Behind Crypto Conferences, Taking More Risks, and Crypto's Private Equity Frontier | Roundup

I genuinely believe that protocols are the new institutions. Like, protocols will be larger than any bank, any software company, any big company that is out there, any Web2 company. Protocols will eventually be bigger than them.

We need to go out to the real world and actually just— you need to buy, you need to have control of these businesses to transform them. That is abundantly clear to me. And you go even talk to a lot of the major companies in the space the Ripples, the Coinbase Commercials of the world, they're like, the tech is kind of there, but no one cares.

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What's up?

Hello, everyone. It's been a while.

Yeah, tough. You know, I'm an eternal optimist, so I always think that we can keep our podcast schedule going when we do these conferences.

Right.

Did you shave your beard? Do you just have a Fu Manchu? Oh, no, no. The lighting.

What is it, a Fu Manchu?

A Fu Manchu? Because the way the light was hitting your—

wait, what made you think that?

No, right side of your face. Yeah, right there. It looked like there was no beard because the light is like shining down on it.

So I thought about shaving. I'm like, it's winter, I should definitely not.

Yeah, not grow it out.

I look like— have you seen, have you seen those, uh, animals that have like a bear? Google bear without hair. Oh my God.

So what's the lesson for, for us and our personal grooming behaviors? I think we need more hair. Oh God, look at that parrot.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's bizarre. Uh, great question, sir. Really, you know, it doesn't really matter what you think. It matters what your significant other thinks in your, in your situation. So, um, as much as you want to think about what you do or what you don't do I don't think you have much of a choice here.

That's true.

We have an hour and 15. Janno just told me he has the— what I heard— the most important pitch that he's ever had. Yesterday— I'm in Amsterdam, in case you haven't noticed— um, I was at a conference and someone said, hey, Janno is building an empire over there. I'm like, uh, have you noticed the name of the podcast?

Let's go.

Let's go. So we got an hour 15. What are we talking about today?

Yeah, we did. No, no, no prep. I actually think some of our best apps are no prep. So, okay, so we could talk about— so we launched our advisory business. Sometimes I feel like sometimes people like the behind the scenes of that, so we could talk about that. We came off Permissionless, so I can give like a very honest, I think, my take on the conference. Like there was— there were good things, but I mean, there were bad things. Like the attendees were like smaller than I thought it was going to be. So like, I can get very honest with that if people find that helpful.

Well, let's switch roles. Most of the time I'm doing the talking. I'm going to do most of the questions in this episode because—

scary, scary.

Santi should let Janno talk. So I hear you. We're going to do that this episode. So, okay, let's start from the top. Permissionless. Give me a rundown. What was the expectation? Number of attendees, highlights, lowlights?

Okay, so I think I will risk being too honest and too open here, but I think it ends up being helpful because we get feedback from people about we're, we're actually currently figuring out Permissionless for our 2025 strategy. So at the risk of being too open, I will be too open, but I would ask for people to give me feedback about what they want to see for Permissionless next year. So Permissionless, um, to, to set the scene, conferences are a really tough business model because you have to outlay all this cash up front, and you're basically taking a bet on where you think the industry is going and what type of cycle that will be in at that time. So when we're booking conferences, it's not like it's, you know, the beginning of the year and it's January and we're like, hey, let's go host an event in Salt Lake City. Great. Let's book— let's book the venue in Salt Lake. We have to book these things years in advance. So our events team right now is pushing us to book. They have a sign, they have a contract for 2026 and they're pushing us to figure out 2027 venues. So if you think about that, That means it's not about actually signing a venue. We have to think about what's the size of the market in 2027. Are we going to be in a bull market? Will we be in a bear market? So one of our advisors is Matt Hogan. We were going to— Matt was like, look, there's, you know, we basically went to Matt. We were like, we want to do— there's like a Bitcoin track and like a macro track and a DeFi track. And Matt gave us the advice. He said, look, go all in on DeFi, just pick a niche and try to own it. And we picked the right niche, actually. So in 2021, we launched this big DeFi conference and hosted it in 2022. And that was the right thing to do. We had 5,500 attendees. There were probably several thousand more who like came down and it was a crazy— it was like an amazing event. The problem with picking DeFi is that doing a DeFi conference in the US was amazing in 2022. In 2023, we got absolutely smoked because when Gensler and the SEC and all those folks are cracking down on crypto, you know, guess what? Guess what else happens? Stani says, you want me to come to the US and speak at a US crypto conference? Kain says, you want me to sponsor? The general counsel at Uniswap says, Hayden, you think I'm letting you go on stage? You think I'm letting Uniswap sponsor a booth? At a US crypto conference? Yeah, right. So 2023, 40% of our speakers said— 40% of our usual speakers said no and dropped out. And probably 70% of our sponsors, their legal teams wouldn't let them sponsor. So that was a real low for us. 2023 permissionless was tough. Okay. 2024. My takeaway from permissionless was it was a much smaller conference than I think we originally wanted to have. And that, like, when I envisioned permissionless at the beginning, it was kind of like Consensus, Token, ETH Denver, big field. So we ended up only— and I put quotes around only— we ended up only having a couple thousand attendees, which I was very nervous about going into it because, you know, we were coming off the back of Token2049 with 20,000. It's like, oh my God, if we only have a couple thousand, everyone's going to think we're this tiny event. It actually had an inverse effect, which was, I think, I mean, Token, I'll give a lot of love to Token because Alex and the Token team just do a world-class job hosting conferences. The, but the industry has gotten, I think, a little bit, not the industry, but like some, some people, when you come off a crazy Asia trip, you're very tired, right? You don't want to go to a 20,000-person conference anymore. You just kind of want to be with your friends and industry executives. And so the byproduct of all the Asia travel in Singapore in September was that people loved the intimacy of Permissionless, I think. You know, we do NPS scores of both attendees and sponsors. We're getting some of the best feedback we've ever had in the history of hosting conferences.

So I'm hearing Small, intimate, high MPS. People felt that the quality of the conversations was high. The panels, from what I could see— I haven't seen the videos— seemed like really good discussions. Just the, the format as well, more debates. You had— it's an election year, so you had politicians there. So how was that? Like, who, uh, anything interesting on the political front that surfaced in conversations or just in the panels themselves?

Yeah, maybe I can pull this tweet up from, um from Senator Mike Lee. So this is Senator Mike Lee. He's the sitting senator from Utah. So we had both Mike Lee as well as Congressman John Curtis. John Curtis is most likely taking Mitt Romney's seat in the Senate in Utah. I mean, unless something goes catastrophically wrong, he's going to become the next senator. So we had both the sitting senator and then the most likely incoming senator Yeah, I went to a fundraiser for John Curtis, for Congressman Curtis. Very impressive guy. Really, really, really. You know, he actually used to be a Democrat, which was the interesting thing. He was a Democrat for 6 years. And so he's probably one of the most— he will be one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate. Very open-minded, very interesting guy. Mike Lee is not liberal. Mike Lee is very conservative, I would say. And yeah, he talked a lot about, you know, saving the Fourth Amendment, keeping the government out of our bank accounts. You know, he's potentially in line to be the attorney— attorney general if Trump wins. So really interesting. I mean, yeah, Tom Emmer gave a standing— standing ovation conversation. Yeah, it was very— yeah, really good event.

Very good.

There was also a health theme. So actually, I do have to credit you. The health theme was one of the highlights of the conference. So I tweeted about it here. We had a pickleball tournament, golf scramble, rock climbing, axe throwing. Say hosted this awesome thing called Say Slam, which was a basketball tournament. Kraken. Yeah, Kraken. So Kraken hosted a like a pull-up bar competition, a hanging competition. We hosted a pickleball tournament. Where you could actually bet on the teams, which was a lot of fun. So there's an app built on Base where you could actually bet on the teams. Ton of fun. And then obviously we hosted Karate Combat, which was a really—

before we go there, I saw you hanging like in the Kraken booth. I— people were tagging me because I made a ridicule of myself in the jumbo booth at Breakpoint trying to impress people. As most people, when you try to impress people, you make a fool of yourself. At least I do. And I did like 22 pull-ups, which were not pull-ups. And then people were commenting on the forum. And then I subsequently posted 2 videos at the gym in the hotel, like, okay, I did. I saw those.

Yeah. Yeah.

So hopefully I redeemed some of my dignity that I just threw away and left at the conference. But you were just hanging.

So yeah, I mean, mine weren't pull-ups. I didn't do a single pull-up. It was a very— you can't compare pull-ups and hanging. So pull-ups—

lying, I would be lying if I didn't say that I tried it just for all shits and giggles at my gym, just hanging.

What was your hang time?

I'm not gonna say.

I'm not gonna say. All right. All right.

So let's just say there were a couple of, a couple of banger songs went by and I was still hanging.

Sure, sure. So no, no, I mean pull-ups work your, what, your back and your shoulders and stuff? Yeah, your back, and it's very tiring. So hanging, it's only about grip strength. So your shoulders don't give out, your forearms tighten up a little, but your grip strength really goes. So I got 1 minute 42.

A minute 42, okay. That's, yeah, you know why my grip strength is so, so much higher? Yeah.

Why?

Diamond hands, baby.

Like, what dumb comment is about to come? Yeah.

So, you know, you know, it's coming.

It's coming from, you know, it's coming. When I played baseball, we used to do these things. You just put your hand into a bowl of rice, into like a bucket of rice, and you just go like this. My grip strength is actually pretty good. Ben Lakoff. Bankless Ventures got 230, I think. Anyways, good. Yeah, good event. The hackathon was really good. I don't know, what did this guy say? Jesse Echo, day one of Permissionless is already my favorite event, favorite conference I've ever attended. No fluff. People are the top 1% of the space. Yeah, I mean, the content was really good. Like, Jill said this too. Permissionless is undefeated, is my favorite conference. I think if you were Here's what happens at every conference in my experience, and I'm assuming it's same with you, is you have, you have a very strong divide between the insiders and the outsiders. So the big conferences are actually really good for the outsiders because it's a place for them to go and start to meet the industry. However, because of all the side events, the insiders go to the side events. So then there are no insiders and executives and good investors and stuff at the actual conference. Permissionless felt like none of the outsiders, but all of the insiders in one place. So, you know, you get stopped at conferences, you're like, oh God, I actually don't really want to have this conversation. There were— there was none of that. Yeah, that's great.

Yeah.

So it was good.

Anything you do differently next year?

You know, I think basically So I really like Salt Lake. It was super clean. It was really nice to not have too many side events. I think it was too tough to get to, and I think it was too—

candidly, for me, it was a royal nightmare. And I had a meeting back home that I couldn't change, and it was just— made it impossible.

It was just too tough.

3 days.

Yeah, it was just too tough for the Europeans, so we lost a lot of You know, if you think that our comp, like, you know, I bet we lost about 700 people from Europe because I was looking at our attendee demographics and we probably lost about 700 people who usually come and would have come and they would have been from Europe. But we also lost a lot of people from New York, right? Who it's, they're like, Alex, I just don't want to go to Salt Lake City. I did like how clean it was. That was nice. But as I think about permissionless, I don't think Blockworks wants to be in the big B2C event space anymore. I think that was a fun thing in 2022. I don't think that's our bread and butter, and I don't think we will be the world's best at that. I really think Token, even CoinDesk does a good job with Consensus. Like, I think we're going to leave the big events to the, to the other players. There's also a business model risk of doing those big events. They actually spit off a lot of cash. In bull markets, but they're really the only thing that can blow up your, your business at this point. Like the thing that could kill Blockworks is if we tried to host, let's say, a 20,000-person event in Vegas or something next year, which like Kane and Stani were trying to convince me to do, which sounds super fun and it would be pretty epic if it didn't go well, it could kill the business. So I think what we'll end up doing with permissionless is We'll do it again. I think we'll do it in a place that's more accessible for people on the East Coast.

Yeah.

And I think we'll lean into being a B2B like permissionless. Really what it was was a B2B event for like crypto executives, crypto investors, the people that matter. And the thing I'd do differently is like probably lean in to make it a little more technical. Yeah, a little less like retail conversations, a little more technical and try to get some of the developers to come.

Yeah, here's an idea. I've been listening to Founders Podcast, keep saying this over and over again, and in the earlier episodes a couple years ago, he— it sounds like he organized these events, these founder events, where you would go in, he would rent out a particular venue, it was like a hotel, and you would never— you would not have a reason to leave this place. And I think there are versions of this, like Mountain DAO in Denver. I think they do like a ski thing. Then there's others in Tahoe. There's obviously Solana is doing like the, their, you know, Thailand thing. And there's MegaETH is doing it in Thailand as well. Zulazoo or Suzulu or something like that. Might you be able to create like different tracks? Like imagine like a broad event, but like in certain days you have like a, a particular track, but like very intimate event where you do more of a curation where you maybe even have to apply. But like the, the best part of conferences, why I keep going is because of the spontaneity. Like sometimes I meet every so often in these dinners or these events, it's someone says, hey, I want you to meet so-and-so. It's really like the random interactions that you meet in the big floor for me at least. Yeah, but anyways, the Founders Podcast guy did that, and apparently, like, to me, I was like, I would go to that. Like, he's like, you need to apply, all the founders apply, and then he just kind of— he does a lot of the curation and then set up— sets up these events, like the Allen Conference, you know what I mean, in tech. Like, for sure, like Davos, I guess, but that was— is no longer cool. Um, I don't know, that, that for me be really interesting. Like, I would actually pay a premium if you curate people that you think I should meet that I haven't met? Yeah, so you could actually, you could actually do something really into the portfolio company of mine called, called Time.fun, which is tokenizing time.

Time.fun, yeah.

And I think it's just something cool about that.

I don't know. So the answer is yes, we're actually going to do this in 2025. And we did an experiment at Permissionless, and we didn't really market it or promote it or anything like that, but we actually went to Deer Valley for 3 days before Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. We went to a really nice resort called the Montage in Deer Valley. There's amazing, amazing resort. And ZKSync, basically we got like a— like ZK— we basically Blockworks and ZKSync co-hosted this thing. And from ZKSync's side of things, we only got their like most executive people. So Nana, who's their president, Alex, who is the co-founder of ZKSync, and like 2 other people on their team. And then we invited just a world-class attendee list. So Samara Cohen, the CIO of BlackRock's ETF business, came. Rich, you know, the head of crypto at Google. We just invited like tier 1 founders.

It's a conference for dealmaking. There will be more dealmaking in crypto. I'm starting a private equity fund too, and dealmaking is going to be more and more important. I want to go to an event where I can meet targets or meet potential, um, like I'm interacting more with like, okay, what's the infra stack? I want to talk to Coinbase Commerce. I want to talk to— talk about the potential acquisition here that Stripe is acquiring, uh, what is it, uh, Bridge.

Bridge. Bridge.

Like, I want to, I want to like create a deal flow conference, so to speak.

So we're going to do this. So our next conference is Digital Asset Summit in New York, DAS, which is like very buttoned up institutional event. I think we're either going to plan— it's in March, so the Hamptons won't be good, but I think we'll probably do something upstate in, um, Lake George. I don't, uh, I don't know where it's going to be.

Maybe like pretty good, actually. Uh, you know, sweater, you know, like it's like—

I was thinking like Hudson Valley, do like, yeah, somewhere in Hudson Valley, probably, you know, an hour and a half north of New York. And I think what you there's two ways to monetize it. We could either charge you like $10,000 and we've done this or, you know, whatever. Me? Yeah.

Yeah.

Because we— and we've actually done this once before, which there was an event in 2021 called Bretton Woods that we hosted.

Oh, that's good.

It was so good.

Bretton Woods. Agree. This is where we went off the dollar, uh, the gold standard.

Yeah, so in 1944, there was a— all the world's most powerful nations gathered at this secret conference in New Hampshire to basically rebuild the global monetary system. And we rented out the hotel where they hosted that secret conference in New Hampshire, and we called it Bretton Woods: The Realignment. And we said the system is no longer working. We're gathering the best economists, macro analysts, and investors to basically say what is the future of money. And we charged people, we charged people a lot of money. It was $3,200, and we sold out the whole event, uh, and then we got 4 sponsors. So we got Blockchain.com, Copper, LMAX, and LUKA. And it was a phenomenal event. We did, you know, hiking, we played golf, We did, you know, fishing, we did like trail running, we did horseback riding. More deals came out of that event than, than, than like any of our events. However, it was a total pain in the ass to host.

Could you crack into inviting people that are not interested in crypto? Like the challenge would be somehow you— it would be really nice to get some of the top executives or leaders of outside of crypto. And, um, get them in, right? You know, you have BlackRocks of the world, but I think that may, might be an opportunity over the next like 2, 3 years, like, you know, to get, uh, traditional banks, traditional tech companies to come in and be an opportunity to learn about the industry in an intimate setting with really high quality, very curated.

Yeah, I think we'll do this. I think we'll do that. So I think we're gonna, I I mean, I think we'll try to do this at Hudson Valley.

Is that a picture of Mike?

Yeah.

Mike looks like Andy from The Office.

You're like there.

Mike, you listening? Yeah, he's definitely going to be listening because I've never met someone that listens to more podcasts. I don't know how he consumes it. Mike, you look like Andy from The Office.

That's a hilarious picture.

Halloween's coming up, so you should dress up as Andy from The Office. He's just like perfect Andy from The Office right there.

That's a hilarious picture. Tough, tough for Mike.

Tough work. Anyways, I love it.

Oh man, that's funny. Okay, so yeah, we're going to do this in Hudson Valley around DAS. If you are a sponsor and you want to— we want one company. I want one good brand, like a Coinbase, an Aptos, a Solana, you know, someone like that. If you are a brand and wants to take a risk and do this, let me know.

So talk about the advisory business.

Yeah, the advisory business. I mean, first off, check out this beautiful headline. Couldn't pay for that.

I'm going to read it. Crypto media darling Blockworks launches consulting business. This is some—

I never thought someone would call us a darling. Very kind.

That's because I'm an investor in the business.

Yeah, yeah. Like, crypto media darling invested in by Santiago launches crypto— launches consulting business. Yeah, we launched Blockworks Advisory. So let's see if I can pull this up here. Yeah. So we launched our advisory business. The TL;DR is that— so 2.5 years ago, you know, we're coming up on our 7-year anniversary of Blockworks. First 5 years was just media and events. 2.5 years ago, May 2022, we launched our research business. The byproduct of the research business— so, so our analysts, we have, you know, we have a team of 20, 20 analysts. Our analysts have gotten more into the weeds than, than any analyst, than basically anyone in the industry. They're in all the governance forums, they're in the chats, they're talking to the builders, they're talking to the developers, they're talking to the investors, they're talking to the founders. They're seeing like the narrative changes, they really have started to understand what works and doesn't work when you're building a protocol. So the byproduct of that is that these teams like, you know, Athena and Arbitrum and Polygon and Optimism and Uniswap and Avalanche, different people inside different org— of different parts of those organizations, um, sometimes it's the founder, sometimes it's the head of data, sometimes it's the governance lead, um, they started coming to our team and they said, hey, We need some help. This shit is hard. I have no clue how to build a protocol. And so we said, you know, I'm sorry, we can't really help you with that. And that was like a year and a half ago. And then we started saying, you know what, maybe we can help you with that, but we're going to charge you for that. And so we started doing work with some of these protocols and it went really well. And the NPS and just the reviews of these people was like through the roof. People said it's like the most helpful outside consultants or outside team they've, they've ever had, basically. And so what we started to do over the last couple months is, is start to actually formalize this. Instead of saying, hey, let's go have one of our analysts, like, throw them on Arbitrum for a month and like tell them to go help Arbitrum with this thing, let's actually formalize this team. And the thesis— I don't know if you agree with this, Santi, or not, but I genuinely believe that protocols are the new institutions, like protocols will be larger than any bank, any software company, any, any big company that is out there, any Web2 company, protocols will eventually be bigger than them. So if you look at how big the consulting industry is, you know, there's a massive need for outside, basically outside information. And to base things that can like hack growth at your company or solve a problem. And what's going to happen is these protocols grow, you can't go to a BCG, you can't go to an Accenture, you can't go to McKinsey, right, for this help, you can't go to Deloitte. You know, if you go to BCG, and you're like, hey, I'm designing an incentive program to bring TVL into my protocol, BCG looks at you like you're crazy. You go to us and we're like, oh my God, we've studied the last 30 incentive programs. I know exactly what works and what doesn't work. We've got this idea on how you can make an incentive program and do all this stuff. Let's work together on that. So that, so that's the advisory business. So there's a couple of buckets that we do. You know, there's kind of like pre-TGE work, which is like foundation launch partner, figuring out like what is the right structure for like labs, foundation, launching governance, all that kind of stuff. There's more like go-to-market help. So what are your distribution channels? Like, how do you tap into like this network of marketing partners? There's economic design, like fee optimization, risk parameters, incentive design. There's managing and running a DAO, like grants programs, co-authoring critical proposals, things like that. There's, there's dashboards, which is basically helping them build like a robust data ecosystem, which we think is really important. And then there's some help with like finance and treasury management. So yeah, that's, that's the biz. It's been— we've launched a lot of businesses at Blockworks. We've never had so much inbound interest from, from, from one single launch. So yeah, if you're— if you would like to work on this team, hit me up. We need some help.

Yeah. What How do you think about the— I mean, advisory can mean a lot of things. Where have you seen most of the protocols appreciate an outside perspective? Where do you think they need the most amount of help?

There's like 4 timelines in a protocol, we think. So there's foundation launch. This is, you know, I met a lot of people at Permissionless. They're like, oh my God, I'm launching it. I'm launching a token in like 6 months. I've no— I'm a founder, right? I've no— I've never built— I've built something in Web2. I have no clue how to do like a Labs business, foundation, all that kind of stuff. All right. So that's foundation launch. The second is pre-TGE. This is in like the months leading up, like how should you talk about your token? What is the marketing? What is the DAO structure, the token structure, the distribution mechanisms? Why do people get, you know, kind of roasted at the stake for tokens and other people, people love their token? How do you do a successful token launch? Then there's post-TGE, DAO management, data services, onboarding new service providers, risk management, incentive programs, grants programs, all that kind of stuff. And then there's like steady state, which is making sure you have a robust set of service providers, well-defined DAO processes, strong brand awareness, like a really good flywheel around marketing and customer acquisition. So yeah, those, those are the 4 buckets that we think people will need. Yeah, yeah. So, um, and then that, you know, we thought about this a lot because from a business model perspective, uh, consulting— I mean, even, even you as an investor, actually, I'd be really curious to get your take as an investor in Blockworks when you see something like this. The enterprise value of a consulting business— here, here's, here's our thesis, and I'm curious what you think. The enterprise value of a consulting business sucks, they might trade for like 1x revenue or 2x revenue or something like that, right? You're not building this multi-billion dollar, like, exitable thing from a consulting business. Probably. Maybe. However, what this allows us to do is actually a similar thing that events allows us to do, which is it spits off a lot of cash flow. It's a very high margin business. And so with this, if you look at a lot of our competitors— yeah, I won't name names, but a lot of the data and research platforms, they're stuck on this VC hamster wheel where they just have to keep raising every 18 months. And Mike and I have always believed, you know, we've only raised one outside venture round in 7 years. We've always believed that like the, the venture model is actually pretty warped and that most companies should try to get to profitability within a couple years. And you want to build a self-sustaining business. And so advisory helps us build the self-sustaining business where it spits off a bunch of cash, and we can then invest that cash into building the data and research business so that we don't have to raise another round, dilute employees, dilute you as an investor. So yeah, curious what you think of that.

I mean, certainly from when I first looked at your business, without disclosing anything, I The primary question for me is, as you alluded to earlier, the event business is very volatile, especially in this industry. It could— and so the multiple on that's quite low, but it serves and complements your business. Like it's sort of like a necessary evil, so to speak. Sometimes businesses have these kind of captive funnels, so to speak. I think the— said differently, like I don't think you ever give up the events business if you're not running it at a loss, it's fine. You wanna, and then when we talked about, see, you guys rolled out the research platform, that's really nice. Over time, the business becomes more of a recurring revenue business. Consulting, I think, is again, one of those business lines that because you're in a position where you sort of start becoming a platform, like someone will do it, you might as well capitalize it because you have that distribution already. And, you know, people are already coming to your platform for research and they're already coming for news. And they're going to your events. And so logically, why wouldn't you expand into this, right? And certainly, obviously consulting doesn't have as much of a like multiple as like a pure research subscription, you know, like a recurring revenue, but it moves you closer to a higher margin business, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's capital.

It's human capital intensive. But if you're already— again, if I think it's a logical transition, if you're already doing a lot of the research and you have good analysts, then why not capitalize, right? On the logical subsequent step is just become, you know, really help these protocols do it, right? Yeah. And I, I would agree with you, there is, there is a need to help a lot of these businesses as they scale and think about opportunities or have a partner that is kind of, um, can objectively tell them things that they should do, best practices, opportunities. So I think it's a— I mean, my perspective, like, I think it's a— I can understand why you're moving in this direction.

Yeah. So yeah, we're excited. I mean, McKinsey does $10 to $12 billion in top line a year, EBITDA assuming like a, what, 20 to 25% EBITDA margins, like a 20-30% margin business. Yeah, so that's $2 to $3 billion a year. BCG, I've heard, is like $8 to $10 billion top line. So that's what, 20 to 25% is $1.6 to $2.5 billion.

Plus, to your brand and your business are also hard to quantify, uh, right? I mean, I guess it just further solidifies your position in the space as a, um, trusted partner across a number of, you know, it just, it just, you become, I mean, Bloomberg doesn't have a consulting business, I think. But, but I think you're becoming, you're not just Bloomberg, in my opinion, like there's, there's more opportunities to like capture a lot of the whitespace and opportunity in crypto.

And it will help our SaaS business too. Like Morgan Stanley comes to us using, not them as a real example, but for example, Morgan Stanley comes to us and says, hey, look, we're pushing into crypto, we, we need it, we need you guys to figure out like the best strategies for us. We say, great, by the way, buy, buy 50 seats to the platform. Yeah, the upsell opportunity is great, right?

If you're already consult— again, it widens your funnel and you can acquire more users that way. Yeah. So in an ideal, you don't necessarily have to run a lot of these, like, but every, for instance, every software company has professional services, some more than others. And as long as you're not running at a cost or like as long as you're not running it at a huge loss, it is a drag on margin, but it's a necessary component to grow and acquire and grow the top line, right? ARR. Yeah. So yeah. Very good, man. Well, I'm excited about that.

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How's your private equity biz?

Well, I'm in Amsterdam. There's a conference organized here by one of the larger family fund of funds in Europe. They're an investor in a number of crypto funds. And so I was here kind of socialize the idea. I took this as an opportunity to just socialize the idea with a few people in person and see their reaction. A lot of them had heard about it just because I've been teasing about it on, you know, just I posted about it on Twitter, um, and, and talked about it here in the prior episode. Uh, people seem to, to like the idea, but, you know, they can tell you like to your face, and there's nothing like raising— I don't know, uh, I just want to get also an understanding of the fundraising environment and whatnot.

So, um, I mean, people have been reaching out to me. Oh, I totally forgot to respond to this guy. Whoops. Someone, uh, actually multiple people are trying to invest in your— invest in it. Someone's like—

so I don't know if you're taking outside money. I'm, uh, I've been very focused on putting together materials, doing a lot of like I think of the name of the fund will make a lot of sense when I disclose it, but I put myself in a position of what would I need to see to invest in this fund? And for me, it's very clear. Um, I, I want to see actionable opportunities, and there's nothing quite like going to someone and say, I've identified 2 or 3 very tangible, concrete, immediate opportunities to put the money to work. I think the timing is very right. I think we're at a point where infrastructure is there. You know, you could look at Stripe acquiring Bridge as an example, like this stablecoin API, right? I mean, these businesses are going to be transformed. And over the last couple of weeks, like, I've met with, like, the CEO of Apollo. I saw the guy, the CEO of Vista Equity, and I'm like, well, what do they have that I, that I don't want to replicate? I never want to compete against them. But what do I have that they don't? And to me, it's like they don't appreciate how crypto can transform. In their mind, crypto is a token. It's like Bitcoin. They don't really appreciate how they can transform their businesses. And I was talking to a guy, an operating partner at KKR yesterday, and he's like, I love crypto, but it's hard to convince these executives and the companies that we're acquiring how they could really use it. But I really want to convince them. Like, okay. And then you go talk to a lot of, you know, most yesterday there was mostly crypto funds. And again, they're trying to just invest in, as I do, you know, companies that are building, you know, technology that would eventually be used by these companies. But I think at that intersection, I understand, you know, being an investor in, in a lot of the kind of leading crypto companies and then having done private equity before, I just, I think the biggest opportunity, and, and we're at a point where We need to go out to the real world and actually just, you need to buy, you need to have control of these businesses to transform them. That is abundantly clear to me. And you go even talk to a lot of the major companies in the space, the Ripples, the Coinbase Commercials of the world. They're like, the tech is kind of there, but no one cares. Like, it's hard to convince a company. I'm like, yeah, it's either a family-run business. Or it's, uh, you know, too big and they don't necessarily care to trim a lot of the fat. Yeah. And so I'm very excited about it. Uh, and so I've been doing a lot of work. I haven't formally gone out and pitched it to anyone, but I will soon.

Yeah, we'll soon. I mean, you've got the winds at your sail, right? You've got— Imran had this tweet, uh, that I thought was a good one, which is With all the chess pieces being moved by Stripe, Coinbase, Circle, Tether, and many others, I'd be remiss not to say that 2025 is our year. And he was making a point that crypto is going to achieve global adoption, etc., etc. But I was thinking about your private equity tweet or your private equity idea in light of this, which is when companies get pitched by someone to do something, they don't need to do anything because they're big. They're like when Fortune 500s do and big companies, they actually don't need to do anything. Because they're the incumbents. But when they feel— when two things happen, they are forced to take action. One is they feel a lot of pressure by upstarts who are starting to eat into their business. That's not actually happening right now. But the other is when people like Stripe, their existing partners, start bringing them things. So when a stablecoin provider brings LVMH, you know, says, look, let's onboard you onto stablecoins, they say, why would we do that? When, you know, Adyen or Stripe says, let's onboard you onto stablecoins, they say, oh, okay, if our, if our existing payment processor is doing it, sure, that works.

Yeah, we're, um, if, if you believe in crypto, then you fast forward and then you believe in a world where most businesses will, will use a lot of this infrastructure, and it might not be very visible to the end consumer, but but they will use it. Payments rails, uh, some things are more visible than others, you know, NFTs for customer loyalty engagement, you know, Blackbirds of the world for, for restaurant management and loyalty programs. Uh, you know, LVMH has sort of teased with NFTs, digital twins. Uh, so, so some crypto elements are more visible than others. I don't think you need to underwrite a token. I'm not actually not underwriting a token for this transformation. But the, the, the, the point is, if you believe in and you're investing in crypto, then you, you're here because you believe that this is going to become mainstream. And it's going to, like the internet, it's going to, this is a continuation of the internet, like a digitization of businesses, and it will make them more efficient. So that might take 10 years, might take 15, 20 years. And so if you invert and you say, well, how can I compress that? Because the tech is there in many ways. Well, for me, it's— this is a strategy. You go and buy business and you roll this out. And I'm not looking to buy small businesses. I want to buy medium or large businesses. And it might— like, the first couple of ones might not be like multi-billion dollar businesses, but I generally think that that's where the real opportunity is, right? Like, you, you know, you, you go and trim fat and every basis point counts. Yeah. And it's a massive transformation. Imagine It's like removing— I said in the episode with Jack in Singapore that went out this week, it's the way I think about it is a lot of these organizations are bloated. They have a good product, they have a lot of really good distribution, but along that, think about those pipes, right? Along that continuum of go-to-market or just servicing customers and within the organization, there's friction points. All you need to do is go in, change the pipe, and, and just let the water flow through it. And I'm looking to buy good businesses and make them great again by removing friction points that haven't been— by the way, when you think about how competitive private equity is as an asset class, financial engineering doesn't work right in a normalized rate environment. But a lot of these operators, like a lot of these funds, have like massive consulting arms that are pretty good operators, and they understand how to make these transformations. But there are areas where they just haven't, because the tech's not there, you just haven't been able to streamline. Um, but crypto, that's like the, uh, very clear areas of friction points. Crypto does unlock that friction. Payment processing. Yeah. Is the, the immediate one. Customer retention and loyalty. Like advertising rates have gone up dramatically over the last 10 years. It's a monopoly, right? You're either, you need to advertise on Meta, Google, Amazon. Or TikTok. CPMs have gone through the roof. So we're spending more time online, but it's harder to capture attention, acquire and retain customers. There's a better way to do that, especially for younger cohorts that have higher LTV. So anyways, I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. If it's how they're gonna— as I told people yesterday, how much you're looking to raise? I'm like, hold that thought. I don't want to set the expectation. I don't want to ideally have a number in mind. If I, if, if I can't get there, I'll just front my own money and just do this case study. But what does success look like for me? Success looks like for me in that I would want to maybe buy one or two companies and have that be a, a huge win. It becomes a case study at HBS or for anywhere, you know, but for HBS, and then everyone, everyone else starts doing it, and then this industry goes from $1 trillion to $30 trillion? Well, you know, like, I would, uh, Pranav, as I like to quote Pranav time and time again, we were on the way to Singapore, uh, to the airport, and he said, hey, have you ever thought about like doing this exercise of writing your obituary? I'm like, well, this is kind of a weird question to ask when we're about to board a Who—

someone brought that up recently.

Where did I hear that? I think maybe Pranav said it to you. Yeah. And I said, no, but it's a really good exercise. And I said, I have 12 hours to think about that. And in that, I was already thinking about this and I was like, yeah, I think I'll— I don't know if this is going to— there's appetite for this strategy in the market. It's sort of new, but I would I would not forgive myself if I didn't take a hard run at this and tried it. If I'm in my deathbed, whenever that may happen, and I think that's the opportunity, and I'm gonna go hard at it. And if it doesn't work, okay, people don't like it, fine, I'll put my own money in it. Uh, I won't regret it. It's like the biggest errors of— errors of— yeah, yeah, not of commission. So if I don't do this, I'm gonna regret it.

Yeah, it's what Bezos's regret minimization thing. It's like make decisions based on what you will not regret.

So anyways, I'll take this opportunity. I am looking, I am, I'm going to need a team. I'm going to need people that really understand the tech, how to implement it. Perhaps people that have worked at Coinbase Commerce or have experience there or people at Bridge or—

I have the perfect guy for you.

So this is a, this is a call to action. If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out because I'm going to need smarter people to execute on the strategy. So I'm looking for that.

Yeah, we interviewed actually, obviously you couldn't make it, but yesterday interviewed Antonio from dYdX about his return to dYdX. Oh yeah. And it was one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had, I think, on Empire, because we didn't talk about dYdX once. We just talked— you would have loved the episode, actually. We just talked about risk-taking in life and what the life of a founder is actually like and why he stepped down and how— and just how his reflections over the last 5 months went and how it's given him a different perspective on life. And one of those things, to your point, was about risk-taking. And people think that they can— people should take way more risk in their life than they are currently taking, because it'll be okay.

It'll be okay. On that point, I really like your perspective as a founder, because I think that you've gone pretty far out on the risk spectrum. You know, as you've liked to say, you know, you bought crypto credit cards, you were living on, you know, canned beans and sardines. Like, you know, the full, the full founder kind of arc archetype. Um, when you say people— like, when you, when you tell— when you say take risks, how do you think about that? And, and are there— might you be able to take a lot of risk in one dimension but, but actually no risk in one part of your life? Does it mean like— because oftentimes when we say you ought to take risk people might say, you know, it's, it's like all-encompassing. But how do you actually think about that? Because I think you could, you could perhaps may, may take a risk in one area of your life but not on another to give you some stability and actually put you in a position of strength. Like, because I think listeners will probably appreciate that. I don't know if you've thought about like how in your life and in your company and your personal life and just the things that you do, like, how does the risk manifest itself and how do you actually like go about this like taking a lot of risk?

But it's a really interesting question. Um, I'm thinking about that.

As you think about that, a lot of times people say, Jana, you're in a great position right now because you have now, you know, your business has grown a lot, it's, it's de-risked. But maybe the answer to that is no, we're actually taking more risk in one particular area. Because like, as you look, as I look at since over the last couple of years, you've actually—

I would argue maybe you've taken even more risk in particular areas because, I mean, the riskiest thing we did that people maybe didn't saw as success but was risky was raising outside money, right? Because Mike and I could have just run the business as a bootstrap business. I mean, we're doing 8 figures in revenue while bootstrapping it and spinning off a boatload of cash. And so we could have just probably done that and either just I mean, we weren't doing distributions, lifestyle business. So the easy thing to do would have been take distributions and then maybe one day sell it for like, I don't know, $100 million, like $50 or $100 or something like that. Like that would— and that'd be like a life-changing, amazing outcome. The risky thing was taking outside capital because now you have an obligation to outside investors. But to go back to your other question, there are different types of risk. I've actually really never thought about it like this. Because I consider myself to be—

you invert, then the name I'm going to find is Inversion Capital because you always invert.

You're— it's inversion. Yeah. Okay.

I'm going to say you always want to—

I hope you've got the domain and trademark. Got it.

I got it. I got it.

I got it. Okay. Okay.

All the squatters out there. I got it.

I got it. Got it. Get the ENS too. You know, a lot of ENS squatters out there. I guess you would get the.sol, but yeah. Okay. So there are different types of—

question on that point. Couldn't you invert and you say not taking money and not getting more dry powder resources is a bigger risk because you have the opportunity to really capitalize on this market from the position of strengths that other media businesses are going away? So the bigger risk, more invisible one, is not going hard enough to capture the market. When you think about not raising money, you could just run this the scale and the growth looks like this, raising money looks like that, and that's the risk.

Oddly enough, I think it has nothing to do with expected value and EV and like risk-reward. For me, the biggest risk in my life is losing motivation in something. And I know that about myself because if I am really motivated by something and really passionate and curious, I, you know, in the least going to try to say this in a humble, in the least egotistical way, I genuinely think I can be the best in the world at it and outcompete anybody else. If I am not passionate about it, and I don't really care, I am god-awful at it. So I think there's a dispersion, right? Or let's say there's a spectrum of like, there's a, you know, there's the x-axis, x-axis, and then there's like Or let's say there's the y-axis here. Anyways, I'll actually— people are listening on podcasts. I won't show anything with my hands, but like, let's say there's a spectrum and yeah, boom, boom, boom, fuck around, find out. Yeah, you read my mind. I think I am like on output, like way above the average when I'm passionate about something, but I actually think I'm way below the average at output and execution when I'm not passionate, Whereas if you take someone who's like working a 9 to 5, maybe they work in banking, like honestly, if they're super passionate or they're not passionate, like they can kind of just get the shit done. That's not how my brain works. So, you know, maybe people, our investors won't like to hear this. I wasn't thinking about EV when we were, when we did our raise. Mike and I weren't thinking about EV or any, because Mike is the exact same way, almost even more than I am. We were thinking about, will this make the next 5 years of our life more fun or less fun? And the challenge is fun. So the risk was losing motivation in a, in just this boring bootstrap business like that. That was the risk in my mind.

And do you feel like you need to put yourself in an uncomfortable position to reignite and keep you hard at, at the full intensity?

Yeah, I do.

I, I want to constantly, like, as I think about it just, I never felt it until very recently that I'm, I'm just bored. And I had it sort of just one day, I was like, I have this growing desire to get out of, like, it just, the investing side of it just became, I love it, but I got to do more. So you, you, you love David Senra.

Like, the, if you listen to these founders, the founder stories, there's a theme which is as soon as a founder feels like they've made it, like a real— like one of the differences between a founder and like a quote, normal person is like once you feel like you've made it or once you feel like you've like achieved the top of the mountain, normal person's like, let's go. I'm chilling, I'm chilling, I'm taking my vacation, I'm chilling. I get to work 9 to 5. Other people think, where can I inflict more pain? Where— how can I push this?

Inflicting pain.

He talks about pain a lot. I mean, Blockworks is max pain. Like, there is— like, the running a company— I mean, and people should listen, we've got Antonio episode coming out on Tuesday. This is the hardest thing. Like, every day is new. Yeah, there is a new problem every day that I think if I wasn't running a company would feel like the hardest problem I'd ever encountered.

So you— would you describe yourself as a, as a maniacal masochist?

With work? You may— I mean, maybe it seems like it, but like, with work, yeah, ladies and gentlemen, this is— yeah, with work, yeah. There—

but, but this is your original question, the scene of Billions.

Different layers of— you said different layers of risk. Maybe it's different levels of masochism, but, um, different layers of risk. Like, there's financial risk, there's Now that I think about it, there's financial risk, there's like strategic risk. There's actually in crypto, there's a lot of compliance and regulatory risk. There's, there's like credit risk, like how much like debt, like how comfortable are you being levered up financially? There's, there's probably political risk. There's reputational risk. Like, like I'm not very comfortable with reputational risk. Like, like when I saw what Selkis was doing.

Yeah, on the— on that spectrum. Yeah, I was gonna ask you, like, which, which ones are you more really comfortable taking risk? Which ones you're totally risk-averse? So you said reputation, absolutely not, and I agree with you because that puts you out of the game.

Yeah, like my— like, I— okay, so talking about Selkis for a second, using this as an example, I know people think he's like gone off the deep end or whatever and all this stuff. I actually have a disagree with him on so many things. I do have a layer of like a pretty deep layer of respect for him because I could never do what he's doing, which is risk my entire reputation on something that— yeah, I just could never risk it. Or maybe I could one day when I'm older. I mean, he's older. Maybe, maybe that's something you learn as you get older. But at this point, I'm not willing to risk my entire reputation And maybe it's because I care too much about what other people think about me. I don't really know. I haven't really done that, that internal work to learn why I don't want to take that reputational risk. But like other things, like financial risk, like if I didn't have a, you know, if I wasn't married, 100% of my assets would be in crypto. Like I would have no 401, I would own no stocks except for Coinbase stock. I would have— I would be 100% in crypto because when crypto goes down 90%, like, I genuinely don't feel 1% of like, oh my God, this sucks. I have zero feeling of that. So financial risk and actually that's a difference in my personal life. Financial risk, totally fine. Business-wise, I don't, I don't like, I don't love financial risk. Yeah. Like, we actually run Blockworks pretty conservatively, I'd say, financially.

Yeah, I think, um, on a couple of things you said, reputation risk— I think there are types of, like, you never control how people individually might perceive you, but I do think you always understand that if you're compromising or doing things that are questionable from a principal value standpoint in the aggregate, that, that can really jeopardize your, your in— your integrity, and then therefore your reputation. But it's inside out, as opposed to doing things that, you know, I don't think you ever want to be a people pleaser as a founder. You do things that inherently are gonna be contra— you know, are not going to be necessarily consensus. And anytime you— I think you go closer to the truth it triggers people and you never— but I wouldn't call that reputational risk. Reputational risk is, I think, one of those things where you just know when you see it. It's like, this is questionable behavior, this is against value, core values, ethics. You could under— you could like discuss all day long what are those, but I think people normally have a good standard of what that is. Um, if you're hurting people, yeah, definitely not, right? If you're doing things that are like, you know, you could argue that a lot— maybe some people during the continuum of the last 10 years thought that you were you know, you had reputational risk. Cryptos had reputational risk because people think that crypto is a scam.

And when we launched in 2017, you know, I was incessantly posting on LinkedIn. I didn't have a Twitter then, or I wasn't like active on it. And, you know, I was still working at my old company, SciSense. I was posting about— back then it was like blockchain every day on LinkedIn. And my boss was like, sat me down. He's like, you're embarrassing yourself, right? You're actually— it was my boss, not my boss. He was very supportive. My boss's boss. He's like, you're, you're embarrassing yourself. And you're starting to embarrass the company. And I had friends from college being like, dude, you got to stop posting on LinkedIn. Cut it out, man. Like, shit's embarrassing. Like, don't be posting on LinkedIn every day. Um, I guess that was reputational risk. So, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, it's something to think about.

Like, there's a guy, Christian, Christian Angermeyer, who started, um, a lot of very successful things, but, uh, Map Compass is one of them. They're a psilocybin company. Billionaire investor from Germany. He's— yeah, he kind of runs a holding company called— I think it's Epirion. But you have billionaire investor out of Germany. He, he talks about this nuance between risk in business and risk in personal life. And so in risk in business, he is one of the biggest risk takers I've ever met. Like he got deep into crypto before most people were comfortable with it and allocated in size. He started the first— I mean, he started the first publicly traded psilocybin company, which was a big both reputational risk and business risk at the time. Put up hundreds of millions into that company. Personally, he, he has never drank. He will— he like doesn't even like get really like getting on planes. He will never do like— he doesn't ski because he's worried about like the risk. I think, I think it's skiing or something like that. He is— he won't go in sports cars, right? Like he is so worried about the one thing that you can't get back. He's like, you can get back money. You only got one shot at life.

So yeah, I definitely think that's a really good way to put it.

Should we talk about any crypto stuff? Like just thinking about that, like There are two things, and I have to jump in a few minutes, but one was Unichain pushed the— pulled forward the AppChain narrative. And it's kind of the only thing that people can talk about right now on Twitter is like every app is going to get a chain. And I actually, I tweeted this thing the other day or yesterday about that, which we can talk about. And then Avalanche's Off the Grid game. So this grid called Off the Grid. Has brought in 7 million wallets in the past, I think, week or two. Um, right. So those are the two biggest news stories of the week, I would say.

Yeah, yeah, nothing to add there. Obviously, I think it would be really interesting to see how Avalanche's perception changes, how the narrative on gaming changes, because it's been pretty out of favor. People just been critical of it because of play-to-earn, but clearly the traction has been these are the new— as we talked about it before, and this is actually a game and it's fun. And so it'd be really interesting to see how that might change the entire meta around just gaming as a category in crypto and what that does for other projects. The other thing is, um, quite interesting, and full disclosure, I do have a position in GOAT. Uh, it's just been this, uh, uh, not this coin that, uh, Mark Andreessen gave a $50K grant to this, this guy, Andrew, I believe. And then he then— this bot, this AI agent, then went out and bought this particular meme coin called GOAT, and it's been tweeting about it like, um, non-stop. And it's sort of become— I find it quite interesting, like this Truth Terminal account. Is it— is it this, Santi? No, it's GOAT. Just GOAT, not GOAT Trading. G-O-A-T. I think it went from like 40, 30, 40 million to like now like 400 million in the span of a week. Uh, I think, uh, this, this AI agent put in like $5,000 or something like that, and now it's like it probably becomes the first millionaire, AI bot millionaire. Oh, this thing?

Yeah, this was on the back of Andreessen saying I'm putting $50K into a—

but he did that, I think he— my understanding is he gave that grant to this, um, Holy shit. 50% today. Yeah, it's sort of gone off. It's gone off. You know, people are shilling about it and talking about it, but I think it's the account Truth Terminal. So if you go on Twitter, Truth Terminal is really interesting because it's the AI, it's like the AI tweeting about this stuff. And it's kind of a fascinating experiment. I think what I'm most interested in is like Yes, Truth Terminal. Yeah, exactly.

So wait, so let me ask you this, because I saw the Mark Andreessen— like, the day he tweeted that, I saw this. I was like, that experiment. I saw this whole Truth Terminal and GOAT thing and stuff like that. When did you decide to put money into this?

Uh, I think it was last week. Uh, someone brought it to my attention and I looked at it.

Was it the tweet that was like so, oh my God, they've made like $150K. Like, there was that—

no, it was, it was the, it was the idea of an AI. Like, uh, at the time I was actually, I was under the impression that it was like launched by the AI agent. Like, basically the, the, the narrative back then, which has changed, was the TL;DR was Mark Andreessen gave $50K grant to this AI.

Oh my God, look at what they're po— sorry, go ahead.

So it gave $50K, $50 $1,000 equivalent Bitcoin to this agent and it said, go do stuff. And what it decided to do was to launch a meme coin and then optimize, like just, just run through it. It turns out that it didn't launch the meme coin. As I understand it, it actually bought it. It like it bought this thing called Goat. And Goat is actually— I wouldn't recommend you going and Googling, but it sort of makes reference to this meme Goatse from the early '90s, like early internet culture. Don't, don't, uh, but, uh, I found that interesting. It's like, okay, this is probably one of the first experiments where an AI agent is just deciding what to do. And it's just really interesting to— like, I, I decided by just to pay attention to like how it was going to interact. And I tweeted today like, what happens if— like, how does this— how does the Truth Terminal, Terminal of Truths, like, take in feedback from users? Because now everyone's like tweeting about to Terminal of Truths like, hey, you know, you should look at this other meme coins, or you should buy this or that. And I'm like really curious to see how it takes in feedback, how it behaves. Like what happens if it, you know, it's sitting on a huge position of GOAT? Like what happens once it reaches a million? Like does it dump on humans? Does it double down? Does it sell? Does it— what does it do after? Like, I don't know, it's like a pretty fascinating evolution. I think the LLM is trained on like 4chan. I mean, look at these, look at these tweets.

I'm not even going to read these out loud, but Whoops.

It's kind of like the, the true sci-fi in real time. And what's, what's quite interesting is the financialization component of it. Like, how does he— how does a bot like just behave as it makes more money? Like, what does it do?

Are you— so your strategy here, do you— none of this is financial advice, obviously, etc., etc.

Do you hold— please, please don't come by, like, just do your own research. Like, yeah, yeah. The goal. Like, do you— doesn't—

anyway, I don't know when to sell something like this. Is it a gut feel?

Yeah, like, I, I size it in a way where if it goes to zero, it doesn't matter. I don't like obviously losing money, but it's an experiment, and I think you always want to— I always want to make it clear in my brain of what is an experiment and what is like, I'm not willing to lose on, like, I'm not willing to lose in size. But I sized it in a way where it's like, all right, this is an experiment. I don't think it's going to be the last one. I think it's an interesting sector of them and quite differentiated in the meme coin category overall. There's like animal coins which are like obviously tried and true, and people are doing more experiments here. They feel very incremental. Whether it's a hippo coin or another cat coin or another dog coin.

But what it's driving to is the fact that AI agents will be the biggest consumers on chain, right? It's like in real time.

I'm actually really— and that to me felt very differentiated. Yeah, uh, of course I sort of like bought and then do more research later, you know, buy now, do more research later. Uh, but I'm, I'm, um, I need to put money on the line to, uh, pay attention to it.

I went to— yeah, I feel the same way. Put money into things to pay attention to it. I went to ParaFi, the ParaFi LP Day on Tuesday. It was great. It was all like very off the record. So I wasn't— I, you know, just because it's all their LPs are there and stuff like that. So I don't want to say too good, can't say too much about it. But the— they did these big predictions for 2030 and a lot of the things were They talked a lot about AI making up a lot of the on-chain activity. Yeah.

So, so a couple of open questions that I have. How does this bot's behavior change as people try to influence its behavior? Um, there's this like really interesting psychological experiment called the, um, the Ash conformity experiment, which is this— they ask, they show like 3 different lines, they show people 3 different lines, and there's— they, they hire these fake people in the experiment and they tell you which line is, is the biggest. I think they show you one line and then they show you 3 different options, like which lines matches the, the length of the line that I'm, that I'm showing you here. There's obviously clearly one that is exactly the same, but the other paid actors show the wrong one. And 33% of respondents— like, it's so obvious, but 33% of respondents are not willing to go against the consensus and they choose the wrong one. But as soon as someone detracts and says the truth, like, they go back to it. Whereas like normally in an experiment without actors, 1% of people like would just get it wrong because it just maybe have visually impaired So again, like what you're already seeing now, like a lot of these KOLs are trying to like influence the bot and the bot's like, fuck off. Yeah, yeah. So it's like how the bot goes through this experiment. One last thing. Go ahead. What happened? The other is like obviously AI coins like TAOs and the world like are in my, as I see them, like also memes. Yeah. What happens to that and how does the meta shift?

For next time.

For next time, ladies and gentlemen, please, please do your own research. And again, I'm not— yeah, I'm not endorsing this in any way, shape, or form.

All right. Enjoy Amsterdam, sir. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Take care.

Hey, everyone.

Thanks for watching today's episode. Just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor, SKALE. SKALE really is one of the best chain experiences out there today, and I've used so many different chains. There's a reason they are gaining so much adoption in both gaming and AI use cases. Hit the link in the show notes to explore the SCaLE ecosystem.