about that kind of meme coinish uh short cycle potential dumps or rug pulls and that we we end up losing money on so we try to invest in vc back projects i have pretty top tier vcs top tier exchanges and some of these projects

that are building them they've got a solid team solid product a lot of users their token is really stagnating so i start wondering like was it a good idea launching earlier this year and launching into a, I would say, bear market, but kind of a dead market? Or is it better to delay that launch and launch later in the year and try to get that more momentum? So the question goes to is when the market recovers, do you think who would benefit the most, projects that raise capital and are waiting to launch later in the year or projects that already launched and their coin is stagnating i'm leaning to more towards projects that haven't launched yet they always seem to get more love than listed

tokens that are stagnating yeah i mean we already went through a little cycle here of excitement this year right and so now you're seeing that those projects that really falling off right now, right. It's like, you know, something like a, like a slurf is down 65%, right. Those meme coins. And so I know it's a little bit of a different bag than like a utility token and a company that's building, you know, maybe a decentralized social media app or something. Um, it's like, if you're building for utility and building for longevity, like i don't see it as like striking while the iron's hot in some way with you know it's i feel the same way about fundraising just like personally like people you know there's a lot of companies that raised you know series a back in the crazy days of crypto series they have 50 million dollars

at a 300 million dollar valuation and you know they they And they built on the backs of Terra Luna giveaways and bounties. And now it's like, well, what do they do with that money? And they've been just probably having to fire people and revamp and pivot and figure out their model. It's like you just... I think it's like if you launch slower and you're more focused on what the problem is that you're trying to solve, the token will take care of itself and people will see that um and i think it just kind of depends on the unlike that you know it's like adidas announced that they were going to you know build on base like you know they don't care

what the timing is or something like that so i'm kind of i'm in that camp a little bit i would say yeah let me go to i think it's first time we have him on stage golding you there golding delphi you there? Golding, Delphi, you there, man? While waiting for Golding to... Yeah, we can, we can. How are you, man? Good, good. How are you guys?

Good, good. Again, Delphi Digital, you're probably one of the best guys to ask about that same question. What are your thoughts and kind of what is your strategy? Do you think projects that have raised capital, do you think they made the right choice launching either now or earlier in the market? Or is it better for them to wait for the market to pick up? What are the pros and cons of each strategy, in your opinion? Got it. So I'd like to kind of go with what some of the other speakers were saying, which is that if you are building a long-term sustainable business and a long-term sustainable kind of protocol that is predicated upon solving a solution to that, a very specific

group of people, like a solution to a problem that a very specific set of people feel very strongly, you need to get that out to market. Because that means you think that with a high conviction, you have a product market fit. Now, if you don't think that, then by all means, if you're kind of like wishy-washy, that by all means means try to delay. I will also say one other thing that it is very hard to time the market, there are some people who can create the market, right? Like, I think that, in a sense, Jito almost kind of like created the market for the Solana run up, right? People were very excited. And then Jito

just kind of time that really well well that's a one in a million chance are you are you someone who can you know get up there and and and execute at one in a million chance every time and if and if the answer to that is no if you think that the odds are that you have a less than 100 opportunity or less than a 50 opportunity at executing at one out of a million or one out of a billion then then you should just get your product out, get your protocol out, and make sure that you're iterating as quickly as possible to keep solving this core problem that inspired you to even create this business.

And kind of going back to the original question I started with to Joe and a question to you personally, but also Delphi Digital Strategy. What is your strategy right now, guys? What are you guys focusing on? Is there any narratives that you think are not getting enough attention and that you guys are investing more in? So we always keep an open mind, right? We do think that there are certain areas that will see muted returns compared to others um but we try to keep an open mind you send me a deck i will always look at it um and because of that sometimes you may need to ping me because it may be over bandwidth but please by all means send me i respond to dms um and so we so we've made investments across multiple categories this year, right?

Whether it's DeFi, whether it's crypto and AI, whether it's infrastructure, we're constantly looking at consumer stuff. We're looking at everything across the board, trying to find exceptional founders building something that's differentiated, that can have a long-term sustainable advantage. And again, it comes back to, do we think that these founders are uniquely situated and are uniquely talented enough to solve the problem that they're coming to us, telling us they're trying to solve? So again, we look at all different verticals.

But you started off by saying that you think that some verticals will not perform as well as others would be a bit more muted in their performance what what would you say those are and then which ones do you think will outperform other verticals so i'll say personally um and this is just me when i'm looking at my thing this is not delphi as a whole but just personally, you know, I believe that a lot of these RWA plays most, I'd say 90% are not going to perform as well as I say 90%. Like the median RWA play won't perform as well as a median, like cutting edge, like crypto native play. And I say this because I think that RWAs, like bringing RWAs on chain is a marginal improvement it is not an innovation like a net zero innovation um like when gmx came out when synthetics came out when axi came out

these were zero to one innovations when solana came out that was a zero to a thousand innovation right and so um whereas okay now we have stocks on chain, that is good, but we think that that is a marginal improvement. We do not think, or I should say I don't think in general that that is a zero to 100 innovation. And your thoughts on obviously turnovers that we've talked a lot about here, your thoughts on AI in gaming? So we do believe quite strongly that AI will transform both the developer experience as well as the user experience. And so we have made a significant number of investments over the last 12 months in the AI space.

We will run one of the most kind of goaded AI and crypto chats. Like Bloomberg News has even sent like moles into our chat to try to find like what's happening, what's the cutting edge stuff. So we strongly believe in the power there. And in gaming, you know, we help create crypto gaming by backing Axie Infinity and by helping them as like value add investors,

literally sitting pen to paper, helping create lore and stuff and working on various parts of their economy um and so ever since then we have we have continued to back crypto games we continue to back uh that entire ecosystem from infra to to gaming your thoughts and your thoughts on the on the gaming ecosystem web3 gaming ecosystem so one thing and we'll go to the panel as well but one thing um it has been mentioned that we've had obviously adamoka on stage a few times and uh yeah and others have always said um just games take a long time to build but i think what we're seeing right now is a lot of

the games that were being built in the previous cycle are starting to launch in this cycle and obviously is a few examples um we've been probably gaming is the the niche that we've invested in the most um has it do you. Has it exceeded your expectations in terms of the quality of the games, the daily active users that we're seeing among those games? Or do you think it's kind of moving a bit slower than you would have liked? So we think we are very excited about games. We are very excited about the innovation happening. If you look at like gg.zip, you look at mafia you look at itopia we are very excited for several of the games um that we

have back we are excited for the gaming space in general um if you saw the announcement yesterday from magic block out of solana like what they were able to do like building this like kind of concurrent engine that uh can have enable on-chain game tapping 50 millisecond latency and like confirmation times like we think that's super interesting um and so we will continue to back and be staunch advocates for the the crypto gaming sector and last question i have before going back to the panel um and by the way anyone on the panel just feel free to jump in kind of really see how you guys are playing the market, either from a VC standpoint or just as a trader or an investor on a personal level. Golding, just one other question is in-game assets as well.

So something we've been very bullish on, and I've talked about this before, just in-game assets from the last cycle, NFTs, in-game NFTs. Obviously, they've stagnated previously and continue to stagnate um or underperform um is that something you guys are bullish on is that something you're investing in uh so we have not made any investments in specific like in-game assets if by that we mean like nfts or similar what we have done is we have backed like kind of the creators of those assets. Right. And so we do think that there is a world in which people will be. Well, it's obvious that people want to trade the want to trade these assets. But again, we try to stay focused on game studios, on some of the tech that games need to create.

That's kind of where we invest and where we think we have secret sauce or where we have a competitive advantage. Yeah, I wanted to go back to, again, the original question I asked. Ran, in your show, you're talking about the, so like the questions you kind of covered on your show is when the bottom will be,

how that bottom will look like, and more importantly, how that recovery will look like and what happens to altcoins when we finally see that recovery. Because otherwise, if you look at the markets, pretty much the same thing has happened in previous cycles. It's not worth it discussing the same thing over and over again. So how would you recap what you discussed in your show and when and how that recovery would look like in your opinion? So I don't know if the bottom's in or not.

I don't really care. What I did see yesterday was a capitulation candle on the downside where it just felt like a capitulation. You also saw a capitulation candle in the charts. I also saw the RSIs bouncing off a very critical level. And so for me, it's like, you know, it's good enough. It's good enough. There may be some more downside, but for me,

it feels like a lot of the selling has actually been done. And I think it's, yeah, I don't know if it's up only from here, but I certainly think that the worst is over in terms of panic. Okay. And then is there any specific coin, specific narratives that you think will do well if we start finally seeing that slow recovery or slow move towards a bull market? Yeah, I mean, I think the best risk return narrative right now is ETH. And when I say ETH, I don't mean ETH. I mean, ETH asset's cool, but I don't think you're going to change your life with ETH asset.

But buying into the ETH ecosystem, so Arbitrum, Optimism, Aave, ENS, Lido, all those ETH, EtherFi, Gearbox, Velodrome, all those ETH tokens. I think that that right now is the best risk return play on the market. Okay. And then your thoughts, I know I've always asked you this, but I probably ask you every month or two, your thoughts on AI. Are we kind of past the AI hype? Do we see that excitement? I kept saying to you at the time that i don't believe in the ai coins it's a narrative that you're playing but there's no there's no air in that there's no substance in the narrative and the problem is that when you get

uh when you get no substance in the narrative as soon as the market gets a bit scary then people go hold on a second there's no substance in this and those are the first coins to sell off which is why meme coins ai coins, some of the overpriced gaming coins were the ones that got the biggest hits. And then meme coins, you think we'll continue seeing that same excitement as the market remains? Okay. Is it over or we'll see a bit more before kind of that hype is done? So I did a show yesterday, and in the show yesterday, I looked at the fact that about $100 billion flowed into meme coins. Now, that $100 billion that flowed into meme coins flowed from, like it could have gone into real protocols.

It flowed out of real protocols or good protocols into meme coins. And, you know, it's almost that you're taking something where, look, I know you can argue whether do protocols have any any value, blah, blah, blah, who like, I'm not gonna get into that. But what I did see was that about $100 billion flowed from real protocols into meme coins. So it's almost like you're taking something from something that may actually get to something and replacing it with something that you know is worth nothing, actually.

Now, yeah, I mean, I think long term, long term, long term, all the meme coins go to zero unless they become technological assets or unless they all of a sudden have a product behind it. But until then, I mean, until then, and unless that happens, I think a lot of money is flowed. It's been unhealthy. The flow of money has been unhealthy. That's what I think. And when you say, sorry, just back on the beat, please. Sorry, Mario.

Yeah, hey, Ryan. How long did it take you to figure this out, man? No, I mean, I knew it. I always said I was putting 1% to 2% in my portfolio, and I was playing it much more for fun because I needed my dopamine while the market was moving sideways. That was always my thesis.

I never thought that meme coins were ever going to change the world. Yeah, but then when you said all meme coins go to zero unless there's some sort of value, something built on top of it. I know you're involved. You launched one and you're involved in another. Tuka Carlson has that media play.

Gummy's more, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, more community-based. Would you say Gummy falls into the... I don't know if you watch the show now, but if you didn't watch the show, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you watch the end of it. Is that the Sunday meme coin one? I watched the last one, not this one.

No, no, no, today's show. I think you should watch the end of the show. Because I think when you watch it, you'll realize that I burnt all the Gummy tokens today, live. I burnt $12 million worth of Gummy tokens. Well, this is the problem, right? you watch it you'll realize that i burnt all the gummy tokens today on live i burned 12 million dollars worth of gummy tokens well well but this is the problem right so it wasn't really 12 million let's be honest and this is the point i made at the end of at the end of the show yesterday it's not liquid if you try to dump 12 million you wouldn't have gotten 12

let's just be honest right like if you had dumped it in the market, you would have a fraction of it. Yes, sir. I just did that off. So, Ron, do you think that Doge is going to zero? No, but Doge is not a meme coin. I agree. As we get into kind of some matters. So what about going to – Doge is a proof-of-work payments mechanism,

and the market is believing that Elon Musk will use Doge, will integrate Doge into what may be the biggest consumer app in the world, and that's why Doge is no longer a meme. Most people – does anybody still care about the Doge dog? Does anyone still remember what the Doge dog actually looks like? No, no one gives a fuck. They all care about the technology and the payment. I don't know. I still think that we are largely in a D-gen market. And the D-gens and the meme coins, the D-gens are also driving the value of the L1s. And, you know, so it's all D-gens. And when some new meme coin, when some new D-gen thing comes out, they're going to take their money out of the L1s and do the newest DGEN. Yeah, but I don't think the newest DGEN is always going to be meme coins.

I think in the last cycle, it was NFTs. Of course not. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So what do you think the DGEN play this cycle will be? But before that, I don't want to avoid the question. So when you say all meme coins are going to zero unless there's something built on top of them.

So if it's a community-based meme coin, and I'll use Gummy as an example because I know you're involved in that one. Something like Gummy, which is based around a community you built and kind of your brand is linked to it in some way. Would that one, do you think eventually in a year, two years, five years go to zero? Or do you think something could be built on top of it? Unless the community finds a use case for the token, just like the Doge community found a use case for their token. If the community can find a use case for the token, then eventually... Look at all the meme coins from the previous cycle.

They are Shiba, Doge, and Floki. All of those guys have now got use cases. They're no longer meme coins, right? No one even gives a shit about the meme anymore. They're all we care about. I've said this before. longer meme coins right no one even gives a shit about the meme anymore they are all we care about i've said this before what meme coins is is a reverse entry mechanism into a market the normal entry mechanism into a market is you launch a technology or a product first and then you build community and uh and that's what happens now meme coins do it the other way around

they come into the market on community and then they look for a use case they look for a product so you know like what what could happen with gambian i mean i don't want to spill too many cards out of the tables but example uh we've been approached by a gaming company right and they're looking for a community to play their games and we have a community and so if they make all the games as gummy games then that might be the use case for the gummy right and so we came in from the other side of building a community first whereas a gaming company would have built the technology first and then come into the market and try to find it and try to find the game how so that's interesting and i like the idea so if a gaming company would have built the technology first and then come into the market and try to find a game.

So that's interesting. And I like the idea. So if a gaming company comes to any meme coin, let's move away from gaming, but any decentralized meme coin, how would it work? How can they add the community into their ecosystem? Is it like offering some sort of utility for token holders? Or how would that integration work? Well, you'd say, for example, you could create a whole bunch of gummy games, right? So, you know, like Flappy Bird or whatever it is,

one of the games that we're building is a game like Flappy Bird, which is a gummy, but instead of the bird, it's gummy, right? And you can play that and you win gummy. If you can beat the highest score, you win gummy it went like if you can beat the highest score you win gummy so kind of like think about it like this think about uh when you wake up in the morning the highest score is zero after one hour let's say vinny gets the highest score so vinny gets the first airdrop for the day and then uh then let's say you beat vinny's score you get the second airdrop for the day. And then Scott beats your score.

He gets the next airdrop for the day. So it becomes like a bunch of games, which emit tokens, right? Airdrop tokens for playing the game. So it's like, I'm just giving you some examples of, you know,

this is one example of like, if you, if, if, but I mean, think about any example of a technology, which is looking for a community. They can either go and launch a technology and spend millions of dollars creating a community, or they can just launch it.

In South Africa, we call it a reverse listing. I think in America, it's a SPAC. I think it's what we call a reverse listing, where instead of first building a business and then listing, you find an empty shell and you reverse into the empty shell and then your shares become tradable. So it's the same thing, same principle. The principle is that you would – that meme coin communities are ripe for the taking if you come in – you can reverse list into a meme coin community because the community

exists and i don't know what you can list i mean i'll give you example i spoke to one of the meme coin communities yesterday and said look if you think about geico from what i understand geico was first a brand and then it became an insurance company right so think about that analogy for meme coins where first you've got the geico which is the brand which is the lizard or whatever it is the gecko and then you find the product market fit for that community and then you launch it you leveraging the brand of the of the meme and ran when when you're talking about that they're having a community what what kind of community are you talking about well what's about what's a viable community that would be interesting I can only tell you what I know about gummy gummy has about 70 000 holders okay now how do I know

this because I know how many of them are holding it on centralized exchanges and I know how many are holding them on on chain wallets there's about 70 000 people now I can tell you that there's a lot of passion in the communities because we know of at least 200, 210 tattoos of people because we had a tattoo competition and people sent us pictures of competition. And I think we've got 210 tattoos. So we know that, you know, that there's,

it's quite a, I agree with him, quite a passionate community, quite a passionate community who are willing to tattoo gummies all over themselves. Right. So that doesn't sound degen at all no it is degen but the whole of crypto is degen come on i mean which part of dg which which part of crypto is

not degen we hear this run you just you just described a solution looking for a problem yeah i think i think if you're going to do these like meme coin kind of pivots it needs to be into something relatively close to what to do these like meme coin kind of pivot, it needs to be into something relatively close to what you're doing. So meme coin, kind of becoming some type of in game currency or some kind of in game asset in a game or in a fantasy world that kind of makes sense. But I've been pitched things like, oh, we're going to go from meme coin to hardcore, the cutting edge quantum resistant AI coin, like 10 or 20 phds like that just that's that's

almost an impossible pivot in my mind like this it just goes back to marketing 101 and branding 101 right like how do we how do we create an audience and how do we go how do we provide like different services to this audience that that audience wants um but to go from complete left curve to complete right curve that's like it's no no no obviously i mean you wouldn't launch you wouldn't launch fucking saying that you've you've got a market and you want something that's relevant to this target market so if you were if you were to launch a casino app a gaming app um you know you gotta you gotta understand who who is this market you know what i mean the problem that you're The problem that you're dealing with right now is that you're dealing with the attention economy.

You're basically creating multiple different memberships. I don't know how many people are members to a tennis club or to a gym. Imagine being a member of 30 gyms consecutively at the same time. You're not going to do that. And so the problem that you're creating with all of these meme coins and these quote unquote communities is that you're trying to get the attention and you're trying to get the time of each member dedicated to that specific community. It's impossible.

And so that is why you start to have these kind of extraneous type of, you know, kind of processes where you're trying to force some sort of utility or force some sort of experience into these communities that never really existed in the first place because most of these participants are just there for the yield they're yield hunting that's the same people that we saw in d5 season that are yield hunting when you know all of a sudden the yield goes from 15 to 10 percent to to 7%? But hold on, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What is yield hunting? Yield hunting was a way that it was a substitute for marketing.

In my mind, it was one of the most genius marketing campaigns in the world. What is yield farming? Yield farming says, I give you equity in my protocol, for lack of a better word. Instead of spending the money on marketing and trying to acquire through doing Google ads and TV ads, I'm going to just give it to the users and that's going to attract through doing google ads and tv ads i'm going to just give it to the to the users and that's going to attract users and that's a genius method of marketing yield farming it's so it's so genius that we haven't necessarily been able to grow beyond three trillion dollars in market cap in the entire industry for the last five years

but that's i mean that's that's a dumb argument because because if the protocol itself is not a great protocol etc etc you're not going to get the users well i don't know a better i don't know a better use right i don't know a better you i don't know a better way to get people to sample things than to offer them equity in the fucking product imagine coca-cola it's not equity it's not equity oh okay i mean if we can get into this discussion we can get into this discussion, we can get into this discussion. But if it's not equity, in some sense... Run, run. Are options equity?

Like a call option, is that equity or is it a derivative? It's an equity derivative. Okay. So do you consider tokens to be an equity or do you consider tokens to be a derivative? The same thing. Okay. So are you telling me... It's not the same thing.

Okay. Hey, guys, I think what you guys are missing in my view is a talk around community is that you know it's very easy to start a community and get excited about community but again it's i'd like the attention economy you know it's very difficult in my view uh communities are either growing the engagement of their members or they're dying and 99.9 plus percent of communities die pretty quickly you know they're you it's you know it's actually really easy to get 25 guys to get a tattoo for something you know what's really hard is to get them 25 guys to get it you know to grow into 2,500, to grow into 25 million.

That's really, really hard. Lou, what are your thoughts on that? Nobody's getting these fucking tattoos because they actually feel that aligned with the way they're doing it. They're doing it to create hype, to fucking pump the token so that they can dump them on people later and make money. Alex, where do you draw the line between a pump and dump group, which I don't call a community, versus a community that ends up building like what Ryan said when it comes to a game on gummies or any other point? I think you guys don't understand. I think you guys don't understand it.

So let me break it down for you guys. When a protocol launches, a protocol spends a lot of money, or can spend a lot of money on marketing. Now, what is that process of marketing? The process of marketing is getting people's attention. I think we understand the point, Brian, and agree with you. It is great marketing. Please let me finish so the whole idea behind marketing is to get attention now whether or not the protocol is successful in then converting the attention into long-term clients goes beyond just the ability to create hype and attention to actually how good is your product now what meme coins are meme coins are focused attention with a focused type of target market.

So instead of launching the product and then going to spend your marketing budget looking for a community, you can reverse list a product and saying, look, we have a community. If you have a product that has a product market fit, instead of spending money on a community use this community over here And that's all it is So it's actually saying you reverse instead of building a product in a community building a community and then create the product after It's just like the same strategy just reversing the order Question I have to ask the question guys I have to ask the question, guys. Who is this community? Is it a bunch of 13-year-olds, 15-year-olds online? They don't have two pennies to rub together.

Who are these people sitting behind these computers, wasting their time on this shit? I'll tell you this. They don't have enough money. It's a bunch of people that, in the case of Brett on base base have 1.5 billion dollars to their names because the market cap of the coins is 1.5 billion dollars now you may say that's not real money but you may say it's not real money but right now the market is buying and selling at that price um if you want to know the number of people i can i can i can give you the number of people i think i think look

this doesn't change. Forget the market cap of these coins. It's irrelevant. Who are these people? Like, for example, and I'm not trying to pick on you. I'm just asking the questions.

Like, if you've got 70,000 gummy bears that are following you around, like, what are these people? Like, who are they? Like, do we have any idea of the demographics of these people?

They are the same target market that almost every brand in the world is after. No, I disagree with that. How is that possible? Are you telling me, like, I guarantee you there's a bunch of 12-year-olds. These are people that have, let me break it down for you. Number one, these are people that have internet connections.

Number two, these are people that have relatively decent technological skills because they can use wallets. They can use computers. So they're highly literate people. These are people that have disposable income, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to get into that. Now, listen, maybe in the States, that's not like a high bar to set. But in everywhere else in the world, that's already sifted from 95% of the population, right?

Vinny, you've lived in South Africa. How many people have good internet, good technical skills technical skills have disposable income and can actually enter a market but top five percent that's not the point that i'm trying to make here like we have these like unknown groups of people where you don't know what the demographic looks like it's basically just guesswork and it's called the community and i mean and i've been around for this long time and i'm i'm i'm not gonna ask what that sound is but i'll let you maybe finish what you're doing it's a it's a it's a gardener sorry ah sure it is um but yeah sorry go ahead no no all i was saying is that um i've been in this world for a long time and these communities

are... The only community that actually... I mean, it's the large L1s and Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana where there's been a long history of established wealth creation where people actually have money and value. Most of these 10,000 coins out there in the communities, first of all, it's the same people over and over. This is the Solana community. The people that are buying GAMI are the Solana community. They all got Solana wallets. When you talk about Solana community, this is the end user of the Solana community.

Without this, there's no Solana, Vinny. Without these people, there's no Solana. It's a subset though. It's a subset. Without this, there's no crypto. There's no Solana. These are the people that are currently using the protocols, lack it or not. Lack it or not, these are the people that are currently using the protocols, lack it or not.

Can we actually talk about things that are substance that are building for the future tomorrow instead of just a meme like this? Sure, David, go ahead. We'd love to get your thoughts on what things you're investigating. Well, you talked about AI and, you know, Alex, I heard you, obviously, very close to Delphi. We do a lot of stuff with them. And so, you know, the thing with AI is that, obviously, this is a multi-trillion dollar, like, imagine NVIDIA type of an approach. And by the way, everything I'm saying here is not investment advice, so everyone do their own research. But NVIDIA is up about 500 and something thousand percent because, obviously, of the positioning they've made for themselves. You know, AI has that same trajectory in everything that's happening in the world today, from think of medicine, chat, GBT, engineering, to medicine, and to academics, and to every aspect of life that we have.

But as Alex and the Delphi team know, as well as many others, is that the data supply is starting to become already scarce. You're starting to run into situations where the models are already starting to come into a period of not having any more data left. And so this is an area where we see the human-centric side of digital assets and blockchains, where humans can supply data, material, content, graphics, imagery to these LLMs to continue to supply more and more of the information that they need to get better at what they do and optimize. You know, imagine, you know, seeing a mid-journey picture two years ago,

and you see that there's already started to have massive optimization in it now. Imagine another year or two with more imagery and content that humans are providing to these models and being incentivized them, you know, through a bit tender type of model. This is going to continue on. So this is a massive, massive place where AI and crypto meet together, where humans are going to be able to provide their experience, their knowledge, their content, their material, and for the first time be able to have not only ownership of that because you can prove it on chain, but also provide it to these LLMs and models that are using them for more sophisticated GBT type of modeling.

So this is, and Ilya brought this up yesterday on a call for the NIR ecosystem. They're calling it the ownership type of an economy where humans have all of this experience, all of this knowledge that they're going to be able to have proprietary, immutable ownership of, and then be able to have, you know, proprietary, you know, immutable ownership of and then be able to transfer it to these models. So this is a huge area that we think is, you know, just starting to get rolling. And this is an area where we think has massive potential,

not only for, you know, obviously potential gains, but for sustainability in the marketplace. So we think that's a huge area. Vinny, I'd love your thoughts on this as well. Go ahead, Lou. I totally agree with that. And also, I'm with the Crypto Oracle Collective. We're a decentralized Web3 advisory service.

And we just completed week 10 of our AI Web3 accelerator. And so we've got 10 great cohort members. And it's just started. This industry, we're going to solve. I think this is where we're going to solve decentralized identity. This is where we're going to solve doing trillions of machine to machine payments. Is at the intersection of crypto and AI. So I couldn't agree more.

How are you going to get your users? How are you going to get your users? The chat dbt was the fastest growing internet site in world history. So yeah, this is something that humans are already using in in. I'm just wondering how you, I understand, I understand how well ChatGP is, I'm just trying to understand how you plan to get your users for this amazing application

that you're building. It's really simple. It's not me, it's 10, we have 10 companies in cohort number one of the collective accelerator, but the same way that every company does, by building something that people want. By spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on marketing and maybe, maybe, maybe being able

to convert 2% of the people that actually pay attention to your marketing. How much did ChatDBT spend in marketing? I mean, don't use the one single company that maybe- But that's what we're all trying to do. We are trying to be those companies. I understand, Tony. That breaks through.

There's 100 million companies that launch every single year, and one of them got this- Correct. That's capitalism. Two of them got the marketing. But that's everything. I know. In the history of marketing,

I think there's two companies that maybe got it right. But that's everything. One of them was ChatGPT. The other one was Tesla. You're correct. One was ChatGPT. The other one was Tesla. Every single other company in the world spends millions and millions and millions of dollars

into marketing. And you think that yours is just going to launch and bang, you're going to get this fucking, you're going to take off like ChatGPT. Come on, do me a favor. That's what we all think. That's what all entrepreneurs think. Right? This isn't easy. This is fucking hard if you've ever started a company. It's hard for 100% of us. You can sign up and you can leverage the Gummy community now, or you can come back and try and

leverage the Gummy community later, but it's going to cost you more later. If you build a community that grows its engagement over time, you're exactly right. But again, Ron, you're saying that you're going to be one of the tiny percentage of people who are actually successful at doing that. And maybe you will be, but odds are highly, highly, highly against you. But you're up for the challenge. Ron, why don't you get the Gummy community to go to civic and get civic passes on their wallets to make sure they're all unique and you'll see how quickly the 70 000 becomes i have a bet again

it's not me it's not me it's you would need to go to the gummy community and you would need to get them excited we've got them all in places we have them in centralized places let me let me david what would it take for you to become a gummy investor, David? I know this is a very, very exciting topic for you. For me? Yeah. I'm seeing if I can push that button, see what I get out of it. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

Actually, you know what? I'll actually change my question to a serious one, and then we'll go to Achilles and Dave and wrap up early today. But actually, I want to move to a serious question. First, I love your argument about AI, so I'd love to have you you on the panel again because we've discussed this a lot on the stage so we'll probably invite you again next week as we discuss web 3 and AI again but just one question going back to Gummy and the debate what would it take for you to start looking at meme coins differently beyond just a pump and dump group or is that literally impossible like is there certain indicators that are like all right cool

this is more like shib uh shib like doge now and i'm happy to look at it as a potential investment or that's that's not something you could see happening mario i i gave an answer to this yesterday before i left and as i gave the answer you changed the topic so i'm happy to i'm happy to reiterate what i said please yeah go ahead, go ahead. And it's basically this. Like in the meme economy, you can't take a million dollars or $10 million and turn it into a billion.

You can't 100x scale. So you can't take large amounts of money and scale it up. You can take 50 bucks, 500 bucks, maybe a couple thousand, maybe 10 grand and bet on a whole bunch of meme coins and hope you get lucky.

That's not investing. It's gambling. And so the problem is with meme coins, there's no ability to scale it up as an investment class. So serious investors aren't going to waste the time and energy putting money into meme coins and having to manage them because even if they put money in, like they can't do it in size. And even if they hit, so even if you put in 100 grand and you hit 100x,

you can't get it out. It's not liquid enough. But as you're looking at investing privately in meme coins, you're looking at listed meme coins because obviously there's listed meme coins that have, you know, Brett that Ryan was talking about. I think me and Ryan are both investors in Brett. Volume

is 90 million. Market cap is 1.4 billion. So there is enough liquidity for those bigger ones. But a lot of that's just back and forth, right? You know, the bot trading per day. Like if you look at it, you try and sell 5% or even, you know, any more than 3% to 5% a day, you will crash the price massively. Isn't that on all small protocols?

But yeah, that's pretty much every project that we invest in really doesn't have that liquidity early on. If you're going in early, I get it. If you're going into

top 100 coins, top 50 coins, you're fine. Yeah, but how many of those top 100 or top 50 coins are three months old? Yes, but my point is,

Ron, you have to play the field, yeah. So you have to take bets across a whole swath of these coins and you have to manage the field here so you have to take bets across a whole swath of these coins and you have to manage and you can't do it in size

so as like serious investors how do you like what's the most money you've ever put into a meme coin besides dummy 300k oh shit

which one based based based yeah that's probably our biggest investment as

well okay cool okay let me rephrase that what's your average

investment in a meme coin that probably start off at $10,000 when they on zero

market capital exactly this is my point it's you know for investors who've got a large

series of investors who have large pools of capital to deploy, you can't go on making these 10K bets all over the place. This is really a DJ in space.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's for institutions, but I think for retail, it's the best risk reward in the market. Best casino in the world. Let me ask one last question to David, and then we'll go to David and Achilles. David, you talked about AI, but is there any other narratives in crypto that you guys are focusing on this cycle?

Yeah, I would say one of the big ones that we firmly, there's a few, I'll lay them out. We believe that the expansion of Bitcoin is real. We believe that obviously it's the largest market cap asset in the world that it has you know in terms of its as its sturdiness its its ability to be hardened with uh the core devs that have done amazing work over the last 15 odd years uh that we're starting to see the expansion there. We're very excited about that. So anything from DeFi happening on Bitcoin to obviously some of the newer instances that we're looking at in terms of the L2s that are starting to come out. We're seeing a, David. Sorry. We've supported the early adaptations of Ordinals and also Runes.

And so we see continued expansion there of Bitcoin. The other areas that we're very excited about are we firmly believe that to get to a billion users, which is supposed to be the aspiration of this entire community, is that we need to really focus on native mobile application build out. We can't continue to have people go on their desktops and try to get to a billion users. We have to really live where they live, which is on their mobile device. So how do you get to native mobile applications and not EWA type of applications is incredibly important to us. Lastly, we also firmly believe that, again, meeting a use case and a need

to centralize physical infrastructure deep and is something incredibly important. Here in the United States, there are probably about 100 million people that still don't have access to high quality broadband speed at home or at school. There are dead zones throughout the country in 2024. And so this is a significant problem where decentralized physical infrastructure can solve that. And so whether

it's a helium, whether it's, you know, a hive mapper, whether it's a number of the different projects out there, we believe that this is actually a solution to a problem that has existed. And Vinny said, you know, kind of the solution finding a problem that has existed. And Vinny said, the solution finding a problem type of situation. This is a problem that the actual infrastructure is capable of solving and providing a solution to. So those are some of the areas that we're very

excited about. Real quick, Mario. Wait, David, you said, just real quick, you said you're interested in deep end, so you want the infrastructure to be decentralized, but you don't want people to launch progressive web apps. You want them to launch in a captured centralized iOS or Android ecosystem? I would say that we believe that what Solana has built out with their phone, we believe that obviously some of the adaptations there. Sure, we can have a debate back and forth about

the pros and cons of that. Yes, PaaS E is obviously secure enclaves on Apple. I understand that. But again, at the same time, we have to use what we have today. I would love to see more of the Solana type of approaches to building out our own phones in the ecosystem. Is there a corner? I would love

Is there a corner? What's that? No, no, Ren unmuted by accident. He does that a lot. Go ahead, David. You know, I would say that if we have the ability to do that in large mass, that would be fantastic. But I'm also cognizant that OEMs and the development

of new phones takes anywhere between three to five years in terms of development and kind of processing. And so sure, you know, I would say, you know, what I'd love to see that and what I'd love to see more of decentralized kind of layer zero approaches where we don't rely on the pre-existing fabric of architecture and design and corporate, you know, kind of, you know, control. Absolutely. But I'm also a realist and I realize, you know, that we can try to control what we can control. We can give people access to these things and try to give them an enlightening period

where they can say, OK, this actually is helping us instead of just kind of farming for yield. This actually helps us on a day-to-day basis. This does something for us. For instance, there's a billion people around the world that don't have an identifier. They don't have a passport. They don't have a driver's license. Sure, there are things within the blockchain, you know, kind of community and some of the adaptations that we're building here right now that can actually help people. So, yes, I understand where you're going with that comment in terms of, you know, what we're

looking in deep end in terms of decentralizing the physical infrastructure and that. But I'm also cognizant of where we are in terms of the current build um and yes i would love to see you know obviously solana is going for their next phone they've sold you know in order 60 million dollars worth of that you know that's great you know have i have their first one um i was using it early on would love to see that happen more now i think that makes sense good joe dave and Achilles. Dave? Dave Weisberger? I think he's got his perma hand up.

I can jump in, Dave, real quick. I agree with you. I'm looking forward to the Tesla phone. I think the operating systems all there, Starlink, can almost act as your network. And I would utilize that one. But understand, yeah, it's kind of like you find a local top. Like, hey, we should be prepared for when the precipice of that phone comes and it makes sense. And one real quick, I know we've been talking about meme coins and covering off. Like, Ran's right in one respect around, like, if you want attention, right, and you can

kind of participate with some of these communities. It happens for us at Lunar Crush kind of native where you know we see social media spikes we post about some of these communities and it's just a absolute groundswell of social activity when you can kind of get into these communities and get into the algorithm that way but that being said like i think the hardest thing to do in the space right now is actually build like the killer app or an app that could get us to those users. Because I mean, how many people are launching new layer twos? Because it's just easy. It's so simple to launch that like nodes as a service as a thing. And people think, oh, it could be this huge, massive, big thing.

Is this going to be the next, you know, Ethereum killer? And it's just money just flows to those things. And it's all just this speculative money where when you're trying to build for users, you're trying to build for users, you're trying to build for scale, people can really point to, oh, there's, you know, how many transactions around this thing, right? Or who's using this, or the like, speculatively, it's pretty easy to say, oh, there's, you know, 90 or $100 million in trading on Brett, right? It's like, to do what it's like, to get where. And so I think if you're out there building, and you're trying and you're a founder trying to build in the space and trying to build an actual app that

people use, like it's going to be a much harder thing. You've taken on a much harder job, but you are needed in this next generation because we can't live on layer twos forever. Great. Mario, I got to jump in. Thank you so much for letting me up here and talking to you guys. You know, Vinny, it's been a hot minute since I've seen you. And a few other guys and looking forward to it. You know, Vinny, it's been a hot minute since I've seen you. Thanks.

And a few familiar guys. And looking forward to more podcasts. I appreciate that. Yeah, we're wrapping up anyway. Achilles, Dave, I think you're putting my hands up. But let's go to Achilles. Yeah, Dave, go ahead. Yeah, I went to you earlier, but you didn't unmute. Go ahead.

No, I'm sorry. I just had an 11 o'clock call, which actually I just finished. It was quick. You know, when I listen to the argument going on between Vinnie and and and ran, I'm struck by the fact that they both have there's a lot of truth in what they're both saying, but there's something that people are missing. And, you know, I hate to be the old guy to bring back to stuff, but it's kind of the difference between meme coins and things that actually have real value and utility, at least in the beginning, is a lot like the difference between pink sheet stocks that people play around with and the actual real ones that get listed and develop into something.

And every once in a while, something may start off in one and graduate to the other, but it doesn't happen all that often. And it boils down to two things. And one, and it really has to do with regulation in the U.S., but it really boils down to monetization and confidence. Now, Rand made a post today talking about, I can't believe if Martin Shkreli really did convince people that the Trumps, because there is no regime whatsoever that holds issuers feet to the fire. There's no way to register these tokens. There's no way to do so in a way where your claims are validated. And if you lie, your feet are held to the fire. So it has to get to some extreme level before somebody will say, OK, let's prosecute them. And that decreases confidence in the system. That's why you can only invest maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. And you may

think you're going to make millions, but it's really, really hard because there's no liquidity. The other big piece is monetization. And once again, same thing. You build a community, you monetize it. How do you monetize it? Well, there's lots of ways. You could sell things to that community. You can give the community members participation in things that they're doing, et cetera. But virtually every meme coin issuer is staying away from that. Why? Because if they do it, it will be considered an equity, which is why that whole conversation about is it an equity or is it an option, it's all kind of funny because options are also securities. It's all because of the frigging regulations. Uber, for years and years and years, was the model, just build an audience and we don't care if we're making money. Now,

obviously, now they are making money. They charge a lot more as well. The point is, is if we ever got to the point globally, and it's not just the U.S. that doesn't have a really good regulatory framework. It's pretty much anywhere. Ever got to the point with light touch regulation where issuers could register, make statements, and if they lie, get prosecuted, you would have a totally different thing. And in that environment, building an audience of 75,000, 100,000, or a million people become incredibly valuable to people because you could give those people, it's like the whole difference between Web 2 and Web 3, right? You know, we always say, well, Web 3 is great because you're no longer the product. But if you're buying a meme coin and you get no economic participation in the network, well, guess what?

You're more like Web 2 when you are able to have ownership in that network and can share in profits made because you have this group of people that people want to access, well, that's a totally different story. So I kind of find it all amusing how we tie ourselves in the knots, and we know why we have. But really, where meme coins and communities start mattering is when you can build, be more like the Web3 ideal, where you can monetize that community and you can be confident in the representations to be made about it that's the point i want to make now i mean you found the middle ground between both vinnie and and uh ryan achilles anything else to add on the discussion i know you've you've had your hand up a bit earlier yeah i mean uh it was it was a very interesting conversation but i wanted to just uh touch on a point which is a lot of VCs that I've been kind of in a way conversing with have been trying to explore coins or kind of Web3 projects that are related to energy.

And I think that's a space we can have later on to tackle in more details but like there is an inherent kind of value to web3 connecting web3 in a sense and coins to the to the energy to the value of energy when it's transferred from like sector to sector or uh across uh across um certain chains etc so there's we've seen that in in the carbon i've been involved in the legislation when it comes to carbon credit in in abu dhabi and so this is this is something that we've seen a lot of attention to so i wanted to highlight that to have a to have a debate on that to have a conversation and the second point is when we talk about community i mean to be honest i mean what i've been seeing i've been here since 2017 and what i've been seeing, I've been here since 2017, and what I've been seeing is these community members that we're talking about simply migrate from one project

to another based on specific interests. So if we want to talk about real community, the question would be, can we steer those community members to buy new products, other products that we would provide potentially or other services that we provide? And can these communities really try to kind of, in a sense, push the project despite the initial yield that they would be getting or despite the initial kind of reward that they are getting in the first few months up to a year of a project? This is a very big debate, I think.

And to that point, I don't think that we've reached a place where we can really talk about communities being used as SPACs, just like Ran was saying, like SPACs when, like, obviously, when you're taking a company and you're using it as a vehicle to list your shares, saying that you're going to use a community to kind of really go up the ladder when it comes to awareness it's is is not really it's not really i think it's not really doable that's for that's for one and two uh i don't think

that these projects would have to spend millions to kind of build something. Someone mentioned like it's extremely affordable and becoming more and more affordable with technologies, with new technologies, with AI, et cetera, to build code and to build products. So, yeah. Yeah. I think the first one, the tokenization of energy would be definitely worth it for another.

I'd want to do more of these kind of VC spaces where we just have different VCs debating their strategies. And on your second point, I think you've agreed with Dave and again found some sort of middle ground. It's like not all communities are equal. And I think for a community to become more like a SPAC, it needs to be based less on the price of the asset class and more on the value being created on that asset class. So I think this is where like a community grows from a pump and dump group to an actual community that cares about the

whatever it is they're investing in. But I think it's a good discussion, good debate. And let me know in the comments if you want us to do more of these spaces where we just, you know, instead of talking on the news and the markets again for the millionth time, we just start debating different investment strategies and theses that we all have. So yeah, I'd want to do them more often. Otherwise, appreciate it. Thanks a lot, everyone. We'll see you again, same time as always, tomorrow.

Bye, everyone.