Unchained - The Chopping Block: Points or Airdrops, Which Is the Better Engagement Model for Crypto Projects? - Ep. 603

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news and with special guest Aevo's Co-Founder - Julian Koh. This episode zeroes in on the latest buzz around the Jupiter ($JUP) airdrop: What's the real story behind Jupiter’s valuation and controversy? We peel back the layers of Jupiter's token strategy and its impact on market dynamics. The dialogue then shifts to the innovative approaches of Aevo (formerly Ribbon Finance) in pre-launch derivatives and the burgeoning trend of airdrop farming: How are Airdrop strategies altering the landscape of token valuation and investor behavior? The debate intensifies as we tackle the contentious battle between points systems and traditional airdrops: Are points a revolutionary engagement tool or a complex web of incentives? With the resurgence of ICOs and the strategic pivot of Ribbon Finance, we explore the implications of rebrands on the crypto ecosystem. Join us for an in-depth exploration of these critical topics and their profound impact on the world of cryptocurrency. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show Highlights 🔹 Jupiter Airdrop Deep Dive: Unraveling the complexities and controversies behind the Jupiter ($JUP) airdrop. 🔹 Valuation Variance: Examining the fluctuations in Jupiter token valuation and their market repercussions. 🔹 Community Engagement: Evaluating the effectiveness of @weremeow's live streams in shaping community perceptions. 🔹 Airdrop Discontent: Analyzing the liquidity dynamics and user dissatisfaction stemming from airdrop strategies. 🔹 Innovations in Derivatives: Exploring Aevo's unique approach to pre-launch derivatives in the DeFi space. 🔹 The Airdrop Farmer's Dilemma: Discussing the strategies used by airdrop farmers to hedge against price volatility. 🔹 Points vs. Airdrops Debate: Delving into the pros and cons of points systems compared to traditional airdrop mechanisms. 🔹 Rebranding Strategies: Assessing the impact of token rebrands, with a focus on Ribbon Finance's evolution. 🔹 Pre-IPO Markets and Crypto: Drawing parallels between traditional pre-IPO conversion markets and crypto points systems. 🔹 The Uncertainty Factor: Considering how the allure of uncertainty influences engagement and investment in crypto. 🔹 Protocol Dynamics: Investigating the effects of airdrop farmers on the health and engagement of blockchain protocols. 🔹 ICO Resurgence: Discussing the potential comeback of Initial Coin Offerings and their role in the crypto funding landscape. 🔹 Stress Testing with Points: Highlighting innovative uses of points for protocol stress testing like Eigenlayer. 🔹 Referral Systems in Crypto: Analyzing the impact of referral-based points systems on protocol engagement and growth. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Guest ⭐️ Julian Koh, Aevo's Co-Founder Disclosures Links Jupiter LFG Launchpad Blog Article - https://station.jup.ag/blog/jupiter-lfg-launchpad  Blockworks: “Jupiter airdrop draws criticism, but support remains strong” - https://blockworks.co/news/jupiter-airdrop-draws-criticism  Proposal: “Merge Ribbon Finance into Aevo” - https://gov.ribbon.finance/t/rgp-33-merge-ribbon-finance-into-aevo/709  Weremeow’s Twitch Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/weremeow  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there's enough demand, people will make pooled models. The pooled models become much harder to police. You know, it's like the cat and mouse game keeps going on. So, like, I think that's where it's extremely different than Web 2. And that's also something where it's like purely the on-chain stuff will dominate the centralized. Because the centralized things will look like Uber and they can shut you down, right? They can just turn off that market. Not a dividend.

It's a tale of two Kwan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. named training firms who are very involved. I like that ETH is the ultimate POMES. Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody.

Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together to give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. GM, everyone. Next we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain,

and Grand Puba at Conlin. Yo. Today we've got a special guest, Julian, the architect and Avo, formerly ribbon finance. Yep. I guess I'm Robert standing today. You are our defy maven today.

Or I guess not. The crypto connoisseur today. And then I'm Haseeb, the head, high man at Dragonfly. So we're also very sick. We have a very sick. Slightly sick. Slightly sick. Not that sick, but my voice makes it sound sicker than I actually am.

I want a caveat that nothing we say here is an investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping block that X, XYZ. for more disclosures. So Julian, welcome to the show. We should caveat that I think everybody here is an investor into you or into Ribbon Finance, I should say.

We wanted to get you on because there's a lot of topics today that are kind of circulating in the crypto world that we thought you'd be the perfect guest to talk about. And we also want to get some time to talk about what you're doing with Ribbon Finance and AVO because I think it's at the center of

a lot of conversations that people are having right now about where defy is going and where crypto is going generally. But the big news this week that you just explained to me that you've been totally on top of is Jupiter. So for those people who don't know, I'll give the very brief background. So Jupiter is a Dex aggregator on Solana. So a Dex aggregator is essentially, you can think of it like a price line for Dex's.

So essentially it looks across all different dexes and tries to find the best price, best execution. and it does fancy routing in order to give you the best possible price for whatever you want to buy. So one inch in which we are investors is the equivalent of this on Ethereum. Jupiter is essentially, they didn't take any VC backing. And people have been very excited about Jupiter because they were doing a point system. They technically did for, they did technically take VC for one project. Right.

One of the coins did raise money. Yes. Prior project, you mean? Yeah, it used to be like a curve on Solana basically last cycle. Oh, I see. Was it a Sabre? No, no, no. Saber was the twins or the brothers, sorry.

Oh, the McConaugh brothers. That's right. Okay, got it. So they were doing a separate. Okay. So they did something in the past of raised VC capital. Jupiter had no VC investors. So they had a very highly anticipated,

uh, uh, airdrop after their point system. Uh, and basically, we saw the day of their irdrop, huge amounts of activity. I think it crossed over a billion dollars in daily volume, several days leading up to the

irdrop, which is very anticipated. They actually flipped uniswap v4 for volume. And Salon on certain days actually superseded Ethereum, defy generally for volume. The airdrop finally took place on February 1st, and we saw huge amounts of capital. Some people, I think it was about, let me see here,

they rewarded about 10% of the supply to about a million wallets that were active on the decks aggregator before November 2nd. Today, the token is circulating about 60 cents, which would imply a fully diluted valuation of $6 billion, which would make them worth more than uniswap on a fully diluted basis. However, there's a lot of controversy around exactly how the airdrop took place. So despite the fact that, you know, some people got 40,000. dollars worth of Jupiter tokens on theirdrop. There's a lot of controversy about the way in which the team sold some of their tokens

or maybe sold some of their tokens during thisirdrop. So I couldn't understand it because there's a lot of people flinging around accusations on Twitter and it seems a little bit esoteric to me. Julian, can you walk us through like what the hell happened here and how do you think about it personally? Yeah, so I mean, this is what they call like an LBP on Ethereum. Basically, you can think of it as like a Unisop v3 position, but it's one-sided. So they don't post USC and juke tokens.

They just post juke tokens. And the range they had the jupe tokens was between 35 cents and 70 cents or 69 or something. And basically what this means is once the price crosses 69, the whole LP position would be fully in USC. and it would be about 150 mil of USTC. So I think that was sort of expected. The team sort of mentioned that this gives users or traders. The ability to sell back into the pool. It is sort of like good for traders and price discovery from their perspective.

But I think what caused the uproar is like a lot of users didn't read the fine print, which was the team's going to remove the LP position in like three days. So they actually extended that to seven days. But I think that sort of created all the drama where, you know, people just actually realized yesterday that, oh, if the price stays above 70 cents, the team's going to withdraw 150 mil of cash in a week. So I think that was sort of like the main cause for drama. And how do you feel about it? Do you feel like that's a fair criticism? Do you feel like, hey, they were transparent.

They said this from day one. I think they were pretty transparent, to be honest. I think, you know, they sort of masked some of the terminology with like new words that they came up with like an open market auction and stuff like that, as people usually do. So maybe some people were somewhat confused, but I mean, I kind of understood it pretty early on. So I felt like they didn't actually like change anything last minute, which I would consider wrong. In fact, like, they actually increased how long the LP position would be in the pool for from like three days to seven days. So, I mean, I think, yeah, anyone who actually understands, like, defy and read the fine print would have followed it. I think my main criticism is like, it's actually pretty hard to find this information because the founder just writes these blog posts on Twitter.

So it's just like these super long Twitter posts. And if you don't read them, you can't really find information. Yeah, I would say I agree with that description. I think they were actually in some ways extremely descriptive of this. And I think a lot of people who are complaining, like, yeah, we're really just complaining because they were hoping that everything would have been written in the language that they understood immediately. And I feel like they didn't really read the fine print and or they didn't get an air drops.

So they somehow were pissed in some weird way. But I feel like if you've watched, I mean, you have to be a little bit mentally insane to have watched all the content that Mr. Miao produced. I mean, that motherfucker was streaming 24-7 for like the last, you know, it's like watching a live stream for like a week. But like, you know, I think he did say everything multiple times. So you just kind of set it in weird formats and like, yeah, you know. But also, I think one thing that maybe I wouldn't have done, even though I know there was a reason they wanted to do this, was they like launched all these meme coins beforehand that confused people even more.

So, but I don't want to confuse our listeners with that because that is another very deep rabbit hole that I think you probably just want to watch the live streams for or like watch them on 5x to try to, to get. Wait, so literally live streams. What was he live streams? Miao's live streams are crazy. Like, yeah. Okay. What does he live stream? So, no, I mean, he's not like a streamer, but

like leading up to the event, he basically just said, like, fuck it, I'm going to go live and just like talk through the whole LBP process. I was one of the few hundred people watching it, so I guess I understood it pretty well. Yeah, I see. I see. Is he doxed or no? No, he's a public guy.

Yeah, he's completely doxed. I mean, I think he actually explained it pretty fairly. It's just like if you didn't really read or watch these like hours of content, maybe you would have missed the fact that they were going to withdraw like the LP or something. Yeah, all of this suggests that someone needs to train a Solana to an each person language model to convert all this Salana content to each people language like translator. Right. Tom, what's your take on this?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like, I think there's maybe the component around transparency. The other point, too, is like, you know, people's got air drops, you know, tens of millions of dollars and they're upset that the team is providing liquidity and maybe also taking some liquidity for themselves that they're not having raising any money. Like, I feel like no matter what you do with air drops, people are always going to be upset and they always want more, even though they're always getting free money. And so I think it's kind of comes back to the point around like, you know, you get this great

sort of press moment out of it. But, you know, to an extent there's always going to be people who are dissatisfied with some component of it. Yeah, I think like the dissatisfaction usually comes if there's not like an immediate price pump on the first day, which a lot of like people who may have missed that drop, they're probably like betting that, oh, maybe it'll still go up. they're trying to trade the event. So I think like if the event is like a nothing burger or it just goes down,

suddenly like all these people get mad. I mean, we've seen this like so many times. So I think, you know, like for Jupiter especially, I feel like a lot of the price discovery actually happen in these like premarkets, which maybe you'll speak about later. So like the actual day one launch was pretty boring. It was like not exciting at all. There's a great transition to talk about AVO actually.

Yeah, so one of the interesting parts of the story was the price discovery that started taking place before Jupiter actually launched because Avo, which is the product that was launched by originally Ribbon Finance, Avo actually listed a, I guess, futures for Jupiter before it launched. And I think at the time, the pricing on the futures was pretty in line with where the token originally came out. Talk us through how you think about launching derivatives of assets that don't yet exist. I remember back in the day, there were a few exchanges that started doing, like centralized exchanges that started doing this. Very interesting to see this happening in defy. I'd love to be your thoughts and strategy. You remember coin flex? There was a few others.

There was a few others. Yeah, yeah. There's some Chinese exchanges that also used to do that a lot. So like, I'm curious. Yeah, talk us through it. Some of them still do it today. I think Ku Koin is one of the bigger ones. But I mean, they kind of rip users off with like the fees like 5% or 2% or something just for one trade.

So it's really expensive. There's like physical delivery of coins. It's pretty sort of annoying to use, I think. And yeah, I think one of the ones that we got inspiration from was like the FTX coin base market, which was like they actually listed a coinbase perp before coinbase IPO which is like really interesting and i think you know liquidity was really bad and like i don't think any serious people are trading there but it was still like an interesting market um it's more akin to i would say like a prediction market compared to like an actual like future um so the type of people who want to trade these

things are more of like prediction market style speculators compared to like actual people who want to trade the stock. But yeah, I mean, we started working on this like maybe six months ago. I think the original idea was it came out of this like Binance launch pool. So Binance maybe six months ago announced they were going to launch Say, which was like a pretty anticipated coin. And like within our office, we were all just like guessing, oh, do we think Say is going to launch at a billion or like two billion?

and we're just like making a market like just casually. I think like someone just had a crazy idea like, oh, what if we just made a market on Avo itself for this? Like instead of just like betting P2P, what if you could just list some sort of market? So yeah, we kind of just did that. And I think the core idea was like, what if people could trade this and when the token actually launches,

we actually input like an index price. So it'll start converging onto the actual price of the token because of the funding rate. So it kind of is like this future, but it doesn't deliver on the day itself. It kind of like gently transitions into a regular perp through the funding rate when the actual token is launched. But before the token launches, you know, there's this whole long period where people are just trading this weird thing. Like no one actually knows what the price is. It's kind of completely dislocated. from anything. So it becomes a very interesting thing to trade as well.

So, yeah, Jupiter was like, obviously one of the most, like, anticipated launches in the last few months. We made a market for it in December. And when we first started this market, it was only trading at a billion. And then over the month, like Solana and Jupiter got like super hyped. The market started trading all the way up to like $8 billion. and over the last week it sort of like came down all the way to 0.4, like 4 billion and then it kind of settled at 6. So yeah, I think interestingly, a lot of people, we're trading this market.

It was like our biggest pre-launch market by far, quite a few mill of open interest. So I actually do think a lot of like price discovery happens on these things, interestingly. And like, I mean, one of the most interesting phenomenon that I've seen is there are all these YouTube videos and like tutorials and on YouTube of like, how do I hedge my adrop on AVO? Because I mean, if you know that Jupiter is giving you like 200 tokens in a month, I can go to Avo and just like sell it now and like lock in the price. So that has become like one of the interesting primary use cases of these markets. All these like industrial level Airdrop farmers can kind of lock in a price. Yeah. So actually a very funny thing I've observed recently,

and I won't name names, but I've heard some larger fund investors who have literally indexed how they were valuing a private company like pre-token based on the Avo price. So they were like, here are the comps, Avo prices of their pre-token launch. And so we're going to value this round of this other pre-launch, like earlier than that pre-launch token at some multiple times the Avo price.

So like I feel like that is, if there is a sign of success, it's like private market. I mean, that does make sense. Yeah. Yeah. Would you rather trust like a million dollars in like actual secondary physically delivered SAVs or would you rather trust like, you know, 10 million open interest in AVO? I agree. But like, you know, for instance, uh, there's a lot of incentive for the team. to go trade the comps and push the comps price up so that their valuation goes up, right?

Like, it's kind of a thing where, I mean, the private market investors have to be kind of a little bit cautious. So prediction markets solve this. Prediction markets solve this on their own. But it's interesting. I love this idea, Julian, that, yeah, to be clear, yes, obviously, you know, relative to a team that wants to really push up their market comps, which it's funny to imagine that that's the reason why you're, you know, the perps on your, I will say that this private investor didn't even think about this. When I mentioned that, oh, well, what if the team did this? They're like,

wait a minute, I have to go back and look. Right. I mean, to be clear, you could also do this on SAFs, right? Like, if you want to go buy, you know, a thinly traded SAFs. I think it's funny that someone was investing and didn't even like think that this would be an adverse selection type of thing against that. Sure, sure, sure. So what's interesting, what I, I really like this idea of airdrop farmers hedging their price risk, right? And we should maybe talk a little about what this means. And this ties into one of the next things I want to discuss, which is points in airdrops generally,

because it's been a big theme, especially of what's happening in Salana, given how many projects on Salana are courting users with air drops or point systems. So anirdrop farmer, for those who are not familiar, air drops are when a protocol basically rewards users of the protocol or people are doing some kind of work for the protocol with tokens. And we've seen these things about Airdrop Farmers, which are basically people who are more or less gaming the system. They're kind of inorganically pretending to do things

that users are supposed to be doing in order to try to make money from the protocol that's kind of giving away these incentives to users. So you sort of imagine the person who, like, creates multiple Uber accounts and refers their own accounts. That's the real world equivalent of what Airdrop Farmers are doing. But in crypto, nobody can tell you're a dog, as the old joke goes. And so it's not very easy to actually figure out who's a real user and who's kind of a, quote, unquote, air drop farmer.

Unless there are certain signatures that actually tell the users. By the way, you know the same thing is true for every e-commerce platform. There's tons of fake volume. Of course, but people generally use, they use phone verification in order to duplicate people and stuff like that. But yes, there's fraud in every kind of referral. Yeah, yeah. Oh, of course. I used to work in anti-fraud, so I know very well how many people try to game these systems, especially outside of the U.S. where like the relative incentive to game these referral systems is extremely high. So the interesting thing is that, okay, so there's these industrial air drop farmers, you know, we can't really call them head funds because I don't think you can do it at the scale of like, you know, tens of millions of dollars, but probably in single digit millions you can make by doing this kind of industrial air drop farming, quote, unquote. The interesting thing is there's another protocol called Pendle, which has also gotten a huge surge in popularity, specifically because people who are farming points on eigenlayer are using it to hedge their

eigenlayer points. So essentially, Pendle, my understanding is that allows you to take your future yield, package it up, and sell it to somebody else, which is essentially not just your future yield, but also your future airdrop on eigenlayer. And so essentially it's become like this pre launch market for eigenlare and valuing your eigenlayer points. And so the market is kind of finding all these weird little ways to be able to give financial products and like hedging products to these industrial air drop farmers. And it's becoming quite a quite a big business. So I find this fascinating, the way in which people are finding markets where they otherwise,

like Pendle before eigenlare took off, or not took off, you know, started getting lots of TVL, let's say. Pendle was kind of floundering in terms of product demand, but they've kind of found their one thing that seems to really be working for the protocol. So I'm curious to get the perspective from you guys. So first of up, the rise of points. We talked before about points.

I think, Tarun, you mentioned that points was the biggest innovation that you thought you've seen in, or the best new innovation for this year. Let's just say it's the innovation that attracted people back. Sure, sure. It's worked incredibly well. And points are connected to air drops, but they're not the same as air drops, right? So, well, let me ask you this. How would you define the difference between air dropping tokens, which was the meta for a very long time, you know, Hayden, the founder of Uniswap, infamous for having done the sort of airdrop heard around

the world, one of the biggest air drops in history. He's been very critical in points. How would describe the difference between airdrops and points and how points are different from just pure vanilla air drops? So one very important difference is that air drops generally have a fixed criteria that is verifiable on chain for when you can claim. So that basically means like, hey, did I use the product for a certain amount of time? I did some set of actions? And then based on those actions, the protocol codifies that in a smart contract, such as a Merkel distributor. or different type of distributor to allow you to claim your tokens. Points, however, are sort of arbitrary insofar that as they're, you know,

realistically at the discretion of the team. They're not actually converted to real tokens. There's like, oh, you do some actions. You get these points. And they may convert to tokens later, right? So, you know, the examples of those are Jupiter, Gito, et cetera, that had like, you know, a lot of these types of, and of course, I can learn being the biggest one now.

I think the the beauty of crypto is that there is this inevitable thing where there will be like the Avo for points. There's already like Wales market, which lets you do P to P points trading. And like obviously once there's enough liquidity in that, people will make a prediction like market,

whether it looks like Avo, whether it's more like a prediction market for bet for trading these types of things. The difference is that there's still some discretion how the points turn into tokens on the team. And so that's the place that I think most of the criticism is, is that the teams are holding that. Now, I think there's a way to view this in the dialectic.

There's like the positive, right, which is like the point systems allow developers of protocols to see which actions people are doing. And then over time, sort of almost like an AB test experiment, kind of get users to do actions that are more beneficial to the protocols long-term health, then just like add liquidity, get tokens, remove liquidity, right? Like that was sort of the old game that existed. So it actually allows for basically, you know, and in my mind, the best case scenario is protocol

developers get to use their users as QA testers and points are a way of like really flushing that out. That's the best case scenario is that the team just kind of like rugs the user or changes their criteria, and the users are like, what the fuck, like, we committed our capital. So I think the key thing is, like, you know, a little bit like what happens in e-commerce marketplace optimization. You kind of have to, like, kind of gently do this type of these changes. You can't, like, do them very abruptly because, like, obviously that will lose user trust. But I do think there's sort of, like, you know, having the right types of commitments from these teams is, like, quite important.

I just generally think, though, the beauty of permissionless finance is that someone will make the prediction market and all of a sudden your points thing won't be, won't be this like thing that's in the control of the team anymore. Yeah, I kind of, uh, we're talking about like futures and hedging, I'm more as a minor of, uh, this is kind of a famous story of how like Rydallio helped McDonald's hedge like horn and, uh, uh, soy futures to be able to create chicken nuggets. Um, and so I'm kind of like, this feels kind of like the chicken nuggets. of, I guess, like, crypto futures and that, like, they allow sort of industrial air farming or

irdrop farming and, like, points farming to exist and that people can now maybe effectively hedge or calculate the rewards without having to, like, be subject to this volatility. But I don't know if that's really kind of the outcome or the good thing that we want. Like, chicken nuggets are great. I don't know if, like, air drop farming is actually good for users or protocols or the ecosystem in general. you could argue both are equally bad for your health you could one involves you sitting and clicking all day in front of a computer and the other one is

well you know the McDonald's chicken nugget which is famously bad i mean i assume a lot of it is automated if you're doing this at scale but yes i'm sure there's also sure but like you have to actually you have to keep reprogramming when they change the rules on the points right it's not sure yeah you have to keep watching these live streams apparently so yeah there's there's exactly exactly yeah um so julian you guys have intentionally not done a point system in AVO. And so you guys originally driven finance, you're launching a new product called Avo,

you're rebranding the token. Talk us through like, why did you decide to do that? Points seem to be the meta. Why are you guys not doing the meta? Yeah. So, I mean, I agree a lot with what Turin just said.

Like, I mean, that's like a positive and negative in terms of like the positive. The positive team gets to iterate on on how the rewards are given out. Some ambiguity. is sort of left on the table so that the team can still change things. If, I mean, if like some sort of user behavior is really getting skewed because the criteria is not set up in the right place,

team can sort of shift it over time. But I do think in the last few months, maybe the pendulum has swung in the other direction, where, you know, teams obviously know that currently adrops are kind of this hot meta. And anyone who announces an adrop with, sort of attract a bunch of people. And I think the pernicious part about points is they can sort of just dangle this criteria in front of you and decide to just not give you anything.

Because ultimately, they control what the conversion of points to tokens are. That's sort of like the weapon that they have. So, yeah, I think, you know, currently in the points meta, everyone's like trying to do this, calculate, like this, the meta game is really just like, okay, I know how many points I'm going to get, but the second game that they're playing is how many points do we think is going to convert to tokens? So they're really two sides of that game.

And I think, like, one phrase that I've been seeing on Twitter recently is like, the farmers are getting farmed. So, you know, teams are sort of attracting all this TVL, like all this, by dangling some point reward, but eventually they just decide to give the farmers nothing. So I think that sort of creates. a very bad taste in people's mouth. I mean, I don't, I think it's just very tempting, right? Like, if you have the ability to, you already have the TBL. You don't need to give the tokens

at that point. So it is very tempting for the team. But yeah, I do think the pendulum is starting to shift away from it. I think people are, like this two-level game also creates a lot of mental like fatigue in terms of like you need to think about how I'm actually farming the ad drop, which is like how I'm getting points. And like you need to sort of try and reason about whether the team's going to give you some of our tokens. So yeah, I think we just feel like, you know, the classic airdrop liquidity mining style thing actually works pretty well. Like the criteria is clear up front on how you're getting these tokens. You know you're getting X amount tokens. You can value it. And I mean, with the rise of all these like financialization of points, it's kind of the same

thing anyway. Like, if you know it's going to be the same thing, why go through all these hoops? So yeah, I think like something simple actually feels better and works better for everyone. So I think we're just going to do that instead. On the other hand, I will say one thing is there is an analog of these point systems in normal finance that's not, you know, like credit card points or something, but that is the pre-IPO equity sales where, you know, right before company IPOs, oftentimes what they'll do is they'll sell in advance at a discount or, you know, undetermined floating discount sometimes, some fraction of their stock prior to IPO so that they have some like guaranteed liquidity on day one. And usually those people are kind of like

holding for a year and they have some kind of discount rights and like if the IPO doesn't happen, then they get paid back in some way partially. And in some ways, these point systems just feel like an almost more algorithmic version of the pre-IPO-to-IPO conversion market. And I just think because crypto is crazy, you have all these amazing prediction markets that show up almost instantly for how much eigenvalue point is worth. Actually, the eigenvalue point market is one of the funnier point markets that you can see, like, the spread in people's pricing is insane. It's like it truly is like like amazing to look at like how like a market can start with so much uncertainty and then like over time like kind of converge.

It's like such a such a beautiful like thing to watch. It's funny. The other analog I guess when I'm the to the pre-repeel market is that there's also this like weird pricing game where like you you actually like don't want to hit the exact market clearing price when you're pricing your company. Like you want a small pop on IPO day, which is kind of like the same as like token launch, which actually means you like left value on the table. But it sort of makes everybody feel good to like see the number go up, even though it means you sold for, you know, undermarket and was you're probably not the right decision. So it's like, you know, air job farmers also want to see the token go up even though, you know, maybe they're selling into it or maybe, you know, the team is leaving money on the table.

Yeah, it's funny. I tend to think that despite the points that you made, Julian. I tend to think that points are, you made the point that they're less transparent. I think that is in some ways to the benefit of the protocol, because once things are completely transparent, then it is a pure financial calculation. And there's clearly something about people that, like, you know, Jupiter AirDrop, the Jupiter team is going to continue to do points,

and they're going to continue to basically create more and more incentives andirdrop more tokens over time. but somehow I think we all know that nobody's ever going to care nearly as much as they will about this initial irdrop not just because of the scale like maybe they'll do it one that's even bigger scale possibly you know one can imagine that but people aren't going to care to anywhere near the same extent the spotlight effect is going to be much less because of the fact that there's so much uncertainty about what the initial air drop is going to look like and feel like and what the story is going to be and and the same thing is true for almost all of the liquidity mining programs

that have been done by, even if you think of, you know, DFI V1 protocols that initially did liquidity mining or continuing to experiment with liquidity mining, the big stories was the first time they did it. And what the token came out at and how it floated and blah, blah, blah, and that's when like the TVL was,

you saw the most craziness. And so there is something about the uncertainty and just like the really, really, the massive volatility that attracts people, creates storylines, gets people's imaginations really going. And then once it's a, okay, well, you know, here's how much the comp emissions are and here's how it changes your da-da-da, and you just kind of do the math on a spreadsheet and you decide how much liquidity to add based on

this incentive, it does lose some of that magic that I think points hold on to for quite a bit longer. Now, maybe it's just a function of the token floating the first time and the second time you do it, you know, second points program, nobody cares. Steve, are you telling us that you really need to go, like, to an amusement park and go on a roller coaster and just get a thrill again? Because, like, that's what you're saying. You're like, you want the, you want the thrill. That's what I'm saying?

Thrill back. Yeah, you want the thrill back. I'm not an air drop farmer. So I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about the, it is very clear the level of engagement when you make people not know, I mean, it's like, you know, why do people enjoy, you know, I don't know, like, a pretty bad example. I knew a lot of guys when I was a professional poker player

who were low stakes grinders, right? And they would play poker and they would grind out making like $10 an hour or $15 an hour, but they would hate working at McDonald's. And McDonald's, I don't know, like sometimes McDonald's actually pay more than that. But there's something about like the uncertainty

and the risk and whatever. It's like, oh my God, I'm making my money doing this cool thing that really captivates people. But if you make it very clear to them, here's how much money you're making per hour. And it's exactly this, every single hour. and there's no uncertainty and there's no risk.

People are like, I don't know, that's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, uh, uh, uh, it's not as to bound myself up with the uncertainty. Even if sometimes I get rugged, people seem to enjoy it more. I think it's just part of human nature. What if, uh, like I told you that like the trend of people feeling like they get rugged keeps increasing over time. And I think that, I think that, I think that is going to happen. And there's going to be a new disappointment every single month. And I think that would kind of change the matter.

again. So I just feel like if at some points, maybe I'm a bit early on this, but if you say you're launching a points program, it's kind of the same thing as like saying, yeah, we're just going to like screw you over later. So I do agree with your point, but I do think that like there's going to be like a strong trend towards these things disappointing to the downside for most users. And that would basically kind of kill the ad drop. Maybe that's like for further better actually. I mean, I thought this was going to happen years ago, but it hasn't happened. Like, the points are very strange because it should be a gigantic prisoner's dilemma, which is that you let everybody else create this norm that you launch points and then when the points system is finally done, you get this big juicy air drop and you make everyone happy. And you would think that everybody's individual incentive is to defect. And basically hide people up and make them think they're going to do this massive air drop

and then do a tiny little nothing air drop, but get all the usage anyway, get all the TVL, get all the trading volume anyway, because you're sort of retroactively rewarding people, which shouldn't work. From a game theory perspective, that should not work.

That should be just an unsustainable equilibrium. And it's been like years now, and it just keeps working because people are afraid of getting yelled out on Twitter. And like when you see people defect and they don't do the thing, they don't give a juicy enough air drop, people on Twitter yell at them for about 10 minutes and the team immediately folds. They're just immediately like, oh my God, I'm so sorry.

We clearly miscalibated. We're going to go back to the drawing board. Our sincere apologies. We didn't realize how much the community is given us. And they go back and they revise theirdrop and they do a bigger one. Every fucking time. Every fucking time this happens.

And it amazes me because, of course, theseirdrop farmers are overwhelmingly not their actual users. These are mostly non-sticky users who don't really care about their products. And they leave. as soon as they get their overdrop. Yeah, I was going to say, like, the people who are disappointed are like the people you don't want, right? These, it's like the, you know, in traditional web tour, like the more incentives and the more,

you know, affiliates and the more referrals you give out, like the less sticky, the less these people spend, like the worst these users are. And so it's really hard to replicate organic users who find your product organically or through word of mouth and they just love it and they're sticky. And so it feels like, you know, that was sort of, you know, idea of liquidity mining is it's a small subsidy to kind of get people in the door. And as I just turned into like, we're just going to track all these basically toxic users who are sort of net negative for the product or aren't actually going to retain and pay them

and they're going to leave as soon as they're not getting paid enough. And it's like, these are people you even want in the first place unless they're, you know, contributing some sort of massive value to the ecosystem, which doesn't really seem like they are. Well, the counter argument many people make is that, well, you know, air drops are not really about users or retention or whatever. They're really about distribution of the token. And so you're just finding a way to decentralize the token and whatever,

these assholes are good. They're just as good as anyone else. Yeah. I give a talk on sort of airdrop stuff at this Apptos summit recently. And I brought in this research from Jack Hawthorne, I think, who works at Variant. One of the interesting bits was, I mean, obviously there's this analysis of people who received airdrops from uniswap and one inch and things like that and what they do, by and large, like a year in, like 90, 95% of them had already sold the token. Not super surprising. The interesting

part was people who bought the tokens from those air drop sellers were more engaged in governance. They held the token longer. Because they were actually putting their own capital and time into the, to the token, they were therefore more engaged and more invested in it. And so, yeah, maybe it distributes it to a larger number of addresses, but these are not necessarily the addresses that are going to be your core user base and your core fan base. Like to your point, it also does seem like the ICOs are making a bit of a comeback again. I don't know if you have seen, but there are these new like protocols launching.

There's one that launched yesterday, which got a lot of hype, but basically their whole like branding and tagline is about like making ICOs great again. So I do think there's some like nostalgia or maybe I don't know we're just like running back 2017 like concepts again. But yeah, I mean like I mean maybe this Jupiter thing where you know effectively they did do a big public sale of the token through this liquid LBP thing. But yeah, maybe there's like going to be a sort of revenge of the ICO. I don't know. It seems to be,

it's like, is me a American? He's, uh, no, he's based in Singapore as well. Singaporean, I see.

So, so actually, you know, I actually am, you know, like I said, I think there's ways to use point systems kind of positively to, like,

stress test things, especially if it's like to stress test how people will use stuff. So I think the eigen layer point system stuff is actually the most interesting experiment to me. Because all of these liquid restaking protocol, calls, which are technically adding a lot of risk in some ways, because a lot of them are levered Levia things like Pendle. And they're levered in weird ways. So that's, that's right now you don't necessarily see that risk because things are trading at par. There's not like some kind of deviation. Like peg, like they're not supposed to be pegged assets, but they like, you know, they trade in some

range. And so that's why these these things seem to be somewhat stable. But the, uh, I think the interesting thing, right, is like this is actually before there's a lot of AVSas, you're actually stress testing the stuff that people are building on top. And what they're doing is they're adding their own point system. And so now you're getting these like not so great users from a revenue retention or stickiness perspective to basically QA whether something will blow up for you before you're live. And I actually think that's a very interesting use case of this type of stuff. Now, as I said, you can tell from the points market. pricing. No one agrees on what the value of an Eginler point is right now. It's like the variance

is insane. And so I think that in and of itself means you get more, you get more like reps of like, you know, QAing is the wrong. It's sort of like, it's like somewhere in between stress testing and QAing. And like I actually think there's some, there's some, some protocols that are new technology where that's actually a huge positive versus like finding out when your token's live. Well, I guess I don't understand for Eigenlare in particular, how it's QAing and not just making it a bigger honeypot. Because what is there to QA right now? Well, I mean, how stable these LRTs are, right? Like, do they have this huge aggregation effect or will they compete with each other so that it, you know, you're relatively.

Obviously, but that's like downstream of, that. Right, but that impacts the security. That impacts the security of the, yeah, but it impacts the security of that, right? So it's actually a way of like seeing what happens with things. that aren't in your control, right? Protocols built on top of you are driving volume, and you're able to see this kind of like interaction effects that you might not have predicted

when you're just trying to build your new thing. So I think like there's a world in which that type of stuff is, it's like incentivized QA testing. It's like better than, it's like somewhere in between incentivized test net and like a live part. You're getting baited, but you're getting paid to be baited. And so it all works out.

You know, I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure this is like, you know, getting catfish, but like then turning out to like the person. Have you guys seen? What? I don't know. I'm trying to find some analogy, but I don't have it. That sounds like a great romantic comedy. I don't know if you guys have seen for some of these like social base points system like

front tech. There's this whole rise of like this. three three thing have you guys seen that i think that's like one of the most interesting phenomenon what is this so so basically frentag and maybe blast and a few other protocols they give you extra points if you refer other people so there's this like virality component to it like how many people can you bring in gives you some sort of multiplier so there are these like informal groups of people like they're not even doubts it's just like twitter people and Basically, they just make an upfront commitment saying, if you use my reflink, I'm going to give you back like 50% later.

Like, I'm going to give the bonus that I got from the protocol to just like send it back to your wallet. And there are all these like accounts now, which are just like zero X CBB or whatever, so of the most famous ones. Basically, he has like an extremely massive like blast group of people using his reflink because he has made this commitment to give it all. back, to give half of it back. So, yeah, it's like a very interesting coordination between people. I think, you know, maybe at some point someone's going to, like, codify this into a protocol or some sort of smart contract way of distributing the points. But, yeah, it is very interesting to see how.

Well, but, okay, so this is one of the advantages of points, though, is that points are revocable, right? It's not a hard commitment in a way that, like, you know, you're talking about how the nice thing about air drops are totally trying to. transparent, the rules are set up in advance. The whole point about points is that it's like, well, the team has a discretion to say, like, wait, hold on, you're right, like, no, this is not okay. You're gaming this and this is not in the spirit of competition. And so, you know, I don't know the particular person you mentioned, but I can imagine blast, you know, when they actually

are ready to convert the points into the, into the tokens. They're like, wait, actually looks like this guy and these guys over here, like what they're doing is bullshit. And so fuck all of you and fuck all your points. And even, you know, people who are trading on whatever that whale market is, so doing these, this, is whale market. Yeah. So this place where people are trading points, you can imagine that a bunch of points systems just go through whale market.

Is it open? Can you, like, see all the people who are trading? You can see all the bids. It's just peer to peer. It's just, it's, it's all the bids. Yeah, if it's peer to peer, you can imagine people just going in there and like saying, look, we're going to go back through like the history of everyone who's traded on this marketplace and invalidate everyone.

All your points go to zero. And all of a sudden, people will feel this real fear that like, oh, shit, I'd better not try to financialize my points because if I get caught doing it, they go away. And that becomes a big risk. Yeah, but I feel like this cat and mouse game sounds actually quite entertaining, right, between the team and the, it's just like now it's another level of game theory between them. Yes, totally, totally. But that's also true for air drops, right?

Like, I mean, back in the day when people were doing just vanilla air drops, they would spend a lot of energy trying to filter out, you know, the airdrop farmers and the inorganic activity and this and that. And so this has always happened, at least with point systems, it's more transparent that that is in the purview of the team to go in and do the work to figure out, you know, who's doing this honestly and who's kind of fucking around. At the same time, I do kind of agree with Julian. I kind of think there's going to be two market forces that kind of cause these things to

change again. one is people being like I can't I can't get rid get out of these and I need liquidity fine but the second is sort of this aspect of like if these financial markets start becoming sufficiently liquid

and then the team is like hey we're going to ban you from using it there are two ways this could go this could go like okay people are afraid they won't they won't sell or that market will suddenly be more liquid because everyone's like oh my liquidity is worthless in this protocol anyway, so I'm just going to exit, right?

And so, like, there's so many different, like, end states from this that would be... You mean, you mean, take your liquidity out of the protocol, or do you mean exit your points? Well, exit your points because you're assuming that your tokens are going to be worthless. And so that kind of causes this, like, everyone, no one adding new liquidity, right? Like, it actually will, like, flatline the point system. So, like, there's this interaction. Because it's less liquid, the points are less valuable in and of themselves. Yeah, and also if the team says, oh, yeah, we're not going to give you anirdrop.

Then like now the most of the market, you might just say no new entrants join your protocol. So there's like there is this kind of tradeoff that happened. And I think that will be this like tit for tap type of thing where like one side does one thing. The other side makes another market. And like that's the beauty of these permissionless markets. Right. Like you can't really stop anyone from doing that. It's not like trad five where Gary Gensler can like beat you on the head with like a,

a bonk malice. Well, yeah. Well, yeah. I don't know what point are points securities. I don't know. That one is too hard. That's good luck. Points are just points. Yeah, points are just points. You know, I think everyone needs to go back and take like a, yeah, beanie babies.

Everybody needs to go back and take like a Web 2 growth marketing course because I feel like all this stuff has been so well trodden. Like even the referral thing that you're mentioning earlier, there was this kind of famous story of, in the early days at Uber, the software engineer figured out that you get like a lower, I think Uber is giving out like $20 to everybody that you could refer. And so the software engineer figured out that, you know, you could run Google search worth ads for less than that like $20 cap. Like he was paying like $2 for running Uber referral code or something adds on that on that search term on Google. And so he's just

racking up like tens of thousands of dollars in Uber credits by running. running Google ads for his own Uber referral link and eventually Uber found out and they like shut down his account or removed its credits or something. But it's like all the, you know, humans are humans and they just respond to incentives. And a lot of this stuff has been tried many, many times over. And so I think if we maybe learn more from kind of the past attempts of doing this, we'd like have actually better systems versus kind of reinventing. I mean, this is why I brought up the like marketplace optimization, AB testing stuff, right? Like that's how people catch or at least tests do these experiments to catch people. right like and and i think that the the the teams doing points are kind of it's not like they're not

they they know they need to do that so it's i think it's it's just more like the the quick financialization changes this in the sense that your ab test can be like interacted with in a way that you can't control so there's that's a novel thing that's very true crypto only like this wales market points market interacting with like how how people are using your protocol is like that's a totally weird thing or like AVO interacting with how VCs are pricing deals. That's also a new thing. You know, do you remember in like the early maybe like 20, 2013, 2015, there were like tons of VCs would just be like, give me your DAUs and MAUs and like retention and like, okay, I'm valuing your company from that, right? Like this is this, this is like that except it's like people are putting more

skin in the game. Yes. I mean, so, Trude, are you arguing that a team should not be actively kind of policing and deleting points and, you know, trying to enforce the non-transferability of points? I just think, like, it's going to be, you know, I think initially if they do it, people might get scared, but then people will start finding ways around it. Like, don't underestimate the creativity of people who want liquidity. Of course, but I mean, look at, Tom just brought up the point of like, okay, Uber and the referral codes, right? Like, okay, if you're Uber, Uber can actually shut you out of the system. It's all in the game, technically, of course, so can a point system. No, I can go sell on Wales market whenever.

Like, my point is there'll be a new financial product that comes out to let you get out, which Uber, you're locked in. I think for Wales market. Right, but you can collapse the value of the secondary market. Yeah, no, no, you definitely can collapse it by like doing these rules. But I do agree that Turin, but with Turin's point is just like, we literally have this like permissionless trading of these things and no one can stop it. because it's all traded in dollars, it's not traded in the tokens of points. Like it's literally a completely separate thing. And it's like enforceable with like contracts, smart contracts.

So it is like a very crypto native thing that you can, you know for sure that this protocol is going to be able to deliver the collateral if the points are worth nothing or something like that, which I think is like, yeah, it's quite quite novel actually. Wait, so the points are generally tied to the address. Are they not? Or are they tied to something else that's transferable? They are tied to the address. So you're selling like an address.

In Wales market, you're not selling anything. It's really just like a future that we both agree on. So if you are the seller of these points, I just post USDC as well. Oh, I see. I'm not actually selling. Yeah, it's like a CM. Yeah. I see, I see.

Yeah. Got it. So you couldn't necessarily identify where the points. that are being speculated on are originally from. You can't really stop it. Yeah. I see. I see.

Well, you can't, like, if somebody creates a new account, that is not the account that actually has the points they're hedging, then you can't necessarily tell who's doing what. Also, if there's enough demand, people will make pooled models. The pooled models become much harder to police. You know, it's like the cat and mouse game keeps going on. So, like, I think that's where it's extremely different than Web 2. and that's also something where it's like purely the on-chain stuff will dominate the centralized

because the centralized things will look like Uber and they can shut you down, right? They can just turn off that market. But clearly you can't really shut off these on-chain markets for this stuff. And that's where the fun is. That's like the excitement. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. For some reason, I was under the impression they were selling accounts.

But if they're just doing derivatives, then, yeah, there's no way to stop that. Yeah, I mean, you could sell forwards, you know, off-chain. you know, super, you know, analog, right? The same kind of thing. I think really, really you need a point system for the point system so people can hedge through points exposure. But I think I think we're already starting to see that. No, no, there's already people starting doing that.

My point is, wait, what? There are already people who are making like a point derivatives. Okay, sure, sure. Like you, I just think, I think that the beauty of this space compared to everything else is this freedom means people. will find a way to be creative because they want liquidity. Yeah. That is certainly true.

Very interesting. Well, so we're coming up on time. So I wanted to wrap Julian with sharing a little bit about it. Because right now you guys are going through a big transition of your own. Originally, as I mentioned, you were Ribbon Finance. I think the token is still called Ribbon Finance. But you are alongside Avo, which is this decentralized perpetual swaps protocol. You're also rebranding the token without points.

as we established. Talk us through why you guys are doing that. There haven't been a lot of rebrands in crypto, or certainly not in defy. Why are you guys rebranding the token? And what is that experience like for you guys? Because that sounds, some people have done this thing where they launch a new token

and it's totally new token supply. You guys are not doing that. You're moving everything over. Why? And actually, this is something, we were just having a conversation internally because there's another team we're talking to right now that is launching a second token

with a new product instead of moving over the original token. Talk us through how are you thinking about that? Yeah, I think ultimately, you know, teams have the choice to do a new token. I think we also maybe thought about it. But ultimately, I think we just felt like the maybe thought about it. Yeah, I mean, like the product, we basically were going to collapse like the old product into the new product and it wasn't going to be this separate thing. And I think where it makes it most sense to do a new token is when, you know, maybe you're doing just like a hard pivot.

Like you're doing defy and now you're doing NFTs. And these are like completely separate things. You feel like they have almost no reason to be tied together on like an economic standpoint. Maybe it makes sense. But I think for us it was like pretty close and the products were going to get collapsed. I think one main issue with doing a new token is sort of like the old token, basically. becomes worthless or becomes worth very little because it's now sort of governing a very small part of what you're doing. Probably the team doesn't, has probably abandoned the first product.

So yeah, I think we didn't want to have that mental sort of decision of like, show I buy this or that if I want to get exposure to what I'm working on. So we just decided like we cut quite like this single token model. But you know, like I think as like someone who's been in this space for a few years, I think I know like new tokens are always like a new sort of story. I think people can build new hype around it. I think there are all these advantages to launching new token. So I think yeah, we kind of did both at the same time. So it's more just like a rebrand, but there's a bunch of like rules to do how the token swap is going to happen. And yeah, I think like interestingly, almost all our users now, like, don't even know what ribbon is.

Like, all these people in Discord, like, I've never heard of ribbon. Why are people saying it's related to this? Like, no one even knows anything about the old product, which I think is, like, really healthy. So I think for those users, like, they perceive this as like a new project. They're excited about it. But we also get sort of the old community who, you know, they've been like hardcore, like, D5 slash option traders since, like, three years ago.

they're still set up along for the ride and still within the community. So yeah, I think that's sort of like our thought process. We just get all these new people, all this new attention, but we also sort of retain the old group. I actually do think we're going to see a lot more rebrands this year. Like Maddick did one recently, Beam Merit Circle did one recently. So yeah, maybe there's going to be this like bullish rebrand,

like trend that's, that be happened but we'll see yeah there's also bit out a mantle it does seem like it's been actually uh it's been rebrand season i guess just in time for a new board you can't forget the uh you can't forget the o g e flinda ava i mean that was the most successful one that was the most successful that's right definitely definitely definitely true definitely true well until but they change they they change the supply though right the denom they they change which i that that part is the part where i actually feel like interesting because like even in normal stocks, people do that for like meme reasons or to like make it more retail friendly, like the Tesla stock split. Do you remember where they like changed?

Yeah, PolkaDat did that. Pocod, I don't remember when was that. Yeah, yeah, PocaDot did that. They had like the unit price is very high and they like did it, I don't know, like 100 for one or 1,000 for one. Yeah. token split. I mean, the rebrand's a good time to do that is what I mean. Yes.

Totally. Totally. But you chose not to do that. Julian, right? Yeah, I think we... Yeah, you decided to go one for one. One for one. Like, the, the denomination was small enough.

We didn't need to add a few more zeros. I do think, I do think it can be helpful to markets just to like kind of, you know, people who are sort of thinking like, oh, you know, this thing trades from here to here. And you like do some weird conversion, like, divided by 3.7. And then it's like, okay, you can't really do the math anymore. It's like, well, who knows what this thing is worth? that does seem to work at least to some extent. But, you know, I want to ask you this before we close out because we're up on time.

But Julian, at this point, you are one of the Defi OGs. You've been doing this for quite a while. Who do you look up to as kind of your personal heroes within crypto or Defi? Who do you think has done it best or you want to emulate? Maybe this is going to be an unpopular opinion. But like, I actually really like the way that Jupiter found. did what they've been doing for the last few years. I mean, like, it's really impressed.

I mean, Jupiter. Yeah, like, I mean, I know the guy pretty well. Like, he's great. And, like, they really stuck it out. I think, like, we spoke, like, almost two years ago at, like, the absolute bottom of Solana. And they were also, we were just, like, brainstorming ideas on, you know, rebranding. They effectively did a rebrand as well from, like, their previous swap protocol to this.

So we have had a lot of back and forth. around like, yeah, how to do this. And I mean, I think I really respect how they kind of stuck through that the Solana planned the whole time. Like zero plans to do. They didn't get carried away by like the cross-chain narrative or Latu narrative. It was just like day one from. They didn't go. They didn't move to a move chain.

Exactly. I mean, all these Solana protocols like move to Suea and whatever, right? but these guys really suck it out. And like throughout the bear market, he was telling me that they had, you know, there are days where they had like zero users. Like basically almost zero activity, but their products, like, they had so much time to just iterate on the product. I think if you guys have tried it, I actually think it's like a really good product as well.

They've just told me like they've done everything from our, arguably best product, best consumer product in crypto, I feel like. Exactly. Like they just care about small stuff like how quickly does the page load, like how quickly does your token list like auto-populate and as well as some like other sort of unique DCA features and stuff like that. So I actually think they did really well for themselves and like the Solana community. So yeah, I feel like I really respect that they really stuck to the mission. They never like pivoted or cared about whatever people thought. I guess that's just like in their personality as well. He's a bit eccentric, I guess,

doing all this like crazy meme coin stuff, but he just doesn't care. So I actually really respect that, which may may not be like a popular thing, but yeah, he's great. That's a great answer. And clearly he's been very handsomely rewarded for that. So well done to meow.

All right, well, we're up on time. Thanks, Julian, for coming, joining us and sharing your insights. And we'll be back next week. And hopefully, I'll hope my throat will be better. Thank you.