Ep.32: Derek Edws (Collab+Currency), Chris Maddern (Floor), Token Market Fit, Notcoin

I don't know what's going on, but there's like a bald CEO meta going on with this because like the, what the, the CTA that you have is you like shave your hamster and then you become a CEO, which I just with. I'm going to be paying more attention to hairless people from now on.

Yeah.

Over 8.

Derek Pritch theme song.

I love it.

It's.

It's so good.

I love it.

We're back, we're back. Episode 32 of Internet Explorers. You know, where we, we shoot the. On. On the week in consumer crypto and you know, try to make some of it make sense, which is getting increasingly hard as the weeks go on and you know, somehow things just continue getting crazier. As you can obviously see, Jess is, Jess is out this week, but I'm joined by an equally, if not more well spoken participant in the.

Well, let's say equally. I have a, I have a high respect for Jess.

Yeah, he's a good, he's a good speaker. Derek, thanks for, thanks for hanging out today, man.

100%. I'm excited to dig in and try and make sense of some of the noise happening out there in consumer crypto and stoked you guys even asked me. I feel like I'm running on fumes list these days. But yeah, excited to kind of talk with you.

Yeah, that's often how these Fridays go. Like the brain is cooked and I don't know, I feel like the better takes come out when you're exhausted and overthinking stuff. Right.

So agreed.

Yeah, excited to. I think just, I hang out too much and I know what he thinks. I think sometimes before he even thinks it. So I'm excited to have a fresh perspective. I really don't know some of your kind of perspectives on the current meta. So, yeah, really excited to get into it. So have a pretty packed show today. Going to kick off with Chris from Floor. Bring him up in a sec. And then, yeah, Derek, that se is what the did Peace do on chain, which is a five minute segment where Peace shows us some weird part of the Internet that I'm sure you haven't seen. And then, yeah, some heavy topics. We got crypto social token market fit, some polymarket notcoin getting into the TA ecosystem. Some fun stuff. We'll see if we get the lightning round. Put a bunch of stuff in there too. I doubt we will because we rarely do, but we'll see what happens. Um, but I know, yeah, Chris is running on a tight schedule today. I think Had a pretty, pretty packed day and meeting. So let's, let's bring him up.

What's up, guys?

What's up, Chris? Welcome to the show, man. Do you guys know each other?

Thanks for having me. We know each other well. Derek's actually a longtime supporter of Floor, investor in our first round and just generally a great smart guy to have in your corner. So it was really funny when you said Derek was going to be out there with you. I was like, oh, cool. So great.

That's awesome. That's why you said yes, right?

No, say yes to you any day.

Nice.

Yeah, man.

Excited to, Excited to hear more about what you guys have been cooking up. I think I, it took probably this week. I was still pretty anchored on Floor as, as like the NFT portfolio tracker. I think, you know, started using it pretty early on when you guys first released. You know, it was cool when NFTs were a thing and then I think as that kind of calmed down and died, I, I lost track of it. But it was cool to see you guys have been cooking along and kind of moving along as the space has evolved. So, yeah, excited to dig into it maybe to kick things off. Do you just want to kind of take us back to the initial starting point insight that led to your starting of Floor and then we can kind of go from there?

Yeah. So go all the way back to September 21st.

A lot of smart people were saying NFTs were cool and I didn't know that yet. And so I, I started playing around and florist really came out of my personal journey of it was just way too hard to get started. It was way too hard to stay involved. It was way too hard to stay on top of stuff. And what started as a problem point turned into.

A set of beliefs which is that NFTs and digital ownership are going to be fundamental and transformative to the Internet over the next decade. There is no desktop computer browser extension revolution of 2024. That's just not how it goes down. Everything that's changed the way that we do stuff financially or socially for the last decade has been mobile first. It's happened where people are spending time with each other and where they're spending all their time and attention. And so Floor is our take on what it means to build something that real people might actually be able to get started in web 3 with. That makes it fun and easy to do it together and importantly, in a world of decentralized complexity, brings it all together and creates one space today that supports nine chains, dozens of marketplaces. It just makes it really, really simple for you as a person who's in the space today. Stay on top of everything. But what we're really focused on now is how do we also make it really easy for your five curious friends to say, like, oh, hey, here's 10 bucks of degen, like, come on in and try it out and see this world through my eyes. That's one of the big motivations for launching some of the stuff we did this week, like the wallet and all of that.

Nice. Very cool. And yeah, I guess you're sitting at kind of the intersection of a bunch of pretty crowded markets, maybe with wallets and on chain social feeds and portfolio trackers and kind of all the stuff that you've bundled into a single product. So I'm curious how you're seeing, I guess, floor differentiate within that. Is it just by having this kind of mobile first bundled experience or I don't know, is there kind of another insight here? What do you think it's going to take to win?

So I got the really fortunate experience back in 2011, 2012, to be part of building Venmo. And Venmo was a really interesting product in the US because it was the first time we challenged the idea of a product should be social or a product should be financial, and it should be social and financial. And I think that Web3, because of it, is a native medium for the intersection of those things. But decentralization just creates so much complexity. The other kind of requirement is aggregation. And so there is going to be a front end that combines mobile, aggregation, social and finance and creates that kind of intersection point that is so high leverage and so convenient for users that you can kind of capture and keep and gain a bunch of attention. There'll be a bunch of people who try to do that. I don't think there are any today really that are actually trying to do that. And I think there are lots of really awesome, credible folks who could take a crack at it when you look at the people who make wallets today. But wallets today are really just like signing key managers. Like, we're not looking for Web3's 1Password moment. We're looking for Web3's Twitter moment, their Google moment. And I think a lot of those other folks will come more in this direction of discovery integrated with the places that you manage your money. But what floor's really focused on is the parts of decentralized finance that you might actually want to do with friends. And I think that's where people are going to start getting involved. That's what we're really excited about.

Chris I'll jump in. I've been watching you build Floor for a long time and I think you've done an amazing job navigating as the metas have changed, as new information has come to light. I think there's definitely been consistency and like a through line you can chart back and the product just feels like a more robust and refined product than where it started. But it's kind of like meeting the market where it's at. I'm curious.

What would you say has been the biggest change in consumer behavior that you've noticed over the last couple of years? And maybe what's been the thing that has surprised you that has kind of remained the same, like any of those core insights that you could share.

So from what people are doing is changing.

Where people were buying $50,000 pictures of monkeys and looking at them and ostensibly enjoying the art a while ago, I think we're seeing a movement into the different classes of assets that people are collecting. The thing that's really surprised and delighted me though, is actually seeing miniature software units getting created kind of these token accelerated token enabled DApps that allow people to do things, explore.

New things that are really only possible when you can add a token to them or some tokenomic device to them. That's been the bit that I've, I think, enjoyed the most for us at floor. You know, NFTs was the word, but floor's always been the place for the intersection of tokens and culture on your phone. And the ways in which people are exploring culture through tokens have changed. Previously it was purely visual NFTs that you could look at and feel. Today, meme coins occupy a lot more of that space. I do think NFTs will actually retake part of that position later in the year. Similarly, micro dapps are starting to take some of that place. And importantly, and I think this is the thing that I'm most hopeful for, people are learning how these three things compose together to create holistic consumer experiences using each of the tools for what they're good at. So I think NFTs as a store of value actually have a lot of flaws. A membership club where the only way to realize the value of it is to leave the club is a fundamentally flawed concept. But when you compose NFTs and ERC 20s and Dapps, all of a sudden you can create this really interesting fluid movement of membership, opportunity, value, exchange. I think what I'm most excited about is people Figuring out how to use those tools together better and you know, I hope we can create interesting places for people to discover those interesting experiences and for.

Yeah, Chris, you kind of hinted at it that NFTs are probably going to come back at some point. But I'm curious being someone who obviously started off very interested in NFTs and probably thought deeply about them, do you see them coming back in the way that they were around two, three years ago? Obviously they'll come back in different forms, but I think we saw a punk sale in the 20 ETH for the first time ever or for the first time three years this week. So curious you're forward looking take on the NFT ecosystem and Derek also interested what you said.

Yeah, I probably followed Derek on almost anything here. My general take is that there's a small rarefied strata of things that will always trade as they did back then. They're fundamentally important to the creation of a new industry. I don't believe long term that the concentration of value in NFTs is actually the pattern that the industry is going to land on. So I think that there's not as many as there certainly were in 2021 and I think we'll do more speculating on things that are always happening there. Do a lot more speculating on things that are easier to speculate on and have less friction like meme coins and stuff like that.

Yeah, I'll plus one there. I think the easiest way for me to kind of tee up an answer is just to think about how value works in traditional spaces. And I think contemporary art markets are valued somewhere around 2 to 3 trillion dollars and global GDP is like 100 trillion. And so the product and service portion of blockchains to me represents a much larger TAM to Chris's point. But 2 to 3 trillion dollars is still a massive multiple from where the NFT space is currently trading and even smaller the fine art component of the NFT space. So if you believe that blockchains are just a formatting revolution that's going to absorb a lot of these categories of value, I think everything has upside potential from here at pretty tremendous multiples if you're pilled. And like this is the tech stack of the future, which I happen to believe, but I think that's the, I think maybe the point of debate right now.

Yeah, I mean I think we're probably all in that camp.

Cool.

Yeah. Chris, you also mentioned, I think the potential power of Florida just be a really great onboarding door into crypto. I'm curious how you're thinking about. I think one thing we really need is just people going and intentionally creating a market outside of crypto Twitter for their products. I think we just time and time again see people just launching in the same way to the same people and you see the same things happen. So I'm curious how you're, are you intentionally going after that? Is there still just a lot of room to grow within crypto before you worry about that?

There's room to grow in crypto for sure.

I'm constantly torn here between my, my optimistic hopes and just realistically growing like the business, you know, realistically there is more conventional swap volume and kind of revenue to be made serving the people who are here spending millions of dollars than there will be in any short time frame by serving folks that want to bring $50 on chain and explore for the first time. And so there's just like a certain amount of realism that we need to serve the market that's here because they're power users who in a highly financialized transactional market are spending very large amounts of money. On the flip side, I actually think that there's a reinforcing network effect if you can be the place that those people can influence and be with the people that they're bringing onto the space. Whether that's influencers bringing on influencees or people organically bringing in their friends. If you can create the place where they can do that together, particularly if there can be rewards around doing that, I think one can actually serve the other. I think that being in Web three with your friend or with the person that you look up to can be a reason to come into the product, try and get started. Equally, having those people here can be kind of a reinforcing network effect for the folks that build audience here.

I really think someone needs to build something that is the default answer to oh, you're curious and I'm in. You should go get X. Like there just isn't a good answer to that question today. I think the closest thing we have is in Solana Meme Coins. Probably the best answer is Phantom. I think that's the one place there's some clarity. I don't see any clarity anywhere else. Like go get Metamask, go get Coinbase Wallet. And maybe less, er, but still kind of not really. It's just so unclear what the no brainer onboarding products are. I think actually today the answer is more verticalized. So like if there's very specific things you want to do, there are like products that are pretty good at like, you know, do you want to do friend tech? Like, yeah, go get friend tech. And like, that's a really good way to do friend tech. But as people think about branching out into exploring the ecosystem more generally, I do struggle with this idea of I have 75 different wallets and passkeys for 75 different sites and I have no idea where any of them are. I do think we have a little bit of pain waiting for us in that particular avenue as well.

Yeah, I feel like being almost the second place people go is a really powerful position to be in because I do think a lot of people are going to onboard into a product experience. There's going to be something that speaks to them, maybe their friend tells them to go check out Pump Fun or something and they suddenly they own some digital assets. You're like, oh, wow, that's cool. That felt different than anything I've done before. Like, what's next? And I think being, yeah, being the answer to that is a pretty powerful, high leverage place to be.

Do you have a guess, Chris? Like, if it is like, does your spidey sense tell you it's going to happen around gaming or collectibles or art or social or like, what do you think is the pass after the pass here? If you were to take a stab.

At that.

Honestly, and I think I would have given a different answer, Nick, last year, out of pure optimism, I believe that a lot of the people who onboard during this cycle are going to do so on a speculative basis. And I used to hate that and now I only somewhat am worried about it for the space. But fundamentally we say Web3 is a place where you can participate in the value of the networks that you're part of creating. And we do hope that those networks start to do more useful things. But actually if Floor was just successful at slightly changing the shape of the types of people who came to explore this early and so got to be part of being part of Web3early, that would make me really excited. And so I think you need safe ways to get exposure to this just like any other.

New emerging type of thing. And if we can make it simple and increase the diversity of folks, geographically, gender, racial, whatever that is, of folks who feel like this is a place for them and that they can actually safely explore, that would be really exciting to me. Even if it isn't around a particular use case, I do think we'll see a bunch of gaming stuff. I think gaming is just a place that lends itself so naturally and the only reason it wouldn't happen is is challenges with established players not knowing quite how or being kind of against it. But I actually think there's a lot of places that we're going to home grow things in time that actually could eat up things that have been created from the outside in the past.

I'm so curious because it's really interesting. I like that you were saying you're less bummed about it being a speculative thing. And I just, you know, I don't know. I've only been into crypto for four years now, so I'm a first cycler and it feels like there's this desire to grow up or something. And I feel almost like every single crypto cohort has that same desire to grow up where the people before them made tools slightly easier to use. They come in and are like, yeah, now we can add this use case because this, this is what makes it actually make sense. And then the people before them are like, yeah, but no, not like that. Like that's not what it's for. And then we make it easier to use and more people come in and they start doing something new and we're like, but not like that. And all along the way there just becomes this increasing social legibility that is like speculative.

Yet entirely social all the way down. And yeah, I can't tell if it matters if it's gaming or if it's some new way to stunt online or something like that. But I, I just think it's. All these tensions are just interesting and I just had to say that out loud, I guess.

No, you're right. Like if you zoom out. The thing that I'm most excited about is I think web3 gives us the apparatus to allow a billion people to be entrepreneurs and to create their own little one person shows where if you can capture the attention of a group of people, there is a native financial currency on the Internet. That means if you're a hut somewhere, you have just as much ability to actually transact and turn that attention into real financial upside as someone sat in New York City in a studio. The only thing that Web2 was ever successful at really financializing in that area is people taking short videos of themselves and putting them on the Internet. And I think we're going to see that explode into 100 categories of people who practice some craft online can get a small following, get a small group of people's attention. We now have tools and this is why I think meme coins, while we're doing some pretty absurd things with them, fundamentally so important, it is Financializing attention. And that is like a new primitive that you can then use to turn to things like that and allow people to actually create value. What we haven't done is allow kind of extraction by the creator very well. Yeah, but yeah, I want to.

I want to actually. So I love that view and I don't know if it's like if it's often repeated, but.

So there is this flattening between the value creator and the value consumer that this technology really does in traditional spaces. It's like the data is like this 50% of GDP in the US is generated from small to medium sized businesses. And if you think about it, this technology is actually pretty decent at allowing that number to probably increase over time. And if for nothing else, then early things like artists being able to monetize their art for the first time or musicians being able to launch Meme Coins for the first time or indie gamers or indie game studios with less than five people being able to launch a network that trades at a $25 million market cap. These aren't like home runs but in the aggregate the technology is working and adoption is happening. And I think maybe the reframe that I would double click on that you're mentioning here Chris is I think instead of looking for what's the killer app or the killer use case and recognize that by virtue of just individuals being able to create livelihood in a much more meaningful way that could actually be one of the killer ways to kind of frame this technology revolution.

I love that. Yeah, it's just like blowing open the optionality of how you can exist and make money online. And I think the even just the shift from like you know, in Web2 venture capital it's like it's a zero or it's a thousand X. And even just like the. The ability to have a nailed it a 5x is like it's just completely new thing.

You're nailing it right now. Exactly. Yeah.

All right Chris. Yeah, I know we're. We're over time. Appreciate you jumping in here. Could could talk for hours but it was great to hear hear the kind of vision for floor.

Yeah.

What's the, what's the thing to do if people are kind of intrigued about the product?

Yeah. Come come tell us how to make your ideal home for you on chain and your phone Floor fun. Get the app but it's in app chat support. Myself and Christine, my co founder pretty much will be on that a lot of the time. That and a couple folks who help man it. We really, really are serious about taking everyone's feedback to create the product that is right for you. And so the majority of features, one way or another, come from people just like you. Like, hey, I wish you did this. Like, great, let's do it. Thank you so much for having me. I really wish I could stay for hour. I could literally chat with you guys forever.

We'll do it again sometime.

This is fun.

All right, dude. Peace.

Nice.

That was my first ever, ever talking to Chris, actually.

Chris is awesome. And his co founder, Christine, like, go to founders. Those guys are amazing. Super sharp on product. And yeah, I think he undersold how attent, like, how attentive he is to, like, feedback and, like, baking that into the product, because that's honestly, like, we're exceptional at that.

And you guys were like, early investors.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were early investors in Florida.

Very sick. All right, peace. What do you got for us?

Nice.

So pretty.

Pretty inactive week for me. Unfortunately. I missed this mint.

But I love it, man.

I don't know.

Salana just continues to have these awesome drops and they always sell out, like, immediately. So I miss this. And then it's great because you can just go to. Yeah. So this is edible. Edible kawaii.

Sorry, I'm.

I'm like jumping all over the place.

Here, but it's 3333 deliciously kawaii demons cooked by Kikilo on Solana. And this is a creator who definitely was selling high end, high quality tokens on the foundation app only four years ago. And now they're doing Solana drop, and it's really cool. And they were dirt cheap. Sold out in an instant. And so what did I do? I went to Tensor Trade and I bought rares. You know, you flip that on.

I don't know.

Does it matter? It doesn't really matter, probably.

Oh, come on. You have a nice little Solana. I love these things.

They do awesome drop. Like, all the good art is dropping on Solana right now. Like, it's pretty active and there's some interesting. Yeah, people out there making stuff. But I really liked these characters from the collection. So I grabbed this, like, faux Kirby Jigglypuff thing, which is kind of the signature Kihilo vibe. Like, can I even.

I'm not spelling your name right.

Oh, yeah, There we go.

So this is this artist.

They're super cool.

And yeah, like, the rares are going for the high price of like 50 bucks or something.

So it's beautiful.

It's.

It's a fun. It's a fun thing.

And the thing that I need to do that I'll report back on is I need to bridge my soggets to bitcoin. Absolutely pathetic. That I haven't.

Loved. Yeah, I was liking seeing the, the Sogit action on floor.

But this is the creator of bitcoin puppets and this is an NFT collection that they have on Ethereum from a couple years back. And we're bridging baby, we're going to the mother chain. So I'll report back once I compress this little shit and inscribe it and yeah, maybe that'll be next week. So that's what I've got going on.

Derek, are you collecting on Solana or Bitcoin at all?

Yeah, I do a little bit. I've never heard of any of these collections which is the point of the segment. Yeah, this is awesome. I'm not even quite sure what I'm looking at right now, but the art is the art's killer. What's the end game for the Kawaii collection?

I think we already reached it. I think the collector has monetized and people who bought it can trade it. And I think that that's it. I think so.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I mean that's all I wanted. I just wanted. I was like I'm not going to not own one of these. They're cool. And that's as far as I thought on my end.

You don't need to go any further. I feel like that was a big downfall last cycle was just trying to layer on utility or over complicate these things. And owning digital assets is just amazing in its own right.

Totally. And I, I really like. Can I find the thing if I search.

Kawaii Demons Salana, nft.

I don't know.

What do we get? Here we go.

Yeah.

These sites, they're like all the NFT drops are always on.

Yeah.

Like launch my NFT or like Truffle. And I just like the vibe because it's. You get to create these different time slots. Maybe some of them are allow lists and you get a price each individual one.

That's cool.

People do these like 24 hour drops and it's like always on a, on a janky product. But yeah, I don't know, they, they go quick and it's.

And what was the dollar value for minting? Like what did you pay?

Well, I missed the mints so I don't know. I paid like 09 SOL for one and 0.3 SOL for another.

I love it.

They're like, oh yeah, Public Mint was 0.1137 SOL. It was like dirt cheap.

Yeah. Cool.

Very sick.

Thanks.

Peace. Yeah.

Let's jump to crypto social. So I just kind of created this umbrella topic here because I think generally it was just an insane week on the timeline. Every time I opened it, people were just mad about something, trying to make sense. You're trying to make sense of like what the hell was happening in consumer crypto. I think, you know, saw just mother performance in select coins. Just having crypto purists in shambles. I think people continue just using like friend tech to make these broad generalizations about, you know, the opportunity in crypto social. And there's just. I just continue seeing this general sentiment right now that you, you can't build lasting consumer products here or no one. And it's just going to be these kind of rotating casinos and gambling forever. And I just strongly disagree with that. Just wanted to create some space to kind of.

Yeah, well, what's your take? I'm curious to hear what you think.

Yeah, I think first of all, speculation and financialization of anything is just the most tangible killer feature of crypto and it unlocks experience that I think are just so much more obviously differentiated from anything in Web2 than any other property of blockchains. So I think, I do think we need to like accept that meme coins or, you know, things that are similar as the most accept accessible version of this, like, are going to probably be the things that onboard the most people over the next year and attract the most people here over the next year, but also think it's kind of a decent way to learn about digital ownership and wallets and markets and participate in Internet culture and make Internet friends. So I actually, I don't know, I don't think that's a bad thing. And I do think we also need to kind of accept that we just don't have enough people doing stuff on chain yet for the real promise of social products. Kind of built on shared data and interoperable identity and digital ownership to just be better than Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Most of our friends aren't here. We need something to get them here before we're going to actually have enough on chain data for this stuff to be interesting. So I kind of think we need to almost lean. We need to lean. What we need is better products that actually lean into the kind of stark differentiation of meme coins and speculative digital assets and then kind of create increasingly meaningful social contexts around them and then kind of over time the social job that these products can perform and serve starts to kind of eat away at the kind of pure financial jobs that they serve. So I think it's kind of this couple step process of probably going to be speculation and meme coins and things like that that attract people in, then we need to hook them with increasingly useful social products. I think just recently with the state of infrastructure actually able to build decent consumer products for really for the first time like you know, week after week, the stuff that this infrastructure is unlocking I think is, is pretty meaningful and profound. So I also just don't think we've had enough time and cycles to really, you know, build the great products that we need.

So I think kind of a combination of that but curious what you think.

Yeah, I don't know if I have anything insightful other than what you just said. I, I totally agree. I, I guess the way I think about it is.

I think the comment that Vitalik is making, I would argue that we are moving in a better direction and we are. Year after year there was this old adage where it's just like the best marketing for bitcoin was the price going up. It brought me totally the space they were able to speculate on this fixed supply scarce object as the network grew. And I think if I look back over the last 15 years of this technology, it just feels like the pipes and plumbing continue to get refined and better and new use cases start to emerge. I mean, four or five years ago, if you were going to say we want to put a full fledged game that leverages blockchain as an environment, there wasn't the infrastructure for that, just like there wasn't for social or for art, for collectibles, for other consumer use cases. And I think what will end up happening is as more people come into the space, some percentage of them will have some of this donative intent that Hayden and Vitalik I think are kind of like promulgating here. And they'll build with that kind of baked into the core product loop and it can move and continue to grow in that direction. And yeah, I guess this tech stack is so neutral, right. Anybody can do anything with it. And so the truth is everything's kind of working. More people are coming to the space than leaving year after year. And some percentage of that are going to be people who want to build with more of like a purpose or donative purpose in place. And I think that's just time is going to solve and sort through that.

I feel like too, I don't know, it's just kind of interesting because I don't think that Hayden nor Vitalik launched a token with any mechanism that protected people or didn't dump to minus 90% and it just feels, it feels like an arbitrary decision on what is a business and what is not. The argument that stoner cats is more valuable because they were going to produce a show.

Feels really silly when I know nothing about the distribution of that.

So whatever.

I can't speak on it, but just seems like there's a ton of value in things dying and like fast.

Yeah, I say that because during Free White Fright somebody said this thing to me that I couldn't. They started talking about the trail of bodies in tokens. And just like the. Which I thought was really interesting because you make a token, you LP it, you lock and burn it, that just literally lives forever. And on that minus 90% is when community forms or people who actually value the thing or people who really want to build create the value versus just like whatever the 2018 Ethereum pump.

You said something really interesting and we don't have to make this like a gendered conversation, but I do think that there is something interesting about the business of selling block space, which is what Metallic did with Ethereum. The business of facilitating a market through this AMM structure, which is what Hayden is doing. And the business of Iggy as an entertainer and creating an entertainment product and products that stow from that and privileging the first two while kind of.

I think talking down to that third category. And.

I see what Iggy's doing and I think it's a very interesting use of the technology. This is what it means for someone to create a product and service on top of block space. And I think we're just going to see more of it and I think that's okay.

100%. Yeah. I think just more of everything I think is just good. I think the thing we probably are missing a bit of is the. I mentioned it talking to Chris is just the people intentionally going after not crypto Twitter. And actually we talked about it last week with Fantasy Top and had this kind of successful month targeting crypto Twitter bunch of usage. Now it's kind of really fallen off but I think now they have this interesting opportunity to say okay, cool that that worked. We learned a bunch test the mechanics. Now let's go try this at, you know, some intersection of like crypto enthusiasts and like reality TV stars and try to like really use this game as like an extension of their fan. These people's fandom as much as it is like a, a financial product. So I think we just need more people who to just like intentionally, you know, try things like that versus just. It's easy to just stay in this, this kind of crypto Twitter bubble because it's comfortable and we all know it, but we need the people doing the hard work to go.

Yeah, I think that's right. I'm curious to hear from both of you guys what you think of maybe some of the more purpose built social finance projects right now. I think I saw a tweet up there around Fronteq. I'm curious to hear. This is something that I'm thinking about quite a bit. Curious to hear what you guys think is working and not working here.

Piece. You want to go ahead?

I think, I mean I, I don't know if I have any real strong opinions other than there's no way anyone is going to buy me out of Friend Tech. Like I already put that money in Friend tech, I don't know how long ago expecting to never see it. And I have a. Every time I log in I have a portfolio value that is higher than I think it should be and they gave me free money. So like, yeah, I'm just, I wasn't even that active on the thing. So there's no way that like that's the trail of dead bodies that I'm talking about. There's no way I'm gonna sell that unless it does something really stupid. And I think there's value in that.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think Friend tech continues to.

Just be like ahead of the curve with some of the mechanics they're introducing. They kind of invented, not invented, but were the first. They popularized embedded wallets. Right.

It's hard to remember now but how shocking of an experience that was to just be able to sign up. Yeah, it was awesome and just.

That was just a completely new thing. And then suddenly there were this kind of compounding kind of snowball of people following their footsteps. And I think even though the product leaves a lot to be desired, I think they did something like that again with the.

Kind of contained world that they built, like having their own native decks to be able to kind of capture the fees of trading their token, really treating their token, I think as a product which we'll talk about next and a core part of this experience. And I think the app usage is one piece of it, but I think the token is just another piece of it. And there's kind of strong memetic value there. People are having fun playing games around it and I think there's a lot of value there. So I love the continued friend tech experience. Of course I would love the product to improve a bit and that get cleaned up but I think it's a great experiment. Also love I think continues to be fascinated by the you know, like Unlonely and Pump Fun and these kind of like meme coin centric social products. I think like increasingly, you know, pump Fun like you can just go and scroll and have like a pretty quick sense of like what is like the top like the, the, the current like.

Memetic meta financial economy. Right.

Which is crazy. And then now people can like live stream directly on this site. You know they can, you can follow people like it, it, it's, you know, it's evolving into this social product on the foundation of this as like Meme coins as this like entertainment vertical. And I think Unlonely has kind of been on a, a similar thing for a while. So I think, I think it's all to pieces earlier point like it's all, it's all social and it's, it's all fi and I think there are lots of ways to build you know, social fi experiences and yeah, who knows where it's going and how you build kept lasting sustainable value there and retain users for 6 months if not a couple years. But I think I'm pretty confident someone's going to figure it out soon.

Yeah, I think that's totally right. I think the only thing I would just plus one that you just said is it feels like the ingredients are here and now it's just a matter of configuring them in the right set. It's like we have cheap block space, we have fast settlement, we have things like smart wallets and embedded wallets. We have.

Single state or no bridging on Solana or just like very easy seamless migration from your Coinbase account to base. We've got.

Experimentation around tokens that's happening in different ways and it's, and it feels like we're now at that point where like someone or all of these people at some point are going to like crack on some core insight and, and it'll be, I mean it'll be exciting to see how, how things evolve from there. But I, I tend to agree. It just feels like things are. Things are right.

Yeah, I think just that.

Just say.

The two things that are missing, the two ingredients are, are good posts and good drops.

Just aren't posting like they used to be. I tell you what? There, there was some new ideas on Twitter and now they're rehashing them? No, I don't know.

I'm.

I'm kind of, I'm just. I like this.

What, what do you mean good drops? Just like new product, new product features or runs or like ideas. What do you, what do you mean?

Honestly, I, I think that NFTs haven't died. I just think no one has done a good drop. Like every good drop kind of like shattered people's understanding or. It was like a surprising thing and we're all so fatigued and burn out on that that it's gonna like we're, we're healing and eventually someone is gonna do a drop that reawakens our imagination and hopefully people get out there and start making some inspiring posts as well. And, and like that's. I sound, I feel like I'm, I sound facetious, but I actually think we need more.

We need more thought leaders. We need more influencers.

We totally. And it has to, it also has to happen naturally. Right? Because like no one was trying to do that. Exactly. They weren't self aware yet. I think in 2020, 2021, some people were just like posting from the fucking heart and yeah, we need to shoot.

From the hip again.

Yeah, I agree with that. All right, let's jump to token market fit here. So Mark Balon wrote a good article this week about talking about token market fit. He was kind of building off his article from a few months ago called the Token. It's the product, but really just explores how he thinks you make a token people want and really looked at it through, through kind of the frames of narrative discovery and more efficient venture capital. So kind of talk, you know, talked a lot about the challenges of like balancing narratives that appeal to the broad market and will drive token demand with kind of the reality that the largest opportunities are often contrarian and misunderstood, you know, and then kind of goes on to like summarize. The big goal of tokens, of course being to like attract high value contributors and participants who really believe in the mission and are willing and capable of support it with their capital and energy. So nothing hugely groundbreaking in here, but I do think the perspective of tokens as products is still pretty under appreciated. But I think it's getting increasingly important as we kind of move away from these infrastructure focus cycles when tokens very much were de facto equity and governance mechanisms and narratives are very much enough to serve that, that desire and job to be done. But I think as we move into kind of A more consumer dominated cycle as retail participation grows. I think the tokens that most effectively speak to kind of the beliefs and aspirations of people and give them access to experiences that they actually want are going to capture outsized attention and ultimately these are products of attention. So I think actively really treating products as or tokens as products and actively going to create a market for your token, making it feel great to own, creating meaningful social contexts for it to exist in and provide value at the end are just going to get increasingly important looking forward. So I think really just wanted a great article worth reading. Wanted to kind of emphasize tokens or products. But Derek, curious how with portfolio projects or just generally how do you think about or talk about tokens with them?

Yeah, so really interesting stuff. I haven't had a chance to totally unpack the arguments here, so I might be meandering or misstating them, but I think the first thing I'll say is I don't know if I would paint with as broad of a brush.

In.

Terms of just like the token is the products. Like a couple of examples off the top of my head. We work closely with a team called iyk. They don't have a token, but what they do is, you know, create products and services that allow these off chain objects to be indexed on chain and for networks to be created around them. And gaming companies and fashion companies and real world object companies are now leveraging these NFC chips on their apparel and there's no token coming. And I would say they're increasingly creating a valuable crypto company. Art Blocks is another one. No token. At one point I think the number of show that did like 1.7 or $1.8 billion in GMV.

And the list goes on. We've done a handful of deals that were acquired and never had tokens. So I don't know if I would say the token is the product for all of crypto just as a kind of primary. And the crisif floor is another great example. No token indexing on chain actions, creating social products.

I think for projects that do have a token I do agree with, I think some of the points that the author is making here, which is just like this thing is like a sharp knife, right? Like it can cut both ways. It can be a massive lightning rod for attention, for networking, for creating an army of believers in your product or service and that's a superpower that we just didn't have before with Internet based software. It's also a knife in the sense that it can cut you and if you're not doing it correctly. And so I do agree with, I think the general thesis here, which is just like there is some thoughtfulness that needs to be baked into how these economies get built and networked and created over time. That can either supercharge your product or completely handicap you from grind.

Totally. Do you think? Yeah, I very much agree that if you have a token, it's your product or needs to be treated as a very important extension of your product. Not a hard requirement to have one, of course. But I guess.

Looking at art blocks, for example.

Would you like them to have a token? Or how it's an interesting thing to think about.

Art Squiggle is just like the passive proxy to the artbox ecosystem. I think some people think so. I think there's probably some of that. But there's not like an ERC20 floating around out there that gives you governance exposure to how the contracts get evolved and pushed. And some of the fee structure gets kind of spit out to artists and creators and so on and so forth. I think. Does a token supercharge that product? I think maybe. But I also will say.

There'S quite a bit of surface area to cover to build an art institution on chain that doesn't really have anything to do with the community ownership at this stage.

Do I think that?

My view is blockchains eat all of this stuff. And so at some point it makes sense to maybe make the governance structure of all products and platforms touch blockchains. But I'll also say sequencing that out.

Is probably the thing that I would.

Really focus on for every individual project for some tokens on day one makes sense. I'm a big believer in things like fair launch, credibly neutral architecture that incentivizes people to come together and build lasting value, or.

The Iggy Token that is a product. She's building entertainment products right now that people are rallying around and excited about. And I saw yesterday that she's now creating a store where you pay the Iggy Token mother to buy the shirts and everything's denominated in mother and you can imagine additional token syncs to create other additional loops for future products and services that Iggy and maybe others on our team create.

So I don't know if I'm totally answering your question, but to me it's very much it depends. I just don't know if there's a. A shotgun answer for every project building a protocol or a platform in our space.

Totally. I think they're both viable paths. Right. Like, could art blocks Launch a token and really evolve into a network that is potentially more broad than just the art blocks website and protocol. Definitely. Do they need to. Of course not. Right. Billion dollars in ngmv I think. Haven't actually checked in on it recently, but continues to do well I assume.

In some, in some form and then like up and down. I mean like I, yeah. So I like I, I need to dig into this article and I think he's probably got some good insights as to like how to make a token viable and why to be thoughtful about it. So I'm sure there's some good stuff in here that I definitely agree with. But. Yeah, yeah, just like I would never push protocol or platform to like get that thing out in the wild because like sequencing I think is very much an important part of the calculation here. Totally.

I think the, the risk factor is not launching one and then someone comes into a similar market opportunity and does launch one and is able to like ravel the network effects or capture a bunch of attention because of that.

Yeah, there are amazing attention creators, dude. Like there's relics that people can tap into that like that's a, that's very sexy. So like I get, I, I definitely see that argument.

Yeah.

Nice.

Okay, let's jump to, jump to Polymarket. So Polymarket had their, their best month ever in May which is great. I think they did $63 million or something in trading volume and it looks like in June they're on, on pace to beat that so far. So the, the volume's heavily concentrated on a few presidential election markets. I think like the top, top four markets which I think it's like Republican Democratic nominee plus election winner is like the vast majority of the volume. But still great to see like you know, charts. Great great to see that they're finding some fit within that vertical. I think the, the question that I continue getting kind of caught on with with like prediction markets as a product or platform, it's just like the, you know, in this case it's like the question of what happens after the election. And I kind of like often struggle to see the path to like broad appeal of like broad kind of generic prediction market platform. But I do think the idea of them and what they unlock is awesome but have always kind of been more interested in vertical specific implementations of them that can really concentrate liquidity and ultimately create more specific social experiences around them. But kind of just wanted to bring this up to get. I think prediction markets are an obvious kind of long time stated great use case of crypto. So I was curious what your kind of general view on prediction markets was.

Yeah, I like them. I think they're just like you just said. I don't know if I have anything super insightful to add here, but the data is pretty clear that pricing feature events and creating a market around them. That's a great use of the technology. It's like we're basically taking traditional plumbing for prediction and prediction betting and putting it on a global database that's international in nature, that runs 24, 7, that settles near instantaneously. And it's like that is a perfect format for these types of markets to form. And so it's not super surprising to me that.

We'Re seeing the financialization of these predictions in real time continue to just go stratospheric and I think that's just going to continue, honestly.

Yeah, totally. I've been playing with Kizzy a bit. Do you know Kizzy.

I think you just had it up a second ago. I was trying to look through it.

Yeah, it's a social media focused prediction market product. Well, I think what's interesting and I think evident is they don't call themselves a prediction market platform or something, they call themselves social media betting which is I think really a smart way to build a consumer product in this space. But yeah, basically what, what they've built is just like a narrow vertical of prediction markets that's focused on betting on like the performance of posts or follower counts for.

Very similar to Fantasy Top but without the NFTs.

Exactly. Without the NFTs, without like the creator involvement in any way. Just pure and then. And I think like already, I think it's in close alpha. I think it's going to open up soon. But I think like already it, you know, it just, it's just going to be so much more appealing to people that are interested in this than like a kind of broad, than like an order book focus prediction market. So I think there's just like tons of opportunity to kind of focus in on something like this and, and build really great consumer products.

Insight I took from Fantasy Top, which has been like, it's been an interesting product to follow.

Is like you can build incredibly neutral markets on top of third party data as long as we all kind of agree to the optimistic data. And Twitter, and Twitter performance is like a great use case. Yeah, I think it remains to be seen. I would love to see a tighter bundling of that. Honestly. The holy grail is stuff that you can't game. So it's like things where you can't spoof accounts or you're really able to track identity or you can't pay for posts or there's some way to manage and monitor that. I think you get closer to that end state with blockchains. So take everything that works about Twitter, put it on a blockchain and being able to create more provably fair markets to allow these payouts to be I think represent more authenticity. But with that said.

I think directionally this stuff is super cool and I think we're just going to see more of it. I remember this is kind of a stupid example and I've shared this before but like when I was playing NBA Top shot in during COVID so this was like mid 2020. It was interesting because like performance of like the games that day would be reflected in how the cards started to trade. So like let's just say Luka Doncic had an amazing game or was on his path to like score a 30 or 40 bagger. Like his cards would start to trade in the market like while that game was going on. And it was the first time that I had started to see like markets forming around real world information that everybody.

Could kind of agree on.

And I think we're just going to see more of that. I think it's going to look like prediction markets, it's going to look like social products like this, it's going to look like NFT games like Fantasy Top. So I definitely love the category and I'm curious to see how it unfolds.

Yeah, no doubt. All right, let's jump to knock on quick. So I'm curious, I'm curious how deep or how much you guys have looked into like Taun as an ecosystem. So I talked about Knockoid way earlier this year. I think it was January when it was kind of like first catching steam and just kind of played with it a bit. You know, it's just, it's like you tap the coin and that was kind of the game. But you were mining, you know, this token that would be eventually released and it just, it was released last, last week I think and they ended up having like 35 million people play. Peaked at like 6 million DAOs. This token's trading at like a $2.2 billion valuation. So like crazy, crazy performance for this like tapping game distributed through like a pop up in Telegram. And then now we're seeing hamster combat I guess is like kind of blowing their numbers away. Like they, They've had like 100 million unique players of this game. So I don't know there's. There's something happening in ton and Telegram is like a distribution channel. Not super deep in it yet. Need to be, but curious how much you guys looked into it Quite a.

Bit over the last few years. So, like, I guess I'll. I'll first start off by saying there has been, I think, like, this belief in like, core social consumer crypto that, like, things need to get built from the ground up and like, need to leverage blockchains and like, this really unique way.

Maybe there's a financialization component or there's a social fi component or tokens need to be baked in that creates a net new experience for a consumer web3crypto product to take off. I've been seeing folks post about that idea for maybe, let's call like 12 months, and I just don't think that's true. Right. At some point, these things are weighed on a scale and.

800 million users trapped in this contained experiment with a very killer execution around a social game that very lightly touches blockchain. And frankly, it's just like a web2clicker or a web2runner or it's just like a very casual consumer game. These things can get fucking big even if you're not creating some Net new design space for social experiences. And I think Telegram is proving that out very quickly. So anyway, when you've got almost a billion users that are spending 10 hours a day in this app and they're totally trapped in this experiment or experience, and now there's blockchains and crypto and peer to peer transfers and protocols that can launch and games that can be abstracted inside of the experience. It's like, dude, I mean, that's a pretty interesting ingredient mix for like something to get 30, 40, 50 million users in a couple of days.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Do you see the opportunity as being like Telegram as top of funnel or distribution for something that, you know, eventually pull them into some standalone product, or do you just think there are big companies to be built purely existing within Telegram?

Yeah. So I would say the investable surface area for like, apps and protocols and things building on top of ton and within Telegram. I still think, like, you know, we're still trying to sort that out as a fund and we place some bets there. But I, I guess the, the. The larger point is, like, there's definitely value there. Like we, we. I mean, you know, this dude, like, this is a tension world we live in. Like, and I mean, I don't know about you, but my entire life runs through Telegram, professionally, personally. It's like we're all very much like captive users inside of this attention network. And I think there's going to be slam dunk home run products that come out of this thing and frankly it'll probably earliest look like a completely different segment. It's not going to be like the hardcore crypto users that the innovation or some net new design space get unlocked around social. It's probably going to be people who want to click their screen a thousand times a day and have some ownable ecosystem reward token that they can use in all sorts of other ways. So I would say.

Moderately bullish and interested what comes out of this ecosystem.

Yeah, I agree with that. All right, well, we're over time pieces put up pictures of shirtless Bezos. So I think it's time we log out of here and shut this thing down.

I just think it's interesting. I think that there's got to be. I don't know what's going on, but there's like a bald CEO meta going on with this because like the what the, the CTA that you have is you like shave your hamster and then you become a CEO, which I just with I'm going to be paying more attention to hairless people from now on.

Yeah. Hey, I just want to say thank you both for having me on with my very mid takes this morning. I appreciate you both. This is a. I love this format. I think this is the first time I've sat through the entire thing and maybe my favorite format in Canada.

It's fun. It's fun.

Well, thank you. Yeah.

Thanks for coming. Open invitation to come hang out whenever you want.

Peace.

Thanks for doing your thing today big time everyone for showing up and we'll see you next week.

Thanks guys.

Take it easy.

Take care.

Sam.