Unchained - Olaf Carlson-Wee and Rushi Manche on Why Move Is Safer for Crypto - Ep. 777

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. The success of any blockchain isn’t just about scalability, security, or decentralization—it’s about attracting developers. The easier it is to build, the more innovation happens. Or at least, that’s the thesis of Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche and Olaf Carlson-Wee, CEO of Polychain Capital. In this episode of Unchained, Rushi explains why Move, originally developed by Meta, is a fundamentally better programming language for crypto than the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). He breaks down how Move’s unique approach to security and asset management improves developer experience and why the Movement Network is bringing Move to Ethereum as a layer 2 solution. Olaf shares his thoughts on how alternative programming environments like Move could challenge the dominance of the EVM, why Ethereum is at a critical moment, and how AI-powered financial agents could change how investments work. Show highlights: 2:32 What problems Move solves for crypto and how it got started 8:57 How the programming language is safer than others, specifically for crypto finance 21:00 What’s the thesis behind the Movement network 23:12 Why Movement chose to become an Ethereum L2 30:08 Where ETH is headed and what it needs to succeed 32:25 Why Rushi is so bearish on EVM layer 2s 34:59 Whether Ethereum is going through an existential crisis 37:47 Why Rushi believes that modularity will save Ethereum 39:28 How Movement differs from Aptos and Sui 41:36 The importance of developer experience in crypto’s growth 44:48 How tokens can signal the significance of content in social media 52:04 Why Olaf thinks we’ll soon see an explosive growth of financialized agents 57:19 Whether AI will replace VC investors and other jobs 1:01:38 What Rushi has to say about the Trump team buying MOVE 1:04:09 The significance of the U.S. making crypto a national priority Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsor! Mantle Guest: Rushi Manche, Co-founder of Movement Labs Olaf Carlson-Wee, CEO of Polychain Capital Previous appearances on Unchained: OG Olaf Carlson-Wee on Why His Crypto Thesis Is Stronger Than Ever Olaf Carlson-Wee: ‘If There Is a Money-Losing Exploit, the Money Is Gone’  Why The First Employee Of Coinbase Launched A Hedge Fund To the Moon and Back With Polychain’s Olaf Carlson-Wee Special Episode with CNBC’s Crypto Trader: Olaf Carlson-Wee on Why This Crypto Winter Is Different From Previous Ones All Things Cryptoeconomics, Pt. 1, With Olaf Carlson-Wee and Ryan Zurrer of Polychain Capital Links Unchained:  Trump’s Crypto Project Bought MOVE Tokens as DOGE News Leaked How Solana Beat Out Ethereum to Nab New Crypto Developers in 2024 Chris Dixon on Why We Will Finally See New App Innovation in Crypto 2025 Will Be a Year of Crypto Competition. Can Ethereum Make a Comeback? With AI Agents Now Trading Crypto, What Does Their Future Look Like? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I was in college, I was like, you know, a 20-year-old kid, didn't have a PhD, didn't know how to code properly. And I think that's actually the biggest barrier in crypto. Because if you want to build, like, the next Facebook, which Zuckerberg built his dorm room, Zucker was able to do that in two weeks to ship a prototype and get feedback on the head. That same social app can't exist in, you know, Web 3 because if you build EDM smart contract, don't get an audited, don't spend time on, like, bulletproofing the code. You'll have an app that goes to, like, main net. And if it gets hacked, you lose your entire credibility, your entire platform.

So I would say it's more geared towards inexperienced and mid-tier developer that really wants to build an app, really build like a cool crypto app, but it doesn't have the experience, you know, that a PhD, you know, each sur, researcher it has to write fully colonel your RFI code. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're an OHIP source for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today we have one from Sigi Vascaro on X, responding to the show on Crypto Kidnet. with Jamison Lopp. SIGI writes, Zero Knowledge Financial Privacy Tech, and Minimalism, can be life-saving. To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall, or leave a comment on our video on YouTube or X. This is the February 4th, 2025 episode of Unchained.

Mantle is building the largest sustainable hub for on-chain finance, launching three new products, enhanced index fund for optimized crypto exposure, Mantle banking for seamless daily financial experience, and Mantle X for AI-powered innovation. Learn more at group.mantle.xy-Z. Today's topic is the Move Language and Move VMs. Here to discuss are Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movementment Labs, and Olaf Carlson Wee, CEO of Paulycheon. Welcome, Rushi and Olaf.

Hello, thanks for having me on. Appreciate you taking a call from New Jersey out here. Yeah, thanks for having me, Laura. So we're at this very interesting place in crypto history. There's a global spotlight on crypto in a way that we've never seen before. There's the beginnings of real adoption, especially in the case of stable coins. And so far, we could probably say like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana have proven themselves. And Rushi, here you are coming along. You're involved with this new ecosystem that's built around a different programming language move. So why don't you tell us how? how you got into crypto and what problems you're trying to solve in crypto by building around move. Yeah, I'll go a quick origin story. I'm Rushi, one of the co-founder's movement.

My background is engineering, so I'm a nerd by trade. I spent my early career at United Health Group as health insurance, really the most boring industry to be in. United Health Group literally tells you not to innovate because they own 80% of the market. But yeah, it was that first get-go into distributed systems and health insurance, then got into crypto, I'd say five years ago. I was really big cosmosful. My family friend was actually involved in nosmosis and I was taking around the cosmolasm and rust-based programming. But I was really excited by how you could essentially not be boring like health insurance

it was and actually build products that users could use on a database and solve the big financial crisis that was, you know, going around the world. To spend early career engineering. Yeah. So I was really interested in the move thesis around four years ago. When I was in college read this article that said Facebook was building a new language called Move. And here was an opportunity for literally a billion users on the Facebook app to access a decentralized network, setting money from New York or Thailand within the Facebook app app. The thesis was a high throughput secure blockchain to power the Facebook intem project. Unfortunately, due to regulation, wasn't what it was today. Shut down an appdust and sui were the two main divisions that's gone out.

I'd built the first decks on APDOS on August 2022. And November 2020, two weeks after FTX collapsed, was still really interested in the Moved thesis, but wanted to bring it to broader markets. And this was around the time that modularity and the whole thesis around alternative VMs, alternate DA started. And yeah, the moving vision was to bring the move via and alternative version machines to Ethereum and beyond. And since then it's been a roller coaster, have had excellent backers in a long launch process.

That was very difficult. but we got here tonight. I'm excited to be here on a podcast. And this question is sort of for both of you, but can you just explain what problems in crypto you saw that you felt that move could solve? I'll start. I think, like, first is the Ethereum Virgin Machine is generally slow and clunky. We look at Ethereum Mainnet today. It looks at like 10 to 20 transactions per second. Most layer twos that popped up don't really scale compared to like Slana and alternative layer ones. But we still believe in Ethereum as asset class, EBM, and all the benefits of Ethereum liquidity. So the thesis for the move being was a twofold. First, high throughput parallelization, Blockist, was the main optimistic parallelization engine,

enabling you to do, obviously, tens of thousands of transaction a second. It inspired many of the research that, you know, MonEd and alternative layer ones used to face. And secondly, really focus on security. So every year, this $4.5 billion lost in smart contract acts. So the question is how do we enable fully homely verified smart contracts? So the move Prover and the move thesis was to bring formal verification runtime, stopping all the hacks we see. So end-to-end, like user experience and developer experience in speed and security, trying to be the fastest, most secure execution environment. And Olaf, when I was learning about this, honestly, I was flashing back to conversations you and I had in 2016.

You taught me about formal verification. You were excited about Tezos. like, you know, this Dow hack had just happened. We were talking about how you can make sure the code actually executes what the coder intended, et cetera. But anyway, just talk to me about your interest in move, like, you know, why and why this particular language. Yeah. So it's interesting because this is exactly what I was going to say, Laura, is do you remember our conversations about this nearly a decade ago? So this was right after the Dow hack had happened, but relatively speaking,

smart contracts were not a popular category. And I really felt that things like Dex's, lending protocols, stable coins, asset issuance, capital coordination, these were all relatively theoretical ideas in 2016. But it was sort of the premise of what got me excited about starting Polychain was realizing that we were going to build this future. And, you know, crypto exchange systems and crypto financial systems in the long term, we're actually going to be inside blockchains. They weren't going to be proprietary companies the way we have thought about, you know, traditional finance, where you have these big central clearinghouses, central banks and everything. Instead, like, not just the money will be on chain, but the actual financial protocols and logic will also be on chain. So after the Dow

hack, there was a lot of question about the security of solidity and the EVM. So not just you know, blame the individual developers that are building apps that get hacked, but can we have better frameworks? And so we spent a lot of time at Polychain, we've spent for years, thinking about alternative programming languages, alternative VMs, and formal verification. You know, I think one of the big questions has also been backwards compatibility. A lot of early attempts at alternative VMs and alternative programming languages simply did not have backwards compatibility with the EVM. And it was hard for them to build sort of network effects around, you know, a brand new programming language and a brand new sort of execution

environment. So, you know, I've been really interested in this category for a long time. And it's, it's sort of, you know, I followed the whole Libra saga. And it, it was very interesting to me that really the only thing that was lasting that came out of that was the move language. And, you know, general, every developer friend of mine that was like had an interest in programming language theory, etc. What just thought move was a great language because it was sort of bottom up designed for crypto finance, right? It, you know, it wasn't a programming language designed to build websites or, you know, front ends or something and sort of transpose to doing finance the way solidity was. So I think that been interested in the category forever, and I think that movement has

sort of hit this sort of escape velocity and, you know, nailed the sort of new development combined with backwards compatibility that I think was needed for this to succeed in the kind of modern Ethereum environment. Yeah. So before, I want to ask you about all of that, but before we move on, let's just explain a few things to the listeners. So, you know, when we talk about formal verification, can you just give a definition or one of you? So my layman definition, formal verification, is the ability to check code correctness at runtime. So whenever you have a smart contract right now, you ship it to auditor, you pay hundreds of thousand dollars of ordering fees.

The biggest issue with that is that's not a runtime. So let's say, for example, you ship a smart contract in solidity. There could be like integer issues, you know, type of issues, memory leaks. The auditor will find that at runtime or order it will find before you deploy it. But once you deploy a runtime, there's no stopping. There's no firewall per se for crypto. So full verification is essentially checking code correctness. And what the move VM does is at runtime.

So every time you execute a move to our contract, it says, hey, is each line of code, you know, memory save, type save, are the integers or workflows? And only execute if all security parameters are met. That kind of checking does not happen in solidity, which has led to many attacks like curve, Khyber, the Dow. Whereas in move, when inexperienced, developers deploy smart contracts, they're met with a program that programmatically checks for any security issues. It's not end-to-end fully complete, obviously, and it's not marketed to

it's more of like an extra step security to kind of stop all the issues or most of the issues we're seeing commonly in the EBM. So think of it like an auditor, a butt at runtime. Yeah, so like, and correct me if I am misunderstanding any of this, but like with the Dow, what happened was, you know, they had a series of smart contracts for the Dow. But then there was one point where basically the user could use their own smart contract to interact with one of the Dow, or it's really, I think it was two of the Dow smart contracts. And what happened was the way that had been written, it was like this person was requesting to remove their money from the Dow. And so it would send them money. And then after that, it would update their balance in the Dow.

So the smart contract, the hacker's smart contract was interrupting the Dow smart contract in that moment in between sending the money and updating the balance. So that's why they called it siphoning the Dow. And they were basically like they just kept repeatedly what's drawing the same amount of money. So if the Dow had been written and moved, then if somebody had tried a similar shenanican, what would have happened in, you know, for in that smart contract to make that not. possible. Yeah, so specifically in the DAO, it's a split DAO function so that any token holder who wanted to leave a DAO and create their own child DAO, they had like a flow of events. So what happened in the DAW attack is like that split DAW function was like repeatedly called. Specifically, it was like the value balance. So it's like a typical reintergeal attack where you keep calling the same

function over and over and over again. And the attack was able withdraw funds repeatedly. That same reinsertory attack is not common in move because A, it checks for like integer, runtime, safety, and actually disables Rehans3 altogether. So the ability to invoke multiple callback functions, like the split-down function, is just not allowed in the VM at all. Actually, Arbitron was another one to actually take inspiration from this. With their own stylist program, they disabled Rehastry by, like, technically, this is a concept called Dynamic Dispatch, and you can actually remove dynamic dispatch, which

enables you to stop the Reastry and multiple callback functions being invoked. But that's kind of the same attack happened in Khyber, I believe, and Curb, where you just have one faulty function. And then once you find a line of attack and weakness, you can keep withdrawing the bounds and ultimately have big effects. But fortunately, with Move VM and subsequent security benefits, that's not possible. So this is like a bit of a random question, but maybe not because apparently a lot of crypto teams are making this mistake. I saw an article where this was in DL News, where a Salana trading bot team had unwittingly hired a North Korean developer. And that developer apparently may have inserted some code into the app that later enables them to steal $1.4 million from users. So I wondered, would move, prevent a crypto team from falling prey to one of these attacks by like if they mistakenly hire a North Korean dev?

I think that's a little ambitious. like if you hire a North Korean dev, like, you probably are screwed. There's actually a funny joke where if you tell, if you, in an interview process, you tell a North Korean dev, like say something bad about King John Noon, they'll actually leave the chat because they're not allowed to say anything bad about him. So if you're hiring a North Korean dev, just go to the chat and they say, say, King John is stupid, and they cannot legally say that. Like, that's easiest way.

But move can't fix your relationship. They can't fix everything. Oh, okay. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, sorry. I guess what I'm trying to say is, so presumably, as long as it's a smart enough team, they would run tests before, right? So wouldn't it be easier for them to detect that the smart contract was not doing what they intended? So they would get a compiler flag.

So let's say, for example, they were doing a swap function and they intentionally put like a memory leak into the smart contract with the goal of exploiting it. It would flag it to like the developer team and like whoever's compiling the code. But if you want it to override it because you know, you're a North Korean hacker with bad intentions, there's nothing stopping you. So the premise of full notification isn't to stop bad actors. If you're coding a rug, you're coding a rug. There's nothing you can do about that really besides not coding a rug. It's more intended for- It's just make sure that your rug like is very effective or something. I think the way I say it's like the idiot proof bail. So like when I was in

college, I was like, you know, a 20-year-old kid didn't have a PhD, didn't know how to code properly. And I think that's actually the biggest barrier in crypto. Because if you want to build like the next Facebook, which Zuckerberg built his dorm room. Zucker was able to do that in two weeks to ship a prototype and get feedback on the head. That same social app can't exist in Web3 because if you build EDM smart contract, don't get an audited, don't spend time on a bulletproofing the code,

you'll have an app that goes to the mainnet, and if it gets hacked, you lose your entire credibility, your entire platform. So I would say it's more geared towards the inexperience and mid-tier developer that really wants to build an app, really build a cool crypto app, but doesn't have the experience, you know, that a PhD, you know, each sur, researcher it has, to write fully quality verified code. So it's more geared towards, like, younger and experienced, the JavaScript-like feel where

you can go zero to one of the apps and I write secure code. But ultimately, like, if you want to write a rug, you want to write a scam, I think stop eating that. The other thing I would add to that, Laura, is that formal verification, while not a sort of security silver bullet, is much more important in smart contract development. Because oftentimes in smart contract development, it mimics a little bit more hardware than software sometimes, where you don't, in traditional software development where it's a web app, where you can sort of cloud push updates, it's sort of ship it fast. If it has a bug, we can just fix it in real time, right? Smart contracts, when they're launched, you know, are much harder to change or upgrade

and oftentimes are meant to be immutable and can't be changed or upgraded for security reasons. So the development cycle to get a smart contract live, it should look and feel pretty different than the development cycle to just sort of launch a website, which you can just, you sort of in real time say, oh, shoot, you know, a button's broken. Let's just fix it, right? In a smart contract, if it's broken, like, it's much, much harder to upgrade and migrate funds and all of that. So like crypto itself lends itself to a more rigorous engineering process before the launch of V1. And so I think formal verification has it specifically a good fit for cryptocurrency systems. Yeah, the last quality of move that I wanted to call out was, I guess, this philosophy, or I'm not sure what to call it,

but I read about this resource-oriented programming, which has a few different principles. Could you just sort of explain this is like, I guess, the way I, was looking at it was sort of like ways that this language treats crypto assets as special and helps to ensure the security. So could you just give a sense of like what some of those principles are? I'll use like game development as my analogy. So if you want to build like a call of duty with move, you could specify each in game item as a module. So it's more similar to like React, I would say, where you can specify custom data sets. So for example, you have to be a game game. fixed objects.

You have to use what's bare bones and in the framework. It's really hard to experiment and have your own asset classes within programming itself. With MOVE, you can essentially customize each in-game asset, each skin, gun, map, whatever, as its own customized module. And then with that module, you can have specific rules. So using a defy example, if I specify, let's say a lending market and then I give a specific module in the lending market only admin rights to the contract deplorer. So let's say, for example, I'm deploying an eth-leaning vault.

And I have a module that says, only change this module when me, the contract deployer, invokes this function. That means that no outside developers, no outside influencers can change permissions, can change who is moving account balances. You essentially have flexibility on how the object is constructed in traits, programming, you know,

actual integer lengths and bite lens, but specifically on account access and permissions. So you can say, okay, there's 200 objects in the game. Here's how much controls the skin, the gun, the clothing of the avatar has, only give access to those permissions to set characters and set users and addresses and completely restricted from everyone else. So I like to explain it.

I don't know if listeners have coded in React or not, but it's very similar to those principles in JavaScript, group where you have complete end-to-end autonomy over how you design objects and have each object be its own modules. You can customize how it looks, how it's programmed, and how the security traits are. So compared to solidity, it's kind of like you use what's out of the box and use what the EDM gives you, which means if you're trying to build, you know, customize defy apps or customized games, it's very, very difficult to find the settings that match for your

security needs and you're in programming needs. So I like to say, like, move is the react of JavaScript. All right. So in a moment, we'll talk about Movement Network, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Mantle is transforming the future of on-chain finance. With a $4 billion dollar treasury and successful products like Mantle Network and EMEE Protocol and Ignition FBTC, Mantle is launching three new innovation pillars that will bridge blockchain with everyday banking.

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or X. Back to my conversation with Rushi and Olaf. So, you know, we were just talking about like all these different principles around the language, but then now you yourself have just recently launched the developer mainnet for Movement, which is your Movium-based layer two. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, I think ultimately we believe in Ethereum as a global settlement layer. We believe that the biggest issues with alternative L-1s, especially at launch, is bootstrapping,

initial liquidity and user base. So the thesis behind Movement was bringing the benefits of APDOS, we alternative L1s to existing liquidity base and user base. So the developer mainnet or movement into public mainnet that's incoming is the first real attempt at bringing the move-virt machine, the DM program, to Ethereum. And I think, like, I built the first decks in APDOS back in 2022. And the biggest issue there was bootstrapping liquidity, getting LPs, family offices, big whales to deposit assets because post-F2X, no one wanted to buy all coins. that pretty much held onto Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Stables.

Same thing with the Ethereum ecosystem, where there's a lot of capital tied up in Ethereum whales, Bitcoin Wales. That's where the true liquidity is. So our vision is to bring that Ethereum liquidity, that Ethereum defy, the Ethereum culture that we've loved for the last years, that's been bulletproof, and give a flavorful twist that actually scales it. If you look at the Ler 2 landscape today, I would say it's majority lagging behind Sala. Solana is taking basically all buts in terms of high throughput execution, in terms of go-to-market and overall culture for developers. I think that's larger been because the EVM L2 landscape hasn't been much product differentiation.

If you look at ZK or there's optimistic roll-ups, obviously there's certain benefits technically, but it feels mostly the same. Alternative VMs actually give a flavorful twist to Ethereum, where you can bring the principles of alternative layer ones with speed, security, different programming languages, and still enjoy the benefits of Ethereum. So movements, amina, is the first step in that direction. And we look forward to competing with Alt-L-1s with Ethereum security. Okay. So when I was learning about this, so obviously I understand like Ethereum is the oldest smart contract blockchain. It's very tested. It has why decentralization

there's many advantages. And yet, you know, here we were just talking about how solidity is not a great language for security and move is like better for security. So it feels a little bit counterintuitive that this would settle to Ethereum or that you'd be using Ethereum for security if it's like inherently built on a language that's less secure. So I don't know, especially with Olaf because you have such a long history, I don't know if you have thoughts on that. What I would say there is keep in mind that the Ethereum security is financial security at the sort of network level. So in general, roughly the security of an entire blockchain system is equivalent to the market value of all the coins combined. And so in the case of Ethereum, we're not talking about

individual app security that would come with solidity, but rather it's sort of the network security that comes with the proof of stake system and the value at stake in that system. So it's taking a more agile framework for developing individual applications or contracts, but then using the security of like the Ethereum staking system to validate, you know, them on a network level. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I understand that. I still wonder, I don't remember the exact examples, but there were previous hacks

where it was like a new technology made a hack possible that wasn't possible before. I feel like one of them was around one of the ERC token standards. But anyway, I'm blanking on exactly what that was. But the point is that is there a scenario down the line where like because it is built on this language that wasn't purpose built for dealing with crypto security, that could happen? Like, I totally get what you're saying, but I just was wondering if there's like a future development that could come. I think a broader question is like the thesis behind modularity,

introduces more complexity. So look at alternative DA. The carer case, like Celestia even, was that using alternative DA in theory is less secure than a theorem DA. I think like what Celeste has proven and, you know, the DA market is proven is that users, application builders, and for builders, they want UX and devX first. So like arguably, Celestial security is good enough today

compared to theme security. Developers are confident enough to sell DA to alternative VA with the trust assumptions that, you know, Celestia isn't as secure as DMDA, but it's good enough and provides user experience, development experience. So that's why I build on top of it. Same thing with, I would say, like, alternative VMs. Like, yes, it's less Lindy proof. It hasn't been around as long as EVM hasn't been as battle tested per se. The bare case may say for alternative VMs is it hasn't been, you know, billions of dollars in TVL on it. But I think that's changed in the last three or four months. A, like Salon of TVL, Solano transaction volume, SvM transaction usage as, you know,

the President of the United States launched a coin on SVM, not the EVM. And secondly, the Moove VM has now has over $2 billion in TVL with very limited to no acts to date. So I think the thesis that it's less ballot tested is being tipped away every day and it's getting more and more ballot tested. So it actually go against your point that it wasn't purpose built for security. you know was built for security. It was built with formal verification in mind and designed to be the most secure execution environment for crypto, while Ethereum was designed to be

the most secure settlement layer for crypto, where like all I touched on, it's the most secure settlement layer in terms of economic security, in terms of not getting, you know, 51% attack vector and having large funds deposited on chain with the ability to trust that four years from now, 10 years from now,

the funds will be permissionlessly stored. So I think what, you know, the modular landscape brings is keeping Ethereum's bedrock economic security and experimenting on different styles of executional air security, deal security, sequence of security, and having the ability to experiment because you have a solid bedrock that is Ethereum. Well, let's just talk for a moment about what Ethereum's future is. I'd be curious, especially for Olaf to weigh in because obviously you, you know, have known Ethereum for so long. But is that basically where you think Ethereum's future is headed just to be a settlement layer for a bunch of roll-ups and side chains? I mean, the short answer is probably mostly, right? It's the scale Ethereum, the roadmap has been, for a long time, layer two systems, right?

And, you know, what I like about this is there are dozens, if not closer to maybe hundreds of different teams, all sort of working on different. scalability solutions on top of Ethereum. So you have so many different teams and so many different approaches that it's like this extremely decentralized approach to innovation and architecture where it's like many, many people are running many, many, many experiments all at once and sort of made the best system win. I do think that the downside to it is basically fragmented application logic and fragmented liquidity across different L2s. So I all. also think that in that future, for Ethereum to successfully scale, we need all the different

L2 systems to be able to talk to each other with ease. Right now, moving from Ethereum to an L2, you're very much siloed to the application logic and liquidity inside that L2. So it sort of feels like from a user perspective, just moving from Ethereum to like another chain, right? And until we get all the different L2 systems, you know, with interoperability, you're not going to have that nice unified user experience that you get with like a just Solana base layer or Ethereum L1, where, you know, you don't have to think about where the app is built. You're just sort of, you know, it's all one ecosystem. It's all one pool of liquidity. It's very easy to move across these things. So I think Ethereum is in this spot where we sort of have.

all the L2 experiments live and running, but we need to move to like more decentralized sequencers across the landscape, and then we need to move to shared liquidity, where it's very easy for the end user to just move across L2 systems seamlessly without having to even think about it. The end user needs to just think Ethereum, right? And today, that's really not how it works because they have to be very conscious of the L2 system that they're interacting with. Well, Rushi, I did want to ask you about a little bit of a spicy tweet that I saw you posted. You said that you thought EVML2 will go to zero. And you said, quote, they mostly all suck compared to Sol.

So can you explain why you think EVML2s don't make sense today? If you've used an EVML2, you can probably relate. It's like, besides base and arbitrage, I'd say, using anything else on a theorem is quite painful compared to Slana. Like, Solana, you have like, you know, low-upic fat, ban a wallet, put some money in there, like, go trade meme coins. And we look at volume today and majority of retail volume and user volume is flowing towards Slana.

Base is a close second. And I think that's mostly obviously because of the Coinbase connection. I think what EVML2s have lacked compared to, you know, slana is user experience. If you try trading on slana, you get your transaction confirmed in, you know, seconds, it's fast, you know, doesn't really go down anymore. And the user experience is pretty great. While EVML2s, they still lag into the throughput. I think the best case study was inscriptions, which was like around a year ago now. Every EVML2 tapped out like 150 GPS. Most went down, sequences shut down. While Slana tapped us and SWI, even near say, the,

alternative L1s that prioritized highly throughput, highly scalable execution layer and better consensus, they all stayed up time and they were able to process that, which was actually the second. E. McNair was no clocking on 1500 TPS. I think TPS generally is a vanity metric, but I think in terms of scalability, and when you look at big events like the Trump coin, right, obviously, like Slana was actually able to decently handle it, which compared to a year ago was a different story. If that happened on, you know, give and insert eVL2, I'm 99% sure the sequence will go down. There'd be some issue there. So I think like Ethereum as liquidity base has proven itself, but the programming and developer ecosystem is still nascent. So I think the rise

movement and some alternative VMs that have really show what we could bring the Sala UX, the Sala developer experience, all the benefits of, you know, better programming. And bring that to Ethereum's culture is where, you know, alternative VMs can actually make Ethereum competitive with Slana in terms of quartermarking distribution. As it stands, besides base, it seems like Ethereum L2 is rather lost in terms of adoption. And I'll laugh to you. It looks like you're nodding your head. Yeah, I mean, I think what everything Rishi said is pretty on point. It's, it's easiest to understand this if you just go use the systems. And you just like just try to buy, you know, a meme coin, say, like something that

should be very easy, right? And is designed for like an average retail user who's just trying to have fun maybe or or make a small investment. Go try to use, you know, the stack of technologies on Solana and then go try to use, you know, the same sort of get the same functionality. of a lot of different ethel2s, it's just confusing. And it's sort of more confusing at every layer, like at every step of the way. It's more confusing. It takes a bit longer. There's less liquidity. It's like the whole mental framework is harder to understand. So I just completely agree. But it's also a culture thing. Like we look at Solana and like the user experience, developer experience, apps, arguably mean coin trading and the casino we call it is one of the biggest

PMFs encrypted today, whether we like it or not. Ethereum culture felt like didn't really embrace that until like very, very recently and until they were forced to. I think Ethereum, as it should in the early days, folks a lot of research, focus on terminology and like doing things by the book, which allowed eke systems like slana and, you know, alternative layer ones to divide the norm and embrace, you know, the Dgen, the shirk corners, the big casino, if you will. So I think from a culture point of view, Ethereum took a step back and chose like the route of not being, you know, being credibility neutral, not prioritizing long term, like research arc and research gain,

which I think, you know, is net bullish in for the goodness of each systems. But I think there needs to be a culture in Ethereum that embraces, you know, the Gen Z TikTok, 12 year old that makes a million dollars trading the Trump coin, right? That is whether we like it or not the onboarding gateway for people in crypto as it was, you know, traditional stocks on Robin Hood on Instagram like five years ago. So I think Ethereum has been lacking that culture. But I think, you know, with teams like moving and like future teams coming, that pepping the step is coming. And I think even base is working on kind of improving that culture. Yeah. So I know we're here to talk about like movement and stuff, but can't help

ask just a couple more eth questions. Because I don't know if you guys saw Hayden Adams tweeted that he had at one point thought about like Ethereum offering to all the L2s that they would like buy them out, like their coins so that everything would soon be ETH based. And then Vitolik, you know, his blog post last week basically, you know, suggested that they, I mean, he suggested a number of things. But one of the things was doing native roll-ups in Ethereum, which, you know, would kind of integrate more of that activity into the protocol itself. So I don't know if you have thoughts on that or do you sort of feel like, because it does feel like, you know, this whole past year has been this sort of, I'm going to call it an existential crisis for Ethereum, you know, the whole thing about

the parasitic L2s and then, yeah, so I don't know if you guys, do you sort of feel like this is this moment in time when things are just slipping away from Ethereum or do you feel like it's going to be okay or I don't know? I mean, I agree, Laura, that it's this question to me of do the existing network effects around end users, around value, in the asset and around developers in Ethereum outweigh, you know, the speed and and momentum of the growth pretty much of the salon ecosystem. I mean, it's, you know, there's been other systems out there that have onboarded, I would say, like a little bit of a different class of user and maybe been a little bit on average more oriented around like small cap coin trading.

This is like being finance chain, finance smart chain, I would say is like a reasonable example of that. But I do think, you know, I love. that just all the experiments are being run. Because I really am a big believer in sort of crypto as a whole just benefits from the most experiments being run and them competing in an open marketplace. And, you know, it's great to me that we have this very, very sophisticated approach with dozens of different teams, building a sort of modular architecture, you know, around Ethereum. and then we have sort of a more focused singular team in Solana, you know, building this just one highly performant L1.

So I agree and I'm kind of happy about it for crypto as a whole. But I also, you know, we're Polly Chain. I kind of put it in the name so that it would be clear from the beginning. You know, I never get religious about anything. It's like I'm a pragmatist and always just want crypto. as a whole to move as fast as possible and toward the world? I think my answer is modularity will save Ethereum. I think the first wave of Ethereum scaling was very pragmatic.

It was, okay, here's what the godfathers of Ethereum told us to do. Here's how we scale and we follow the textbook. I think what the market's proven is that no one cares about your textbook. No one cares about what the white paper was written five years ago. How do you get users? good developer experience. How do you scale? And I think what modularity introduced is it's okay to be unconventional. It's okay to be alternative DA. It's okay to have fast finale settlement. It's okay to use be a side chain, not be particularly L2. No only cares. I think modularity will enable

the end up liquidity as a settlement there to be extended and that will be a fairon's role. And the new wave of builders on Ethereum, like even with abstract chains of someone a fan of. They're of Lidium on Celestia, but really their whole focus is on the Pagy Penguins exist and bring that to layer two. And they're objectively saying, okay, we don't want D5, we don't want to be like optimism, arbitrage, we want to focus on streaming and get a bunch of streamers training on chain. So I think like this new wave of modular L2 scaling solutions, the way we want to call it will be Ethereum, saving grace and the ability to actually compete L-1s, while the old class of, we're going to read by white papers and circle jerk about

who's the best L2 kind of dies. Oh, boy. Well, you know, I have to ask you a question in that vein about Move-based chains because, you know, as we've been discussing Aptus and Suey, do, I don't even know. Is it Suey or Suey? You're both. I think it's Sue. I think Sue.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So we have Aptos and Swee that already use move as well. So what is the differentiator for a movement network? For context, there's two variants of move, which is unfortunate in how it kind of came to be. I would say APDA style or DM style is more in line with how the DM blockchain was supposed to be four or five years ago. Whilst we looks more like Solana today, it's like dynamic parallelism versus static realism, kind of looks and feels more like Slana in terms of a developer experience.

So I think the movement sits in between. We really believe in move. we think that moves the best execution environment is still a purpose built for blockchains. The analogy I like to give is like PHP was the first framework to build websites. People built PHP. I used PHP.

I hated it. Then JavaScript market. And you had React, Vue, Angular, and you can build JavaScript websites in like the big of an eye. And majority websites now they launch your JavaScript. Similarly,

Cylity was the first 15,000 developers. You had Unuswap, all of a curve, D5.1.0. And that sent the foundation. But then you look at, okay, how do we get, actually millions of users on chain. How do we get millions of developers? And it has to be in a

purpose-built language. And I think Rust and the Rust-based frameworks is similar to JavaScript and you have React and Vue, which were the two JavaScript frameworks and that Move SVM and Crypto. And you look at the fastest-growing systems today, according to electric capital, SVM was the fastest-growing system, move a second. And the market share, up for Move is actually increasing faster that SVM did for the first two years. So I think move is solidified itself as the third developer framework and movement's role is, you know, spreading the gospel of move to Ethereum and beyond. When I started Move, movement's November 2020, pretty much every VC and everyone told me that Move was dead, Appes and Sweet is a VC scams. And now Suisse is like 50 billion dollars.

Apis is also being pretty well on all those VCs that didn't believe in move or pudging themselves. So I think move is solidify itself and movement's role is bringing into Ethereum and kind of tying the noughts between the Silicon Valley Facebook DMV and the Web3 culture and the Web3 community and we're proud to be in between that. Yeah, honestly, something I'm noticing. And since I'm not a developer, I'm not sure if this analogy is correct. So I noticed, first of all, you said that when you were in college, you tried to build this Dex and Solidity, but it took you like six months and you had to spend all this money in these

audits. And then later, when you did it and move, it only took. three weeks for you to ship a test net. And it reminds me of, I mean, this was like ages ago, but when they were building Ethereum, Jeff Wilkie, one of the Ethereum developers and Gavin Wood, who was the other one, they were both building different clients. And GAV chose, I think, C++, and Jeff chose Go. And when it came time to launch, because it took like 30 minutes for developers to like download all the stuff to start Gavin's client. And it was like a minute for the other one, like then the Geph basically just took off.

And now still today is like, I think, is it still the majority, or not majority, but at least it's the leader, right, in terms of clients for, yeah, Ethereum. So it sort of just like feels like what you're saying is like the easier it is for developers to work in these languages, like the more you can just get off into like a lift off phase. So who knows, it does feel like maybe the language itself is just going to be that moment where we see this sort of hockey stick rise. I think when people say that EVN has won, I always like won water.

And the analogy I say is there's more developers at Facebook company today. They're all crypto, which I think we're very, very early in the developer landscape. I think majority of applications that want to compete with web to incumbents, like the next Uber, Pinterest, et cetera, will need to use smart contracts. And there's a big opportunity. And we're thinking today with like Slalom and SBM for the new apps to be converted to, you know, Rust-based programming, SBM and Move-VM. And my prediction is five years from now.

S-DM and Move-VM have the dominant market share over EVM. Yeah, and Laura, I have another interesting sort of historical metaphor for how the developer experience, like radically transforms the growth of this whole system. So in on Bitcoin, one of the prominent Bitcoin developers back in the day, Mike Hearn, tried to build an on-chain crowdfunding system called Lighthouse. And it took him almost a year to program. Then when Ethereum was launched, people could program ICOs very quickly. And it maybe took people just a few days to program an ICO.

And you saw that sort of developer experience get that much better. The ease to launch get that much faster. And then, you know, we had this kind of era of Ethereum tokens and ICOs that obviously happened on ETH and not Bitcoin. Now you fast forward again to like a pump fund style experience. And once again, the ease to launch has dropped like another big order of magnitude. And it turns out it wasn't nearly easy enough to launch ICOs on Ethereum. Like it's ironic because I think one of the criticisms back in like 2017 was like it's almost,

it's too easy almost to launch ICOs. Like there's too many tokens, right? But in reality, there weren't nearly enough, right? There should be a token for every post on every social media app. There should be a token for every person on planet Earth. And I'm not joking. Like, I really think the direction that we are going is no code, you know, launch of tokens in the background of every social media post.

And so rather than sort of centralized algorithms, you know, on like your Twitter feed or your Facebook feed or Instagram feed determining what you see, there's actually a market, a financial market, like of creation and curation or sort of reposting, retweeting for every bit of social media content that creates a sort of pump fun style coin that rewards the early the creator right and the early curators of that post. So like this is actually the direction we're going. Like anecdotally, one of the really fascinating things I've heard from some like deep trenchers is that they actually use pump fun as their news source. And this is because like every time there's a big current event, you know, something happens.

it's like, you know, immediately it will be launched on Pump Fund. And when it's sort of a really big event, there'll maybe be like six coins launched, right, really quickly on Pump Fund. And it's sort of like when you're watching that feed, because it's directly monetizing the news through the coin, it's actually the fastest, most respondent system, even above like Twitter, right, for cutting edge news and like just what's happening in the world, et cetera.

And so it's like when Pumping, Fund becomes a news source, okay? We really are seeing the merger of like these microfinancial markets with like content consumption and information distribution. And it makes a lot of sense to me that conceptually the way we get price discovery of assets in traditional financial markets, we would get price discovery of relevant content in sort of content on social media markets. And so I think that, you know, the distance we've come from like Mike Hearn's light house, right? To like pump fun being the news source for like these gen alpha trenchers is like it's remarkable, but it really is a story of developer experience getting easier and easier and

easier to launch. And I think it's like there's no limit to how easy it can be, right? Like we thought it was easy with Ethereum. It's like, like I said, it wasn't nearly easy enough. And, you know, even pump fun, right, we're probably going to look at some future. version where you can just use an AI and say, hey, I want the token to do this and it just does it. So you just got your voice app open and just like when you see something happen in real life, you're like, this is going to be a news event. I'll launch my token by just talking into my phone, right? Like the more we can do the abstraction, the more we are going to see sort of like the way people use these things, if there's one thing I can predict is that it's unpredictable,

right? The idea that like what Mike Hearn was building on Bitcoin would someday become like social media, that's, it's inconceivable, right? Like nobody can really like see all those stars connect. Even if later it sort of looks like, you know, that's sort of obvious the way it went. It's never obvious. And so bringing costs down and making everything easier just leads to these sort of unknown unknowns emerging and these outcomes that like nobody really saw coming. But, you know, now it's sort of becoming more and more crystal clear to me the way this all goes. Well, let's hear you riff a little bit more because I know you've been thinking a lot about AI agents and crypto. So where do you think that whole future is going? Yeah.

Okay. So, you know, this kind of, I've been thinking a lot about these like social media curation markets, right? But the second thing or maybe first thing, actually, that I've been thinking a lot about is pretty much embedding autonomous agents on chain, right? and giving them wallets that they uniquely have access to and sort of go out into the world and hustle and try to make money, right? And so, you know, I think it is so tantalizing the idea that I could own like, you know, a percentage through a token of some agent

that just never stops working, right? He's out there just whatever it is, right? It's like posting, messaging people, making, you know, AI music, right, and launching it, making AI videos and content like trading in in defy markets, like market making, running some quant strategy in defy markets, doing venture style investing. You know, eventually, like, these AIs are going to be more sophisticated than humans at pretty much all this. And I really think that giving them an on-chain or of autonomous identity will be the best mechanism to bootstrap fundraising. So when you have this new AI system

and you say this thing is going to be an incredible market maker, and I, you know, I tuned it specifically for that use case. You know, I need to crowd fund initial capital. You sort of launch the AI. It's owned, it's owned in a sense by all the token holders, right? But it's totally autonomous and trustless. So even the dev that made the AI, you're not going to really need to trust. them per se, right? Like they're not going to be able to shut it down or change it or steal the funds or anything like that. And so where we're headed, again, I think is sort of pump fund for AIs, right? Where when you get the ease with which you can launch an AI agent to be like really, really, really easy and you get the ease with which you can embed it, you know, inside like a TEE

style architecture where it has its own private key. This is like the secure enclave on the iPhone, right, you know, and it can access its own private key uniquely. You make that really easy, and then you make, like, tokenizing that and crowdfunding it, like pump fund style really easy. I think we see an explosion of financialized agents that are out on the internet, like, hustling while you sleep, and you own this sort of portfolio of, you know, autonomous agents. Like, it's like I own a few that do market making for me. I own a few that post in social media.

I own a few that make video content. and they're sort of out there competing, you know, with each other going head to head. And you're going to also see like really efficient liquidity because of that. So, you know, one AI might be good for like a couple weeks. And then, you know, really quickly, you know, somebody makes a better one at covering the news in Philadelphia or something. And like, you know, the capital shifts over to the new one. So I think this kind of like AIs will do a lot of the sort of work in a sense that people do today. And I think the way people benefit could end up being like everyone is a bit of a investor in all of these different AI systems.

And because like so much of the actual labor is done autonomously, the value actually ends up accruing to like the underlying owners of these autonomous AIs, like basically through token portfolios. Yeah, honestly, you know what this reminds me of. I, shoot, I can't remember what they were calling it. But Ian Lee's group at some point, they have. had like this way where you could launch your own investor Dow. I forget the name of it. But the point is according to like certain rules, like you can have up to a hundred people that all go in on a little investment together and they would all like make their own token. And then like let's say there was one person who was like really good at defy. They would kind of entrust them to like make the calls for

the group when it came to investing in defy. Then there would be like an NFT person who, you know, they would do the NFT trades. And anyway, the point is that I just realized like it's the exact same thing except you remove the people and you just have a little AI agent that's it's doing it. But it's essentially that kind of group chat investment that, yeah, he was talking about. Laura, if you want to take it one step further, that's very interesting, you know, picking these AIs or just picking coins, like just to AIs will be some of the coins, like there'll be other coins, but just pretend everything is coins, right? Everything from, you know, e-dollar, e-gold all the way down to like this individual post in

social media, right? you know, picking these things is going to be pretty tricky for the average person, right? And so I do think there is going to be a lot of like entrusting specialization to investors, right, that sort of do it for them, right, for a fee. Because I don't want to, you know, I don't think in the future everyone in the world will be in the trenches. You know, I think there will be a lot of professional trenches and then a lot of people entrusting them with money. And one of the problems with that is that's basically a fund, right? It's sort of a thing like polychain.

But with a thing like polychain, there's a lot of fixed costs that go into launching it and maintaining it. And there's a substantial need for like trust and audit, right, so that the person you're entrusting your money to get sort of double checked and can't misreport their returns or steal your funds or something like that. You know, an interesting solution to those problems is the blockchain, right? So you could imagine like on-chain funds or pools of capital that can be very low cost and are sort of real-time audited with people having a lot of ability to move in and out of this. So you sort of launch a fund, it creates a pool of capital that launches a token that roughly tracks like the nav or net asset value of that pool of capital. And you have the fund manager go to work, right? If they're making money, then the token should like track the upwards move of the net asset value. But then those like tokens that are sort of LP interests, so to speak, in the fund are tradable on secondary markets.

So the sort of meta here is that you end up trading people, right? And all those people are all these like micro fund managers that are actually picking the underlying assets, which again in this case are like the pump fund news cycle or the autonomous AI agent. But I do think it's sort of the next level of abstraction. We've seen this interaction between social media influencers and, you know, like crypto coin picking, right? And the future here is being able to just invest in like the cash tag of that influencer, right? So you just say, you know what? I just want to pick everything they pick.

And it capitalizes them. And then your performance is just tag along with them. They're like my micro fund manager. And then you can have this portfolio of fund managers, right? So like this portfolio of portfolios, I think is like the meta that will allow average people to benefit from all this without having to sit on the pump fund home screen for hours a day. Okay, wait. So I don't know if I fully understood.

So basically where I was going was like you could have an AI agent that replaces a person, but you're saying, no, you'll have a bunch of AI agents that do replace people, but then you'll have people on top who are curating the difference. And like it is a bit of a rabbit hole where it's like, will you have AIs curing AIs, etc. Right. DGI. Yeah. Like it's so I agree, Laura, and that is fuzzy to me.

Like my crystal ball on that part is like I'm not quite sure what comes first, right? Whether it's like picking people or picking AIs only. But the end game of it is like a portfolio of portfolios, right? where you kind of have, you're picking pickers, right, because there are going to be so many assets. It's going to be impossible for the average person to sort of keep up. So they're going to pick pickers who then go like into the fray and specialize, like hyper-specialize in one's little area for a fee.

So I think you're going to see blossoming of like literally millions of funds with hyper-specialization and very, very, low fixed cost that make it possible. I think the analogy that I dropped, it was the way that Robin Hood replaced bankers, and crypto replaced venture capitalists, and to some degree founders, like AI XPT is like the top KOL or influencer

on like various mine share metrics. So where we're heading is like maybe OLAF's in mine job are replaced in three years by AI. And I think OLAF and I agree, that means we did our job. And maybe that's STEM state. Yeah, well, all have I just had Chris Dixenon, and I did ask him this question, but do you feel, I threatened maybe as too strong of a word, but do you feel like there's a potential for you to be disrupted? If I lose my job, it means a lot of other people lost their job first.

I, you know, it doesn't, you know, like, basically the short answer is no. Like, I don't really feel threatened. But like, if I, if AI was able to do what I do, it means it's doing a lot of things. because I think in general, like long-term VC investors are taking into account like so much multifaceted, multimodal, complex data and putting it into some little black box algorithm in their brain and trying to spit out this like probabilistic multiverse of futures, right? I think it's probably one of the hardest things to have an AI do. if I lost my job, it means nobody has jobs, sort of.

By the way, I think this is like great, right? Like I, the reason everyone like has jobs is because we need people to do them. I think if we could enjoy all the wealth of labor without the labor, it mostly becomes like a distribution of wealth question, which is like, let's make sure that the wealth created by AI is broadly distributed. And as I said, I really think the solution to that could be agents living inside blockchains. Yeah, when Shaw Walters came on the show, he said something like that his dream was that everybody would become wealthy off of this so we could all live their lives or live our lives. And then somebody tweeted at me like, oh, that sounds like communism. And I was like, yeah, I think it's super different. Like if it's the government, do we get top down versus like it's naturally because capitalism makes so much money for everybody that you all become wealthy.

I think that's like a different thing. But I did want to also ask just when you were talking about the news thing for a moment, I was like, wait, could my job be disrupted? But then I realized like it seems like what the pump fund people doing, at least for now, like maybe down the line, you know, it could go a different place. But like they're they're creating the coins, the coins on pump fund based on the news. So it's like people in my job like, you know, report the news and then that's like affecting things. Although, yeah, social media plays a role and whatever.

But the point is that, yeah, I was like, okay, I feel like I'm okay for now. I mean, I think ultimately the human element is, like, creating trends, right? So, like, I think Olaf's job will never be replaced because ultimately the top venture capitalists are making the trends and making, you know, the AI crypto, the defy, the defy, they're making the general trest industry should go in and also then making founder bets. So, like, this founder is going to be the face, you know, America DeFi or like Ethereum DFi. But I think where it gets kind of tricky is like the analysts, the out of college, the investment making analysts or the venture analysts, their jobs are probably being replaced because, yeah, I can probably do diligence and half the costs twice is better. But I think ultimately you still need a human element for news because ultimately you're doing podcasts like this that AI probably can do. And then venture capitalists still need to do podcasts like this to go talk about narratives and things that the future crypto and future venture should look like. always going to be human element.

I think, yeah, is, again, assisting in humanity's role. Yeah, honestly, actually, because, yeah, the older I get, the more I realize that something, and it takes so long for any one of these things that happen in my life to be vindicated, that like, it took me until this age to realize that I actually do have a gift where I get into things way earlier than everybody else. Like, now it's like, I need to wait like 15, sometimes 20 years for it to have, but only took like 10 in crypto, but the point is like, now that I realize, like, oh, wait, that's happened to me multiple times, I realize like anybody out there who is able to kind of be ahead of the disruption,

they probably have an edge up in this world. So, okay, you guys, we only have a few minutes left, but I have to ask you, Rushi, about the news this week that the Trump family's DFI Project World Liberty Financial bought move tokens, just like in the half hour before it was reported that your team was talking to Elon Musk about using movement for the Department of Government and Efficiency. So, yeah, have you been talking to Musk? And if so, like, what would that look like? Probably can't go into too much details.

But I think generally, the government is looking at blockchains in general. I think the original impetus for this was the Bloomberg report that Doge was looking into, you know, blockchains in purpose or transparency. So right now, like, there's big expenditures like defense and education, et cetera, and the public doesn't really know where might be allocated. I think this is a funny story that in the last administration, there was $550 million in condoms sent to Palestine. And the question was like, where are these, like, is this actually needed?

Like, why are we spending money on that? So I think ultimately the public is asking for transparency. Doge itself is working on transparency. And that's one of the best parts of blockions, right? It's a transparent ledger for data. So they are exploring different avenues for, you know, involving crypto and ledgers. And yeah, the Trump family took a big bet on move and purchased move.

And we're proud to be one of the few American coins elected by the president. And actually, wait, so I keep hearing this term American coin. Can either of you describe what that means in a world of decentralization other than the coins that are more decentralized or sorry, more centralized? I think like in the past, every founder and their mom was scared of launching a token. like you have like BVI Canadian Dubai and like we have Singapore and then about a month ago

the president of the United States just YOLA the token from Washington DC and that kind of took down all of norms of like what's legal it's not legal right so like I think the the main US thing is also like more like the US is a capital for innovation and obviously

the administration whether you like it or not has increased the view of crypto globally. Should you take Bitcoin Reserve Trump himself like only more multiple crypto assets and pushing crypto as a national priority. So I think like now there's an edge in being an American crypto company. I think we'll see pretty much talent consolidate in New York and San Francisco where founders

have incentives to be American crypto company, whether it's tax writeoffs, whether it's tax benefits for U.S. tokens per se. So the main USA thing, I think, will be an important tagline for this presidency. Okay. And right before we go, I just so curious. Olaf because you have now been in crypto for 12 years or 13, no, 14, 14 years. What are your thoughts at seeing it, you know, being made a national priority in all this stuff? Like, you know, if you asked myself a long time ago, it would be surprised, right?

I think if you asked myself a long time ago about pretty much anything in crypto today, it would be surprised. But, you know, it's interesting. the launch of Bitcoin was really only possible because it was censorship resistant. And it was that in that term, the implication was censorship resistant against nation states. Right. And the idea was, you know, Silk Road was live and Bitcoin was like this adversarial alternative system where the mentality was this, like every other private, you know, quote, private or alternative monetary system will be shut down if it can be. And at the beginning,

you know, Bitcoin was sort of viewed as this explicitly criminal thing for many years, I would say. But it sort of like in part was that because everyone in it acted like that sort of. And I think that now, you know, it's gone more and more and more mainstream and gotten more and more usable and it turns out that so many different things can be built on top of this. Like, it's not just, you know, this e-gold. It turns out it's also all of finance. It turns out it's also like social media. It turns out it's, it's, you know, AI wallets and bank accounts, right? So I think that like as the use case expanded also, it's just become less and less relevant that this be censorship resistant against nation states because it turns out. It turns out.

out nation states aren't explicitly against this anymore. And you've actually seen that too in like the security properties that the market looks for. A long time ago, you know, launching a coin, it was like this has to be nation state resistant or it's a scam. That was like the mentality of your average user. That obviously is is not the case today. And so I think it's great that we've basically gone mainstream to the point where we, you know, we're over the gauntlet. and this is legal now. For the first time ever, I think, you know, I've spent many, many years helping people launch crypto coins or apps built on crypto.

And like, it's never been explicitly legal, right? Nor has it been explicitly illegal. But I think for the first time, it's like, okay, this is allowed. And like in America, right? So I, you know, I'm excited for it. But it is very much a shift from like the origins sort of of Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, I know. Just when I look back at kind of all the ways that crypto has changed across all these years, it's, yeah, just surprises every which way. So you guys, this has been such a great, Chad. Where can people learn more about each of you and your work? I'm at Rushi Manche on Twitter. Moving Labs X, Y, Z on Twitter.

Yep, and I'm at ZX, OCW on Twitter. And then you can go to our website, PolyChChry. chain.capital, and you'll find a wealth of information about what we do. Perfect. Well, it's been a pleasure having you both on Unchained. Yeah, thanks, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about movement, Olaf and Rushi. Check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, both out from Matt Pilcher, Juan Oranovich, Megan Gavis, Pam Majumdar, and Market Courier.

Thanks for listening.