The Wolf Of All Streets - What Is CoinList & Why Does It Attract Millions Of Investors? | Graham Jenkin, Founder Of CoinList

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Investing early in the right crypto project and being right has led to generational wealth for countless investors. The hard part is knowing which project to invest in and being able to gain access. Graham Jenkin is the CEO of CoinList, a platform that plays an important role in vetting and incubating projects to ensure fairness and success. Solana, Filecoin, Celo, and Algorand are just a few of the top-tier coins that began their journeys through CoinList. Without Graham, it would be nearly impossible to sift through the endless projects and protocols to find the diamonds in the rough. -- Amber Group: WhaleFin is a digital investing experience offering easy portfolio management tools, attractive investment yields, and access to the emerging digital lifestyle. With over $1T in volume traded, WhaleFin offers personalized, compliant, and secure service across dozens of digital assets in 150+ countries.  Find out more at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/whalefin  -- Horizen: Horizen is the zero-knowledge enabled network of blockchains powered by the largest node system with scalability and flexibility unmatched by others. Blockchains built on Horizen are enhanced by zk-SNARK privacy tech and provide massive throughput without compromising decentralization. Horizen can support up to 10,000 independent blockchains running in parallel and issue an unlimited amount of tokens.  More at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/horizen -- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode of the Wolf of All Streets podcast is sponsored by Horizon and Whalefin. Please stay tuned for more information on them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where two times every week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, trading, finance, music, art, sports, politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, there are a lot of huge projects that have been massively successful in the crypto space, but people forget that a lot of those had to start somewhere. And they all started with coin launches on platforms like CoinList. I'm talking about Solana, Filecoin, Algorand, some of the biggest names in the space. Well, today I have their CEO, Graham Jenkins here

to talk about how these coins are launched, how they choose their coins, but also to talk about a recent survey that they did talking about the biggest trends coming in 2022. Graham, it's an honor to have you here. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me, Scott. Great to be here. So for those who don't know the quick background, what is CoinList and why did you start it? Yeah, CoinList is a premier token sales platform, as you mentioned. So we go out there and try to find some of the best new emerging teams in crypto and try to help them be successful, whether it's helping them raise capital, build their communities. There's a ton of different ways that we try to help them be successful.

And as you mentioned, we've helped teams going back to Filecoin in 2017. That's really where we got our start. A bunch of other teams, including, as you said, Solana, Algorand, more recently, ImmutableX, Amina in the last 12 months. And there's a pipeline of many more on their way. And that's really what we're passionate about. We're passionate about trying to accelerate the advancement of this technology. And the best way that we know how to do that is by going out into the ecosystem, talking with founders, talking with teams, trying to find the best teams that are really trying to push the boundaries of what this technology can do.

And then giving them all the 2016-2017 timeframe. We were all at a company called AngelList, which I'm not sure how familiar you are with AngelList. Very. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, AngelList was started by Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant in 2010. It's really a platform for startups. It's a startup for at Google for a while, mainly working in the ad space there. And, you know, just like every other clown in Silicon Valley, I had my own startup ideas, had my pitch deck,

and was out there just trying to get some angel investor support for what I was doing. And, you know, one of the investors I met through that process was Naval. And Naval, I don't know if you know Naval well, but Naval's a super nice guy, a really generous guy. He's also very direct. He doesn't want to waste any time. So, you know, we talked a little bit about some of my ideas and he was just like, look, why are you doing any of this stupid stuff? You should just come and join me at AngelList. And yes, I got plugged into AngelList pretty early on, a little bit after they found or helped the Uber team connect with their angel investors way back in 2010, 2011.

And yeah, just fell in love with what the Angelus team was doing, what their mission was really trying to accelerate the advancement of technology more broadly. And we did a bunch of stuff in Angelus from a regulatory standpoint as well, helped introduce crowdfunding into the U S via the jobs act. And then in 2015, 2016, 2017, started to see what was going on in crypto with ICOs. and then in 2015, 2016, 2017, started to see what was going on in crypto with ICOs. And we got really excited about that as a technology,

not just from the standpoint of crypto itself, but also from the perspective of the ICO as a mechanic to help any new emerging technology company raise capital. But there was a massive problem, obviously, which is that, and still is in a lot of ways, is that there are a lot of scam projects out there. And so what we wanted to try to do was keep a high bar, find high quality teams. And also we came up with a regulatory framework that sort of met some of the requirements from a compliance perspective, help these teams raise capital, do it compliantly, try to keep the regulators somewhat happy,

and also protect investors along the way. So that's essentially what we did with the Filecoin ICO, helped those guys raise over $200 million with that ICO, using the framework we developed, using the compliance infrastructure we built at Agilist. And because that was so successful, we got a massive amount of inbound interest from other teams who wanted to use the same framework. And because we got so much inbound interest, we decided to spin this thing out as its own company. And so that was in August, 2017. So that's how we got started. Long story. Yeah. Long story, but relevant. And

I love how you brushed over Google. I was at Google for a while when in fact, you basically redesigned all of Google AdWords, which is the most profitable platform on the planet, right? Online. Yeah. Yeah. It was a big, big team involved in that, obviously. But yeah, I was, I was definitely kind of leading the redesign efforts on AdWords. And, you know, awesome people at Google and, you know, do you know him? I don't, but I met him at Michael Saylor's house about two months ago and was legitimately starstruck for one of the first times in my life. I don't know why. I DJed and did music and stuff for 20 years. I met everyone. I was actually almost legitimately starstruck by Naval. But you sort of touched on this before and I was kind of laughed. You said 2016, 2017, there was so much garbage in the crypto space. Well, if you thought that was a garbage heap, what do you think of 2022? We have like 20,000 projects,

right? I mean, there's got to be 20,000 coins now. How do you sift through that? I know your mission is to find the good teams, find the good projects, the one that will be impactful, but how much trash do you have to sift through to find those good projects? Yeah, a lot. I mean, right now we're at the point where it's very difficult for us to sift through the inbound just because we are literally talking about thousands of projects that are reaching out to us to list on CoinList or run their offering on CoinList. And so, yeah, now there's a couple of different techniques now that we're using to source deals. A lot of it, frankly, is just coming through our investor network. We've got a great community, not just investors on the platform, but investors in CoinList.

And they refer deals to us. And that ends up kind of forming the kind of core of the set of projects we're looking at. We also run a seed, what we call coinless seed. It's a virtual demo day. We do that three to four times a year and we're just about to do one next month. And, you know, that's essentially another process where companies apply to us. We take a look at a number of different dimensions to try to evaluate them and then come up with eight to 10 projects that then pitch a group of folks from our investor community. And that ends up being another source of projects. But yeah, it's tough. And the volume has, it's definitely gone crazy. I think the

big difference between 2016, 2017, and now is that the quality of the teams that we're seeing on average is much higher. Like we're seeing a lot of engineers, a lot of developers, a lot of entrepreneurs coming over from Web2, Lodge, the Googles, the Facebooks, et cetera. So a lot of those developers got interested in, they must've got interested in blockchain in the last couple of years and have just with all the capital moving into the space, have decided to jump in and try their hand. In a lot of ways, it's almost riskier for them to stay at Lodge, Big Tech, just given all the opportunity that exists in the blockchain world. So the quality of teams has increased dramatically,

and that's actually making it a lot more difficult to filter through the teams and decide who we end up working with. That's probably why we see so many billions of dollars coming into venture capital in crypto now. Every day, it seems like there's another billion dollar fundraise because there's so much quality material that needs to be funded. Another big difference I would say from 2017 in my estimation is that projects don't raise a billion dollars that they don't need anymore. At that point, it was just gratuitous. You just literally took as much as would come and a startup that might've needed $5 million would have a billion dollars to operate. And then they lost it, of course. Yeah, right. Well, yeah, the capital that's being raised right

now, it's not at the billion dollar level, but it's definitely large. And I think in a lot of ways it's, it's, you know, mainly because a lot of these projects, this is almost like, especially when they get to the public sales stage I mean, that's effectively they lost fundraise or potentially they lost fundraise. And so the funds they raise at that stage, at that point at which they're launching main net, those funds are meant to to last potentially indefinitely.

And so that does kind of force a lot of pressure on these teams, protocol teams, to raise large amounts of capital. But yeah, now we're definitely seeing much more reasonable plans for how that capital is being deployed. And it is being deployed. So yeah, a little bit different to the 2017 rush. Right. Just my understanding, there's effectively two sides to what you do. Obviously, you've described everything from a project perspective, how you fund them, how you help them, how you facilitate them. Then there's, of course, the launch, which is what's accessible to the public. So let's talk about how somebody can actually invest in these

projects early, which is a huge problem for people, right? They want to get in and often can't based on nationality or other qualifications, KYC, accreditation, all of these things. So how does somebody actually invest early in a project on CoinList? Good question. There is incredible demand right now. And we have a global audience. When we got started in 2017, our main focus was on US accredited investors. that was run as a rigged E506C sale, which means that we effectively needed to collect accredited investor status evidence from all those that participated. And again, for us, what we were really trying to do

is establish a law from a compliance perspective and really try to build trust within the investor community that this is a platform that's trying to do things the right way. It's a clean, well-lit place for participating in token sales. And that was 2017, very much a big focus on compliance, US accredited investors, et cetera. And what's happened over time is that because of a lot of the regulatory uncertainty in the US, A lot of the teams really started in about 2019. A lot of the

teams that we work with have decided to block U.S. resident participation, and that extends into Canada. China, I think since 2017, the Chinese government has banned investor participation in ICOs. So essentially, U.S., Canada, and China now are banned from participating in these sales. And so we definitely saw a massive drop-off in U.S. resident participation in 2019. We did see a very big increase in Cayman Island participation at that same time. So I'm not sure what that means. But there was definitely a big shift. Correct. So there was a big shift in participation. And frankly, I kind of feel like it's actually

a net positive thing for these protocol teams, mainly because back then, a lot of the focus was on raising large amounts of capital and from maybe a couple of hundred investors. And that focus has shifted pretty dramatically over time. Now the teams, by the time these teams come to us, what it is they're doing is they focus much more on engaging a large community of investors and, I participants, it's less about raising massive amounts of capital because capital is freely available. If you're not able to raise capital, then people are like, there's got to be a problem here with you guys. So the time they come to CoinList, the

amounts of capital they're raising are smaller. They're really focused on trying to engage a large community of investors. And so what we've seen, certainly the last year, what we've seen happen is that when we run a sale on CoinList, we end up seeing 900,000 users show up in order to try to win an allocation. And the spots available on a per sale basis end up being in the 10 to 50,000 range. So you're going from 900,000 trying to squeeze that into 10,000. And so that makes the experience for a lot of folks that participate, it's pretty challenging. It's pretty disappointing. And certainly for US, China, and Canada, it's disappointing because you can't participate in any of these deals.

But even for folks who can't participate, the chances of getting an allocation are pretty low. And so there's a couple of things that we've worked on to try to address that. Obviously, one thing is trying to negotiate with the teams to see if we can get larger allocations. That's kind of the obvious thing. Let everyone in. Let more people in. You've got 900,000 folks and you might as well try to capture as many of those as you can. So that's one thing. But the other thing that we're doing is creating a better chance for those sale participants who have demonstrated the ability to contribute positively to protocol teams in the past. We're trying to give those folks a better chance,

a much better chance of getting access to these opportunities. And that's through a program that we call Karma. Karma is essentially, it looks like a loyalty program, but it's really more of like a quality score where we give you points based on your contributions to these projects. So if you're a developer, if you're a minor or validator, if you tend to stake, et cetera, if you've got those type of qualities that the protocol team's really looking for in their community, then we give you more comma points. The higher comma points you have, the greater the chance that you get into what we call the priority queue, which gives you much better access to these deals.

It's a much smaller queue. And instead of being in a queue with 9,000 people, you make you say 20 or 30,000 people. So the chances of getting in just, just much better. And so that, that really helps us drive high quality token holders into these communities. And so that's kind of, so if you do want to try to participate in these sales, it's worth, you know, being a developer, running nodes, et cetera, staking, building out comma points, and then you get a better chance of getting in. Add value, right? I mean, value added investors.

It makes perfect sense that if you're going to choose between two people, you want one who's going to actively participate and obviously be sort of proselytized for the for the project and and be a positive influence on the community. like to work out a way to try to have others, we're talking to various teams about this, we'd like to have other teams leverage that system or try to develop their own system that's similar. Mainly because, you know, Vitalik talks about this from time to time, but, you know, in a lot of these communities, the folks that have most of the leverage, if there's a governance event, like a voting event, you'll tend to see folks that hold a lot of coin be the ones that are really kind of holding sway in terms of how decisions are made. And I don't think that that's necessarily a terrible system, but it certainly cuts out folks that may be contributing a lot to these protocol teams, but who aren't necessarily crypto wealthy. And so if you're committing a lot of code, if you're really helping build a

protocol from the ground up, and you, for whatever reason, don't hold a lot of coin, you're effectively kind of shut out of a lot of the governance associated with these protocols. And so a system like Karma starts to level that playing field. So yeah, if you hold a lot of coin, there's advantage to that. But if you, if you hold a lot of coin, there's advantage to that. But if you're also just contributing a lot of code, if you're contributing a lot from the standpoint of being a miner or validator, that ends up giving you additional weighting

and just kind of levels the playing field a little bit. So our hope is that other teams catch on to that and either develop their own system or use ours. That sort of speaks to the core of the centralization versus decentralization sort of speaks to the core of the centralization versus decentralization sort of battle and ethos happening within these projects and communities anyway, right? You just described to some degree, the challenges of a DAO, right? For sure. And so I think that it's interesting that you're seeing it at that level, because

I think that those are going to be major hurdles for a lot of projects that are trying to be fully decentralized in the first place. A hundred percent. And, you know, we were talking earlier about some of Jack's comments recently. And, you know, I think I think maybe he's he's he's he's pretty assertive about going after a specific set of crypto VCs or just VC funds. But I think part of his argument, which I think is good, is that a lot of these teams that want to try to be central or decentralized actually, and obviously decentralization is a spectrum. I see it all the time. People are at various points of decentralization is a spectrum and all the time people are various points of decentralization

and when uh you know a one or two vc firms hold massive chunks of of token for that protocol then it really just doesn't look like decentralization at all and uh so i think that's that's definitely a problem. And there's certainly VCs out there that add a ton of value and are helpful. But so I'm not necessarily the person to poo-poo on the VCs. And Andreessen's about to raise $4.5 billion more. I think they're doing fine, right? If we're talking about who he's obviously going after. And I talk about that sliding scale of centralization to decentralization all the time. And I love that you said that because it's not so black and white and you can make improvements without going all the way. And I think what's largely missed in Jack's argument,

and I agree with a lot of it, as you said, is that where the money comes from that funds the protocol is secondary to the effect that protocol has on people's lives in the end, right? I mean, you worked at Google, right? Google changed the lives of billions of people and the way that they find information. I don't really care who made money investing in Google earlier because Google's improved my life. No, totally. And, you know, I guess part of, maybe part of Jack's argument too is that, and there's a little bit of truth to this as well, is that the degree of utility that a lot of these projects have provided humankind, it's certainly nowhere near the level of like a Google or Amazon or what have you. But I think part of his argument is that, you know, a lot of these applications aren't

actually doing anything for anybody. And so, you know, a lot of people will say to that, well, we're still in the first inning and we're still early. You know, there is a part of me that actually kind of thinks that the development of these ecosystems has been an adoption of these technologies has been, it's probably not as rapid as what I would have expected. There's definitely a lot of charts out there that'll show you kind of the early stage of the internet and user adoption and then early days of crypto adoption and it's kind of you know one shot's late over the over the next and they sort of look like they're tracking to the same yeah but i think that shot's kind of bs you know because it's it's actually looking it's not really looking at daily active uses. It's looking at wallets.

And so I think the number is actually lower. I think adoption in crypto is slower than the early internet. And I don't know why that is. It could be that a lot of these teams, it could be that it is a gold rush right now. So a lot of people are just coming in, trying to get something out, make their money and then disappear. And so that's not really injecting a lot of utility into the ecosystem. That's something that I'm very concerned about. It could be that a lot of these teams are just very distracted, you know, because the difference between the early Internet and now, I mean, there's definitely a lot of similarity. One of the big differences is that in participating in a crypto project, your ownership as a team member via token is almost immediately liquid.

And so you've got that market distracting you with the number moving up and moving down. You always have the option to sell, which was not the case in the 90s at all. Whereas in the 90s, yeah. I mean, actually, people were IPO-ing a lot earlier than where they are today. But there was a couple of years before you get the opportunity to be liquid. And so you're sort of striving to get to that IPO stage. You IPO, and then maybe at some some point you get some liquidity after that. With these teams now, it's almost immediate liquidity.

And then, you know, a lot of these folks make a lot of money and do it within a few months. And then just like, what do I have to keep working? And so I think that's slowed down a lot of progress in this space. And, you know, I think that's to the detriment of all of this. So I don't know how to solve that. I mean, I think markets are obviously really important for crypto, right? These ecosystems only survive because there's a liquid token out there that provides incentives, not just for developers, but for validators, miners, whoever is securing these networks, you need to have that. So trying to get that balance right between incentivizing the teams to really push and innovate and stick with these projects for the long term. And also providing that mechanic, that kind of oxygen that breathes energy into these organic entities, these protocols, getting that balance right, that's tough. We've still got to work that out. Yeah, it's a tokenomics balancing act. There's no reason that VCs should get 25% of their coins on launch, right? There's also no reason to wait 10 years. So maybe 1% up

front and investing daily as opposed to in chunks over five years, there is a reasonable balance there and a way to do it. But to your point, a lot of them, you know, to incentivize the money to come in, said you'll get 50% of your liquidity in the first three months, right? And it's very, it would be very hard for a VC, especially if they're, you know, managing other people's money in some way, not to take that 100x when they can get it, right? But like you said, then the challenge is how do you keep them participating four years later? Yeah, it's a challenge. Yeah. On the VC end, something that we're very sensitive to is that if a team is launching or running a sale on CoinList, something that we look at pretty closely is when was the last VC round and what were the terms on that round? Because what we don't want, we definitely try to avoid is a situation where, you know, because VCs are aware that a project may be launching on CoinList and we've got a pretty nice track record in terms of post-sale valuations.

And so with some nice multiples there. So what we don't want to be is in a situation where these investors are jumping in at a VC round, say six months before a coinless sale, specifically because they know they're going to get the 10 to 20 to 50X on post-sale and then immediately get there like 25 so uh so having that something that we we definitely want to try to avoid and try best to avoid is acting as uh you

know somebody that's like propping up these deals vcs you know the the thing that we're really trying to drive drive to do is help these teams connect with a broad community of high value token holders so that when they launch at mainnet, you've got 10, 20, 50,000 rabid, tribalistic token holders who are out there really championing what it is you're doing and believe in it genuinely. And what we're not here to do is prop up VC deals. Yeah, that's a big challenge. So obviously now we've talked about the way that a lot of these projects come to market, the way they're funded and people can get access.

But one of the most exciting conversations I want to have is what's coming for 2022, right? For you guys specifically, but also just general trends. I read your amazing report you guys had, the five crypto trends, 2022. Correct me if I'm wrong. Most in-demand category for 2022 is gaming. Ethereum is not the only party worth attending. Bitcoin stays king, no flippening. Cornucopia of distribution strategies, obviously, we kind of just touched on that. And decentralized software will eat software. Do you mind if we go through those kind of one by one and talk about them? Most in demand category for 2022 gaming. Yeah, let's go. Yeah. So gaming is, and actually you can kind of see what's going on in gaming. If you just take a look at say Dapp Radar or any other

site that lists like daily active user numbers and the, you know, the vast majority of, say, the top 10, I think it's maybe like eight out of the top 10 on DappRadar's ranking list are games. And, you know, we're not at sort of the hundreds of millions of daily active user numbers yet, but it's definitely pretty impressive. So you've got some teams that have got three, 500,000 daily active users.

And so there's definitely a lot of activity around gaming from a user engagement standpoint, which we're definitely excited about. And what's great about that is that I think that that starts to solve a lot of the user experience issues that folks have in engaging with crypto. Crypto is not the most, you know, if you want to engage with a DAP or if you want to do DeFi or whatever, you know, you've got to get your on-ramp in either via Coinbase or also somebody else. And then you've got to kind of wrap that token or maybe buy ETH or whatever.

You've got to move it into a non-custodial wallet. And you've got to set up a non-custodial wallet. You've got to make sure you keep non-custodial wallet. And you've got to set up a non-custodial wallet. You've got to make sure you keep your private key somewhere. That sucks. So there's like 20 steps that have to go through before you can make a bet or do anything in crypto. And really shitty user experience. So I think what gaming does is it creates that opportunity for user experience to improve. I mean, games die if UX is bad.

And so it really is kind of a great forcing function to start to improve user experience with a lot of these teams. You know, I've got one of my kids playing Axie. And so it's, you know, the fact that he can do it, it's kind of an indication that user experience improvements are happening in gaming. And hopefully that ends up starting to filter across to other verticals in crypto. So that's one thing that we're really excited about.

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MetaMask wallet, transfer ETH in, open the Ronin wallet, transfer ETH there before actually playing the game? Because the game can have good UX UI. The game can have good UX UI, but getting to it is very difficult. Yes, I have to admit, I nudged him along a little bit. Yeah. I'm just kidding. It's a very difficult process.

Go ahead and make daddy some money now. Right, yeah. Yeah, no, it's still, yeah, there's still a ton of challenges there. But anyway, so I think that's kind of one thing that we're excited about is just improvements to UX. You know, the other thing that's interesting about gaming and is kind of a nuance with gaming is that,

which I think is also awesome, and we're definitely going to see this more going into this year and into next year, is that we're not really just talking about games. Obviously, we're talking about gaming platforms. And one of our issuers that we worked with recently, Immutable, they're the makers of Gods Unchained, Guild of Guardians, a bunch of other games. So their games are great, but they've also architected their ecosystem

in a way that it operates as an ecosystem. So you've got Immutable X as its ecosystem, as its Ethereum layer two, and it has its own marketplace. It's a platform where other gamers could potentially develop games on, and they have their own wallet. So you've got, it's really just not purely about games themselves, but also all of the infrastructure around that, including financial infrastructure. And, you know, one of the things I've been saying to people is that it's a lot, it's a lot like, you know, Steam by Valve Corporation.

What these teams are building is it's like they're building Steam, but Steam at a much more powerful level and Steam on steroids. And so Sky Mavis has done the same with Rune. So Rune is not just the wallet. It's really that L2. So it's really kind of proving it out in a lot of ways. Well, A, there's great things about the fact that it's not just about games, but it's really about building gaming ecosystems. That's something that's really cool. The other thing

that's really cool too, is that these ecosystems, these gaming platforms are proving out Ethereum in particular, Ethereum's scaling model, where you have, you know, because there's no way you can really build games on Ethereum layer one right now, just because gas fees are incredibly high, chain's kind of slow. And so what all these teams are doing is they're building their own layer two, and then all of the transactions are playing out on the layer two. You've got gas fee advantages, it's a lot cheaper to run transactions there. Transactions are faster. And that obviously also contributes to better UX. And then eventually they kind of settle those transactions on Ethereum layer one. So you still have the advantage of security of the layer one, but all the transactional

activity is happening on the layer two. And again, it's really kind of proving out one of the scaling models that the Ethereum team's mapped out. And that's something that we're really excited about. By the way, I mean, obviously, it's not just happening on Ethereum. There's game ecosystems developing and Solana and other- Well, that was your next one.

I want to. Ethereum is not the only party worth attending and that speaks to that right there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think part of that story is around layer twos that speaks to that right there yeah yeah absolutely i and i think um and you know part part of that story is around uh layer twos and moving away just continuing to play within the ethereum universe but either doing that via side chains or doing it via layer twos and so we're going to see much more of that happening it's definitely happening right now

uh related to that too is obviously a lot of the other L1s are out there, Solana, Avalanche, Algorand, Near. And we're definitely seeing a lot of developer activity in those ecosystems. We're seeing a lot of money get pushed into those ecosystems. That's encouraging more developers to move over. A lot of these platforms, a lot of these L1s are also developing Ethereum virtual machine compatibility. So a lot of the development activity that happened on Ethereum can be much more easily ported over to Solana or whatever other chain.

And so I think that that's just going to encourage more development away from Ethereum Layer 1. But yeah, it's definitely exciting. I mean, it's really hard to deny the power of the Ethereum ecosystem. There's so many developers there. And a lot of the tooling, a lot of the developer infrastructure has been developed around Ethereum, Solidity, etc. And so they've just done an amazing job, but I think, but yeah, there's a lot of advantages also to playing in these other ecosystems.

Again, lots of capital there. And, you know, one of the things that may ultimately end up playing out here is that, you know, maybe we just end up not caring what L1 you're playing on at all. And actually, from a user experience standpoint, you really shouldn't care, right? And it should just be about you're either playing a game or you're trying to execute some kind of transaction or you're playing in finance, whatever. You shouldn't really care about whether you're on Ethereum or Solana or Avalanche or some other layer one, right? I mean, that should just be plumbing.

That's the forest through the trees, right? You don't think about how your phone works or how the internet works. You just use it. And you talk about UX, UI. You don't want, down the road, you don't want people even thinking about it as blockchain or crypto. You just want to think of it as their game, right?

They just go for their game. Yes, yes. So, and you know, I think it is their game right they're just yeah they're gay yes yes so uh and you know i think one of the big developments that's going to help us get to that that sort of multi-chain universe is uh that we are we are seeing quite a bit of like layer zero or inner chain um activity like projects like uh in a protocol, IBC protocol that came out of the Cosmos team. There are other layer zero projects that are in our pipeline that we're looking at. And so those kinds of projects end up just being one additional step closer to this world where whatever chain you're operating on is just plumbing and you shouldn't think about it.

These chains can interoperate or users can interoperate or assets can interoperate across these chains. And yeah, there's a lot of activity going on in that space. But by the way, I don't want to say that it's not cool to be talking about all these different L1s and it's really interesting. I mean, anytime a new L1 comes out, like we're always like, hey, what are these guys? What's their new angle?

What are they trying to do? So it's fun to geek out on what these L1s are doing. And I'm sure you do it. So it's, all that stuff's fun. Yeah, right. Ad nauseum. But I think ultimately, you know, these teams, these protocols, they're meant to try to solve use cases or entertain or what have you. And so, you know, hopefully that ends up being the focus in the next year or two. I've been talking about this a lot because at the beginning of 2021, all we were talking about really was Bitcoin, right? I mean, DeFi was bubbling to some degree.

We'd had sort of this DeFi summer of wild yield farming and rug pulls. But we were talking about microstrategy and Tesla, right? And what companies were going to invest in Bitcoin and what nation states were going to adopt Bitcoin. And then all the money really came in through VCs and all the things we just described, right? The money did not come into crypto through Bitcoin largely last year. Some did, but people want to invest in all of these protocols and the technological side. But you say Bitcoin stays king, no flippening. So maybe that narrative is going to change back? I don't think so. No, I think Bitcoin stays king. And part of the reason why I think that is because, and part of what the data suggests,

is that a lot of the capital that's coming in is actually folks who are Bitcoin wealthy. And they're selling off a small portion of Bitcoin to make some additional bets to try to find the next Bitcoin or find the next Ethereum or find the next Solana. And a lot of that money ends up coming back to Bitcoin after it's made. So that's kind of one big thing that we see. The other is that we do see a lot of kind of cross-chain or interoperable variants of Bitcoin. I'm sure you're familiar with Wrapped Bitcoin. So that was something that really came on big in the last year and a half or so. Partnering with the BitGo team early on to help with some of the retail distribution of that. And we did about $6 billion in conversions in 2021 of wrapped Bitcoin. And there's just a massive hunger amongst the Bitcoin wealthy to take their Bitcoin and put it to work on other protocols. And these folks do not want to,

they don't want to let go of their Bitcoin. So they want to hang on to their Bitcoin and, but earn some yields via WBTC, WE, liquidity pools or what have you. Luke Gromen, So we're definitely seeing a lot of resistance to selling off Bitcoin en masse and going into one, two, three other ecosystems and wrap Bitcoin. There's a bunch of other variants of tokenized Bitcoin out there, but we definitely saw a lot of activity around those kinds of conversions. And so, yeah, I think people don't want

to let go of their Bitcoin. Yeah, perfect sense. And why would they? I mean, it's the most secure network, right? Like it's been proven over the last 10 years. It's somebody, CNBC or something asked Sam Bankman-Fried maybe a week ago, like what three chains or projects are you most excited about? And he said, I think Solana, Avalanche, and then he copped out and said, wrapping everything. And so I think you would agree. And I never really thought about the fact that so much of this money that's flowing in is early Bitcoin adopters who understand it and are willing to make that next bet.

That's a really, really good point and not something that I considered. The next one was a cornucopia of token distribution strategies. Yeah. I mean, we saw a crazy increase over the last year in terms of different ways that people run, whether it's token sales or airdrops. Airdrops. And I think airdrops kind of had their moment in 2018, but then they came back, and they came back with a vengeance. And, you know, I think it's, it's something that these teams are really hungry for is like, how do I get a lot of communities of people holding my token when I launch?

You know, I want to, I want to make sure that there are people out on social media people in the markets that understand what we're trying to do, believe in what we're trying to do, believe in what we're trying to do, and are ensuring that our asset has value because that's going to attract more people to it. That's going to attract great validators, miners, what have you, developers. And so it's just super critical for these teams

to build their communities, even more so than raising capital. And we talked about this at the outset. It's hearing A16Z raising a $4 billion fund and just thinking about how teams are thinking about how they engage with an A16Z. I think it's just going to be increasingly difficult to deploy that capital. I'm sure A16Z and others are going to be able to do it, but I think it's going to be increasingly difficult to deploy that capital. I'm sure A16Z and others are going to be able to do it, but I think it's going to be increasingly difficult because you can get that

capital anywhere and you don't have to sell the farm to a large VC. You don't even have to sell to a VC at all. You can't just go directly into the market because there is so much liquidity in the long tail crypto markets that you could very easily raise $100 million and at the same time engage 50,000. Do it on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, right. It's crazy, but you really could. What I find so funny. I haven't, I haven't had the airdrop conversation here at all. And I know that it's much more nuanced and deep than this. You just talked about why airdrops are so powerful, but I still find it very funny that our community rails so hard against money printing, but love airdrops. Government free money is bad, but our free money, when it goes in my pocket, that's it. We're different, you perfect. That's right. We're different.

You know, we're different. It's decentralized. Yeah, decentralized money printing. Yes. Right, right. That one's okay. Yeah. Well, you know, I think airdrops are definitely, I think what's different now about the way that a lot of teams are approaching airdrops is that they are being much more selective in terms of who they target. You know, there was, you know, back in 2017, it was pretty indiscriminate. Like

a lot of teams would just drop in every Ethereum wallet they could find as they dropped their token. And now it's different. Now it's a little bit more like, okay, well, what kind of user, what sort of brand do we have? What kind of user do we want to attract? Are there DAOs that we may want to target? Let's go target this DAO and drop to them. And so it's much more nuanced. It's a lot more intelligent now. And I think that that is going to increase. I mean, a lot of the teams that are talking to us have got,

maybe it's not super sophisticated approach to marketing and targeting, but it's certainly way more sophisticated than what it was even a year and a half ago, where teams are very specific about what they want, very specific about the kinds of uses they want holding their token, and we can help them find those people. Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, obviously, like looks token, whatever to, if you're doing an NF massive NFT platform to airdrop your coins to everyone who uses open scene. Right. I mean, that, it makes sense still kind of some irony in it, but the strategy makes a ton of sense. And then the final one was decentralized software will eat software.

Yeah. So it's, you know, over the last 30 years, there's been incredible development, obviously, across all kinds of verticals through the internet age, whether it's search, e-commerce, social, finance, even. And, you know, what we're seeing is that there's a lot of teams out there that are trying to tackle the same verticals. And for the last year and a half, finance has been a clear vertical that has been attacked by decentralized technologies. And gaming is now being attacked, collectibles, I don't know if that was a vertical, but I guess in crypto it is. And then a lot of teams that we've worked with have tackled some of these others, including social, including e-commerce, including search. And so, yeah, we're definitely seeing more and more teams looking at, okay, what are the use cases that was solved by web two or web one?

And is there a decentralized solution that makes more sense? And so, yeah, we're just seeing more and more of that. And then I think ultimately, even just by definition, the, these protocols, these systems, they have the potential to run indefinitely. At some point, a centralized company will cease operations. And I mean, it might be hard to believe that now thinking about sort of the Amazons and Googles of the world. But I went through this. Blockbuster. Yeah, you know, I went through the first. Blockbuster. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, Sears. You know, I went through the first internet bubble and I was working at an internet agency in kind of late 90s, early 2000s. And, you know, we supported so many dot coms and zero still exists. I mean, maybe that's a commentary on how successful we were in supporting them, or maybe it was just because it was just a phase, right? There was just a million different ideas, big gold rush, a lot of teams putting their stuff out there, and eventually they stopped operations. And there is greater potential in crypto for these ecosystems to run indefinitely. And by definition, that has the opportunity to supplant a lot of these decentralized platforms over time.

But I don't think there's going to be a complete devouring of software by decentralized software. But I think at the very least, it just provides a very powerful alternative, a really attractive alternative, and one that increasingly, hopefully more and more people adopt. I mean, in the world now, it's nothing, not a knock against decentralization or what's been built,

but a lot of centralized systems just work better than decentralized systems right now. The Visa network is a much better payment network than any of our blockchains. Absolutely. For sure. Yes. Yeah. I think that's totally true. I think also some existing centralized solutions, while they work great for the vast majority of people, they also don't work great for some. And I mean, a good example might be search. And if you live in China, then Google isn't that great. There's a lot of censorship that's gone on in Google search results in that jurisdiction. And so you may want to have a solution that isn't subject to

centralized government or centralized entity censorship. And so in those cases, there may be a better decentralized solution. So yeah, centralized services for the vast majority of them, they just work fantastic, but not for everybody. I know we sort of made the, you know, the classic joke earlier. Maybe we're just in the first inning. Maybe we're very early. I mean, we talk about all this stuff that's still coming in 2022, all of these platforms trying to launch.

I mean, is your feeling that this continues sort of indefinitely, as you said, and that we just continue to grow with time? Or do you think we get a bubble and see sort of a few, a few companies rise from the ashes like the.com bubble, right? I mean, people love to like, uh, kind of poo poo the.com bubble, but it's how you get Google and Amazon. Right. And so we have a thousand winners or is this just all a process to find the biggest, the next round of biggest companies in the world that are Web3. Yeah, that's a good point.

And I do think that there's opportunity for make these decentralized technologies work better for people. We're not seeing, at least in terms of the projects that meet our quality bar, we're not seeing a slowdown. We're seeing an acceleration. There's just more and more teams, high quality, better capitalized, very legit, serious teams really trying to push forward this ecosystem. And that's really what we're excited about. That's what we focus on. And so, yeah, I think there's an opportunity for some segment of the ecosystem to go through some kind of bubble and that'll have ripple effects to everybody in the industry. But definitely the folks that are serious about what they're doing, there's definitely

going to be some really big winners there. And we're going to keep seeing those teams come out of that woodwork and reach out to us. I love that we can see these smaller bubbles now that don't implode the entire industry though, right? I mean, we sort of like, we had a little DeFi bubble, a bit of an NFT bubble and everything doesn't have to crash at all together. I think that's showing that there's potentially some maturity in the market and maybe some of these things can stand out on their own without just being affected dramatically by a market-wide move or a China ban or a Bitcoin correction, right? Yeah, we're popping one bubble at a time.

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I think it's cool for the industry. And I think the thing that I'm kind of more excited about as well is just seeing a level of maturity in the industry so that we don't have, and I can't imagine this completely going away, but we don't have as much kind of irrational tribalism around each of these protocols that we do now. Because I think that that definitely does slow down. Yeah, it's to the detriment of the industry where you've got a lot of people, whether it's on crypto Twitter or elsewhere, propping up their thing, shilling their thing and poo-pooing other protocols and that sort of irrational tribalism, even though we can kind of sit back and say, hey, we rise above that or we don't have to listen to that noise. There's a lot of people who are coming into the industry or coming into crypto who see that and start to believe some of that. Or are turned off.

Exactly. And, you know, maybe that helps accelerate some bubbles popping, but at the same time, it also slows down progress more generally. So, you know, in talking about the industry maturing, I think that's still a big piece of maturing that we haven't got to yet. I agree. We're way too small as an industry to not sort of cheer each other on and work together right it's just that no project is big enough to dominate at that level where you can be a maximalist about it in my opinion but no i'm 100 with you i mean obviously the the reality is the um this is an internet technology it grew up on the internet and the internet has its bizarreness its trolls, its tribalistic activity. Dark corners. Yeah.

So all that comes along with it. And some of that's really fun. But I think net-net, it's probably slowed things down. And yeah, hopefully we can get over it. Awesome. Where can everybody follow you after this and start to participate in CoinList and the Karma program and try to get access to some of these projects? CoinList.co. That's home for us. So sign up at CoinList.co. We also are on Twitter. So CoinList on Twitter. And I'm Graham Jenkins on Twitter as

well. But CoinList.co is the best place to go. Most important question. How often do people call you Jenkins? You know, my dad used to say Jenkins dollar because he always used to put Jenkins and somebody would put S on the end and he'd put a strike through it. Oh, I get it. It just seems like the natural mental jump would be from Jenkins to Jenkins.

I don't know. It's an assumption. Yes. Jenkins, Jenkins dollar, Jenkins, whatever you prefer. For now, I'm calling you, Graham Jenkins dollar. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really do appreciate it.

Gave some great insight into what's likely coming in the future. And so we'll be following along. We'll have to have this conversation again down the road to see if we were right. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate your time. Great conversation and thanks for everything you do.