CZ: Bitcoin Price, AI's Role & What Founders Should Actually Build | CZ at Token2049

I'm always foolish. So if you ask me though, and the deepest winter 2019, I'm bullish. 2022, 2023, I was bullish. And if you ask you the peak, I'm bullish. And then the market goes down. Had the correction, so. So I'm. It's very hard to count the market so far. The market still are four year cycles, but it's very hard to tell like if this one is going to be shorter or longer, et cetera. But I think if we take a long day, we're so early. BNB had Bitcoin its existence. Ethereum probably has as well. Even though I know a lot of people have opinions about even Doge, which is crazy, right? So there are a few projects that outperform bitcoin, but those are a small number. But I do think that they all continue to be new projects that will outperform big bump, but they're very small in number. And also they start in a much smaller market cap. Right. So you see if you look at the multiples, yeah, they can go higher but once they, if they reach to the size of a bitcoin today they will sold out. It's much harder to grow a large market cap than a small one. So it depends on your risk appetite, risk profile of what you want to invest in. But I do think there are still many opportunities. But it's true that if you want the least amount of work with very good returns, just buy the top four few tokens, you're in your shape. What we've seen is that this cycle so far has been ETS, the US and institutional money going to ETFs and those money go to Bitcoin because the Bitcoin ETF the biggest. So in that regard, yeah, Ethereum didn't go up that much because the money hasn't. The money is kind of stuck with bitcoin. But what's good for bitcoin is good for other crypto. Eventually the money war dispersed. When they're in an etf they usually take longer because institutions for them to move go from bitcoin to Ethereum to other altcoins will take a bit longer. But what we seem, and I still believe 100% is Bitcoin is usually the first crypto that people interact with. When they come to crypto, that's the first one they learn, that's the most stable, that's the most decentralized, et cetera and that's the biggest market cap. But once the money is in crypto they will Eventually. So you will come. So yeah, I think where I think we're still partially. Well, I think we're going if we go by four year cycles to the end of this year, we don't know for sure. Many regulators still want to regulate everything locally. They want a local custody border solution, they want a local order book, they want a local everything, local team, et cetera. But that's usually not the best way to go because setting up a secure custody solution for billions of dollars requires a lot of money. It requires a lot of funds and requires a lot of expertise which is very lacking today. Just setting up a global one is already difficult enough. If we have to do like 200 times, we just don't have the people, right. For each really cold wallet you need to have like 15 signers. You can't find 15 signers that are not public that are really extremely trustworthy in different parts of the world in different geographies and they don't. And they're not incentivized by more money. They have a shady job, they're high income, they're nice family. So just can't find like how many times more of those freaking people, right? So and also local order book again if you divide each country with their order, local order book, they're pretty going to suck. And so when you want to buy like a million dollars, delivery is going to be super high. So those type of issues are very like, you know, real concrete issues. Many countries have the capital control, so capital flight issues. Almost all of those countries want foreign direct investment. But the thing is if you, if you, if you don't open up, open up your, if people can't get money out then the money's not going to come in, right? So, so a lot of those like issues that are very real, very tangible issues to, to address. There's a few countries who are extremely amassed on that topic. I think Bhutan, I believe His Majesty King of Bhutan is actually in the city today. He's, he's a, he's an early crude oil doctor. He's a very smart guy. And they, they have excess energy, clean energy, highway energy. So they've been mining bitcoin for years. So they have billions and billions of dollars of bitcoin for a very small country. Now they've added Ethereum and BNB to, to their national reserve. So, so the early adopters are moving forward based on public information. US seems to be using the holding at least no longer selling the bitcoin. You know, some of the OGs like us actually Kind of hope that governments will sell their bitcoin so that other guys can buy them cheaply. But you know with this US administration they're very business savvy so they understand what's malleable. So so now they figure that out with the US with one of the world's largest economy holding bitcoin now or holding making a crypto reserve other countries are forced to do it because the later you do it the more expensive your crypto will be. So yeah, so I think we are talking with many countries on advising them how to set up the crypto strategic reserve and also like if you very simple stuff or very basic fundamental stuff like world wallet solutions to use, do you use a, a professional custody solution or do you use your own cold borders? Do you have the, do you have enough expertise to build that kind of infrastructure etc? So for most countries we when they start with this, most countries starting amount are not as big as us, right? Us have like 200,000 bitcoins or something. For most other country when they have a much smaller amount we actually just recommend them to use a professional custody solution. That's multi sig, right. So no single person can move the money. When they build up to a certain large amount then they should move to their own cold storage solution. So let's have a discussion along the sides. I think the crypto industry so there's a lot of money flowing around but they all chasing short term dates. So I would like to sort of help the founders to build real products. So I'm a builder myself, I like to see product built that a lot of people use. So. So I think that's the single most important metric. It's not the token price, it's not everything else, it's just building use cases for people. So this is why I'm actually spending majority. The biggest chunk of my time today is spending on easy labs with founders so tough with the founders looking at different projects just part of help them. There are still many, many small founders. It's just like their voice is a bit muscled right now. So I think you've got to help those founders to be more volatile, more active and also more engaging in the community. I think crypto so far has not expanded beyond trade so but this also represents an opportunity. So right now RWS by D is growing but it's still finance related still like sort of tokenizing real world assets et cetera. Deci or decentralized social media hasn't really taken off yet. There's a number of really interesting attacks that we're looking at. But when I talk about the government solutions, I think that's another area that most likely can kick off and that's not finance related. So those are just pure blockchain for efficiency and for transparency. For example, land title rights in many countries they don't have very good systems. Even in Japan they still use a piece of paperwork with a scratch off code to verify you own that is a land. And if you lose that paper it's actually quite difficult to replace or to get it back. So and in other cars like in Africa, there's many land, you don't know who it belongs to. And also even in countries like us where there is pretty mature record keeping, but the record keeping is done manually and the local municipal office keep that record and it's not digitized. So when you try to buy a piece of land, you don't know the history of that land, you don't have data so that you cannot price it and then you have more liquidity. So there's all of these issues which can be addressed and we are actually investing in a company that's solving this problem. We recently invested in Stein which is another project that does decentralized IDs and they are building layer 2s for governments, et cetera. So I'm pushing really, really hard. So yeah, so there's a lot of interesting solutions being built. I think AI has sway applications that unfortunately this industry happened before AI. So we need to change this industry to a AI enabled industry both in terms of absolute building product tools, customer support, risk management, respondenting and also AI itself can use blockchain. Right. So I think as I said Twitter before, the currency for AI is crypto. AI is not going to swap a card, you know, enter SMS code that doesn't work for AI, it's compute crypto. So and then AI is a lot of data to train Today they exhausted the subject data, but there's a lot of data we don't capture today those data can be captured in a privacy preluding way using blockchain. But if you give those data to a third party company then you can't ensure your own data sovereignty. So capture of data in logically places to be done on the blockchain. But today it's easier technology wise to do it on a centralized platform. So we will hope to see that transition happen. And then today many people, there's so many different AI agents with a token but the agents don't have a lot of utility. What I would really want to see Is like real agents that have real utility that can really help you, that have tokens. So today there's so many platforms, you call it AI token launch platform. You click a button, you get your own AI, your own name takes three seconds and then you get your own token. That token is useless or most look I would say 99.9999% of those tokens are useless. Then maybe 1 or 2 percentamental diary for cultural value for other things. But what we want to see is real AI agents that can do things like you know today the big ones like chatgpt, zsig etc, those are real thick AIs that can do a lot of stuff. There's a lot of AI than those guys that can do a lot of stuff that know video editing, image editing. I'm just a demo of AI paying for literally pay for hotel booking and but today that those AI debut to our website. Hopefully in the future there she AI top into AI to book to book that right. So I think in the future we will see a very heavily automated world. I think I was talking to a fund manager yesterday, they say of 80 people in the world of the data that we generate every day it's about 300 trillion tokens. Like token meaning not a bit of token meaning the words for AI tokens. Today AI is generating about 10% of best day. In the future though, AI will generate can come to more than meeting. So we have AI AI, we're interacting with each other. There were so many exchanges in the tokens in the the world tokens or even interactions and then they will be more commerce. AI will be training with each other, they will be paying each other, they will be like you know, transacting. They will use crypto. I think we got a lot of things wrong. So when we first started I think we said maybe like you know, top 10 in three years and maybe top one in five years so that, that we got well and you know we didn't expect the growth that we had but the industry changes very quickly. Another example we got was like you didn't think stablecoins made it that big. Really? Yeah. So there's like stable much big intermediary thing between CI and crypto is a, it's like a patch, it's a band aid solution for people who are selling crypto holding stable value for a little bit. But so I got that rule and so there's a lot of things we got. Like for me I can never predict markets, I don't predict industries, but the Long term is easy to predict. Blockchains can be really, really important. AI is really, really important. This fuel is going to grow. So but we do weak basis, we have to kill it. We have to adjust. I didn't expect needs to get us this big, right? So they're just things that you cannot expect. But with David Kong big, you have to adjust to it. What we lack on is score foundries that have very strong conviction. So founders for our mission driven. Founders for money driven. In this industry, in the crypto industry, it's quite easy to raise 10 to 50 or 100 even more millions of dollars. People who are money driven, once they come into $100 billion, they sometimes be like, no, they kind of think they made it and they kind of, they kind of know just the drive is they can't lose it. Whereas people who are mission driven, they will continue to go. And also people who are mission driven, when there's some kind of diversity, they faster. So what we lack, well from our perspective, what we lack the most is strong founders in the space. I think we have a lot of strong founders, but we need more, we need way more. We need 10x more. So that's where the shortage is. So strong founders with conviction, with ability to execute. And yeah, if you have all three, like there's so much money to be made and you don't have to think about making money, the money will just come 70 years or so. If you want to start a business, you can only get a loan from a bank. And it's very hard to get fundraising right. So then like 30 some years, 30 something years ago, VCS started their care and it makes sense for Internet businesses because you know, they go house, they go through a lot of money before they have a rent anymore. And that kind of works for Internet. And then now we talk to ICOs. ICOs are so much easier to raise money, right? That's 2017 for ICOs. You actually still have to have a website and have a white paper at least. But that's super easy compared to like traditional VC fundraising. And then now like, and then we went through like sort of the NFT it creates etc. But now just one image, say like one meme and then you, and then you go to platform and then off you go. And so the fundraising become so much easier, which is kind of, it's literally easy now. So I think, but I think there are still, still many. There's so many stockholders for using the like, no, the solid approaches, YK World products and the TGE much, much later after the product have product market sent. And I think we still see a lot of strong projects in those categories. I think long term go far just will win. Right now there's a handful of countries that's talking to me about blockchain adoption and most other countries I don't see anything going on. So out of 200 countries, even this 12 countries, they're just starting, right? So US is just starting. So ETFs only like the last once a few months, right. So everything's just starting. I think people, people when they invest they very impatient. So of course when I invest I want to see my money can next tomorrow. Why not? But the market doesn't work like that. So I think if you want to chase, if you're chasing things that are against how this world works, you're going to be always disappointed. So basically you're chasing something that doesn't make sense and if you chase too hard then it's going to backfire, you're going to lose money. But I think in this world we can understand how the world works. Money, catch, contribute and what's good for crypto is what's good for bitcoin is good for crypto and it was due to other things so. And it will take time. As long as we understand the right time horizons then we can set those expectations correctly and then everything will make sense. It.