Unchained - Placeholder's Joel Monegro on the Fat Protocols Thesis Today - Ep.65

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Joel Monegro, partner at crypto VC firm Placeholder Ventures, describes how well his seminal blog post, "Fat Protocols," is holding up, why he and his partner Chris Burniske opted to found a crypto VC firm as opposed to a hedge fund, and what main factors they think will determine the success of a blockchain. He also describes how crypto and blockchains fit into the evolution of technology, how the business models in the crypto space will be built, and why their first publicly known investment was in Decred. Plus, he reveals why their firm is called Placeholder. Placeholder: https://www.placeholder.vc Joel: https://twitter.com/jmonegro The Placeholder investment thesis: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZL4eT1gxnE168Pmw3KyejW6fUfMNzMgeKMgcWJUfYGRj/Placeholder%20Thesis%20Summary.pdf The Fat Protocols Thesis: https://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols Decred investment thesis: https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2018/5/12/decred-investment-thesis Blog post on information technology cycles: https://monegro.org/work/2018/2/20/information-technology-market-cycles-a-brief-history Joel's blog post on the shared data layer of the blockchain application stack: http://joel.mn/post/104755282493/the-shared-data-layer-of-the-blockchain and on the blockchain application stack: http://joel.mn/post/103546215249/the-blockchain-application-stack Two episodes featuring his partner, Chris Burniske: http://unchainedpodcast.co/how-to-valuate-a-crypto-asset-s3e08 http://unchainedpodcast.co/want-higher-returns-invest-in-bitcoin-say-arks-chris-burniske-and-coinbases-adam-white Another episode that I forgot to mention during the show, the interview with Bill Tai, which contains ideas that overlap quite a bit with Joel's: http://unchainedpodcast.co/maitai-globals-bill-tai-on-why-blockchain-is-the-6th-wave-of-technology Thank you to our sponsors! Preciate: https://preciate.org/recognize/ Blockchain Warehouse: https://www.blockchainwarehouse.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Who in crypto will be recognized today? Stay tuned to find out. My guest today is Joel Monegro, partner at Placeholder Ventures. Welcome, Joel. Hi, Laura. Thank you for having me. So before we dive into the meteor questions, I just need to know. Why the name placeholder? Well, we couldn't come up with a name. So our lawyers did. All of our legal documents said placeholder management in brackets because Chris and I couldn't come up. Chris, my partner, Chris, we couldn't come up with a name. And so there was a point at which we just had to incorporate. So we went with placeholder.

Okay. I love that. And by the way, for listeners who don't know, he's referring to Chris, Berniske, who's been on the podcast a couple of times and is well known for his models of token valuations, I guess. So you fell down the crypto rabbit hall while working for the Dominican government. Tell us what happened. That's right. I started working for the government of the Dominican Republic in early 2013 after shutting down a payments company. And I was hired to start a department called the Digital Economy Department at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. And one of our mandates was to work on payment system reform policies and infrastructure. And through that work, I did some traveling around Latin America and got to know a little bit about the political

environment surrounding payments in different countries in Latin America and became really frustrated with the inability of governments to really coordinate their efforts and create a unified financial system in the region. And then I started looking for a technology solution to that problem. And that's how I discovered Bitcoin. And how did you transition from that to becoming an analyst at Union Square Ventures, which is what your next gig was? So that was an interesting and a little bit random transition. I had known, not known the USV team directly, but they used to have a website that was a little bit like hacker news, a little bit like a forum that I, that I would frequent. And it was a small community, so there weren't a lot of other people on that community. So it was

easy to stand out. And after about a year of working at the government, USV opened up its analyst position, which is a two-year position, usually, and I applied. And what's interesting about it is that there is, the application process is basically two videos and, you know, something that you write. And the two videos was one around what drives you and the other was around what services out there inspire you. And I was driven, I said that I was driven by services that help or allow more people to make more money. And then in the service that I picked, I actually picked Telegram because they were building a communications protocol. And I thought protocols were very important. And both of those things resonated with Union Square Ventures, which got me the

interview. Interesting. And while you were at USV, what did you do? So I joined my application project, which was kind of the second stage, was I did a study of blockchain APIs. I had already fallen down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and the reason I wanted to work at USB besides it being USB was I'd also gotten tired of working for a small crop government. And I wanted to continue working on this idea or this market. And it was great timing because at the time, USB had just invested in Coinbase Series A a couple of months before I joined. And so USB was already coming into the space or had begun making investments in this space, but no one really knew, not just at USB, but in general, we didn't really know how this was all going to play out. And blockchains felt like a very

interesting technology lacking a use case. And so I took it upon myself to figure that out. And USB didn't have a whole lot of structure or guided management. And so it was really like a playground for learning. And they really gave me the platform to go out and explore this market. get to know entrepreneurs and participate in a couple of early stage investments. So it sounds like you were part of the process for deciding which crypto projects to invest in. If so, what was that process? Like how did USV make its decisions? You know, at that time, there wasn't much of a process. If I were to describe it, it was a little bit like it felt a little bit like I was the kid who had found a new thing

and they were letting me play with it. And the reason it feels that way is that USB has always, or in general, describes itself as a series A stage firm in terms of the stage in which the firm typically makes investments, series A and on. And the blockchain investments that we made, this was before we called the crypto, the blockchain investments that we made were uncharacteristically seed deals. So the first one that I saw happen shortly after I joined was Albert's investment in one name, which is now Blockstack. And then shortly after that, we got to know the mine team,

which then came to be known as Media Chain and then merged with Spotify. And that was the first investment in blockchain that I worked on. And what would happen is I would find these teams and get to know them and want to work with them. And one of the partners would kind of sponsor me and make the investment and then let me run with it. And so was there any type of, investment thesis at that time? And actually just for listeners, let's name the time frame that you were working there. So this is now 2014 and I left in early 2017. Okay. And so was there some sort of

investment thesis or was it really kind of one-off projects where you were like, you know, this seems interesting and these founders seem really promising. Like, was it more like that? Or was there? Because your writings really indicate that you had some kind of overall thesis for how the space would develop, at least as early as 2014, from what I can tell. Yeah. Early on, I think we had an investment instinct more than a thesis. And the instinct came from something that is a good skill in venture capital, just pattern recognition. And what we saw in the blockchain was something that we've seen over the history of information.

technology, which is an open source platform or an open source architecture that felt like it had the potential to really turn into something great. We didn't quite know how they were going to work. And so when we made those investments in media chain, their open bazaar and a few others, one of the open questions was, how are these companies ever going to make money or how are we ever going to get a return? Because at the end of the day, as interesting as it can be in theory, it is a fund and you have to produce a profit. And we went into all of those deals with no answers to those questions and with the idea that the best way to learn was to make the investments and work with the teams.

From that first kind of stage in the 2014-2015 timeframe, what I realized was, okay, there's a new application stack that's being built here. And I kind of put together a model, which I called the blockchain. application stack, which at the time was very Bitcoin-based because it was so early days that there wasn't really much more than Bitcoin and a few out coins. And Ethereum had been announced, but wasn't out. And the idea was, well, you know, we can use the blockchain as a kind of foundational layer for data. And then on top of that, we can build. There's protocol layers and applications layers. And I was just describing what the blockchain application stack looked

like, right? And it felt different from the internet. And that I was mostly looking at Bitcoin and in Bitcoin, you have Bitcoin, and then you have overlay networks or protocols like Lightning and, you know, layer two services. And then you have applications like Coinbase and then you have the users. And so I kind of went off that and that gave us a framework that we could use to start studying the space. And then over time, as we made more investments, we got to understand that, you know,

we opened up a world of understanding in a way in terms of, okay, there's something much deeper going on here. Yeah, we're going to get into all of that in more detail later because it's incredibly fascinating, but I want to keep moving through your bio. So in 2017, you left to launch placeholder. Why? A bunch of reasons, but it starts with, I met Chris in 2016, and we really became fast friends. You know, I think you and I met him at the same event. Was it at that koala workshop? Yes, yes.

Yeah, because, yeah, I remember that event, because, yeah, I remember that event, because, Well, obviously, partially because I had talked to Chris on the phone, but then I met him in person. But also, I remember the panel you spoke on, and I remember thinking that guy is super smart. Well, thank you. That's very flattering. So we actually didn't meet at that event. We met a couple weeks later. Chris emailed me a paper that he had just finished with Coinbase calling Bitcoin a new asset class.

And I don't remember this part. This is how he tells the story. Apparently, I took the paper. and we met for coffee and I walked into the coffee shop and told him that I had the paper printed in my hand and said, you know, I haven't read your paper, but I agree with it. And but the part that I agreed with it was in the, what was so exciting about meeting him was that that was right around the time when I started to realize that the value was in, in the assets and in the crypto assets and not in the applications necessarily. and the way he was looking at it from a U.S.A class perspective made that a lot more clear. And so we bonded over that. And so that's how our friendship started.

And then towards the end of 2016, as this thesis around crypto assets and tokens was starting to become more and more clear. And the market as a whole was starting to embrace it, we saw the beginning of the sort of crypto hedge fund wave come to market. And that's around the time that Polychain got started. And that was one of the last deals that I worked through at USV and so on. And sometime in October 2016, Chris and I were out somewhere. And that's when we first started talking about what, you know, a future might look like in which we work together. He was working at ARC. I was at USV. We initially didn't think that we would leave our respective firm so soon.

But come 2017, the market's just exploding. And we decided to both leave and start placeholder. What does Placeholder do? So Placeholder is a venture capital firm, and that was a very conscious decision, and it's related to what I just mentioned around the crypto hedge fund wave, because by the time we decided to start a firm, we had the option to go the hedge fund route or the venture capital route. And we chose the venture capital route because we saw the volatility in the market, and we very much prefer. the committed capital structure of the venture capital fund. And so our fund, like most venture capital funds, is a 10-year fund and it's committed capital, which means that our investors can't withdraw their investment from the fund, unlike in most hedge funds. And so what that means is that

our fund is a lot more stable. We don't have to deal with investor withdrawals. We don't have to subject the fund to the whims of the market in that way, and that allows us to make bigger, longer terms and longer term investments. And so what is the lockup period for your LPs? 10 years. And why? So if I'm an LP and I have this option of investing in a crypto hedge fund versus one with a 10 year lockup, why would I opt for your structure?

Well, number one, it's much cheaper for you as an LP. A hedge fund, there's the sort of 220 fee model that also applies to VC, but it works differently in a hedge fund than an venture fund. In a hedge fund, you take 2% a year in management fee from total assets under management, so whatever the value of the portfolio is at that point in time or year after year. And you also take 20% carry of the, or 20% of the profits year after year, typically. And some hedge funds even do take profits quarterly. And so that really prevents money from compounding because you're constantly taking money off of the portfolio

or taking assets from the portfolio or reallocating them. In a venture fund, there's a two-and-twenty fee model, but it's based off of the committed capital, so the total size of the fund. And so the management fee is fixed. It doesn't grow with the size of the fund. And then the other big difference is that we don't take any carry until after we have returned 100% of committed capital back to our investors. And so we don't make any money until we've given all the money back. And then after that, we only take carry when we return capital to investors as opposed to on a content. basis. So if you're a long-term investor with a long-term mindset and you want to invest in the

asset class for the long haul, this fund structure, just from that perspective, is much more capital efficient and much cheaper for you. From a strategic perspective, it's this thing that I mentioned earlier around the volatility in the market, making it difficult to operate a hedge fund if you are facing withdrawals, for example. And so if you have an investor base that is more interested in short-term profits and there is a big change in the broader market environment, a hedge fund can really kill itself if a lot of the investors pull out at once. And that can be bad for the other investors who want to stay in. So for longer-term investors, a venture structure can be a lot more comfortable because it's more permanent, more stable. So it sounds like maybe your

profits, your personal profits might be slightly less, but the longevity of your fund is, or the potential for the longevity is increased, something like that? something like that though I you know it's more than slightly I would say it's much less but it's a trade off between it becomes a question of what kind of work do you want to do and this goes back to what placeholder does Chris and I were both analysts at different kinds of financial firms and our favorite thing to do is not so much invest as it is just analysis and working with the teams and helping entrepreneurs and with a hedge fund structure you your incentives are set up such that you want to create the maximum portfolio value for the next quarter for the next year. With a 10-year fund with this structure, because our payout is stretched out and pushed over to the later part of the fund and to the long-term, we're more incentivized to do deeper, longer-term work. And so we decided that we didn't want to be on coin market cap every day checking prices and trying to squeeze profits out of market fluctuations, but rather we want to. wanted to have a kind of slower pace of work and really drill in with the teams and help them succeed. I think that's a good idea. I think I also would go to Crazy Town if I had to check

coin working at every day. I would be a terrible hedge fund manager. So what are your assets under management? So we raised over $100 million at the end of last year. And who are some of your LPs? So our LPs are mostly institutional. Our first batch of LPs, where Unuscore Ventures was our first investor. And we have investors like Andreessen and Foundry Group. More on the institutional signed. We have investors like Aberdeen Standard, Morgan Stanley, and Vesco, some fund of funds like Truebridge. And we have a couple of foundations and nonprofits like Texas Children's Hospital and so on. Oh, okay. I interviewed Eddie Duslack at a conference. Is that who you know there? TCH.

Yeah. No, our contact is a different person, but we got to know the whole team and we were very impressed with everyone. Okay. You plan to make only 15 to 20 investments over a four-year period, which is extremely selective in an environment where new projects are springing up every hour, it seems like. What is your process for deciding upon a potential investment? So I'm borrowing a lot from USV in that I kind of like there being no process in a way. It's a little bit more art than science in some ways. And this is where Chris and I are very complementary because Chris is more pragmatic as an investor than I am. And so we have different styles.

From my perspective, the way I work, I treat it as a long conversation with the teams and with the entrepreneurs. And what I really want to get at is, do I, first, do I think that this team and these entrepreneurs can build what they are setting out to build? Second, do I think that what they're building is going to be very valuable? And third, do I want to work on it? And if the answer to all those questions is yes, then I may be inclined to make an investment. But there isn't a standard process that I follow. And it's more of a feature of venture capital where, It's the riskiest asset class in many ways or one of the riskiest asset classes.

And a lot of the work is more art than science and different people have different processes for deciding whether they want to make an investment or not. And for that first question that you ask about whether or not you think the team can accomplish their goals, how do you figure that out? Well, there's many layers to that. And it also depends on the stage of the team. If you have a much later stage team that has already been executing and has put stuff out there that works, then that is a much easier question to answer. When you're dealing with three entrepreneurs and an idea, then it requires a little bit more work. The simple answer is you can vet them, check their background, much like you would, a potential employee. You can do reference calls.

We don't go as far as to make full background checks, but you can do that. And so you can diligence the team in that way. But it's all part of that sort of long conversation. If you're meeting, for example, the CTO of a team, then if they can, one rule of thumb for me is if they can explain the technology to me in a way that I can understand it and their background checks out, then they're probably a pretty good engineer or they understand very well what they're building. So that's a good signal for me. And then there's this concept in VC, which is this idea of founder market fit, which is also kind of abstract and more art than science. but sometimes you get a founder that doesn't quite match the market. And this is imprecise because you don't want to miss out on an investment because you misread a founder

or you didn't think that they were the right fit, but they were good at executing and so on. But I think just to bring it down to a more concise answer, it varies. It changes with every team. and you kind of have to feel your way through it, and there's a lot of instinct involved in it. Right now, it seems like a very easy time to raise money for these projects. So how do you compete with other firms that are also trying to get an allocation, and how do you negotiate a fair valuation?

Well, we like to win deals on the basis of our work. We tend to be more opinionated and conservative on the valuation side, in part because we understand that we're in a stage of, the market where nobody really knows what these things are worth truly. And so we have to proceed with caution in part also because we have such a long time frame that we don't care if the token is going to be, you know, a two, three X next year because that's not when we, that's not our focus. We're really, we're a 10 year fund, so we care more about where it's going to be in five, six, seven years. And so understand that there's a lot of volatility in the market. And we may be in a very

different place next year than we are right now. Just as right now, we're in a very different place than we were a year ago. We tend to be more conservative there. But the argument that we make to entrepreneurs is, and we do this through our work, is you have the ability, and this is, you know, as if we were speaking to an entrepreneur, you have the ability to choose who you take your money from. And we don't make claims about other investors' work styles, but we know the work that we do and we think it's valuable. And if the entrepreneur is interested in working with us to help them solve the problems that they're facing, then the price will reflect that.

So we don't engage in bidding wars and have no interest in sort of winning a deal on the basis of outbidding everyone else as much as we are interested in winning a deal on the basis of the relationship. And since these are open source projects, how do you approach investing differently than you What if these were startups where their code and data were proprietary? That is, that's a huge win for VCs, I think. You can actually see for the teams that have open sourced their work and have built their networks out in the open. You can see their progress.

You can see them executing. You can poke through GitHub and you can see the project evolve. And you can have the code vetted by other people. You can, part of the diligence process can involve. diligence in the quality of the code and the quality of the technical implementation in a way that you really couldn't be for, because now you do get to look at the code. And it's really important in this market in particular because ultimately as an investor who holds tokens in crypto networks, you are relying on the code more than anything else. So it's very important that you diligence the code as well. What structure are you using to invest in these projects?

Are you investing directly in the tokens? or are you taking equity in these companies or how does that work? So the structures vary and they vary mostly based on the side, not the size, the stage of the team that we're investing in. Our primary interest is in investing in decentralized information networks and crypto networks and holding the tokens directly. When we encounter a team that we want to support but hasn't released a token yet, then you can't hold a token directly. so you can use other instruments like a SAFT or some other kind of futures agreement, but also at least my personal preference is to invest in equity in a company that's going to release the token in the future.

And the reason I prefer equity to SAFTS or other structures is that when you have an early stage team that is still in the design and development process for their network, there's a bunch of open questions around what is the network's monetary policy going to be like? or is it going to change? Is it the right one? And when you do a SAFT, for example, and you're pre-selling a fixed amount of tokens, for example, or a fixed amount of a network,

you're kind of locking yourself into a particular economic model for the service, which in the future may turn out to be problematic for the entrepreneurs if they later decide that or realize that they need to adopt a different mechanism or a different way of releasing the token. And with equity, you kind of solve that problem because what we're saying when we invest in the equity of a company that's going to release a crypto network is we're in the same boat as you. If the entrepreneurs and the investors are in the same company and the same cap table, then we'll figure out the economic model later. We'll figure out the tokenomics. We'll work with you on figuring out the issuance models.

But for the time being, we have an agreement that we're partners and we'll figure out how to release the token later. we can get involved into the signed process using that structure. My next question for you was going to be about what kind of support you offer teams once you do make an investment. So did you start to kind of give some examples of what types of help you offer? Those are some of the examples. We describe placeholder or our practice as being focused on crypt economics and governance. I would say that we're pretty balanced in our thinking. Chris focuses generally more on the crypto economics, and I focus generally more on the governance,

but we overlap a lot and we work very closely together. And we've found that many teams, especially earlier in their life, craves some support on that end. And it's not that we claim that we know what we're doing because these are such new fields. The entire space is 10 years old where all of these are experiments. But we do spend a lot of time thinking about those two areas, and we spend a lot of time looking at different projects and different teams. And so we have a wider perspective in terms of what different kinds of techniques or ideas or approaches there are to solve different kinds of problems in the design of a crypto network.

So there is that kind of support that we like, that kind of work that we like to do in the early stage. But there's also all the other things that plague early stage startups. Going back to the founding of placeholder, one of the other realizations tied to the fund structure was that behind all these multi-hundred million dollar network valuations, you still have early stage, series A stage teams that have all the same problems that a typical startup has, except now they're operating in this open source public world. But that doesn't mean that all the challenges that occur in a normal startup don't occur in this world.

And so we do a lot of work on that front as well. There's all the kinds of fires that you can put out operationally, to be more personal stuff when you have a founder that's just, you know, burned out and demoralized, and sometimes they need a pep talk or some direction. We do a fair amount of that as well. And what are the different ways or moments in time when you might exit from an investment? No, that's one of the big luxuries of venture capital that have been removed in this market. And in traditional VC, the decision of when to sell doesn't fall on you because you are a minority shareholder

in a private company that's either going to get bought or going to go public. And that's, you know, the decision of exiting is made for you by the entrepreneurs or by the company growing to the point where you can go public. Here, we have to decide when to sell. And we haven't made that decision yet. And we're not going to do it for a while, so we get to kick the can down the road for a little bit. But we do think about that question. Part of the reason we have the luxury of kicking the count down the road is our fund structure, right?

We have a long-term time horizon. This is our first year in business, and so we don't have to confront that for a while. But we will have to come up with a framework for thinking around when is the right time to exit an investment. Well, we don't have any rules or any specific ideas about how that works, partly because every deal is different or every investment is different, and partly because we haven't encountered that yet. we do have kind of values or morals in a way in that sense. And for us, it's something that we borrowed from one of our investors. We exit when the thesis has played out. When the network is successful and has scaled and it has a lot of users and it's doing what it's set out to do and it's working well. It's a well-oiled

machine and it doesn't need our support anymore. Then we can start releasing the capital back into the network and get ourselves out from the network and leave it to the community. We're going to discuss your FAPP Protocols thesis and placeholders investments and more. But first, I'd like to take a quick break to tell you about a fabulous sponsor. Blockchain Warehouse is an international blockchain accelerator, offering a wide range of token sale advisory services to promising blockchain-based ventures. With access to heavyweight technology leaders, the accelerator is heavily involved in crafting the blockchain technology, token sale, and regulatory landscape.

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reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us. Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. I'm speaking with Joel Monegro, partner, at placeholder ventures. Let's talk about your blog post about the fat protocols thesis. I remember when that was published, it made waves, and it became, at least in my mind, part of the fuel to the

eventual ICU craze that came about in subsequent months. For listeners who haven't heard of the Fat Protocols thesis, can you give a brief summary? Sure. So the basic thesis is, it's more of an observation than a thesis is that value in crypto network seems to accrue more at the protocol layer, so at the actual network layer like the Bitcoin protocol or the Ethereum protocol and so on, then at the application layer, which are the interfaces and services built on top. So that came about after actually looking at our Coinbase investment back when I was at USV. And what I did is I looked at every time that we had put money in Coinbase and then went back and looked at the price of Bitcoin at those times and calculated what it would look like if we had instead bought

Bitcoin and Bitcoin turned out to be a better investment. And that was kind of the genesis observation of that thesis. How well do you think the Fat Protocols thesis has held up and how well do you think it will continue to hold up in the future? So I think the thesis has held up well. We've seen this explosion of growth and value at the protocol layer or at the Dow layer. of crypto networks, we're seeing more and more services being built with tokens that are the ones that accrue value instead of equity in companies. I do wonder to what extent that is a function of the market realizing that we have a new asset class here. And so all the new capital is going there. And we're seeing less capital go into application layer services.

And so I think that it's too early to tell how it's going to play out over the long term. but what I do have conviction in and we based our entire investment thesis on or the entire fund on this idea is that all the most of the new value being created in this ecosystem is going to accrue to the tokens. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the application layer doesn't have any value or is going to accrue very little value. You look at a company like Coinbase, it's an immensely valuable company riding on top of an immensely valuable protocol. And I think we're going to continue to see some of those. And I think there's real investment opportunities at the application layer. But I certainly do think that the protocol layer is a better place to be as an investor.

One thing I've always been curious about when it comes to the FAP Protocols thesis is just how many of the really valuable protocols there will end up being. Do you have any thoughts on how that's going to look like? As you probably, I'm sure, as you know, right now there's this huge race in the smart contract space. So are we going to see five successful smart contract platforms or is there really only give me one? Or what are your thoughts on that? That is the trillion dollar question. The idealist in me believes that we will see a large number of blockchains doing many

different things. But there's also the investor in me that recognizes that cycle after cycle we get this explosion of innovation and all of these new firms and investment. opportunities pop up and as markets mature, they tend to consolidate around the smaller and smaller group of players. And so it's an interesting tension because when you have that kind of market centralization, it ends up being bad for innovation. But it most often is good for consumers.

So there's a lot of things to unpack there. But there's one thing that keeps me on the more idealist side in terms of believing that we will see a larger number of networks than people expect. And that is that the larger network is the harder is to coordinate it over time and to manage it over time. And I think we're starting to see some of those, or we've seen some of those cracks in the way Bitcoin has grown. And in some ways, the way Ethereum has grown. And what we've seen is that as developers get frustrated with a particular platform, at least in the space, there's something new here, which is you can fork.

And I think that as these networks scale and become more and more important, larger and larger, there will be more and more disagreements between different groups of different communities, and that is going to be a driver towards more decentralization over time. That is more of an instinct than anything else, and I did qualify it with the idealist in me, because I think it's a very ideological way of looking at the world. But specifically on smart contracts themselves, I see smart contract functionality as a bit of a commodity in the way that in the sense that any blockchain can really implement as a smart contract system if they wanted to. And so I think that what we'll see is we'll see a lot of many

different chains with smart contract functionality. But the more important question is what are developers going to do? Where are developers going to build decentralized applications? Which blockchains are they going to choose? And what are they going to base their decisions on? And I think that the actual functionality is not going to be the issue. I think that we will reach a kind of feature parity between different chains in terms of what you can do with them as a developer. But I think that the developers in the future are going to base their decision on where to build on the basis of governance and community. And so I look for good governance mechanisms and strong communities in blockchains. And obviously there's a lot of different experiments right now in governance.

What are some of the more promising solutions that you see and also some of the bigger problems that you think the space needs to tackle? So we've announced one investment, which is in Decred. And Decred is a blockchain, it's its own blockchain that started from the basis of let's create a network with good governance. and then from that core idea, then let's expand and grow into more and more features. And what's really brilliant about that is that they basically decided to leave it up to the community, what Decrit becomes over time. And on Decrit's roadmap is smart contract functionality in its own way and the ability to create decentralized autonomous entities.

But DeCrit started from a much more humble place with a focus on let's create the tools for the community to build this network and for the community to drive the direction of the network, which is really, at the end of the day, what's important about governance. We obviously have a lot of conviction in the decrit team, which is why we made that investment. But it is, it is to me one of the best governed, or at least one of the networks that is best set up for long-term evolution because of its good governance process. And that governance process is a combination of proof of work, proof of stake, plus this percentage of every block reward that gets allocated to the developers. Can you just describe a little bit what that looks like and why you

think it's smart? Sure. So it starts at that very first layer that you described. So the decrets consensus algorithm is a hybrid proof of work, proof of stake system that's different from, say, bitcoins, and that Bitcoin is only proof of work. And in proof of work, you have basically the machines that run the network and verify transactions are the ones that ultimately have all the governance power. What we learned with Bitcoin is that that alienates the actual users because if you hold Bitcoin but don't have a machine plugged into the network, then you don't have that much of a say.

A hybrid proof of work, proof of stake system, what it introduces is a system of checks and balances between the users and the machines in some way in that the machines in D-crate are producing blocks much in the same way that Bitcoin's machines are producing blocks, but each block has to be vetted and validated by the proof of stake layer. And the proof of stake layer is driven by the asset holders, by the holders of the decred coin. And so every 10 minutes or every, actually degrates block time is shorter, but every time a block is produced, five random users in a way are being picked

from the pool of people who are willing to participate in that process to decide on whether that block is valid or not. And then if that block is the invalid, then it gets added to the chain. And so what that allows the community to do is to control for minors that go rogue or control for miners that act against the interests of the network. And then from that core governance component, they have built more and more user-facing governance functions. And so the latest release is a platform called Polytea, which allows the DECR community to make proposals. for funding and to make proposals for upgrading the Decrit platform. And so that allows the users, the Decrit community at large, to govern and direct the evolution

of the network over the long term. One example of that is recently Decrit announced a proposal to build a decentralized exchange, and that proposal is going to be put to a vote to the Decrit community using the Polytea system. And us as Decrit holders can participate in that process and can vote on whether we think it's a good idea to add a decentralized exchange or not. And so that gives us power as investors to vote on whether the network is going in the right direction or not. And so as an investor, that feels like a very good place to be because you have a lot more influence over the long-term evolution of the network than you do in a network like Bitcoin. You wrote a very long but interesting blog post about

information technology cycles and their business models. And it began with describing describing how the transistor and how IBM came to dominate the market, and then how later Microsoft dominated. It ends with how Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are now the big, I guess, the consolidators. Yes, the Titans. So how do you see crypto fitting into this long view of historical, technological and business cycles that you described? So what we've seen is ever since the beginning of the information technology industry, starting with, as you mentioned, the transistor, is the cycle of expansion and consolidation. And what drives each expansion cycle seems to be the introduction of a new open architecture that changes the information technology paradigm and commoditizes the previous cycle.

And so just running through history, we get the transistors. which was an openly available technology that dramatically collapsed the cost of producing information circuits. And so that created an explosion of integrated circuits and that allowed for the creation of the modern computer industry, starting with the sort of IBM era. And so we got the birth of the computer industry

as a result of the introduction of the transistor, transforming the electronics field. And then we had this big wave of innovation around mainframe computers and so on that later consolidated around IBM as the market mature. And then we had another open platform come along, which was the microprocessor, another innovation, that collapsed the cost of building computers by commoditizing what IBM did and making it available in a single component that was widely available. And that allowed for first the decentralization of the computer industry, because then we got

an explosion of hardware manufacturers and computers went from being large and taking them entire rooms to, you know, now our smartphones, all based on the microprocessor as the platform. But what happened is that value moved one layer up to the software layer. And so the microprocessor really took hold in the 70s. And also in the 70s, we got the software industry boomed on top. And so we got Microsoft and PC software companies that emerge. emerged. And then it consolidated, of course, around Microsoft later in the 80s and into the 90s. And then in the middle of that consolidated market around Microsoft in the 90s, we got another open platform, which was the Internet and Linux, I guess two open platforms, that commoditized what Microsoft did.

So Microsoft's business, if you think about it, was built on the basis of proprietary software running on proprietary computers and proprietary distribution, because Microsoft, had a proprietary distribution network. They could put more CDs in more shelves across the world than any small computer vendor or independent software vendor. And so when the Internet comes along and when Linux comes along, we have a free operating system combined with a free distribution network. And so that directly challenges Microsoft's leverage and this last cycle around the Internet that we saw

is rooted on those two platforms. Once again, value moved up from the software layer to the world we live in today, which is the data layer. And if you think about Google and you think about Facebook and you think about Amazon, you think about Netflix and all of these large technology companies, at the end of the day, their greatest asset where all their leverage lies is in the large amounts of data that they hold. And it's proprietary data.

They make it available to select parties and they charge for it. Their entire business model is based on either charging for access to that data or leveraging the data to provide a better service. So, for example, in the case of Amazon, Amazon is. is able to outcompete anybody else in the business because they just have so much better data around demand and consumer demand and so on. And same for Google and Facebook, et cetera. Crypto comes along and does to Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, what Linux and the internet did to Microsoft, which is directly challenged the business model by commoditizing it.

And in this market, it takes the shape of free data in some way. If you look at the at blockchains and in the way they're constructed, all the data is open in some way or it's available. And so data is no longer the proprietary asset in this world, in the crypto world. The data is open and available for developers to use and interact with. So it becomes pretty difficult to build a business on the basis of proprietary data when everyone else has the data. So you've successfully commoditized it, but then value has to accrue somewhere else. and then we get into a whole conversation around governance. Oh, wow.

So you really think, because, yeah, I was going to ask you about, you know, how this business model is going to change. So you feel like the value will accrue to networks based on their governance model? Yes. One more precise way to describe that is I at least personally believe that the tokens that will accrue the most value over the longest period of time. are the ones that have a governance function built into them. So, Decrit is another good example. The Decrit is a cryptocurrency, so I can use it as a cryptocurrency, but Decrit also gives me power to govern the Decrit network as a user as a holder.

And I think ultimately, features get commoditized, software gets commoditized, and now in this world, data gets commoditized because it's widely available. And so what becomes important once you have large networks that have taken over the world, where all the data is free and open, then what becomes important is what are the systems that we put in place to manage those networks and manage that data. And I think that over time,

as these networks become more valuable, the power to govern them and the power to change them will grow as well. In that light, what's your outlook on Bitcoin and Ethereum? Well, I'll put on my VC hat and look at it from a pattern recognition perspective. and that tells me that the first version of anything is rarely the one that wins. The first social network is not Facebook or the first search engine was not Google.

The first PC manufacturer wasn't, or the first computer manufacturer wasn't IBM. The first operating system was in Windows. The winners tend to emerge later in the cycle as the market begins to understand what matters and what doesn't then newcomers come along with better systems. And so I don't want to say that, you know, every cycle is different. So I don't want to say that I don't see a future on Bitcoin and Ethereum and quite the opposite. I'm at the moment quite long, both. But I also believe that over time, we will see new approaches to both of those kinds of services that will resonate with larger parts of the population.

And it's important to remember that we're so early in this cycle that most people in the world are not encrypto. though most people in the world are not participants in this ecosystem, but they will be at some point in the future. And they have not yet made a decision about whether Ethereum or something else is going to be the dominance of our contract platform. And so I think that it'll take some time for us to really see how these things are going to play out. In the placeholder investment thesis, which I urge listeners to read. I'll put it in the show notes. You and Chris mentioned the importance of crypto economics. What is your current working thesis around what types of systems will work well versus which ones won't? You know, that's a bit of an abstract question.

In what way are you thinking? Oh, just, I mean, well, we've talked about governance a little bit, but I don't know if you have any particular thoughts on proof of stake versus proof of work or any other different consensus algorithms. Or I know Chris has certain thoughts around like the velocity of a token and how that affects the value. So, I mean, there's just any number of factors or variables that you could be playing with and, you know, find more promising than other ones. So that becomes a design process question. And particularly on cryptoconomics, it varies network to network.

It varies service to service. You have to design custom crypto economics for every single new network that you are building. But there is one thing that is constant, which is that you're probably going to get it wrong in the beginning. And even if you don't get it wrong, you're probably going to have to change it in the future. And so the reason is because when as networks grow and more stakeholders come to the network, the profile of the network changes. The dynamics of the participants change. And so cryptoconomics isn't something that is fixed. It's something that evolves over time.

So for example, there's a debate now on Ethereum on whether Ethereum should switch to, a fixed supply model where they would cap the total number of ether that would ever be created or continue in this perpetual mining model. And those are all open questions that are never going to go away. And this is why we think that governance and crypteconomics are intimately tied with each other because if you think of crypteconomics as the sort of rules of a blockchain and you think of the governance mechanisms as the mechanisms to change the rules and the power. to change the rules, then what you want to achieve is you want to achieve a good balance.

You want to come out with a cryptoconomic model that works. And here works means that it incentivizes all the participants in the network to do what you want them to do. But you also want to make sure that you have the right mechanisms to allow the participants to change the rules in the future as they learn more about the network as they learn more about themselves. And so I look for networks that have both, or at least teams that are building both of those values into the design of the protocol, both sound cryptoconomics that works for whatever

service they are building, but also governance mechanisms that allow the community to change it in the future. In another blog post, you wrote about the blockchain applications deck. What does that look like and how does it differ from the tech stack we know today? So that is a blog post from 2014 when I thought that everything was going to be built on top a Bitcoin and that turned out not to be the case. But I think the overall, but I think the general structure

remains and there's a graphic in that post, if I recall correctly, where it presents these set of layers where at the bottom most layer, I said, you know, there would be the Bitcoin blockchain and then on top of that you would have a protocol layer,

which would be services that would be built on top of that blockchain that would do different things. And then on top of that, you would see an API layer, which was kind of unnecessary, but basically to illustrate that there would be an interface between developers and these protocols. And then on top of that layer, there would be an application layer,

which is the user interfaces that people actually utilize to interact with the services built on the protocols that live below. And I think that structure remains today. What has changed is that we're no longer building everything on top of Bitcoin, but rather there's a much more diverse ecosystem of blockchains on top of which you can build. That is a little bit different from the current tech stack or the internet stack, and that on the internet you have the protocol layer.

And so these are all the IP protocol stack. So you have TCP IP and HTTP and protocols like SMTP and FTP that are simple messaging protocols that were devised a long time ago to help computers talk to each other over a network. And then on top of that, you have the entire application layer and all of the data and all of the coordination around what a service is and what it provisions and what it looks like to consumers,

that happens at the application layer of the Internet, and it lives inside companies like Google and Facebook and so on. And so Google and Facebook and Amazon and all of these companies are building on top of the Internet protocols, but then they control everything that lives on top of those simple. messaging protocols. Here in the blockchain, we're encoding more of these functionality into the protocol itself. And so a good comparison might be looking at what PayPal looks like versus what

Bitcoin looks like. And so using the internet model, you have PayPal built on top of HTTP and a couple of other internet technologies. But all of the payment functionality, all of the ledger functionality, all of the identity functionality, all of the user interface, all of that has been bundled into the service that PayPal built and provides. If you look at Bitcoin, it's a lot more, or the Bitcoin ecosystem, it's a lot more layered. You have the internet communication protocols that allow for miners to communicate with each other to facilitate the Bitcoin network. But then in the Bitcoin protocol itself, we encoded a value transfer service.

And so we encoded the monetary policy. We encoded what it means to transfer a Bitcoin from one person to another, how that works, and all of those rules were built there. And then Coinbase, one layer up, provides the interface and provides the interaction mechanisms that users can use to transact with each other or to use Bitcoin. And that's a more layered ecosystem. And what's kind of brilliant about that is that it's much more resilient in the sense that it makes it such that you don't have to rely on Coinbase to use Bitcoin. and you can use any, there's a large number of different wallets and services that you can use, whereas with PayPal, you can only use PayPal, for example.

And so that is probably the most important difference in the way this ecosystem is evolving versus how the web evolved. Yeah, I just love this description. I think when I read things like what you wrote or think about this description that you just provided, it just blows my mind and it really kind of underscores for me how empowering I think this will be for everyday people. if it does end up getting built the way that a lot of people are envisioning, which is an open question. What is something that you and Chris disagree on when it comes to the crypto space? That is a tough question. I mean, if there isn't anything, maybe there isn't anything, but.

You know, we will have debates at times, but we have a very good consensus algorithm. We get to consensus very quickly. It can, it's kind of scary sometimes how good we are at arriving at consensus. And that's what's great about our relationship. It's very easy. We have very complimentary skills and ways of looking at things. And so because we're so complimentary, we usually, you know, when Chris has a strong opinion around something, it's good enough for me. And when I have a good strong opinion on something, it's good enough for Chris.

Interesting. Yeah, well, I know you guys are super close and always, always enjoy talking with you about everything going on in the space because you definitely are some of the brightest minds, in my opinion. We'll see what the listeners think. But it's been fantastic having you on the show. Where can people learn more about you or can touch with you? Thank you for having me. You know, the placeholder website, it's placeholder.vety. That's where we publish all of our work.

And that would be the best way to stay on top of what Chris and I are up to. Okay, great. Well, thanks so much for coming on Unchained. Thank you, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Joel, check out the show notes inside your podcast episode. New episodes of Unchained come out every Tuesday. If you haven't already, rate review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

If you liked this episode, share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Elaine Zelby, Fragile Recording, Jenny Josephson, Rahal Singh-Ready and Daniel Nuss. Thanks for listening.