Hivemind: Fate of ETH, Initia with Zon, & OpenAI's Deep Research

I think every chain now, if you're not fast, you're not really building the right architecture. I think that the industry is going into this pure, like, you need to get latency as low as possible. That's what everybody's talking about now. And you just need to make like your changes as fast as possible. And so, you know, is that bearish for Solana? I think that it's confirmation that Solana is the leader in the correct thesis of what people want. They definitely will have more competition now though.

Nothing said on The Hive Mind is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is strictly for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our own opinions, not financial advice. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Hive Mind podcast. The goal of the podcast is to provide an inside look into what we like to call the Delphi hive mind, bringing together some of our brightest minds from each of the divisions to share insights, alpha, and shitposts. Today with us, we have the usual crew: myself, Ceteris, who leads our institutional research arm, and Jan, managing partner at Delphi Ventures. But stepping in for our shitcoin scavenger, who is on holiday, we have Zon, CEO. Are you CEO? CEO and founder of Emission?

I'm just CSO. Well, I used to go by CBDSM officer, Business Development Strategy Marketing.

That does not have a good ring to it. CBDSM.

To some people it has a very good ring to it though.

Nice to be here.

So what do you go by now? CSO?

Yeah, just CSO, Chief Strategic Officer, Chief of Strategy. I usually just say co-founder.

Very cool.

Okay.

The thing about being a co-founder is really you're just like a glorified intern. You end up doing anything or everything anyways.

Yeah, that is unfortunately true. I can confirm. So we have a lot we want to talk to you about today. I think you're pretty well positioned to talk about a lot of this stuff. I think we want to start with ETH. And specifically, I think that the framing I want to go at this from is, can ETH be saved or is ETH going to be like the Atom effectively, where sort of the Cosmos SDK and obviously, you've been building in Cosmos for a long time. I've been bullish and building Cosmos for a long time too. I think a lot of people were rightly bullish Cosmos SDK. And the Cosmos SDK has kind of crushed it, but the token has not gone up, right? Like there's a lot of successful chains using Cosmos SDK, but ATOM is, is, is basically a stablecoin for the last few years or, or worse recently. And so what do you think caused that? And do you think ETH is going to have the same fate? Is ETH going to be the ATOM basically? Like rollups succeed, you have a bunch of new rollups launch, Unichain, Base, WorldChain, like all these, by all means, successful rollups, but does ETH just become Atom?

Yeah. So I think there's a few different things here. The first is what went wrong with Atom and Cosmos. Like you said, the Cosmos SDK is a very good toolkit to build unique blockchains and it is what everyone still uses to date. Celestia, Nillion, Barachain, Initia, like all these things are built on top of the Cosmos SDK and they all have, a lot of those are probably going to have larger market caps than Atom itself. I think where Atom failed was the original ICF never really had a guiding hand over how the ecosystem should form and evolve. They're very credibly neutral and the same thing happened with Ethereum. And with that, they never cemented Atom within the network of chains, right? No chain in Cosmos cares at all about having the Atom token have liquidity or have use cases or build demand for it. IBC does not require Atom at all. There are a lot of original designs to Atom, like having assets move through that chain. As the router chain or as the hub chain, which could bring, you know, maybe some value capture to Atom, which was never really done. I think the ICL now, so Interchain Labs, which has been spun up by the Skip team and is kind of taking over Cosmos SDK development only within the past few months, they've really like cleaned house and are starting to, you know, look at this with a fresh lens. I'm very excited for what they're going to try and do because they will bring some ideas back to the table. And maybe this is not the best thing to say, but every good tokenomics design has a little bit of Ponzi to it. And so I think some of those things were missing. And with Ethereum, the difference here was that Ethereum was canonically supposed to be money and every rollup on Ethereum uses ETH as gas, or at least the vast majority of it. So I'm not exactly sure where things went wrong for ETH. It is, you know, the biggest credibly neutral smart contracting platform. Everyone still uses them as gas. I obviously am a bag holder because I have most of my net worth in the Ethereum token. One of the things I think that needs to be fixed is just the Ethereum Foundation. Their leadership is like unknown. Like I have no idea who anyone on the Ethereum Foundation is. Except for Vitalik. And I think that's very strange, right? You know, Anatoly and Raj, you know, a lot of people on the Solana Labs Foundations, they're talking, they're using protocols, they're using apps, they're engaging with the ecosystem. And the Ethereum Foundation has nothing like that. But I don't know how that system is run, so I can't really come in and say what to fix. But I'd be curious on some of your takes.

I think personally, when you talked the ETH is money thesis. I think they have made ETH money, right? Like, to your point, ETH is used on all these rollups. It is used as the gas token, but that hasn't accrued any meaningful value to the token really using it in that way. And so I think like, yes, ETH is money, but I think it was the expectations for what that would mean were like a lot higher than in reality. What it really is. Um, and people are just starting to value infra, and ETH is infra, mostly on fundamentals. Like, if you look at most infra tokens over the past couple years— and people will put up, pull out like meme coins or XRP to prove this wrong— but like, if you look at the majority of infra tokens, they are trading based on what kind of like real economics they— people expect them to provide over like the long term. And so ETH is in such a weird—

that's true.

I do think that's true. Yeah. Look at every—

Ethereum has the most, the largest amount of transaction fees in the past 7 days out of any smart contract application or chain.

It makes less than Solana now and is valued at like 4, 3, 4x the amount of SOL. Um, if you look at all the other infra tokens like L2 tokens of a lot of these dead L2s, they're all basically down only. Um, TIA is— I think TIA is like interesting here for the first time, but you know, it's hard to get around Like, you need to be really bullish on Celestia just absolutely crushing as a DA layer. And it's like hard when you see something like Solana get so much activity and so much real dollars actually accruing to it to like— and then again, all like the L2 tokens, if you look at their historical charts, they're pretty atrocious.

I just disagree with this fundamentals thing. I don't know. I don't think any of this stuff— like, you still have so many all L1s trading at multi-billions or tens of billions of dollars that do no revenue. I mean, the same with the L2s to some extent. Like, all of them would be valued at absurd multiples. The bridge protocols— like, there's so many examples of things that are valued in the billions that don't have the revenues or cash flows to justify it. And like with even SOL, like right at the bottom before it started pumping, that was the argument everyone made. Like SOL will never have cash flows because the transaction fees are too cheap. And then it pumped. And probably I'd say like, I don't know when REV started to catch up, but it was pretty late into the, into the pump. It was probably like SOL had already cleared $100 by the time REV really started to catch up meaningfully because you needed the wealth effect from the SOL pump for people to start aping memes. And then the memes are what generate most of the, the revenue. So I'm just skeptical of this story that price follows fundamentals. I think it's more like price moves for reasons that I think are very hard to understand. And then people make like— then it improves fundamentals. And also people start telling stories about fundamentals more than anything. But yeah, curious what you think, Jan.

Yeah, yeah, it's usually, you know, narrative drives price and then the reflexivity there. Drives activity and fundamentals and kind of looping and everything else that's built on top. I don't know, ETH kind of had, you know, initially was, uh, fat app thesis, velocity of money, MVPQ stuff. And then afterwards you went ultrasound money because there was actually a deflationary element and you can meme it as this kind of internet bond thing. And then over time, as activity waned, now it's gone back to you know, trying to indirectly do velocity of money where it's just used everywhere but doesn't actually drive enough fees. So you're getting to the point where inflation— you're basically undoing all of the, um, deflationary elements that happened from the, from the EIP. And so it's in a weird spot where, you know, the activity on it isn't going to justify— I think, you know, pointing at some of the, the, the other ghosty chains that are trading in the low billions. I think, you know, to some degree, all of these have like a baseline valuation in that, you know, low 10-figure range. And that's just kind of like without any activity, this is what the FDV of these things trades at. And then to get to the higher echelon, you really need to rationalize it somehow. And I think ETH now, you know, it's just fundamentals aren't getting there and it's going to kind of, I think, gradually compress. Um, I just don't see where the incremental bid for ETH will come, um, over some of these others. Like, I guess, namely SOL, basically.

Eric Trump.

Yeah, I was about to say Eric Trump. But, um, to the fundamentals point, like, I just looked at DeFi Llama one-year fees dashboard. And Ethereum is number 2 for 1-year fees with number 1 being Tether and Solana is like number 6. So it does generate fees.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's valued at like $300 billion though.

Yeah. I think it's, it's almost at the same revenue multiple as the market cap difference between Solana and Ethereum.

Yeah. I think Solana's people are just pricing in that it's going to keep, if you look at every chart, SOL versus ETH revenue, app GDP, um, it's just all up into the right. And it's like Solana just keeps taking more and more of market share. And so like, I don't even know if Solana trades at a higher— it doesn't because it's doing more revenue over the past like few months and it trades at like a third of the market cap. So it's not even like Solana is doing a higher multiple versus ETH. So there's still a lot of market expectations that ETH is gonna like turn it around in that sense, or Solana is not going to be able to scale to their kind of these ambitions that they have of, you know, 200 millisecond latency, like 100,000+ TPS. So yeah.

Solana, what do you think about the competition that Solana will have along its vertical, right? Solana is fast chain and upcoming over the next year, we have maybe 10 new fast chains that are trying to directly compete, but nothing is trying to compete with Ethereum.

Just one, one point I wanted to make on ETH before we move on to fast chains, which I think is a really good segue, is just that I don't know how you guys, how your journey with ETH went, but like ETH was what got me into the space pretty much. Like I had heard about Bitcoin before, but not an Austrian economist, so I was really bullish. Uh, ETH, pretty much have held it my whole— probably the only token I've held, first token I bought, and the only one I've held the whole, the whole time. And at some point in, I think, probably 2023, when the merge or whenever the merge happened, I actually was fully convinced ETH would flip in BTC. And I don't know if anyone else had this, but I was fully convinced, probably very close to the local ETH-BTC top, which is always how it goes. But yeah, the merge just happened. It was deflationary. Everyone was masturbating to the burn. And it's like, if it's deflationary in a bear, imagine what it'll do in a bull. And then since then, ETH BTC has just been like down only. And all the activity just moved to these rollups, right? Like all the meaningful sort of transaction flow. And like, I don't know, for me, I still hold ETH. I don't, as I've been saying for like a year on this pod, I don't really know why, but I do still hold it. I still like ETH. I like the values and the community, just the innovation that happens there. And I do think the ETH could fix this. And for me, I think there's 3 things I would prioritize. The first one, I think, is that you do need to reclaim L1 execution. And it needs to happen parallel with this rollup-centric roadmap, but I think you need L1 execution to scale. I don't know if you can do that within the EF. I think you probably need like a hungry team to do this. Like, I don't know, acquiring like a Monad or something like this earlier on when it was cheaper, I think would have made a lot of sense. And having a team like this work either within the EF or outside of it on scaling the L1 would have made a lot of sense. Then I think L2 interoperability, like the stuff that you guys are laser-focused on with Anisha, I think like the EF should take control of that like much more. Have like bridging standards, like enforce like wallet UX standards and just like care about— like it's obvious that it's broken and it's sort of obvious what needs to be done for it to be fixed, at least in terms of end-user UX. And I think that should be like a way bigger focus. And then the third thing is sort of what you mentioned, Zaun, which is just the like BD/DevRel, which is just terrible. Like we have teams on ETH that have, I won't name names, but that have like multi-billion dollars of TVL on ETH L1 and that have never spoken to the Ethereum Foundation or have spoken to them once, reached out once. And then they'll launch on Solana and immediately have the Solana Foundation reaching out, Solana Labs, the super team, they're getting them connected to all the teams. It's just a completely different experience. And it just feels like the EF is in an ivory tower. They don't use the chain. Like some of the comments on ETH Research over the years just shows that, you know, it's always this Alice pays Bob thing. Like no one understands that Alice doesn't want to pay Bob. She wants to ape shitcoins, right? And like across different chains.

Today was the day Ethereum Foundation put in something like 25K ETH into a few different protocols today.

Yeah, I mean, exactly. It's like 5 years later, right? 5 years post-DeFi. But yeah, I think it's fixable. I wish they fixed it. I think Vitalik's awesome, like spiritual leader. I don't think he's the prince. He's more like the prophet, right? Like this kind of spiritual leader of Ethereum. Like, super impressive. Someone who's been in the space so long, had so many opportunities to corrupt yourself and never has, has just always remained pretty pure. He posted about love and communism today. I didn't see that. That's unfortunate timing. But, but yeah, I hope ETH fixes their, their shit. I don't know if anyone has anything to say on that. Otherwise, we can, we can move on to the fast chains and competition for Solana.

My only thing with ETH is like a lot of the demand last cycle, I think people, a lot of people got psyoped into thinking that there was a lot of natural demand to use Ethereum because Ethereum was like a good product. And the reality is that it was kind of the only game in town and it's where all the early innovation happened. And so that's the only place you could really do stuff. And then you saw in the bull market when ETH fees got really high, then you started to see people branch off and use like Polygon BSC was obviously massive, Phantom, Harmony, like all these, you know, pretty like dead chains today. The difference with the last couple of years is that people were using Solana in the bear market when gas prices were like 1, 2 guai, right? And so this is kind of— this was like a fundamental change in recognizing that people like— it was more than just the expensive fees why people didn't want to use Ethereum. It was a lot of like UX issues. Around that. And so that has been like, I think the biggest, and a lot of this just stems from the EVM just like not being good. And so I think that was like a big kind of like reality check over the past couple of years.

The other big one was just the recent scaling roadmap that had plans out to 2030. I think that was a big nail in the coffin for anyone who had, you know, a last-ditch hope of this thing actually becoming, you know, usable at scale.

Yeah, I think it's just expectations. That's all. Like, again, it's still like $300 billion, right? It's not like it's cheap. And so I think it's just people had, like you said, uh, José, like you thought it was gonna flip ETH, right? A lot of people had that opinion. And when it was 0.08, on the ratio, it's like it pretty much has to flip Bitcoin at that point for it to be a good investment, right? And so all you've kind of seen is the reality that it's not going to flip Bitcoin, just get like priced in. And yeah, Solana has outperformed Ethereum a lot because it, you know, it's got a lot of users, all this stuff, and it was like just so cheap compared to ETH, right? So yeah, I don't know. It's like, it's, it's to me, this is like expected for ETH. Like, it's like the operation, it was a success, Ethereum, but the patient died, ETH, right? Like Ethereum as a, as a movement, as an ecosystem continues to grow, but ETH is just not like people. I see people bring up like MegaETH as this is going to be what starts pumping ETH again. And it's like, why? Like MegaETH uses EigenDA. Yeah, uses ETH as the gas token, but it's like their own sequencer, their own— I don't know, like it's hard when you're a big asset. It's hard to move it like these, these little things. I don't know.

The types of users and buyers are also very different this cycle versus last cycle, right? You had like on-chain degens coming to play on Ethereum and some of these sidechains. But most of the boomers or people that were not involved in crypto yet would just buy BTC and ETH. But now you have like senators buying pump fund shitters. And so when that starts to happen, they are not trying to get into crypto to buy Ethereum anymore and be convicted in tokens. They're trying to flip the coin, right? And 10x. And so I think that just totally changes the type of dynamic of what users are coming to do here. At least right now, until we have some more, you know, like long-term products within this space and figure out how to make sure that it's not just about gambling. But we should segue into the fast chains.

Yeah, let's do it. So what are the fast chains? Like, what are you— or maybe just, yeah, what are the new chains that you think are competitors to Solana or that you're excited about?

I think every chain now, if you're not fast, you're not really building the right architecture.

Like, is BearChain fast?

No. And I think they, like, I'm not, I don't know. It's BearChain is, I have like no disrespect to the team or anything. And I know a lot of people like it, but it's kind of weird. It's like, feels like 2021 DeFi. You still have the approves and swaps on everything, which is a pretty bad, like, I don't understand why people still launch EVM chains with that UX flow because it's, it's really bad. Like, people just do not like it. It's not like, you know, crazy high performance. I think you're seeing a lot of these, like, you know, MegaETH, obviously there's Paradigm doing Ithaca, there's Rise. Obviously you had Sweet Aptos, you have now you have like Fogo, just pure Fire Dancer. I don't know, like how real FOGO is. I know you have ex-Firedancer Liam doing Unto, I think it's called, which is, I think it's like VM-less even. Like, I don't even know if it has, or it's making its own VM. It's not SVM or anything. I think that the industry is going into this pure, like, you need to get latency as low as possible. That's what everybody's talking about now. Um, and you just need to make like your changes as fast as possible. And so, you know, is that bearish for Solana? I think that it's confirmation that Solana is the leader in the correct thesis of what people want. Um, they definitely will have more competition now though, so it's not like they're guaranteed to take this spot. And you do see this time and time again in crypto where people want to be early to stuff and you can't be early to Solana anymore. And so that, like, that force alone, right? The force of being early could help some of these newer chains that are like direct Solana competitors, right?

Yeah.

And it's just like how much the thing is, it's not like the people, when people say this though, like, oh, there'll always be a fa— a bigger, like a faster Solana and all this stuff. It's like, maybe Solana still, they're still trying to be as fast as they can and they're still trying to improve like the L1 and still trying to improve like, you know, having double zero now, right? From like xSolana people. So it's not like they're stopping going after that goal. They're continuing to go towards that goal of being like the fastest global. And obviously if you're like a mega ETH or something, you can be faster than Solana. Just based off of pure, like, physics of having, like, one sequencer. But yeah, it's, like, unclear to me that a totally new re-architect L1 can actually be, like, faster than Solana. Like, maybe, right? But then, like, how much faster? And then, you know, if Solana can get down to, like, 200 milliseconds with multiple concurrent proposers, is an L1 that can do like 150. Like maybe that 50 milliseconds does make a massive difference.

I don't know. Fogo's aiming at like 10 or 20, right?

Yeah. Fogo's weird though, because it's like, and it's an app chain.

So like they're, they're, um, it's sort of like, it's also interesting because it's extending this Tully thing of there's only 6 contracts that matter in blockchain, which I agree right now, but I, I, I really don't think it's a good sort of bet for the long term. And they're like integrating, I think they're enshrining an oracle plus doing like special order book logic where, you know, similar to Hyperliquid, like order cancels going first and stuff to make it easier to run order books on chain. Because like order books on chain, Solana is fast, but still like Phoenix is never, as far as I know, hasn't really generated like significant volume. Like order books have not really picked up. And it's, I think a lot of people point at this as the reason why. So it'd be interesting to see if like, it's basically faster Solana with like some enshrined stuff that makes it better for the main contracts that people use blockchains for. So it'll be interesting to see how that does. I do think the competitor, like the, Chow, I think that's how you pronounce his name from Alliance, had a quote. About how it's hard for him to recommend his founders go anywhere other than Solana right now, which I kind of agree with, honestly. And I feel the same way for most projects where they're not using much of the chain. They're just like basically launching a token or just running like undifferentiated contracts because chains aren't just like tech. And at this point, like you said, the tech is pretty commoditized. And what you're really looking for is like capital markets and community. And when you launch on Solana, you have the entire like pump fund degens, all the Phantom users, everyone ready to ape your thing. And I think that ends up being— it's sort of like, you know, launching on the NASDAQ versus like FTSE, right, in London. Like, why would you not launch on the US? Why would you not IPO in the US if you could? And like Solana is in the same position right now. But I think the exception— there's two things I'd say on that. The first one is that every chain is only one killer app away from unseating Solana. Like, this stuff's still really small. We kind of saw that with Solana itself, right? There was no activity during the bear market, really. There were just like a few people putting their Jito SOL on margin or something. Like, there was nothing significant. And then PumpFam came out of nowhere. And like, now Solana is king. I think it's very possible to see that happen with another app on another chain. Is the first thing I'd say. And then the second one is I think there are projects that do need the chain to do certain things that aren't sort of well suited for a generalized environment. That's sort of where I see like Initial really, really play. And I think you're going to also see a lot of those. But yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, one argument for not launching on Solana. So like, what benefits do you get by launching somewhere else? As a quality project, it's direct interfacing with the core team and some level of incentives and foundation support and financial support. And so, if you're building an app where there are elements that are on-chain, but if you're interacting with the app, they're mostly obfuscated anyways. And so, you can benefit from on-chain liquidity and on-chain transactions, but you don't necessarily need to be a crypto-native user to tap into that. I think in those scenarios, as an app, you don't benefit as much from the community within Solana, but you get to benefit from the financial support of a chain that— from a chain that needs quality apps. And so I think, like you mentioned, with each platform being one super app away from, from, you know, onboarding a massive amount of users. I think like those are the kind of setups where it makes sense to potentially avoid Solana to some degree, not avoid, but where, you know, it makes sense to pick something else in place of it.

If you're building DeFi, I would still not say that Solana is the best place for you, right? Like the DeFi heavy users, the big amounts of sitting liquidity. And like the people that come to farm are still on the Ethereum layer 1. The problem is that's why like Athena was there, Usual, Resolve, like all these major DeFi protocols that launched this cycle still chose Ethereum layer 1. If you are looking for just plain users, maybe you go to Solana in that case. Yeah, not exactly DeFi, it's like stablecoin equivalents. But I think if you're trying to do anything unique, that's when you kind of start to look at full-stack apps or building your own chain, and that's when you come to Initia. And so I think that my thesis around this is, you know, every chain is going to be fast, right? That's like going to be table stakes. You have to have good infrastructure, whether that is a general purpose chain or an app chain, they all need to be fast. Um, and they can all probably be fast enough. I think everyone that's competing along the camp of how do I get the fastest chain possible and it's general purpose for everyone is going to have trouble when it comes to fighting for a similar set of users, projects, and liquidity. When you do have Solana, that really is the king here. Now, I think if you look 1 to 2 years in the future, and you know that every chain is fast, where do projects start to find unique value propositions that can actually attract users and build real products? And that's when they start to tweak parts of their chain that are specific for their application, whether that is using a VM that only makes their application possible, whether that is customizing transaction ordering and execution. Right? These are the, the things that can start to create little differentiators for you to find like a niche product market fit along one specific vertical that you would never get by building on a general purpose blockchain. And that's why I'm still very bullish on the long-term app chains being the winning solution here, because you'll need to start finding those differentiators to win out users in liquidity. And you know, I think the greatest success of this cycle was Hyperliquid, but it's very hard to point to other examples right now outside of perpetual products where appchains have really won yet.

Yeah, and you really got to do it all yourself if you're launching an appchain, right? Not just build the chain, the tech, like, although there are some solutions for that now, but also like get your community, do your marketing. I think that's what—

Yeah, I think that's what Initia exists for, right? Like you come and you focus on your app and you just focus on the alters you want to make and everything else is there for you and follows a lot of shared standards. I think modularity and what happened this cycle with that is everyone got tricked into thinking modularity was about, you know, what DA you use, what oracles you use, what interop solution you used and you had. These RaaS services basically build these vending machine-like models where you can come and pick whatever you want, but you still have to do a bunch of BD work as you talk to all these third-party integration teams. Initia, however, is a very opinionated design on how these things work because when you actually talk to builders, no one cares about what DA they use, what interop they use, and what oracle they use. They care about those just working. So we work with just the best in class there. You spin up a rollup on Initia, you get LayerZero, Celestia, built-in oracles. You have an entire front-end product suite for how you connect to wallets, how you bridge into the chains. And because everyone uses shared standards, we can build like the UI and UX elements that can sit on top of all of these and eventually create a chain abstracted experience where you still have these applications that are uniquely altered for their one specific segment. And I think, you know, having this design along with a really strong economic model is how you're going to be able to share liquidity users and have them move between these different app chains in the future, because everything is no longer fragmented and we can have a hand over how this ecosystem evolves.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I know I want to get Ceteris's quick take on the— because you were an AppChain bull, an early AppChain bull, I would say, in the bear, right? Like you were very involved in us writing that report where we made the fateful decision of choosing Cosmos. Not blaming you for that. But you updated your views, right? You kind of went the other way. But I'm curious to hear where you're at right now.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, a lot of my AppChain bullishness was because of like Ethel won in last bull market. Right. And I was like, okay, you can't fit everything on one chain. You need to like create these isolated chains. So it made a lot of sense to me. But then over, yeah, the years that followed that, a lot of the issues with AppChains kind of became apparent. And a lot of these are just like Cosmos, like it's the coordination thing, right? Exactly what Sam was saying, how like it was kind of a free-for-all. And then you had a lot of people in Cosmos just launching new, new chains to like launch their own token. And then everybody wanted to be early to a new token in Cosmos. And so there was always like new chains getting launched and because everybody wanted the new token and then nobody could ever like coalesce around one thing. And so there was like a lack of unity around the whole process. And then at the same time, you had Solana over here and yeah, it got like the worst thing I think any eco could go through. And like they were still building and then they were building what people wanted. We talk about, uh, you know, how the only successful appchains so far have been perps and that's true. But if you just think in general with crypto, like the only success— successful apps in general have been like spot trading and perp trading. And like, you know, DeFi goes along with spot trading in a sense, like minting CDPs, all this stuff. It's like, you know, these financial primitives in spot trading, even if you look at Ethereum, like I compare Ethereum to Solana. Solana trading is very basic. It's like meme coin, you know, dog hat. Bonk, whatever. And then Ethereum, you have all these like yield games where it's like usual, it's like, okay, let's, let's mint this 4-year locked token and then we'll go Pendle YT and we'll farm that. And like, they're just different games, but they're still kind of just trading at the end, at the end of the day. And so I think that, yeah, I think Anisha is going at this problem, like being coordinated from day one, having shared standards, having like, if you look at Ethereum, you know, there's like Superchain ERC-20, right?

And it's like, okay, Superchain I think is the best comp for what Initia is trying to do. I would say, I don't know what you think about that, Zun, but yeah.

But, but even still, there's still even the Superchain. I think that a lot of that stuff is trying to make a cohesive thing after the fact still, and a lot of Yes. Respect, right?

That's the issue.

And so a lot of that is in Ethereum is like, and like you see AggLayer and they're like, oh, AggLayer is this neutral? AggLayer tech might be good. It's very hard for me to see AggLayer being like a real long-term solution in Ethereum there, even if it has this amazing technology. Um, I think, yeah, like you need the cohesiveness with everything you need. I think Cosmos is probably Atom's problem. And like Solana is kind of backing into being a place where people are launching, like Zeta's launching Perps, uh, AppChain rollup on Solana, right? Uh, you're seeing some other like couple apps and these are also like network extensions, whatever you want to call them. These are mostly like app-specific on Solana, which is kind of like the original Cosmos thesis, right? And I think Solana kind of backed into this. By accident because they just had this, like, they made, they had this like shared liquidity economic layer, right? And that was successful. And now people want to like build around it. Whereas Cosmos, where's, yeah, where's Cosmos was just like, just everybody go build your own apps. And then there was no unity around it or around anything. And then people felt like guilty of like giving back to to Cosmos Hub. So it's like, oh, we'll airdrop to Atom stakers. Like, this is the big thing. This is how Atom was involved. It's like, oh, we'll airdrop our new token to you. But there was never any. And then also the Atom community was like, when they turned out Atom 2.0, I realized that it was like pretty toast at that point. So yeah, I don't know. Shared standards is like a massive— yeah, shared standards is probably the biggest thing. Like, you can't— you just need like you need, you need, you also need like one explorer, right? Yeah. Like one block explorer to look at everything. Not just for UX, also for like taxes and stuff, man. When I go, when I go trying to use like Cosmos chains and I don't want to start doing all this stuff, it's like, oh fuck, there's like all these different chains I need to add now to like my taxes.

This is amazing initiative still.

Yeah.

It's like, it's, it's that, that thing for sure. A lot of people don't pay taxes and stuff and they don't care, but that's like a pretty big deal. Or do you want that operational headache of reconciling? Like reconciling your Cosmos taxes was the worst, most painful experience. And yeah, I don't know. So yeah, you need that like cohesiveness.

Yeah, I think so. Going back to some of the first things you guys commented on, there's things like Superchain ERC-20. I also agree that it's a bit little too late, and I tweeted about this like 2 days ago where, you know, it's like that meme where it's like, oh my God, there's 18 standards, we need one more to fix all these things, and then there's now 19 standards, right? I think we should just use frameworks that exist that everyone already uses. So like we use LayerZero, right? It is probably the most canonical bridging standard now. Every major asset that people care about actually bridging uses LayerZero. They now also have USDT0. So you basically get native Tether issuance when you have a LayerZero endpoint and every rollup on Initia just boom, has access to that day one for free.

This is, I think, the big thing Cosmos thought that all people needed was security and a stack to build a chain, right? I think there's like two things wrong with that. First of all, people don't really want to build their own chains anymore. They just want to have their own rollup. I think it's sort of in the current meta, ends up making more sense for most people. And then the second thing is just that security is like, first of all, you don't need security in the same way with the rollup. And second of all, that's just like a very small part of what you need when you're launching a new chain. right? Like what Cedrus was saying, the explorer, the wallet integrations, the having native stablecoins on your chain, having an oracle, having integrations with exchanges, right? Like if you have a new chain, the exchange has to, it's much harder to get integration with the exchange. There's like all these things that are huge frictions of launching an app chain. And to me, like the initia is sort of like, how do you have, because it's clear that app chains have benefits. How do you preserve those benefits while eliminating all these frictions? All these annoying frictions? Or like, I guess, what would ETH look like if they were building it from scratch now for a rollup-centric world? I feel like that's the other kind of way to see it. Um, maybe you can— I'd love for you to also talk about like the wallet stuff, because I found that really cool, like the MetaMask, the way you can use like MetaMask or Phantom to use Initia. But you can finish your last— and by the way, we should have probably disclaimed this at the beginning, we're investors in Initia, in case that wasn't obvious. So I'll probably redo the intro and say I just want to say that just to make sure we don't get torched for this. But yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I think the Superchain comp is probably what I would say is the most direct of what we are trying to build right now without saying we're trying to build Ethereum. It's actually like a reasonable comp. I think the one difference here, or the major difference is we are starting with these shared standards already in place and the teams that we are trying to target are just by far different, right? When you build on the OP stack, you get the same copy-paste fork right now, and it's basically only used by these general purpose institutional blockchains. And I think that's very unexciting. I think that appchains are about, you know, having customization and building for a specific purpose. And so the types of builders that Initia has right now building on the stack are really like either DeFi native, they're like fully on-chain games, they're teams that are trying to optimize for a specific vertical. And I think That's where they'll find success and we won't end up with the same, you know, 4 or 5 copy-paste applications that end up on every single one of the Superchain Layer 2s. I think shared liquidity, like—

I actually just want to, I just want to hit on that point though, too. Like, I think your point about like all the copy-paste to general purpose, I think that is like, I think that the two architectures you should probably do are like a very performant general purpose chain. Like a Solana Suite type thing, and then probably like an AppChain type thing. And to your point, like all these Superchain chains are the exact same thing. They're not differentiated at all. And that has always been my biggest problem with like the Ethereum rollup thesis going back like years is that all these teams were building the same, like vanilla EVM.

Different color on twitter.com.

Yeah. And it's like, that was always the thing. And like, and you, and you see it, like nobody uses zkSync AVM. Nobody uses Polygon zkAVM. Optimism mainchain, nobody really uses. They all use Base now. It's like, if you just make like Scroll, if you just make a million of the same product, it's not— anyways, I didn't mean to cut you off, but it's like, that was always my biggest issue. Yeah.

People got so fed up with EVM layer 2s this cycle because we got the same VeloDrum fork. The same lending market fork, um, just reskinned on every single one of these. And so I completely agree. I think just the two ways to scale blockchain are going to be very application-specific full-stack apps, take advantage of the chain for your application, or the GigaFast Layer 2, or sorry, just GigaFast base layer chain. And I don't know which one's going to win yet, but I have placed my bet. But some of these other things that you're mentioning, like shared liquidity is very important. And that's why the initial Layer 1 is this shared liquidity hub. Assets are fungible across all the different Layer 2s. Having those shared bridging standards means that the trust assumptions across all the chains are the same. Asset issuers, if they're comfortable with one, they can feel comfortable with another.

Yeah, that was the worst thing about IBC, by the way. Just when you IBC to a new chain and you did the wrong version, and then it doesn't even show up on your wallet, you have to go find this thing. Bridge it back. That's like, these things are so important. Like these little UX things.

Oh, you thought, you thought you owned Atom Osmosis Atom. You actually own Atom Luna Osmosis Atom.

Yeah, exactly.

You got to go back 3 times and then go back. Yeah.

And the same thing happens on Ethereum now, right? Because you have a lot of different bridges to the same layer 2, but they can create wrapped token standards. At least now with Intents, this is starting to get a lot better. But some of the UX pieces are still not there, right? But on Initia, you can move, let's say, USDC from one rollup to ETH on another, you know, in less than a second through one unified interface that every one of these Layer 2s have, as well as like the Layer 1. And on the wallet part, I think a lot of what this comes down to for Appchains is how do we break down as many barriers as possible so users can just come in and use products. They don't necessarily need to come for Initia to use this. We want them to maybe just come for this application or this fully on-chain game. And so how do you break down the barriers? Obviously one was the bridging and now two is, you know, connecting to wallets and creating accounts here. And so what we've done is every rollup on Initia is a Cosmos SDK chain underneath, but we offer the ability to use EVM, MoveVM, or WASM VM. And when you move tokens across all of these, they get converted into Cosmos native tokens and then bridged. So you can move, let's say, from an ERC-20 into a Move Fungible Asset and a Move Fungible Asset into a CW-20. So it's all nice and seamless. And when you come and connect with a wallet, we wanted to make sure you don't have the problem where you have to download a new one. I think Cosmos wallets have come very far, but they are still one of the reasons that I don't like using Cosmos. I never went to Aptos at the beginning for a while because I didn't want to download new Aptos wallets. When you go to Solana, you still have to get a Solana wallet. Like, all these things are a huge pain. And so we built this thing called the Initial Wallet Widget, and what it does is it basically lets you use any wallet from EVM, SOL, Cosmos, we'll add the Aptos and Sui ones later, but to sign with any of those wallets on any of the chains, despite what VM they are in, without needing to know any RPC information or what chain you're on, you just need to sign a transaction because this thing acts as like a, a middleman where it just takes your signature and then it posts that signature to the chain instead of having like a real wallet integration. And then that wallet widget shows you all of your assets across all of the chains, but it really just breaks down those barriers without us needing to BD every single wallet team to get support for every single VM.

Yeah, that's going to be really cool. I can't wait to use that and see if it— so basically people should be able to use Initia with Fantom or MetaMask or whatever without having to download any new wallet, and they can interact with any of the rollups using Phantom or MetaMask, basically.

That's right.

Okay.

Even if the rollup is in Move or Cosmos or EVM, or maybe even doesn't even have a VM. All these little UX things we just want to try and break down and like explorer stuff too. Cosmos explorers have been notoriously, you know, dog. So we acquired the best explorer team in Cosmos. And we just said, okay, now this team can focus on making the rollups on Initia have the best goddamn explorers and create one unified system here.

What was the Injective beef on Twitter the other day? Or do we need to get into that?

We probably don't need to get into it, but they released some new updates to their explorer and it was like a copy paste of our explorer.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I guess we don't need to get into that, although you kind of did just then. But yeah, we'll probably get a Merza tweet for this. Yeah. Anyway, no hate to Injective. So next, I think we've hashed out the modular thesis pretty well and what needs to happen. Is there anything else you guys want to talk about on this, like Tia or People are doing a bunch of cash flow models for TIA. Even Gort did one. I was surprised. He like busted out the Kaczynski model. Yeah.

I'm curious about your guys' take on is there is recently a governance proposal, two of them for TIA. And I know Seth in some of his past podcasts has said, I'm bullish on Celestia and data posting, but I'm not bullish on the token. And so I'm wondering if these two updates change your view. One was reducing the inflation rate and the second was locking investor rewards going forward.

So I think both of those are like good, but both of those, none of those fundamentally change like the token, right? It just kind of changes the supply dynamics for a little bit. I think I am getting more bullish on TIA these days though, partly because of how much it's been hammered, to be totally frank. Also, you're kind of seeing that Base is taking like 50% of Ethereum Blobs, and it's going to take a long time for Ethereum Blobs to really scale to any meaningful level. And so it seems pretty clear to me right now that Celestia is going to start taking a lot more rollups market share. And so that alone is like, you know, the problem, one of the biggest problems with— I didn't like TIA at the beginning is it just went up so much. And then they had like nothing there and you had to make some pretty, you know, I like $20 billion with no rollups on it where you need like millions of rollups posting to actually make it like economically viable. It's kind of like a hard sell. I think there's more of a path here. What I think is interesting is kind of the ZK stuff with Celestia. If you can actually like start bridging TIA. With that, which I know they've been working on, that is pretty bullish. There was this paper the other day too. I don't know if you saw it about like actually using Celestia for verification of computation, which is kind of interesting because then you're actually like verifying execution and everything. And that kind of— it kind of like changes. That's kind of like a far-out thing. Who knows how like immediately applicable that is. But yeah, I don't know. There are like, there are— my biggest question with DA layers is that there are benefits to sharing a DA layer, right? Like there are, um, there are these economies of scale that you get as a DA layer, you know, the bridging and everything. Like there's something real there, right? Like it is a fundamental security like benefit. My question is always though, like, what is the premium people will pay to get that, right? I think that people, like, you know, people aren't going to keep paying— new rollups aren't going to be keep paying like Ethereum blobs when they can get Celestia blobs for a hundredth of the price because of the improvement of like Ethereum security, right? So it's kind of like, what premium can you actually charge as a DA layer? And that's kind of, that's like the most unproven kind of question out there for me. And yeah, but I think Celestia has like some momentum now. I think it's got like shit on too much. I was part of that too.

I think they just have the best scaling roadmap by far. Like no one is going to compete with them amongst the alt-DA camp, like EigenLayer, Avail, and these others, unfortunately, are going to be outcompeted here. I think they're just going to be the clear winner.

Yeah, because Celestia is not going to— you're not going to— like, Celestia already has pretty big blocks and they're kind of like increasing them pretty aggressively. So it's not like rollups using Celestia will really be forced on cost basis anytime soon. And that gives Celestia like a big opportunity with blobs being fully saturated and a lot of new rollups coming to market. That gives them a pretty big opportunity to kind of capture a lot of that market share. So I think like obviously Abstract isn't using them yet, but they're going to be using them. Obviously you guys are coming to market. There's like Eclipse and Flame, which are early, early days, but you're starting to see like more— you're starting to see more rollups using them. So I think like, yeah, the next year or two, I think is, um, yeah, I also thought that the Celestia marketing, I didn't like the whole modular versus monolithic framing. And I think a lot of people got psyoped by the term modular this cycle and didn't really think about what that really meant properly. Um, and I think that's kind of changing a bit now too. All right.

Should we move on to markets? Like just the all annihilation that we've been through for the last month or two?

Like there's also some big launches that came out.

Yeah. Mara, Story Protocol obviously launching in some pretty bad conditions.

Does anybody know what Story actually is? Like, I still don't really know.

Yeah, I haven't— I tried to read about it. It seems like it could have been an L2 or just launch on Solana with their IP. And then I don't know what programmability the AppChain enables, but to be fair, I haven't made a very strong effort to look into it. Did you know, Zhan?

I don't exactly yet. I think IP is tokenized as NFTs, but it is built as a Cosmos chain with EVM. I think, you know, really a lot of story will be what does their BD look like, who can they actually end up bringing on chain to use this thing, not the tech at all.

I think it's sort of like if you have the IP relationships, then the best way to monetize it is to make an L1 around it, you know, and get the L1 premium more than it making a lot of sense to have an L1 for this. But again, I admittedly haven't looked looked into that much.

Yeah, it's more marketing. Like, realistically, you know, if what's going to create the most buzz and, and encourage or convince the most amount of IP to get moved on is if it's an app versus an L1. And then the, yeah, the argument is L1, the premium allows you to have a bigger war chest and, and make more noise and, and ideally onboard and create an ecosystem there. The trade-off is basically Does the lack of other liquidity on this chain limit the value of the IP and the liquidity of it? And so that's kind of the trade-off you're making, at least from my perspective. So TBD.

So it launched earlier today. It's trading at around $2 billion. Beara Chain launched last week. They're also trading at around $2.5 billion. FDV. The parachain one surprised me the most. I thought this thing was going straight to 10 billion, but I'm obviously very biased because I was a big fan of OHM back in the day, and that's kind of where this came from. And I've known Smoky for a while, and I just think the ecosystem is so ripe for like new DeFi builders or old DeFi builders It's kind of where you would want to go right now if you're looking for, if you were looking for people that are going to actually use DeFi on-chain. But I think something we've seen after the launch is that people didn't use the chain, but it's only been a week, right? So there's, there's time, but I think anyone who isn't live yet, right? Proof of Liquidity is not live yet. And the pre-deposit vaults may have been a miss in the sense that if you wanted Berra exposure in size, you already deposited $3 billion into these pools, which are supposed to automate using the chain for you. But a lot of it turns out to be like useless liquidity, right? You have like WETH-STONE LP pool. So like an ETH-LST, ETH-LST for like hundreds of millions of dollars. But who's, who's using that?

Yeah.

But the opportunities, sorry, I was just going to say the opportunities on the chain, if you go and use it, are incredible right now because people aren't there. So I've been farming stables for like hundreds of percent APY.

Yeah, I checked, I went on Kodiak yesterday and they have like islands and like fruitful islands or something, I don't know. And there's like some crazy APRs on these 4 pools and one of them was ETH, Bera, and it only had like $160K in it. And this is like the main DEX. And then I go to the other tab and it's like, oh, it's because there's like 500 million in STONE Bara and it's earning 0% incentives or anything. So yeah, it's kind of weird. It's, yeah, I think your point makes sense. Like a lot of these pre-deposits that are just locked essentially and people don't have extra bullets to kind of deploy because they already made that allocation decision. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, you still need like, I still think though you need fundamentally new apps and it's still mostly everything right now on Bear at least is just DeFi stuff again. So I know they have the whole like how the, how the system works is like unique, right? And like innovative. I guess it's like TBD if that is enough.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I don't know, I feel like the— again, I'm same as Zana, like bullish on Smokey and really like the team. Think they've done a good job, but it does feel like this would have been a good like 2021 launch. Like proof of liquidity was— made a lot of sense back then. Like GMX was big, but I feel like Cosmos SDK, like EVM chain in 2025 is a tougher sell. They have managed to, they have really good builders on there, like I think Exponents was one of our favorite teams that we saw on there, Ryan Park, shout out to him. But yeah, I think it's a, and I think for a lot of L1s, you really need a very strong reason to exist.

right?

Like some kind of— you need to have something that enables like net new apps to be created because I think otherwise it's just going to be tough. But I hope the bearers pull it off for sure.

Yeah, I think proof of liquidity, once we start to see it live and kicking, will be very interesting just because we haven't seen it yet. So yeah, this thing needs a few more weeks.

And so are we— Are we near the bottom now? Maybe, Jan, are you— yeah, is the alt annihilation over soon? Like, uh, please.

Uh, I mean, I think the longer the— like, BTC chop isn't really great for it, um, as we've seen. So, um, I, I do think we're kind of starting to, to turn the corner though, where you know, bad news is no longer really nuking the market. So I think there's, there's some degree of kind of seller exhaustion on that front, which is good to see. Um, you know, the two back-to-back high inflation numbers, you'd think would have a larger kind of impact than they did. Granted, like on the, the PPI side, if you look underneath It's not— it's like driven by portfolio managers and some other kind of noise. So, you know, I think if you gave the backdrop of inflation reigniting, you'd think markets would be massively pulling back, and then that's not the case. So I don't know what will really take us quite a bit lower. Now, you had tariff delays until April 1st, and so Um, a lot of alts look like they've bottomed. I mean, I, I do think now is probably a good time to bid. I don't know, I don't think you're going to get this like straight leg up though. I think, you know, you do need some kind of a bounce from Bitcoin to give people confidence to, to kind of go back in. Will it come back as quickly? Definitely. For like, the other reason it won't come back as quickly is because of you know, the amount of liquidations you've seen, like, that's just money that's not really gonna be coming back. Like, a lot of people got taken out, and so, um, that's gonna hurt quite a bit. Uh, you're gonna have tax bills that are pretty large that people are gonna have to pay, um, after a good year last year. So that's gonna be another kind of headwind. But, um, I, I mean, if you were like— the concepts and the reasons you were bullish before should still be intact unless, right, unless it was like a pure momentum trade, then, then not so much. But, you know, if you thought narratives were strong before, then they should still be strong now. Not much has changed on that front.

Um, and that's the thing, right? We were all, we were all bullish at the local top in, in December, Jan, right? And so it feels like if you're not bullish like 60, 70, 80% lower prices like a month later or a month and a bit later. Either we made a big mistake in December, January, which is obviously possible, or I feel like this is a good time to—

yeah, you're just letting price— the only thing from, I think, macro, it's like obviously the tariffs are a bit of a wild card, but the more they become a thing, the less important they kind of are. And then, uh, the inflation print is like one material thing that maybe You know, but other than that, like, I don't think stuff has really changed too much. So yeah, then you're just letting price dictate your, uh, thinking, right?

And just crypto always front runs the bad news, right? Like, and the— or any news, like, it almost, you know, like the tariffs and everything. I think that's all, and like unlocks, is sort of all built into the price. I don't know, I still think the dispersion theme that we've been banging on about is obviously gonna be a big thing. Like, a lot of these alts don't do anything, don't have any users, don't generate any cash flows, and still trading at 9 or 10 figures. And you have like a bunch of unlocks coming of people that know this stuff doesn't do anything and are like highly incentivized to sell. So I think like fading those assets makes a lot of sense. But I do think, as we've been saying, there's going to be some strong performers. And I don't know, basically the way I see it is like there's 3 kind of proven PMF businesses in crypto, which is like stablecoins, exchanges, and L1s basically. And I think you want to have like the own the fastest horse in, in each of those, or a few of the fastest horses. And then I think there's interesting upcoming areas that are gonna— that are like crypto AI, which I'm really interested in, um, and I think DePIN could be interesting. And you want to kind of have some, some bets in those too. But that's kind of how I'm seeing alts right now.

Yeah, and broader market-wise— sorry, go ahead.

I was just going to say, I think there's a lot of coins that you can just fade the cycle, right? You can just choose not to buy. And so much of it is still vaporware right now that I've been seeing, right? There's like some projects that have launched to mainnet 2 times and are going to launch mainnet a third time, but they're trading in multiple billions of dollars. That sort of stuff is kind of wild that it's still happening right now, and that maybe our user base still hasn't learned of how to price things.

Yeah.

And then I guess broader market catalysts. I think what was a detriment before is now going to be a catalyst, right? Detriment being that Everyone is kind of assuming there would be some executive order bid-related activities, whether that's buying or setting up of the SBR. That got kicked out 180 days, but you have like the Trojan horse of it happening through the Sovereign Wealth Fund, which was on a 90-day timeline from announcement, which I think puts it at like early May. where basically have to deliver a plan. So I think there will be some rumblings around that, which, which, uh, will start getting priced in at some point, um, and then market will react to that. But that seems like a, a pretty good way for them to get around some of the issues while, uh, of kind of the regulatory— not the regulatory, but the legislative issues around, uh, buying Bitcoin, um, through, through this entity. But yeah, it's a tricky one because it's like, where's the financing from that going to come from?

Debt.

And so then it's like, are you going to outpace the cost of debt on this performance? Or yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they kind of facilitate all that. One of it will probably be through increased mining activities, but like oil mining, not necessarily crypto mining.

Yeah. Anything else you want to talk about on alts?

No, it's just, it's been like this. This isn't changing. Like, this is the new reality of this market. There's too many tokens. There's going to be good pockets to be in. There's a lot of stuff you just want no business holding. Like, there's just too many tokens. Like, the FDV of crypto is totally fake, right? It's like not It's not a real number.

It's also crazy, like the level of deception happening. I would say these cycles—

That stuff is crazy.

Float that people publicly say these days is just entirely fake. People say they have like 20% floats or whatever, but secretly, you know, there's actually only like 5% of the float that's tradable. And that sort of stuff just happens naturally and is like widely accepted in the markets.

And so there's some gross games being played for sure, um, with the float, like seeing way larger. Also, like, I feel like some of the stuff that happened with World Liberty Fi, or, and some of the stuff that came out around these liquid funds, you know, getting kickbacks to buy stuff on the open market, like, this stuff is really bad.

Um, yeah, Seth said we got to start pricing things with fundamentals, but it seems like having no product is still bullish in 2025.

Yeah, it seems like it. Um, yeah, launching a product is kind of the worst thing you can, you can, you can do in crypto, especially if you've built up a lot of hype and raised a lot of money. But, um, yeah, I do think the teams that win long term are those that didn't do that, honestly. Um, yeah, and then I just want to do a quick note on—

because I said Ripple.

Yeah, I asked you guys, um, about if you'd been using Deep Research. I'm curious if any of you been, been using, I know Ceteris hasn't, but Zon or Jan, have you been using it? Like the new OpenAI release?

No, I haven't been yet.

Okay. I have not either.

I highly recommend it. I think it's like the most insane, like I've been using it like 3 or 4 times a day on holiday, much to my girlfriend's displeasure. But you can basically get your own like tailor-made reports on anything you want that are like the level. That a pretty good analyst would do, um, in like— that would take maybe 2 weeks for them to do. Like, I'll give you some examples just to— like, I was looking at a humanoid robotics play that, that Kang's been, been bringing and wanted to see what the TAM is for humanoid robots. And it basically produced like a giant report looking at all the different verticals that humanoid robotics could be used in, adding nuance. Like, in manufacturing, there's a lot of specialized robots, so what are the specific jobs that only humanoids could do, talking about service jobs, like calculating the global time, calculating like how long it will take robots to penetrate these different areas. Yeah, like we were looking at neuromorphic computing play again, produced a whole report on that. I'm in a country in South America that has an interesting local culture. I've researched everything about that. Like there's just so much It's just insane, like the, the what you can do with this. And I think people are just gonna become like super people who use AI well are just gonna be superhumans for a few years before everyone uses it. Like you're just gonna be able to 100x your, your productivity and like the amount of stuff you can, you can intake. Especially as these things become, become more agentic. And yeah, I highly recommend.

Does it take like how long, how long does it take to think to like make one of those reports?

It depends what you ask it. It's anywhere from like 3 to 30 minutes, basically, depending how complex what you're asking about is. It's also interesting, like sometimes you think you've really stumped it and then it does it in like 5 minutes, and other times it's like, seems relatively simple, but it takes like 30 minutes to do it.

Simple questions are hard to answer.

Yeah. And it's really interesting how like, you also, when you go down the rabbit hole, like prompting. Is the skill. And I do think what this does is, is it just like the most, the smartest, most efficient humans really get like 100x'd and then everyone else just kind of doesn't really have a job until, until obviously like this thing gets so smart that even the smartest humans don't, don't have a job either. But I think that's gonna take ages because yeah, for, for, for, for a bunch of reasons. But you're kind of seeing this with like, uh, the prompts that people who are specialists in their areas can, can make. And the type of reports and responses they can get are so much better than just random ones. And you start to really like, there's a big science to like prompt engineering and stuff like that, which I just think it's so interesting.

Yeah. I'm gonna start making it a habit to use it like daily, I think.

Yeah. And there's also another interesting app. It's called, I think it's called originality.ai and you can basically run any text through it and it tells you whether it was generated by an LLM or not. And this is also really interesting to see how much of the shit on Twitter and like even blog posts is basically LLM generated.

Um, is, is there's quite a few of those. There's a, it's funny. Uh, I was talking to Shane who I saw in the background. He was sending me some, uh, libtard argument from, uh, a friend. And I was just like, this sounds like the most LLM thing ever. And it's like 99% chance it was, it came out of this. And I just sent him the screenshot. I was like, send this back to him.

Yeah, it's really funny. Um, yeah, and I think also the gap between people who are— because you're gonna have like hyper-efficient, like AI-generated ads and content that just addict people, and then you're gonna have like hyper-efficient people that leverage AI for their, for their own benefit. And I think the gap between them is just gonna increase so much. Um, it's kind of crazy.

It's also just destroyed engineering, right? Like You can make a full application, like front ends, back ends, design, like everything wired up in minutes now. Whereas that used to take days before when, at least when I was studying in college, which was not too long ago, a few years ago.

Yeah.

So things have just really come far and I didn't think, I think engineers will be one of the first to be replaced and I never thought it would be that order first. Right. I always thought it was like the human robots that would replace the people that are restaurant workers and things like that.

but I think it's gonna be engineers, but it's just way easier to train on engineering problems with, with RL, right? Like they're, they're just much more easy to, to have like definable KPIs around. Yeah, I was just, Google, Google's like, I think they said 30% of their code's being generated by AI at this point, which is pretty wild.

Maybe I should start writing some contracts. Maybe I should launch an Initia, a Minisha.

Yeah.

My new, uh, Handheld buddy.

Basic shit. Just one quick story. Like I had on my condominium that I live in, like they basically sent me an email saying that I can't, uh, like my dog's piss has been creating like holes on the grass and I, I can't walk my dog in the public areas. And I just literally had AI put together like a response. Like I was like, just tell them that I'm gonna keep walking my dog in the public areas and like the, the, this, this isn't a problem. And it just wrote this like really amazing, like long response to them, uh, citing like regulations around this stuff and all, and all this thing. And yeah, it was so funny how much AI slop is probably gonna go into like just these email exchanges and stuff. Like you're just gonna be able to waste people's time by just having an AI like continuously respond to people.

It's all over Twitter, right? Especially with the Yap farming and Kaito. Like half the responses that I see, I'm pretty sure are AI. And then I have asked them if they're AI and obviously they say no, which means they must be AI.

Yeah, I used it for my daughter's preschool application. Just read the whole thing.

Yeah, it's crazy. And it's just insane how like AI— sorry to keep going on, but like AI passed the Turing test, no one cared. And now it's like doing like superhuman, like researcher-level reports and stuff and still like no one cares. The world just keeps going on as normal when it just feels like if you use it, like everything has changed and it's just hard to wrap your mind around how much. Everything's going to change with once this stuff like proliferates, um, especially considering how bullish Sam seems to be on continued like progress even past this, this current level. Um, but yeah, we can end it here. Cheers. Thanks very much, Zon, for coming in. That was awesome. And thanks everyone.

Thanks for having me. Thank you.