181. Key Investor Takeaways From Token2049

You don't know any of that stuff, but you use it because it's so damn good and the value proposition is so high that those other things don't matter.

And it was just packed full of these exhibitors and from memory it was at least 30 or 40,000 US dollars per exhibitor. I think there's probably up to 10 max problems right now that need solving that could be sold and there's literally 15,000 plus projects vying for those 10 problems. So he was up 16% overnight from the party. Like if that's not utility.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of collective shift alongside Ms. Burgs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scanning a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. If you like the episodes, we'd love for you to leave us a follow or a subscribe and we can share it around with your friends and family. It's how we grow the podcast each and every week. And I still cannot say the word subscription. I need to slow that right down.

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We'll get there by episode 1074. But we're on episode 180 today folks, and we are talking about token 2049. The biggest crypto conference in the world was in Singapore last week and I was there and Bergs, it was pretty epic, man. 20,000 people came into Singapore. It was completely nuts two day event and there was over a thousand side events. A thousand. So for those that haven't been to one of these events, it is just bananas, right? It's just the who's who, whose event can you get into? And it's just who's got the bigger, bigger ego, who's got the bigger, you know, budget, who's got the biggest parties, who can throw the biggest events, especially from the layer 1 blockchain space. It was a race for the biggest event and there's lots of takeaways which we'll get into. It was awesome. We'll share all the insights and analysis. But yeah, Bergs, it was, yeah, absolutely epic.

Mate. Were you on that plane they hired where they flew it in an entire plane and they're doing karaoke and everything?

No, because I would have jumped out of it if I bloody.

So there was a. I think it was actually, I don't know which project it was. They Hired or they bought out. They booked out an economy cabin on a Qatar flight and it basically turned it into like a crypto cabin. And it was some of the most cheesy, you know, just like, I don't know, it, it was, it was pretty cringy to see.

Cringe is alive and well, mate. Oh, and bro, I have to bring it up. Let's, let's get the cringe out of the way first. Then we'll get to the good stuff and then the takeaways and, and the juice, mate, the meat. But first, old mate, your best mate. Vitalik, no, had a keynote and all I saw on Twitter were these clips of him singing on stage. Mate, you were there sitting in the audience. What on earth was going on?

It was just, I don't know what he was doing. Like, I just think he's that far on the spectrum that he doesn't really understand the social cues or he's so smart and he knows it's going to get a lot of marketing and a lot of like viral, virality, I don't know. But ultimately he just started singing the theme song of this show where apparently Ethereum was first like conceptualized. He, he asked, you know, five minutes. He's like, who's heard of this show? No one puts their hand up. He's like, well, who's heard the theme song? And obviously no one heard the show so no one's gonna know the theme songs. We're like, okay, cool, well let me just sing you the, the theme song. And he just goes on this 35 second like humming slash singing of this song that was not even in English. And I was like, okay, cool. Haha. Vitalik, you know, this is vitalic, you know, cool, cool. Let's just keep moving. So speaks a bit more and then he's like, you know, what's wrong with the crypto industry? The theme songs. And I'm like, oh, here we go. He's like, this is what a bad theme song sounds like. And then he goes on another 30 second rant of singing this random crypto song. He's like, that's a bad theme song. Here's what a good one should sound like. And you just start singing a good one. I'm like, this guy would not stop singing. He literally sung for like a minute or two. And at the same time we opened up the like the one minute chart on, on Trading View and Ethereum was like down only for like 15 minutes from like when he was started. So that was pretty funny. But outside of that his, his, his conversation he never saw Vitalik never talks about Price. Even when he, you know, back in 2018 when he came into Sydney and spoke at Edcon, Edcon Ethcon, can't remember he was there. And you know, he never speaks about Price, always speaks about, you know, product development. And back then Ethereum was $80 and now it's, you know, whatever it is, 2600. Talks about decentralization, talks about, you know, a lot of the upgrades that are coming up and they're not as exciting as they have been in the past, but they do have a lot of, you know, good fundamental upgrades. We got to remember that Ethereum, six or seven years old, we've got a lot of big projects building on it now. It is the most secure blockchain. And again I continue to be super bullish on eth. I think people have, you know, sort of written it off over the last, you know, year or two. Same with Solana. When Solana hit $20, everyone wrote it off and look what's happened since then. So it's just whoever's in the limelight, whoever's got the conversation, the narrative is what drives Price and I think it'll continue to perform well even though the founder loves to sing and dance on stage.

And for those who haven't seen Vitalik, creator of Ethereum, one of the creators and think like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory is probably the closest like person I can think of to this guy.

Yeah.

And but honestly man, some of his like posts, especially his blogs, absolutely cracking, really deep thinker and he has a very long term plan and direction from Ethereum to the sphere in which he can actually influence it. Which is fantastic to have someone like that building that out.

Yeah, 100% like just everything that's going on there and there's some very good projects that are built on Ethereum. We know that and we know that ETH continues to be one of the main dominant blockchains. A lot of the big defi projects a lot of the big protocols are built on top of. So it might not be as exciting right now but again I continue to be know, super bullish outside, outside of that I think really, you know, a lot of the layer ones and, and, and next gen layer ones are getting a lot of, you know, opportunity in the, I guess in the sun. Like the, the two big blockchains that sort of stood out for me while I was there was Sui and Berachain. So two what we call like sort of next gen layer ones which essentially are Just different ways of computing the blockchain, but they're essentially competing on speed and transactions. So both of them are faster than Solana and they're trying to come out as like these Solana killers. Sui actually spun out from Facebook or Meta when they attempted to create a stablecoin. Then it got shut down and what happened was that the team that was building Sui continued to keep building and now it's one of the leading names trying to, yeah, dethrone that Solana sort of play. And then you've also got Beret as well, which is, you know, unlaunched at the moment, but coming up. But mate, Sui had the biggest party in Singapore. It was nuts. I went. It was a three story nightclub called Marquee. If anyone's been out in Singapore, this place is nuts. It was like three storey stories. It had a Ferris wheel inside the nightclub, like. Like a legit Ferris wheel and a slide. So me, me and Greg and a couple others were like, yeah, let's get down the slide. So we roll in there, like 11:30, they've got Steve Aoki playing. It was completely free, so they booked. Steve Aoki paid 300,000US dollars for Steve Aoki to play free drinks all night. There's like 2 or 3, 000 people in this nightclub and you go from the slide at the top of the nightclub all the way down to where the bar is and then just go out. It was. This place was packed, mate. It was nuts. I've, you know, I haven't been in an art club that big, I don't think before. And to think it was a crypto party was just insane because Steve Oak is a bit. He's a bit. He's a big crypto guy as well.

He's one of the guys where we had the Steve Aoki signal. When he starts, like adding stuff to his NFT wallet, it's time to sell. He's almost correlated perfectly. Mate, Mate.

So he was up 16 overnight from the party. Like, if that's not utility.

See.

Well, a lot of these projects have too much money, right?

Literally.

And, you know, throwing parties and getting the community active. Yeah, fair enough. But, you know, build things as well. And you mentioned, like a big theme was layer ones and really what layer ones are competing on is the blockchain trilemma of security scalability and decentralization. So if you think of things like, you know, bitcoin, it's got really good decentralization and security scalability. Ain't that great? That's one End of the spectrum, if you go right to the other one, you're going to be more centralized, you're going to be able to scale the security might not be that great as well. Yeah, so that's a huge spectrum on which these changes trying to compete to attract customers to you to use their blockchain.

Yeah, spot on, mate. And I think the reality is so much saturation in this space. Like there's so many layer ones, there's so many layer twos. If anything, I've sort of come back and realized that, you know, that I'm continuing to try and keep a really simple portfolio, not going to try and chase too many coins. Like, you know, we're really still waiting for that, that core product. Like what is that consumer product that people know crypto for? You know, I think for AI, and we've spoken about this a little bit, AI was obviously ChatGPT. Once Chat GPT was launched was like, everyone's like, oh cool, I understand AI, I know how it works. What is that in crypto? Like we've got bitcoin, but what is that consumer application that, you know, anyone outside of, you know, crypto bubble would understand? At the moment, polymarket is probably leading the way in terms of the UI and ux. It's been, you know, mentioned in mainstream Polymarket. For those don't, for those of you don't know, is basically decentralized betting app where you can basically bet on markets. The biggest one right now is the US election and it sort of gives you like, you know, a no middleman sort of idea of how to, you know, bet on markets. But again, I don't think that's really going to be like the killer app for crypto. Like what is that thing going to be? There's a lot of conversation about. But you know, the biggest takeaway on, on why we haven't got that yet is because there's really just a lack of one quality founders. This was an interesting take from one of the VCs that he's mentioned. He's basically saying there's a lack of quality founders that know how to build consumer applications. That's 1, 2 is consumer applications in crypto don't get funded as much. So all of the VC funding predominantly goes into infrastructure plays. That's why there's so many layer ones because yeah, essentially have big evaluations. And number three is there's a lack of understanding from retail investors which is putting a price cap on the valuations because of the lack of retail understanding of how these Projects work. So that was kind of three, three takeaways as to why.

Yeah, like if I got the average person or even crypto person and said, tell me the difference between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XYZ chain, they wouldn't be able to do it because it's very difficult and is very technical. And it gets to the point where people are going to stop caring about the technology, the decentralization, the security and looking at the application and what it actually does. And think about that today, like in Facebook, do you know about their security or what they do or decentralization? No, you don't care. You just use it or WhatsApp or Instagram or Twitter, you don't know any of that stuff, but you use it because it's so damn good and the value proposition is so high that those other things don't matter.

Yeah, yeah, spot on. And, and to that point I think like the narratives that are driving in the moment aren't the most exciting, you know, from a retail perspective, but they are the most, you know, I guess the most development that's happening in the space of getting the most limelight. And that's AI and Deepin. Again, two super complex sort of topics. You know, one I think on the AI side of things, one I took away from it was, and again a lot of the AI panels was pretty intense. Like we're talking about pretty smart AI guys and girls that I was roughly staying on top of. But some of the things I was sort of getting into was pretty insane. But I think the biggest thing around AI was just trying to transform that user experience and maybe using chatbots to move tokens across chains, like going from USDC on Ethereum to Solana to buy an NFT for example, or with some sort of AI interface or where you can use AI agents to connect GPU to start doing mining or creating user and community owned models. And the other one was obviously dpin which stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. I'm investor into Hive Mapper. You know, where you're mapping real world, so you're mapping real world maps in, in real time and selling that back to, to, to digital companies. So that's just a couple of examples. Again, we don't really know. It's very complex. I've just spoke about this before. There's a couple of very big ideas in the AI space that I think is going to take a long time to come to fruition. But I think it's probably going to get the retail interest that's Right.

And it's like, do the consumers actually need these things? Like for the longest time AI has existed before chat GPT it was just very difficult to use. There are a lot of stats, you had to be a programmer and then now all of a sudden you've just got natural language processing which is also a data science and AI thing. You can just talk to a computer and it'll give you back what you need and that has incredible value. You don't have to, you can just. I could get my mum to use it. Like I don't have to teach her, I don't have to do anything. And if a lot of consumer apps need to be like that at the moment, crypto doesn't really have that. You don't need to do anything unless you're an investor. You want to custody your own funds with the bearer asset. You understand high level economics, technology, all that stuff. You'll be an investor in Bitcoin, Ethereum and a few others. But if you really want to experiment, like the majority of people aren't going to come to crypto for the experiences and things that we offer.

Yeah, I agree. They're coming from price appreciation at the end of the day.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, one thing that we noted before the show, Burks was just around like that. Don't get distracted and just focus on the long term games like the long term investments. I think there's so many things that come and go in this space. One thing that was absolutely not at the conference or that didn't get much limelight at all was Metaverse and gaming. Two of the biggest sort of narratives that were in previous cycles but basically non existent at the conference. So these things come and go and I think it's important that you know, continue to, to, to not get distracted and double down on those assets. You have conviction in long term. They're not just here for a little bubble. Yeah.

And that's your advantage as well. If you can understand the fundamentals, add time and think longer term as to what people are going to need, that's a lot easier than deciding what they're going to need next month or next week. And Ben, mate, you got to be overwhelmed at the conference, walking through the booth area, tell us about how many booze there were and how much they actually charge, mate.

No, I was completely, I was like, I got to the first floor, I'm like oh yeah, this is like, this is pretty good. Like there's a few exhibitors like nothing crazy but there's a lot and, and then I was like, oh wait, the conference is three levels. Oh, so went up to the second level and that whole second level was just full of exhibitors. It was nuts. Took about 10 minutes to get from one side to the other. And, and it was just packed full of these exhibitors. And from memory it was at least 30 or 40,000 US dollars per exhibitor to be there because we were looking at potentially going to be involved. And when I looked at them like not a chance on earth am I, you know, spending that, that much money to get there. Because again like these conferences there were US$600 a ticket perks. Like it's not like, you know, your, your everyday investors like rolling up to this conference and spending a thousand US dollars on a ticket. Like it was a lot of B2B. So what ended up happening was it was just basically people selling stuff to each other. Cause everyone there is BD people, right, Trying to sell and you know, build business. There was a lot of exhibitors, 90% of I'd never heard of before. There was a lot of credit card apps, a lot of stable coins, a lot of exchanges, market makers, and just a bunch of random stuff, like more layer ones. Just a heap of random stuff, like if people just, you know, want to be in crypto and probably raised a bunch of money too and need to spend the money somewhere. So yeah, I think again the over saturation was crazy. There's just so much in this space and I've been pretty firm on this. I think there's probably up to 10 max problems right now that need solving, that crypto can solve. And there's literally 15,000 plus projects vying for those 10 problems.

Isn't that interesting? Raising a lot of money and then you've got a really hard problem to tackle. Like these are deep tech problems, they're very, very hard. And you're inventing new things and you need to show activity to your investors. So I went to this conference, did this thing, did that thing quickly burn through your cash, raise another round, own less equity in your company?

Well, I think that was a, that was an interesting point too. Like that we're talking about the research meeting the other day that like in an equities world, if you're starting a startup, you have to wait five, 10 years before you get an exit. In crypto you could have an exit within the first year. So a lot of these founders are raising massive amounts of money. The VCs get the unlocks, they get the money out. The founders getting the money out and all of a sudden after a year, the VCs and the founders rich, the retailer poor because they've been the exit liquidity and they've got no project and they just give up. That's basically how this space works.

That's so crazy. And yeah, well, they've shortened their time horizons. Right. Which is good because I guess you can find out if you're a good VC or not. Otherwise you have to wait seven to 10 years by which time you swapped companies 50 times, mate. So who did you meet over there? Anyone interesting or any of the talks that really stood out to you while you're over in token 2049?

Yeah. So caught up with Coinbase. So we're doing a little bit of stuff with Coinbase base at Collective Shift, which is cool. So had a great. Yeah, a couple of meetings with those guys. So putting together some stuff. A lot of sort of founders that were building projects like credit card apps, like Stables met up with the Stables guys, went to a Stables competitor like.

Like event just to see what they were doing. A lot of copycat credit card apps went to Fireblocks. And Fireblocks was probably the largest custodian of, of assets where a lot of the exchanges, you know, rely on Fireblocks to custody their assets. They've actually got over 650 employees, I found out, which is absolutely nuts to think about. So some pretty big companies in the space also met up with a couple of, you know, early stage projects they're trying to, trying to get off the ground. So I sort of spoke to those folks to see, you know, how I could help them. Also went to the Shuffle party. So Shuffle was like a casino app that was pretty nuts. Again, that was a pretty, pretty cool party. So went there after the SUI event and then, yeah, there was also another event which I couldn't go to. Diplo was actually playing for another project on the same night. Couldn't quite get to there and. But yeah, met up with the block earner guys. Etoro. Yeah, sort of. Yeah we did. Also did an Aussie meetup which was cool. Well, it was like an Aussie founders dinner. So it was probably 15, 18 of us Aussie builders are in singers had had Mexican in Singapore. Yeah, it was pretty cool.

That's so cool. And speaking of food, mate, I heard you had a cracking meal over there. An absolute legend. Recommended that you go and eat somewhere and it was a winner, mate.

Well, mate, I thought it was a rug pool considering who was giving me the information. So Bergs calls him up he goes, mate, you need to try this thing. I'm like, oh, here we go. No worries. He's like, buckete. I'm like, bucket what? He's like, buckete. All right. Oh, mate. Righto. What sort of rug pull is this? And then he sent me the. Sent me the place in Morado and it turns out I was starving. He's like, okay, I'm going to try this. Get there. And I'm like, where the hell am I? Uber drops me off in the middle of nowhere. I'm like, oh, Burgess is proper. Stitch me up here. And there's like a shopping mall. Like, okay, right, look in the shopping mall. And like, you know, no, being from Australia, you just know you don't need. You don't need in a shopping mall, mate, if you.

It's weird for Australians, isn't it?

You know, if you don't want to be in the toilet for the next three days, you know, you're not going to eat in a shopping mall. Anyway, I've seen the shopping mall. Like, here we go. Get to the place. Massive line. I'm like, bergs is proper. Stitch me up here. All of them. I saw a Subway or a Mac is around the corner. I'm like, nah, this. We only have Subway. And then the, and then the twitchy in the line. I can't do lines when I start twitching and just like, I can't do this. Sent you a photo. I'm like, nah, this is cook, mate. Anyway, line shortened up pretty quick and got in. I was like, right, here we go. We get in. Menu's not in English. I'm like, great. Don't know what any of this stuff is. Forgot what Bergs even said I needed to buy. So I'm like trying to call him. Like, what did you ask me to buy? Like, I don't even know what I'm trying to get here. He's like, get this, get that. I'm okay, cool. Anyway, just basically pressed a few buttons. Didn't really know what I was ordering. It all came out really, really quick. And I must say it was one of the best meals I've, I've ever had. It was the. The poor. It is, mate. The pork on the, on the bone was just like, you could take it off with chopsticks and then you dip it in this sauce. And then I had like this other chicken bowl thing. I'm really sure it was. That was epic. And had the, at the. The bread in the soup. I was like, oh, yeah, this is pretty top shelf.

It's so good. So. So for those listening, if you ever go to Singapore, ate at a place called Song Pha and they're like best dishes like bucketeers where everyone goes there for. So it's like a pork bone. Super. This amazing like broth that has like, you know, aniseed and other stuff in it. And the dough you're talking about is yu chow or yu chukwei. And then you order like another dish and mate, it's such a good combo. And you were chuffed.

Mate.

They even had someone coming around bringing you like. What were you drinking? Some kind of refreshing tea or something.

Made some tea topping up my soup. Got me a Coke Zero. Within 20 minutes I was in and out. I was like that was unbelievable. Like it'd take 40 minutes for someone in, you know, Melbourne even figure out which table I was sitting at.

Like it's just so good. So yeah, it's one of those restaurants in the Michelin guide and it's like 20 bucks to eat there. It's amazing. One of my favorite meals.

And then yeah made after the conference I had to head home. So I was.

No, no, you had to leave Singapore early, Ben.

You had to leave early. I did have to leave Singapore, I was going to say for the F1s but I had. I had big duties. I had to come back for the Brisbane Lions. We're playing on Saturday night against this against Geelong and Boyd. What a game. Bugs. It was unbelievable. So flew home on Friday, got home late Friday night, got into bed, got up Saturday and went to the game. And I went to the GWS game the week prior and that was one of the best games I've ever seen. Second biggest comeback ever. And then this game was just even better. It was to and froing all game. You didn't know who was going to win. 95, 000 the G. You didn't know who was going to win in the last like 30 seconds. It was just phenomenal.

And I bumped in at half time. Went to a mate's house warming. It was my second party for the day. So got there half time or like 20, 30 points behind something like that. My. Oof. Rough and mate. So many quick goals. Absolutely dominating. Toing and throwing even the last few seconds. Like Geelong could have won like the last minute. It was just edgy, your seat kind of stuff.

It was to be there. There's nothing better than live sports. And I'm a pretty tragic Brisbane Lions fan. I was there last year when we lost by four points in the Granny when we were oh and four at the start of the year. O and three, like, we're like complete write offs and then to come back. We're in the Granny this week. I've got tickets. I'm going to. It was one of the best and worst days of my life last year when we lost by four points. I don't know if I can do it again. It was sickening. Like, I just. Oh, I just hope we don't have to go through that again.

It's so good because we've actually got a Sydney supporter on our team who's flying out to the game. Ben will be there as well.

We might get that awesome thing where you have a draw and then you have to play again next week.

I think they've changed the rule now from memory. I think it's now they play overtime.

Oh, boo. I love that time. We had two grand finals. That was epic.

But at least it's against Sydney. Last year when we lost against Collingwood, I had to go, like, walk home on my own with my scarf and just get abused from, like, the MCG back to, like Chapel street from every Collingwood Sephora. The back of the car. That was bad.

A standard, mate. You cop that without a scarf these days?

Oi, Simpson.

I still remember that time I came into Perth for that first time. Pulled up at the hotel five minutes and came out the front. Was looking for you. Was on my phone trying to get an Uber and there's this big commie pulled up, flying down the street and puts on the brakes and, like, just skids right in front of me into the road. He goes, oh, it's Mr. Bitcoin. And then just drives off just like.

So good.

Welcome to Perth, mate. That's a good perfecting. You're lucky it in glassy on the way, mate.

Out the hood where you live, mate, after wearing.

Oh, bro, yeah, don't come out here, get stabbed. For sure.

Awesome, mate. Before we wrap up, any final thoughts on 2049 and Singapore and everything that you saw there, mate?

Just that we've got a big Q4 lined up. I'm super excited. A lot of big altcoin launches that I think, you know, many are sleeping on. You know, we've got big VC interest in a lot of projects potentially. We've got token launches from the likes of Poly Market, Scroll, Eigen, Layer Story, Protocol, Be Chain, Monad. Like, there's a lot of big things coming up and I think that's going to really fuel a lot of excitement in the back. Three, three months of this year. So, yeah, hopefully going to be pretty exciting time.

Absolutely legendary, mate.

Awesome, guys. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in. If you think your friend or family member or colleague would enjoy this episode, we'd love for you to share it around. It's how we grow the podcast coming to each and every week completely free. No ads, no commissions, no affiliate links. Just giving you the beans to help you in your crypto journey. So thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks, champions.