Is Crypto Quietly Quitting? | Roundup

Maybe we're making out crypto to be more influential than it actually is in, in the grand scheme of the electoral game theory. I know Brian Armstrong tweeted or said something to the effect that if you're anti-crypto in DC, it's like committing seppuku, like it's a suicide, political suicide.

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Yeah, well, we— if you relocate to Austin, maybe we can go shoot guns in the back door, you know, just open the door and shoot some deer or whatever. Uh, Yeah.

So what's going on? How's, uh, so we took the last 2 weeks off. Um, big, big win for Empire, hit a record number of monthly downloads in August. Correlation, causation.

Does that mean like we just like take the entire year off?

I don't know. Yeah. Um, big shout out to the Delphi guys. They got on the feed in August. That's been awesome. And then the 1000x Podcast, which is also, uh, Avi and Jonah, which is also on the Empire feed, has been booming. So Yeah, just big hats off to, I guess, this mini empire that we're creating on Empire. So, and just big, just big thanks to everyone who were, uh, who's been listening and supporting. We've been doing the show for like 3 and a half years now, coming up on 4 years.

Yeah.

So let's go.

That's good. We're just getting started. I mean, if we can, if we can hit these numbers during what has felt like a very, uh, like dead market, then I think we're doing something right.

I think we're the third biggest show now. So it's— I think it's Bankless, and then I think Unchained is still the second biggest show, and then, and then it's us now. So I do love Laura. I do love Ryan and David. But we are coming for that, for that number one spot.

Absolutely.

Yeah. What's on your shirt? What are you wearing?

I don't know. It's like my t-shirt that I wear.

Nice.

Sleep with, I guess.

Gotta get you pretty late out here.

Just, just, yeah, I'm burning the midnight oil here in, uh, in Seoul.

Yeah, tell us about Korea. So you're at KBW?

Yeah, yeah, I was, uh, I got here yesterday, uh, was at the Aptos Experience event today speaking with, uh, it was like a fireside chat with Neil, the head of ecosystem, talking about DeFi and kind of my perspective Um, I was so jet-lagged that I made it— he was like, you're not supposed to ask questions in this fireside chat, I'm the one asking questions. I'm like, wait, wait a minute, it's easier to ask questions than to answer them. Uh, and I'm speaking tomorrow at, uh, again. So yeah, really good. I, I, um, I really like Asia in general.

Any takeaways from the event, or too early?

Very well put together. Uh, very well attended, quality of speakers high.

So it's, it's, uh, it's FactBlock and Hashed put it together, right?

The Aptos Experience?

No, no, KBW.

KBW, yes. Yeah, I haven't— I didn't go to that one actually. Surprisingly, traffic is very bad in Seoul. I didn't remember it. Last time I was here was for the Winter Olympics in 2018. Um, And God, traffic just horrible. Funny thing is, like, I tweeted about this, like, the streets are like 4 or 5 lanes. You could like roll tanks through these streets. And there's like 2 lanes that are always congested because they want to turn left. And it's just like everywhere you go, it's like 40 minutes. Like every— the recurring theme of the year is Dubai, there's flash floods, huge traffic and congestion. That so has this conference. I'm trying to forget that there's another one. I mean, London was not so bad, but yeah, it's just brutal.

Tough. I had a long catch-up call with Alan, who I think— did I introduce you to Alan? Do you know? Did you end up doing the OpenSocial deal?

No, but I saw your tweet. Maybe you should talk about it.

Yeah. So had a long catch-up. So I'm going, I'm going to Token. I've never been to Singapore. I'm very excited. I've never— it's my first, like, work trip, I'd say, to Asia. I'm very excited for that. I've spent a lot of time and been to Thailand a couple of times and Vietnam and stuff, but I've never spent a long amount of time there for crypto. So I'm just excited to, like, be boots on the ground. And we're thinking a lot at Blockworks about, like, there's kind of this untapped market in Asia, not just obviously Token's done a very good job in KBW, but like more from a media and research and data perspective. And so I'm excited to go there. So anyways, I had a long catch-up call with Alan. Alan runs EVG, Everest Ventures Group. There are— I think the best way to look at EVG, I kind of hate to use this comparison, but like it's a good mental model, is they're kind of like the DCG of Asia. They're just— they're a large holding company. They incubate companies, they own companies, they invest in companies. And they just have a lot of influence over that area of the world in crypto and just had a very long catch-up call with Alan and his CMO and his COO the other day. And one thing I realized is just how little Westerners know about the Asian crypto markets. I think the, the idea is that in Asia it's like number is big. Oh, a lot, a lot of users in Asia. Okay, maybe people in Korea like to trade a lot and maybe there's a lot of users in Indonesia. And like basically the knowledge, unless you really have spent time on the ground there, the knowledge kind of ends there, I've realized. And it's kind of shocking to me just because of how large the industry, how large the impact of Asia is on the industry, the lack of knowledge there. So yeah, at least in the West, right? In the West. In the West. Yeah. And so like, I don't know, he just walked me through all these things. I actually want to have him on the show to do this big, like, almost Asia brain dump because there's, there's a very, some very interesting buckets. Okay. So one was like who the powerful players are. And he kind of described it as there's like 3 buckets of very influential and powerful players. The most powerful are the exchange owners, are the exchanges. The second are kind of the most, the like the apps that have really taken off, like SkyMaven and things like that. And then there's kind of like Animoca, like the holding companies like EVG and Animoca and folks like that. The big difference, one of the big differences from, from how Asia operates versus how I think people in the US operate, US is very bottoms up, right? Like let's say you're making a sale to someone. Let's say you're trying to sell software or trying to sell a partnership or something. You know, you can kind of start with like a junior BD person. That person elevates it to their head of BD who elevates it to the CEO, elevates it to the co-founder. Everyone's happy-go-lucky. Alan was describing a hierarchy that exists in Asia where it's like CEOs talk to CEOs, you know, head of BD talks to head of BD. It is very like not power games, but hierarchical in like class of what you've built and what you've accomplished and like where you sit in, where you sit in the power games and like those people should interact with those people. And if you want to get something done, like, you know, he goes to the CEO of X exchange and X exchange goes to the CEO of, you know, maybe OKX comes to him and he goes to that person. And like, it is very direct business like that, I would say, which is actually for folks who have built companies in the US, it's very different from how it works. And there have been a lot of US companies who have tried to go to Asia, specifically a lot of CeFi brands that I think really failed. And really flopped. And Alan described that hierarchical difference as one of the main reasons why a lot of them flopped, just because they just send a lot of, you know, BD people who maybe speak Mandarin or something.

You gotta, you gotta pay, you gotta pay respects. Um, sort of very much ingrained in the culture. Doing business in Asia requires a very subtle and deep nuanced appreciation for culture and cultural differences between the countries. Like Korea has its own unique forms, then Japan, and certainly China, like, and, you know, like, okay, like Confucianism, like, is a big backbone culturally of these countries, but there's flavors to that. And, um, yeah, it's just very, uh, you gotta know, uh, and it's, it's very apparent when you don't, and, uh You know, like, you remember the scene in like The Last Samurai where like there's a certain tradition and ways to do things? Like, they'll also never reject you outwardly, and so they're just polite, but they're actually telling you like, fuck off.

Yeah.

And so, uh, uh, uh, you know, like even tipping, like it's, it's actually, uh, considered very rude to suggest that, uh, you should— you're going to tip because it implies that the service was not up to excellent standards. Uh, this is actually very refreshing, but also you don't tip? No, absolutely not. You don't even—

see, I didn't know.

See, you don't even—

you don't even—

yeah, suggesting tipping implies, uh, subpar experience, which is an insult in many ways to, to it. So, you know, you can imagine someone coming from, you know, New York where, yeah, even a robo coffee maker suggests a 20 tip. Um, so yeah, it's, uh, it's very— my first time in— I don't want to say Asia, but in Japan was like very magical. Like, I'm obsessed with Japanese culture. One of my favorite books is, uh, Shogun by James Clavell and his whole Taipan, and he has a whole series of books. I landed, the taxi driver's wearing like gloves, just the precision of like— he would take off his gloves when we hit a red light. As soon as he would— he would know exactly when it would turn green because he would put his gloves back on. I kid you not, every time he finished putting the second glove on, immediately the light turned green. I'm like, I'm living in a fucking—

you're like, sir, just, just keep driving this car around. Just keep driving it around.

I, I could have— I could have— I was in this trance-like state observing his hands in this process. I'm like, there's just excellence here. You sit down for a makase you're seeing the assembly line, and people should go watch the documentary of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Like, the Japanese cuisine is like not one of adding stuff. It's like simplicity in the ingredients and like perfection, and that is what drives a lot of the flavor. It's just crazy. Like, the chef, like, you like 17 years of just like being able to like—

I love that. I love that.

Make the rice. Touch the rice.

Touch the rice.

Yeah. Um, and like, you're not— you eat with your hand, like the omakase, like the nigiri, you eat with a hand. You're not supposed to add soy sauce. The chef will add the appropriate amount. It's just, it's just very, very interesting.

Yeah.

Uh, but, but to bring it back to crypto, Korea, Korea is an interesting market. It's always been— it's one of the most crypto— the countries with the highest crypto adoption. I think over like 10% of the population has used crypto. Uh, it peaked a few years ago. Um, it, uh, at certain moments in time, the volume in Korea has eclipsed and been larger than the US markets. Um, it's very, it's very impressive.

Yeah.

Um, it's— there's been a setback because of Terra, uh, right? But, um, but yeah, it's very, it's very, it's very cool place. Japan is Similarly, very much, very much Bitcoin-centric, but also very much like, you know, people really get crypto here.

Yeah. The downside of the hierarchical thing that I was saying earlier is that, you know, in a place like Korea, it's very dominated by— in the US, it's like startups versus the incumbents, and everyone's like, yeah, go startups. Although unless you're maybe the, you know, current administration or whatever, who seem to be very anti-founder for one reason or another. But You know, there it's like in somewhere like Korea, it's like you really need the stamp of approval of a Samsung or a Hyundai or, you know, SK or Kia or LG or POSCO or something like that. Right. Like it is in the way that like the— I don't know, from speaking with the guys at Hashed and speaking with, I don't know, some of the, some of the builders in Korea, it is very it's less about wanting the enterprise connection because of like users. Like, I don't know, I think people here, you know, maybe an L1 wants to partner with Nike because they have all the users there. It's like they just need the almost societal stamp of approval because it is a very top-down, uh, yeah, way of building. Now I do recognize that we're two white guys talking about what it's like to build companies in Asia, so I will— I am going to invite Alan on.

I mean, Yeah, well, you know, at least our perspective, uh, yeah, yeah. But, uh, I've made a number of investments in, in, you know, not so much in Japan, but definitely Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, um, Malaysia, um, Singapore. Uh, one observation, just, uh, one of the things I get so excited and inspired being here is like, I remember in the early 2000s, like when I started my professional career at investment banking, you're covering all the internet giants, what were still growing in the US fairly rapidly. And you started to see the rise of Chinese internet companies, and the commentary from people in the West was they're only copying what is, what is working. China historically has been copycat manufacturing, therefore it's copying in tech. And in some respects it was true for like the likes of Alibaba. Um, you know, copying Amazon. But then you had this phenomenon called WeChat, which was actually something quite novel and new, where it just became— started with messaging, so you could have confused it with WhatsApp, and then it just became the everything app. It was Netflix and Uber and Instacart and, um, you know, Amazon, and everything was bundled into this everything app. And so just today I was, I was just reminded of that. And my theory is, or the way I link it, is like DeFi in many ways attempts to do what WeChat has done in a market like China, or Kakao has done in, in Korea. But like, the point I'm trying to make is it's very integrated. Like, payments is natively integrated in whatever it is that you're doing, so you never leave the app. Um, so it's, it's like the seamless integration of finance within the app, in-app, compared to in the West where you're think— you're thinking of finance as a standalone product, meaning you're doing something over here, an app, you want to do a payment, like for the most time you go to another app, you log into your bank account, you input your credit card data, but you, you have to like think of leaving. And so finance is like the standalone product with apps or Revolut or Venmo or PayPal. Maybe Apple Pay approximates that, but it's nowhere near the integrated, um, how it's so integratively integrated in Kakao or WeChat. Um, and so like, I think when you come to Asia, you truly appreciate how powerful it is to have that native integration because it just totally removes the friction. People People don't even think about— finance should be invisible, but it's not in the West. And so I think— I don't know if that explains why crypto is, is just more native and easier to understand for someone in Asia, and maybe that explains part of the adoption. Um, but I can certainly— I think if you were to survey like 100 people in Korea, for instance, and you were to like tell them, hey, get on board into crypto, how easy is it for you? They would probably say I'm interested in this, this doesn't feel as foreign, and it's actually fairly easy to get onboarded. Whereas if you do the same survey in the US, for instance, it'd be like, God, this is, this is really difficult. Why do I need this? I don't really understand it. I have Venmo, PayPal, Revolut. Um, but it's one of those things where you have to feel it, you have to experience it, you have to send your first stablecoin transfer and like do that to, to really have that aha moment. So that, that is just a bit of more of a, of a barrier for adoption, I think, in, in a place like the US or in Western Europe.

Yeah. You ever looked at the top 20 internet companies and where they're located?

Asia.

So yeah, here, I'll pull this up. So 7 of the top 15 are now in China. So for anyone who's listening on Spotify or Apple or something, can't see the— I'm sharing my screen on YouTube, but Amazon and Amazon and Google. So Alphabet, Amazon and Alphabet are the top two. Then it's JD.com, which is in Beijing.

China-based.

Yeah, in Beijing. Then Meta in San Francisco, obviously. Then it's Alibaba and Tencent, then ByteDance. So 5, 6, and 7 are in—

then Meituan, Hangzhou.

Shenzhen and Beijing. Then it's Netflix. This is by revenue, by the way, not market cap. Then it's Netflix. Then it's Meituan.

Meituan.

Meituan. Which, what, big e-commerce company too, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

E-commerce company.

Then PayPal. Then, then Wildberries in Moscow, which I know nothing about. Then Salesforce, then Suning. Nanjing, then Baidu, or then Ozon in Moscow as well, then Baidu. And Baidu is like the Google, right? Yeah. So very interesting. So anyways, so to wrap up the Asia conversation and my chat with Alan, I posted this thing on Twitter, which is the DAUs of the top 3 social protocols. So OpenSocial. So basically, Forecaster and Lens really dominate the narrative. and I was looking at some like OpenSocial type investment stuff and I was like, I wonder what the— not like not OpenSocial in the name of the company. I was looking at some like decentralized social investment stuff and I was like, I wonder what that market looks like. And I'm a small investor in this company called OpenSocial, so I get some updates from them. And what it— what I realized is the narrative is all about Lens and Far Capital, at least on my crypto Twitter feed.

I'm here. Totally.

Yeah, it's like all Lens and Farcaster. Um, and it feels like kind of like Lens maybe has more of the creators and it's more like soft marketing and fun and playful and some awesome creators are on there and Farcaster is more like the intellectuals and like the Ethereum crowd and like crypto natives and stuff. And it's, uh, there's another one someone posted about on, about some, someone in Solana. I'm forgetting the name. DSCVR. Which I'd never heard of, but it sounds like a Farcaster for Solana. But it turns out, so Lens has 25,000 daily active users. And again, these are, these are Dune metrics. It's very tough to actually figure out like real DAUs and like how many people are actually— but it's a standard, like standardizing some of the data because a lot of it's from the same person. It's like Lens is 25,000 DAUs, Farcaster 65,000 DAUs. And this company OpenSocial run by Allen and Everest Ventures Group is 110,000 DAUs. And the most interesting thing here, I think, is twofold. One is the dispersion between narrative and users, right? So Farcaster and Lens dominate the conversation, but OpenSocial has 2 times the users of Farcaster and almost 5 times the users of Lens. But I like— nobody talks about OpenSocial. Nobody really knows OpenSocial. And the only reason I know them is because I'm a tiny, tiny, tiny investor. And I've noticed that US crypto media and crypto, like Blockworks included, and crypto Twitter really rarely covers the founders and companies and communities in Asia, whether that's Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia. I just, I actually think there's a big media opportunity to help kind of bridge the narrative awareness media gap between East and West. So that's one thing I'm thinking about a lot. The other thing is I just think it's like, it's crazy what can happen when the right— when like there are either less regulations or very clear regulations. And I think you're seeing— I mean, there's obviously a lot of people in Asia, but I don't actually attribute a lot of this to like the number of people in these places. I attribute it to just like the builders can build there. And in the US, they're really hamstrung right now. So I don't know, I just found this data very interesting.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, uh, I mean, certainly, like, I actually got a lot of coverage in the West, uh, this play-to-earn movement. And, um, I think in terms of adoption, like, yeah, I mean, actually most of the users came from, uh, you know, the Philippines, um, you know, Malaysia, Indonesia. It's just, yeah, the probably combination of younger demographic plus more digitally savvy And, you know, for, for something like Guilds, obviously, like, the income opportunity is just more, more like there, there for these folks.

Yeah. So, all right.

Yeah.

What else happened this week? Um, well, we missed the last couple of weeks, so, uh, I hope people enjoyed the, the, the extra guests. But there were, there were a couple, a couple SEC things, right? SEC issued a Wells notice against— I'm doing this off memory, so I should probably Google this. OpenSea. OpenSea. But I'm trying to remember what it was for. I think it was for— you know what? This is, this is dumb.

Unregistered securities again.

Yeah. OpenSea. All right, let me read the— so this is— I like Devin Finzer's post. Devin Finzer is the CEO of OpenSea, and it's very clear he's going on the offensive here. So OpenSea has received a Wells notice from the SEC. Threatening to sue us because they believe NFTs on our platform are securities. Longer post that we can link to if people are curious, or you can just search his name on Twitter. But so that happened. So the SEC is threatening to sue OpenSea because they believe NFTs on the platform are securities. And then the CFTC—

Pokémon holders beware. Pokémon holder cards, baseball card holders beware.

But yeah, the, the CFTC issued an order against Uniswap Uniswap Labs for illegal digital asset derivatives trading, which is essential. And I think they, I think they settled. I think it was $175,000 settlement over basically— I think it was overleveraged tokens being accessed on the front end.

Yeah. So yeah, there was, there was also a settlement of something north of $200,000. I think it was $225,000. The Galois Capital It's a fund based in— former fund based in Florida that, uh, and also prominent, like, just Twitter account, um, but got entangled in the whole FTX stuff. They had assets in FTX, and the, the complaint of the SEC was they brought charges in them because they were using an unregistered custodian, and they, they were they were— they failed to adhere to their redemption policy. It was, uh, a very— Galloway then put out a statement saying, and like other hedge fund managers then came out in, in their defense, was, you know, some of these assets are not supported by registered custodians, so the best solution to use is something like Fireblocks. And, you know, that's just the nature of the industry. Um, and their redemption policy was like 5 days, and then they just still were like— they allowed people to redeem and waive that 5 days, and they thought it was like a good thing. And yeah, ICC went after them for that. I think it had more to do— not knowing anything from the inside— it was more to do with the— probably the fact that they, they were using non-registered custodians. I think it probably had to do with the fact that they had so many assets on FTX and that, that penalty is going to pay their investors actually.

Hmm. So maybe quick thoughts on both of these cases. One is OpenSea. The old take is— I think the old SEC take was that if you can prove— their belief was if you can prove something is an unregistered security on your platform, then it makes it more likely that your entire platform is an unlicensed exchange. And I think that is starting to be— I think that is starting to be disproven in the courts in cases like Coinbase and Ripple and things like that. Right. So what the Ripple case— again, should probably have a lawyer on here, but I think what the Ripple case showed us is that the token is not a security, the investment contract is a security. So token's a security, investment contract— and then I think there was a Coinbase case or another case where the conclusion was something along the lines of, hey, it's not just— it's not that having unregistered securities on your platform makes you an unlicensed exchange or even an exchange. You can just delist that asset and you'll be fine. So the new take, I think, is like you just from the, from like a policy or legal perspective inside one of these either DEXs or CEXs is just delist the asset. And so now what I think the SEC is trying to do—

but which asset with if you don't have guidance?

So it's a really— I think again, I haven't dug into this too much, but just things like, you know, Blockworks' coverage and stuff like that and posts on Twitter. I think what the SEC is trying to do with OpenSea is— and again, none of this is fully public yet, right? I think it was just a Wells— I think it was just a Wells notice. So which basically means they will be coming after them at some point soon and, hey, giving them a heads up. Basically, they— it's kind of a sneaky way to go after an unregistered security because if you wanted to really go after an unregistered security, you should go after that company itself, the issuer. The issuer. So, but in— by going after OpenSea, the issuer can actually defend themselves. So like making— or I won't say any names, but like going after NFT XYZ, saying they're an unregistered security. Well, now OpenSea kind of either has to defend them for them. Yeah. Or just say, okay, fine, they're an unregistered security, we'll delist them. It's actually— it's kind of a smart move by the SEC to do this. The other thing about going after OpenSea is it's the same thing that pissed me off when they went after Uniswap in, in, in I think April, issuing them a Wells notice is Uniswap is in New York. Hayden has just been posted up in Brooklyn for several, several years. Devin Wright is in either California or New York. Like these are founders and teams and companies who decided to not leave to Dubai. And not leave to Singapore. And I know so many founders who have done that. They've said it's just too risky in the US, I'm just going to leave to Dubai. And they've built subpar products and honestly kind of shadier things. And Uniswap and OpenSea did it the right way. And they've got massive legal teams, they spend a shit ton of money on, on outside counsel. And they're the ones getting sued because they decided to stay in San Francisco, New York. And that just— they didn't even go to Texas, right? Like, it's, it's, it's— if you're going to stay in the US, it's much more favorable for you from a legal perspective to go to somewhere like Texas and get sued in the courts in Texas. They decided, like, if you get sued in California and you're fighting in Northern California, you're fighting the SEC in Northern California, like, that's an uphill battle. Like, Northern California is much friendlier to the SEC. And so I don't know, just— it just— that, like, there's so many bad actors. I was walking around Brooklyn the other day and there's Unicoin. Which is a scam company, they've been advertising on taxis for 2 years, like their entire taxis that at the top in the electronic bar and the whole taxi is now wrapped with it says Unicoin, the world's best cryptocurrency. It's a scam company and nobody's taking action against that. And they're going after Hayden and Devin. So yeah, it's just like, yeah, from a founder, it just really pisses me off because it's, um, You got to imagine, like, the Dems are saying they're, you know, they're pro-crypto and Kamala's pro-crypto and coming up. But like, if I'm— I don't, I don't know the communication between like CFTC and SEC and the administration and the campaign, right? Those kind of four actors. But if I'm Kamala, I'm like, you idiots, like, you idiots, we are trying to get these people to vote for us and you just keep going after them like now that ship might have sailed, honestly.

But yeah, two counter-observations. That one, I think these cases take a long, long time in the pipeline to develop, build a case. So it might have been possible that they've been building a case against these, um, two companies, and then they decided to, you know, this—

yeah, but someone is more powerful than Gary Gensler, and someone should be saying, shut it down, buddy, shut it down.

No, this was my second point, which is maybe we're making out crypto to be more influential than it actually is in, in the grand scheme of the electoral game theory. I know Brian Armstrong tweeted or said something to the effect that if you're anti-crypto in DC, it's like committing seppuku, like it's a suicide, political suicide. I mean, if that were truly true, you, you would, you you would, you know, be acting like you said. But yeah, I know it's, it's, it's a world of polar opposites.

The counter—

like Trump, Trump apparently, you know, obviously has, has only intensified his fervor and support for crypto, whereas Kamala has just been silent. And the current administration, which she serves obviously as a vice president, has, you know, continues, continues to be under the same— like it hasn't shifted its stance. So I don't know.

Yeah. The counter to the Brian Armstrong thing is the Fair Shake PAC, which is a pro-crypto PAC, became the largest super PAC of the entire election cycle. Right.

True. Yeah. And Trump, I think, is now receiving more money in crypto than in fiat. Or had for like a week or so.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it's Trump.

So Blockworks did this, looked at the on-chain data and some of his royalties info is public because of the lawsuits. So there's a great Blockworks piece. He's— Trump is now making more money from Ethereum and from, from NFTs than he is from all of his royalties from the show The Apprentice. Wow. Yeah, that's good headline. Good headline.

Yeah, that's it. That's a good headline.

Good headline.

Um, the last, the last thing on, on this conversation around what happened was, uh, obviously Pavel, uh, Durov, uh, the founder of Telegram, got arrested when he flew into Paris. Unclear why he flew into Paris because there was an arrest warrant and he had interview with him saying he avoided going to the US and Europe and was mostly traveling, you know, and, um, in other places. Unclear why he went to Paris. He was detained. Um, what was interesting was, so he was a citizen of Russia, then he acquired nationality in France and then Dubai. The Dubai— the United— sorry, the United Arab Emirates. So UAE actually issued a statement um, where they canceled a purchase order of fighter jets from France and were pressuring the French government to get more clarity on the arrest, kind of like really protecting a citizen of their own. To me, that was like pretty awesome to see, candidly, um, you know. And it just speaks to how government should protect their people. And yeah, it was really like— I'd be lying if I didn't— like, now, of the places you go as a, you know, someone that is in crypto, like, Dubai is probably top of the list. Candidly, I know, I know there's other factors why you wouldn't want to perhaps live there year-round, but primarily the weather. But from a government stance, like, I think it's— they're leading the charge. I mean, it's been incredibly impressive and even more so solidified, reinforced by their recent support of Pavel and, you know, really putting pressure on the French government.

Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. I wanted to talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently, and that is where are all of crypto's killer apps? We often ask this question on the show, so I'm excited to tell you about Empire's latest partner, Anoma, the universal intent machine Intents are a new way to build dApps, enabling users to say what they want without needing to specify how it's done. Let's say you have an NFT on one chain, but you want to swap it for a token on another chain. To make things even worse, you also don't know which bridge to trust or how to navigate different DEXs on each chain. Disaster, right? But here's the good news. Thanks to Intents, you can just tell the app what you want to do, and Anoma's solver network takes care of all the complexity in the background. We're excited to see what cool dApps Anoma's architecture will unlock. To stay up to date with Anoma, you can follow them at x.com/anoma or sign up for the newsletter at anoma.net. 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Polygon Labs is developing the next generation of open-source zero-knowledge tech to aggregate crypto liquidity and user bases, empowering developers to grow in a unified web of interoperable chains with the AggLayer. That was a big mouthful, so I'm going to tell you what it means in my, in my words. There's all these things popping up, L2s and L3s, and it's chaos, right? If you are building something, you no longer have to worry about bootstrapping liquidity. You can basically just build in the AggLayer to tap into the liquidity of the AggLayer and the users of the AggLayer. You get the users, you get the liquidity. It's the AggLayer, it's hot, it's by Polygon Labs. They've got the, uh, Polygon Community Grants program. It was launched with 1 billion tokens just for Polygon builders. Season 1, it's live right now. It features $35 million in MATIC to support the next generation of Polygon builders. Join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.technology/grants. That's polygon.technology/grants. If you talk to anyone, let them know Blockworks sent you. Hey everyone, I wanted to take a second to talk about Real, a permissionless L2 for tokenized real-world assets on Arbitrum Orbit. What's really cool about Real is that it uses the off-chain yields from RWAs as a sustainable solution for native liquidity incentives. Real is also the first L2 where 100% of profits from transaction fees and fees from protocols accrue back to the L2's governance token, RWA. Real has just launched their rewards program where 10% of the RWA supply is being given away to early users of the chain. Users can provide concentrated liquidity, trade, borrow, and leverage tokenized real-world assets including T-bills, real estate, and tokenized basis trades. Just as a quick disclaimer, this is not investment advice or product solicitation and not aimed at U.S. persons. Find out more at re.al/rewards. Special thanks to Real for sponsoring today's episode. I always struggle to explain like why I'm excited about crypto and what I like, why I think crypto is good for the world. And one of the ways— there are many ways to describe it. There's like the Bitcoin argument. It's like almost like a hedge against chaos. Like, you never know. There's the, like, maybe Chris Dixon way of explaining it, which is like, look, the incumbents just have too much power. And like, we need to— this is the best way. Like, regulation is not the best way to eat away at their power. It's like empowering startups and crypto are the best rails to do that. There's another way to describe it, which is just that censorship-resistant applications and ways to transfer value and ways to transfer information don't matter at all until they really matter. And I think people in the US really can't comprehend that. And I— it's very tough for me to grapple with what that even means because I grew up in the US. I lived in the US my whole life. But there's this, this Wences Casares, like, podcast with Laura Shin from maybe 2016 or 2017. That was one of the first podcasts I listened to, and it really just stuck with me. And he just explains how, like, I think in the US, the US is the hardest place in the world to explain crypto to someone because the government works and our money works and the companies don't. They have too much power, but they don't abuse the power. And monopolies oftentimes end up helping consumers with lower prices. So it's like the monopolies and the companies work, the government works, and the money works. So it's very hard to explain this Telegram case with Pavel. Just reminded me that, like, you need alternative in a world of overreaching, not just governments, companies, governments, whoever it may be. You really need a way to opt out of that and have censorship-resistant platforms. And again, there's actually a Wired piece, like there's a Wired piece called The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat. And it focuses on how the— so there's a lot of like, I'd say, sympathy posts for, for Pavel, which is great. And I don't think the French government should be doing what they did. Obviously, there's another side of the argument, which is this Wired article called The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat, which focuses on how the Russian government has basically increased its surveillance of private communications on Telegram. And it kind of highlights this case of Marina Patsapouline, I think is their name, which is a Russian opposition activist whose private group chats on Telegram were accessed by Russian authorities. And there's a lot of other kind of examples in this story. And so the thing that is frustrating— so one is it's a reminder that it's important to build censorship-resistant platforms. The other thing is it pains me that I don't know who's telling the truth. I don't know if the Russian government has infiltrated Telegram. I don't— I just— I don't have a way of seeing that. You either have to listen to the— what, like this Wired article, or you have to listen to the CEO of the company. Like, there's no way to verify it. And I just wish there was a way to openly and publicly verify what the privacy settings of Telegram actually are. And I'm hopeful that building things on crypto rails can help with this. Maybe it's— I'm not smart enough to understand if it's ZK or crypto rails or open ledgers or whatever it is, but I'm very optimistic that like we'll live in a society one day that where I could quickly verify what, what that is.

Yeah. And encryption is like Telegram's not encrypted as far as I know, unless you make the chat secret.

Yeah. What I do know is that my friends who care about privacy the most refuse to use Telegram.

And yeah, but then they were using Signal and then they stopped using Signal. So what do you do?

A lot of them are still like anything with the US government. The US government is also— I'm at all these chats with, with folks trying to get them to speak at Permissionless. It's all on Signal. Interestingly enough, it's all, all US government stuff. It's all on Signal.

Yeah, you know, you're meaning like people that work in the government.

Wow, that's crazy. John— sorry, John Deaton just since the Republican nomination. That's crazy. Um, big, uh, Elizabeth Warren, uh, uh, taking, taking on Elizabeth Warren for her Senate seat. Sorry.

Um, You mean the government uses Signal?

The government uses Signal, not public— not publicly, but like any, anytime you're trying to chat with someone who works in the administration or on like even on the campaigns, it's all on Signal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they won't use Telegram, by the way.

I think that's for ideological reasons more so than anything.

Yeah, that's—

I, I, that's your conjecture here, but they, they probably have a backdoor in a Signal. They can control that, whereas they don't necessarily— the Telegram, they, they may not have guarantees. But the, the working theory is, you know, you get pressured into— like, like Zuckerberg, actually also relevant, Zuckerberg, um, issued out a, a communication saying that, uh, he was— Meta was pressured into censoring, um, censoring posts on during the COVID during the onset of COVID uh, pressure by the administration. And he said it's, uh, one of his deepest regrets. He wouldn't, he wouldn't do it again. So just, um, just goes to show that, I mean, I guess if you're the— probably the likely reason why Pavel got arrested was that he refused to censor particularly stuff around child trafficking, pornography, you know, bad stuff like, uh, terror, you know, terrorist activity. And, and so whereas had he complied, you know, they were asking him to comply, and I think he refused to comply. Yeah, around ideological reasons of like censorship resistance. Um, and, and then you have the opposite, right, which is someone like Meta, which, which complied. Um, so I mean, I, I think, uh, we're living in interesting times, like very Orwellian, like panopticon kind of thing, where there's, there's probably no semblance of privacy, not if you're using Signal, not if you're using any type of communication. So, you know, it's just sort of like the state of the world. Um, the, the one thing that I think you brought up was most important is like You know, Twitter's become the, you know, world forum, the, the town hall of the world in many ways. And most of— I mean, I don't even check news sites at this point, haven't for ages. Like, Twitter is just the place where stuff gets, uh, you know, reported first. There's also a lot of commentary. The, the community edit notes are really valuable. Yeah, I mean, I think, uh, what would have happened if we were living in a world where Elon was not at the helm of Twitter or X? You know, it's a, it's a—

I mean, it came out that the, that Twitter and the US government were— yeah, yeah, so yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, I think, uh, there's always this There's always this really delicate, controversial discussion when you talk about censorship resistance and permissionless systems, right? You develop a protocol and it gets used in ways that no one really intended for it to be used for, you know, for evil. And, you know, technology in and of itself is neutral, but the implementation of it might not. And How do you grapple with that? How do you sensibly kind of, you know, contain it, if you will? You really can't do that in a permissionless system, right? So what's a happy medium? Where do you draw a line? Who's the arbiter of— who's the judge of that? What's fair? What should and shouldn't be censored? I mean, it's very— it's not, it's not very— it could be heavily contested. But, you know, I think we can all agree that, you know, human trafficking, terrorism, anything that causes harm is, is bad and should be censored.

Yeah.

Um, you know, but maybe there's some far extreme ideological people that say that they're doing that as a, you know, response to authoritarianism and yada yada and all this crap, but I don't know, it's, you know, there's a reminder, like all these Nobel Peace Prizes. It was Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite, and he wanted to absolve himself from that pain that he had by creating this, you know, well, could be used for industrial purposes, ended up being used in war. And, you know, so, you know, he created the Nobel Foundation. But yeah, it's a— the myth of Prometheus, so to speak. He brings fire to the world and it's not always used for cooking.

There's one other, there's one other case that I feel like hasn't been talked about enough, which is this Binance executive case in Nigeria. Oh, I just want to call out Tigran. Yeah. Gumbarian. It's a real, it's a really fucked up thing that's happening. And just people I don't think are talking about it that much. So, so basically he's an American. He was the head of, I think, financial compliance at Binance. He has been detained in Nigeria for over 6 months, basically on claims of essentially money laundering. So Nigerian officials have accused, have accused Tigran and Binance of money laundering, and they're actually being charged separately. He is— there's a video that— the reason I bring this up now is there's a video that just came out on, on, on Twitter that basically got leaked of him going into his trial. He is currently suffering from both pneumonia and a herniated disc, and he can barely walk. And he's been— and I mean, you can visibly see him walking on this crutch and he tries to grab the arm of someone to help him walk. And they won't— they won't let him walk.

They won't—

they won't help him out and they won't put him in a wheelchair. And he says— he says, this— this is fucked up. He was told not to help me, pointing at a guard. He says, why can't I use my goddamn wheelchair? This is a show. I'm effing innocent. And it's very clear that just looking at him now versus looking at him a couple of months ago, like his health condition is rapidly deteriorating. And you would have seen something like this and said, this is, this is really messed up. I don't really know the story. This is really messed up. and it would've been a bummer, but I just want to shed light on it. I just read this book, Red Notice.

Um, oh, Bill Browder.

Bill, about Bill Browder and Hermitage Capital. And, um, really one of the, uh, really the first like big hedge fund in Russia from an outsider. And, um, and it is a story of building a hedge fund for the first half of the book and a story of like extreme human rights, um, violations.

And they killed his— they killed his lawyer, uh, his bodyguard, uh, they detained him. He's— he then had— then he then became too, too important that Putin ended up protecting him, uh, you know, uh, because it was like, yeah, I met him.

You met him?

Yeah, I was at an event with him when he was being honored.

Yeah, it's an insane book. I would— I just finished two books actually in the last— I've been reading a lot recently. Two books. One is this one, The Fish That Ate the Whale, about the Banana King, which is really good. And then Red Notice. And I really recommend both of them. But Red Notice, I mean, it's literally what they are doing to this guy is what they did in Red Notice, which is they have a suit against Binance and Binance, you know, Richard, Tang came out and was like, Nigeria is not a big market for us. The government said that we made 20— the government of Nigeria said they made $26 billion in revenue from Nigeria in 2023. Obviously, that's not the case. They did 20, almost $23 billion in total transaction volume, not in revenue. So they're mistaking revenue and total transaction volume. And what the Nigerian government is doing is literally what Russia did in this book, Red Notice, which is holding an important person who could have been tied to something hostage, letting his health really deteriorate and hoping— and basically every day probably putting statements in front of him saying that Binance is guilty. And eventually his health will get so bad that it's like, do you want to live more? Do you want to live or do you want to say that Binance is guilty? And one day a lot of people crack. They sign the thing that says Binance is guilty because they need to go to the hospital, they need to get a surgery. And it's Yeah, it's extortion and it's horrible human rights violation. And yeah, I just, I don't know, I just haven't really seen people talking about it, so I just wanted to—

No, that's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah.

So I don't know if there's any policymakers who listen to this or any U.S.

government people, but some people were suggesting something about it for folks to tag his representative. And I don't know what district he's voting district he's on, but to tag his representative and probably get more attention that way. As that being an effective strategy in the past.

Interesting. Yeah, that's a good call. I did see Rep— who I think Rep Hill, Representative Hill called it outrageous. So it's starting to get some eyes. So anyways, tough to— I don't know, you have any like high notes, any good things happening? I feel like we've been like on a downward trend this podcast. Yeah, I know. Bad mood going into this one. Weekend?

No, not at all. I mean, I, I think I have a question for you.

Did you see Travis Kling's post yesterday?

I did, yeah. I mean, you want to talk about positive? Yeah, well, let's talk about that, because, well, this, this is— continue on this magical trend of positive.

Okay, I was gonna say, this is pretty negative, but, uh, no, I mean, it's—

it warrants talking about. I think it's There's some good points there.

Yeah. So Travis runs Ikigai and they got hit hard by some FTX stuff. They had a lot of funds on FTX and they've recovered all or most of that money. And he's just a— he's a personal friend and really like the guy. But he tweeted just essentially a long thread, essentially about like quiet quitting in crypto.

Um, he said NFTs are dead, the metaverse is dead, DeFi is not going anywhere. Uh, so what are we doing here kind of thing.

Yeah, he said, what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing and hearing— my Twitter's glitching out— what I'm seeing and hearing is that a meaningful swath of the crypto community is simply much less engaged than in prior years, and they are much less engaged because there's much less belief in the potential of crypto projects to solve real-world problems and gain significant adoption as a result. That was a dream that was consistently sold and bought from 2017, the year I got in, until 2022. Crypto will solve real-world problems and gain significant adoption as a result. Many billions of dollars of venture capital funding were raised on this premise, and there were steps along— anyways, we can link to the thread, very long thread that essentially— that there are a couple of takeaways from it that he drives to in the conclusion. But one of them is just that there's a lot of quiet quitting happening in crypto and people who got in in 2017, the 2015 or 2017 class who are just like, look, I mean, I still probably got a lot of my net worth in crypto, but like, I'm cooked. I'm either burnt out or I don't believe in this anymore.

Does it surprise you?

No, no. I would assume this happens in most industries. I don't know.

In every cycle. It's sort of like a hallmark of a trough. Now the, the question is, is this time— again, is this time any different? And is this, is this sign of something that is more enduring? Like, is it— where are we going? Um, is— and I think the beauty and the curse of crypto is that you have real-time price discovery. I'm very emerging assets that in traditional markets wouldn't have price discovery. They would be private. But you're attempting to have price discovery on very liquid emerging piece of technology and assets, and that presents both an opportunity and a challenge, even though you, you can drive it through mechanisms like an AMM and novel mechanisms. But it's still— even Bitcoin is still going through this Is it digital gold? Can it be digital gold? Can it be uncorrelated? Can, you know, is it truly going to work out as a hedge against everything else like blowing up? But, you know, let's go through a series of questions. Do you think that the idea of NFTs, of digital ownership, of creating digital art or digital scarce assets going away No, I mean, I've— if you go and talk to artists that have made their livelihood and being able to monetize, not just the big guys but just small artists that can no longer need to rely on Sotheby's, Christie's, or art galleries in SoHo or somewhere to be discovered Do you think that— do you think that that's going away?

Yeah, I don't think— I mean, I don't think— I don't think any of this goes away. I don't think you can put this back.

Let me put it easier. Do you think that Larry Fink is going to stop talking about crypto because of the soft quitting that Travis is talking about? There's two kinds of investors, one that gets really excited when they're soft quitting and another one that freaks out and says, maybe we're dead. And every cell in your body is telling you as price goes down or does nothing. I wonder, I think price not doing anything is probably worse than price going down because it gets to the impatience of many investors.

Yeah.

Um, but I read that and I think it's another affirmation of like where we're on the cycle, the opportunity of, you know, being disciplined, being patient.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Uh, many.

Like, I've seen this movie many, many times.

Yeah.

You know, people— how many times have people called the death of Bitcoin?

My current thinking around this cycle is that it just got very warped by actually the ETFs. So you should have seen a line up that looked like this, looked like this. But instead you saw an extreme, like, rise up at the beginning of this, like, you know, and when was that, December or January? And then but it basically pulled all of that growth like you should see like a slope of 1.

But, you know, like crypto never, never is linear.

No, no. Yes, growth is never linear.

It's been a linear phenomenon in crypto. Like it's just we— the famous Bill Gates quote, which is we overestimate what can happen in 10 years, underestimate— we overestimate what What is it? We overestimate what happens in 2 and can happen— underestimate what can happen in 10. And like, people fast forward and like, they— crypto cures cancer one day and then it's, uh, rat poison the next.

I'm just trying to put a reason on why I think the vibes feel very down when—

because the market is ripping, or it was ripping. Like, that's, that's something fundamentally, if if we're all in this together and equities are going down and rates are low and crypto's going down, it's like, yeah, you know, it's just, it's just you just got to hunker down. You know, we're value deep, long-term investors. But when that's not happening, then it's like, oh, shit, I made it.

But the market's not ripping.

It was. It was most recently, like the last week or two. NVIDIA is down a bit. The Magnificent Seven is down a bit, but this year to date, it's been a stellar performance nonetheless.

Oh, yeah.

And as we covered in the other podcast, the cycle has been one which has been different. It's been one of very selective outperformance the same way that traditional markets have. If you weren't invested in the Magnificent Seven, yeah, you really missed it. Uh, if you're in the Russell, yeah, you missed it. If you were in, um, MSCI World Index, you missed it. If you're invested in Europe, yeah, good luck. Like, you know, you really underperformed. Similarly here, if you weren't in Solana or Bitcoin or meme coins, everything else kind of like has been in a, in a, in this, in a bear market kind of down-only trend line. So what I'm trying to say is it just hurts more when, when an easy simple narrative like AI pumped Nvidia has done so well and you end up looking like an idiot. Um, you'll get yourself in the mirror and you're like, what am I doing here? Like, I should have just punted AI and gotten— enjoyed my summer. And here I've been glued to the screen, poking my portfolio, refreshing and not seeing anything. It's like the impatience, right, gets at you. Not worried about it. We probably in the next week, month or so, you know, we see 50 basis points rate cuts. Takes one or two, one week where Bitcoin goes to 75 and everyone's like, let's go.

Okay, that was my take. It takes one week. Let's go.

And Travis secretly, it's like, Fuck yeah, we're back.

We're back. We're back.

You know what I mean?

Like, that's, that's okay. That's, that was what I was going to conclude with too. It's like, it's all it takes is one up only week and then it's, and then it's BlackRock buying our bags.

It takes one green big candle to say price drives the cycle, baby.

Price drives narrative. So then it's price is above $70K and then it's okay, we might get a pro-crypto administration and the SEC is backing off and Larry Fink is buying our bags.

It's a classic meme of, you know, Bitcoin hits— Bitcoin's at 59, Bitcoin's at 65, we're going to 250. If Bitcoin's at 51, we're going back to 40, like Goblin Town. And it's like, there's a big asymmetry there. Like, temper your emotions and, and, uh, and just like go do other things.

Go do other things.

You know what I mean?

Preach. All right. We got some big new speakers. I was supposed to call this out at the beginning of the show, but per usual, I forgot. So come to Permissionless. We got— actually, we got some really cool new speakers lined up. We got the most likely the future senator of Utah, Rep. John Curtis, coming in. He's speaking. That's going to be really exciting. Got the commissioner of the CFTC, Caroline Pham. We got Richie Torres, great Democrat in New York. We got Dan, Dan Morehead from Pantera coming in. We got, speaking of Crypto 2017 class, we got Ari Paul from, from BlockTower. We've got global head of crypto at Google coming in, Rich, who's been great.

That position still exists.

What's the tradition?

I don't know.

I don't know. What did you say?

Does that position— I'm surprised that position still exists.

What acquisition?

That position.

Oh, that position. Dude, don't sleep on Google. Don't sleep on Google's crypto team. No, no, no, no, no. Okay, that is a— they, they are—

that's the tease to go to permissionless, I guess.

No, do you want to actually see this? Wait, Google crypto. This is a slept-on thing. Oh God, I don't know what this website is anymore. Try the—

404?

No, I'll link— I'll link it. Google has done some really cool indexing of all of the L1 and L2 crypto data. So if you are someone who sits on top of that data, like a Nansen or Blockworks Research—

oh, that's true, that's true.

They've done like with it— with my, my prediction is that Google is going to run people's show in crypto data. And they will end up being one of the biggest crypto data providers, actually. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, it's gonna be gonna be a great event. We have tickets for you. Tickets are now $700 a pop. They keep going up like every week. So go get them now. $700. Empire20 is the code.

So you heard it right, 20% discount.

Yes.

And this inflation, man, what's $700?

Or you can buy a group pass, 5 tickets, and it's only $539 for a group pass.

Should you use Telegram groups?

Uh, how do we pick that pricing? Finger in the air. Sounds about right.

Yeah, be social. Should you use Lens, uh, Forecaster? Telegram or this live— what is it?

Live social?

OpenSocial to coordinate your group. That's up to you, ladies and gentlemen.

That is up to you. Whatever group you use, you can buy 5 tickets for $539.

Incredible neutrality, folks.

Or if you're a developer, for some reason we give free tickets to developers. Or if you're a student, it's $99. We have a lot of ticket options for you.

You know, I, I still have my student ID card, by the way. Um, I was— I'm so cheap sometimes.

I used to tell me—

no, not anymore, but like back in the day, like, what I— now they look at me and they're like, yeah, no, no fucking way. But you know, like a year or two after college, you know, I whip out the ID card and it'd be like, oh yeah, you gotta—

year or two, for sure. You got it, you got it. I was eating sardines Yeah, I mean, sardines are probably really— you know, my salary my first year in New York, $18K, which I later learned is a year. Yeah, below. Well, then I got— and then I got— and then I got commissioned too, but it was— I got a $1,500 check on the last day of every month.

Wow.

Yeah, it was tough. It was a grind. So I actually did eat sardines and black beans. It was, it's a good grind.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's impressive.

And I started buying crypto on credit cards. Good for you.

There you go. All right.

We just got the permissionless agenda live. Oh, your boy Logan. We got Block Production, MEV on Solana, Lucas, Eugene, Logan. That'll be good.

Nice.

All right. Agenda's now live. You heard it here first. Go check it out.

Oh, that's good.

That's a good panel. Oh, see Raj and Rich.

Yeah, I'm no longer qualified to speak next to this caliber of speakers. It's really— I'm too afraid to go and talk.

These are good. These are good panels.

Yeah.

What's the main stage day 2? Oh, we got Rushy, Mert, Nick from Celestia, Rushy from Movement, Kyle Samani, and Josh from Supra. Interesting. Oh, we got Balaji giving a keynote. Oh, this will be a good panel, actually. Macro Case for Bitcoin. Jan Van Eck, Mike Novogratz, Dan Morehead, and Dan Tapiero.

That should be great.

Yeah, it'll be fire.

Really good stuff. Some, some, uh, well, the IRS has entered the chat.

Uh-oh.

Some AI stuff.

I think this is gonna be our best event. Yeah, this looks good. Absolutely.

This might be also a very politically important, uh, conference gets picked up by traditional media if a lot of these crypto, um, yeah, yeah, we've got Axios going, Politico going, Wall Street Journal.

Financial Times.

Very cool.

Oh, Live Empire Roundup. Good thing Santiago won't be there.

Oh snap, tough. Oh, there it is. I'm still there.

I didn't know this. That's a real— that's a good— I don't know who set this up. That wasn't me, but that's a great— Vance and Ari.

Yeah, so I'm speaking at a breakpoint, and the breakpoint are debates only. and I'm debating Solana versus Ethereum. Avichal actually is my opponent. He's taking the Ethereum side. I will be taking the—

Oh, Avichal's going to get cooked.

I said, I basically tweeted to— I was like, where's the prediction market for this? Like, come on, Avichal.

I love you. I love you, Avichal. You're going to get cooked. That's not even— it's over.

Yeah. So that should be fun.

Yeah. Oh, well, good night, sir.

I'm excited. Yeah, very good to see you. We're back. We'll be, uh, we'll definitely see you.

You know what? I didn't get your take on the Maker rebrand. What do you think of Maker rebrand?

No comment. Sky? I was barely—

I think that's— I think you just gave a comment.

I gave no comment. So Rune reached out and I did a Twitter Spaces with him, and I finally— we had him on the pod. I didn't understand anything in the roadmap and the end game at all. Mind you, I've been fairly close to Maker for many years. It was just, I didn't get it. So he— we did the Spaces, he organized it, and it was, I think, uh, me, him, and some— I think joined, and myself. And so I finally started to understand the endgame. I don't know if I agree with it, but I understood it finally, I think. And then as soon as I was starting to understand that there's a rebrand, I'm like, okay, I just— I— this, this is a topic for a broader, more longer conversation around the future of stablecoins. There's now speculation of more people entering the chat, more people entering the game. Stablecoins are highly lucrative. Like, you got to look at Tether and say that's a huge opportunity. And so it's just, I struggle with DAI's position in the market in not being singularly focused on distribution. Yes, you're focused on yield. Yes, you're focused on kind of like the, the Athena side of like yield is important for adoption, but you need the distribution. You need to be embedded in exchanges. You need— and if you don't have that Look, there's a reason why Tron stablecoin is— what is it, like, is it Tether on Tron? That's the most popular. Tether on Tron is the most widely used stablecoin, and it's, it's super popular in emerging economies, and it just— they just crush the local distribution game like no other. I don't see Maker doing that.

Yeah.

So I don't know what they're— I don't know what you as a former delegate think, but like, what do you think about the rebranding and just generally like the position of DAI in the ecosystem? Is it just going to be capped?

I'll talk about the rebrand. I just, I don't like the rebrand. I don't like, but I don't like 9 out of 10 rebrands because it's really hard to build a brand. Like building a brand is just about trust. And like, every day that your brand survives and lives is another day that your brand gets stronger. And Maker is one of the backbones of DeFi.

Yeah.

And they've got one of the best brands in all of like, what is DeFi? It's Maker, Aave, Uniswap. Like, I think of like those companies, honestly, like probably those three protocols and maybe some others. But really those three and I just don't like the rebrand. I think you should do a brand evolution and turn Maker into something else. Like if they want to build like an app or something or a chain, like just extend Maker out and make it more things. But nobody knows what SKY is. Now you've got to make a brand from scratch. And that's a very hard thing to do.

Pie in the sky.

Yeah.

Well said.

I wouldn't bet against Rune. He's a— he's an eclectic but very guy, but very good builder, I would say. Very good crypto builder.

Well, I want to end it with— it's been, as you alluded to, an active summer of reading. I read this fantastic book. It's called Never Enough by Andrew Wilkinson, the founder of Tiny.

Oh yeah. Was that good? I got that.

Fantastic read. Fantastic. People should go read it and you'll finish it in a day or two. It's really good.

One or two takeaways?

Honestly, it reaffirmed a lot of my, my evolution and thinking of like what you're optimizing for. He was incredibly successful and he just documents his journey from nothing to being a billionaire and all it— and, and the realizations that he came about. And it's just a really good perspective from someone that has made it and and then came to terms of what he was optimizing for. Um, very refreshing.

He's a very, very good storyteller too. For people who don't know Andrew, he started TinyLab. They own companies like Aero— and they buy company— they buy startups like— they buy companies— AeroPress, MetaLab, Dribbble. Um, and he's also the co-founder and chairman of WeCommerce, which is a— they start and incubate and buy and invest in a lot of amazing Shopify businesses. Public company. I think he took it public with Bill Ackman.

Yeah, yeah, it was public.

Um, really? But I've got that on my list. I'll get that.

Yeah, put it on the top.

Read it. Any like main takeaways for, uh, folks who are going to read it?

Time is the most valuable asset. Um, we've time and time again, we've talked about it here in this pod. Owning your time, you know, is the most important valuable thing. I think you talked about it in a prior pod of like being a time billionaire, um, and I think that's the most important thing. That liberty of owning your time is the greatest luxury that you can have, and sometimes it does not equate to the amount of money that you make. And so being able to share with the people you love, but owning your time is my North Star.

So there's a— you ever listen to the Graham Duncan Tim Ferriss episode?

No, I don't think so.

Okay, so I put that as a— I haven't listened in years, but it's a must-listen-to episode. It came out in early 2019. We'll try to link in the show notes, but or you can just search like Graham Duncan, Tim Ferriss. And basically Graham Duncan— so Graham Duncan's a hedge fund manager. He says he references a— do you know Tyler Cowen?

Yeah, The Marginal Revolution.

Yeah. So Tyler Cowen talks about cultural billionaires. And so Graham Duncan basically says something along the lines of he says, look, I feel like in our culture we're so obsessed with as a culture with money, we deify dollar billionaires in a way and he was thinking about something like he says, I was thinking about time billionaires that when I see like 20-year-olds, the thought I had was they probably have 2 billion seconds of their life yet, but they aren't relating to themselves as time billionaires. And I was thinking— and this is his quote— he's like, I was thinking about how if you could, you know, what would Rupert Murdoch, who's worth $20 billion and he's 90 years old, what would he pay if he could take the next 5 years of someone's 20-year-old healthy body, mind, etc.? For that 20-year-old, how would they price it? And he said, over time, my pricing has gone completely vertical because the next 5 years, if I were to lose— and the key to this question is that you can't sell the 5 at the end of your life, you got to sell them right now— he said, I don't know how I'd price it because my kids are at a certain age they'll never be again. But I don't know that I, that I live every day that way, but I aspire to. So I think his idea of this time billionaire is Yeah, he's trying to capture this like cultural billionaire, dollar billionaire. It's time billionaire. There's also a Tim Urban calendar. He has this concept of a life— I don't know if you ever read the blog Wait But Why by Tim Urban. Yeah, he has this concept of a life calendar and what he— he sells it as a poster, actually. I'd recommend it. What he does, he puts a week, he does a circle for every week. So there's 52 circles on the horizontal and then 90 rows. So you can actually see a 90-year life in weeks right on one poster.

And it's a powerful visual.

Very powerful visual. Yeah.

Yeah. So I, I was with my parents. They visited and I was just talking to my dad about it and we're like, how many more skiing vac— we love skiing. How many more skiing vacations do we have? You know, my dad's approaching 70s.

Yeah.

I'm like, and then so for me it's a no-brainer when it's like, go skiing, go ski with my dad. And I'll never regret that. I maybe have, I don't know, 1, 2, 5, probably no more than 10 good ski trips lined up. So when I think about it like I'm inverting, I think about it like that, it just gives me so much focus of where I want to spend my time. Um, funny enough, I announced an investment in Time.fun, which is trying to tokenize— is tokenizing time. And it's trying to bring price discovery into time. And I think it's just going to be the best way. This primitive of time as a valuable instrument, commodity, an asset, uh, I think is, is an area that I'm really excited to explore.

Yeah.

And, uh, you know, there's Web2, like, companies that have been trying to do this, but I think it's, it's going to be interesting how this unfolds and maybe even gets layered into social apps, right? You want to get my attention, you want to get a phone call, but other things, right? And so I think it's, uh, yeah, it's going to be a fun experiment.

Yeah, the— I'm gonna, I'm gonna send you this Time calendar post by Tim Urban. The thing that he, he wrote, this one line, I haven't read it in years, that really hit with me is 98% of the time that you spent with your parents is gone. Right? Because you grew up with them every single day. And now, I mean, rare moments, right? Right. You only, let's say you're, let's say you're 40. You got, yeah, you see your parents, your parents are 80 or something, or your parents are 70, right? You've got 20 years left with them and you might see them twice a year and 5 days at a time. Very finite amount of time.

So, uh, think about that every day.

So great positive note to end on.

Value your time. And maybe as an experiment, thought experiment this weekend, think about something that you haven't done that you get a lot of value from, whether it's calling your parents, doing that thing that you've— oh, here's the question, and I heard it in a podcast. It's like everyone always knows who their call would be. If you were to say you got one call, everyone is something that is very top of mind for people. Maybe it's your parents, maybe it's your loved one, or maybe it's something that you've always wanted to do. And, you know, call that person that you wanted to get it off your chest. So I don't know, maybe it's worth doing before, before you're actually put on the, on the hotspot.

Yeah, good call to action. There's also one last movie on this time concept called In Time. I think it was Justin Timberlake.

I've seen that.

Yeah, yeah, from like a, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago. But you've got like time on your wrist, remember? And you pay for things in time, and there's these time billionaires, and it's like you go to the casino and like you're buying in with chips, you give them time, then you get time back. So you're like taking other people's It's very interesting concept. And then the really poor people like are always racing to do jobs to get more time, or else they just die if they run out of time.

So that's the bull case for technologies that it will free us up of our time by creating abundance.

Ah, sorry, the last thing, and we're—

the last of the last—

this Gavin Baker episode. Let's end on an optimistic note. So I want to talk— there's actually this Gavin Baker episode that he did with Patrick O'Shaughnessy. It's one of the best podcast episodes I've listened to all year. It has nothing to do with crypto. There are some crypto comparisons with— he's talking about investing in apps versus infrastructure, why infrastructure is more exciting from an ROI perspective. Very— there are a lot of similarities to crypto. I think we could have talked for 30 minutes about that.

But let's make that the homework episode. People go listen to that. We'll link it. We'll talk about it next.

But if you want to get optimistic about the future, go listen to Gavin Baker talking with Patrick O'Shaughnessy. About full self-driving. So, I mean, Gavin lays it out clearly. We have solved climate change, he says. We have solved— he said to all the 20-year-olds who are terrified, don't want to bring kids into this world and crazy pessimistic all the time, like, I don't know, a lot of Gen Z people are like crazy, crazy pessimistic and like, you know, refuse to bring— yeah. And I think there's a correlation with that sometimes. But yeah, They— he's like, we have solved it. We are compounding at 11% a year. It is like, I don't know, just go listen to this episode. It's very good.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I had immediate response to it and I loved it.

Yeah.

So we'll link it. People listen to it. We'll talk about it next pod. So that's homework for people. I haven't given people homework in a while. Back in September, school's back in session. Get your ass— hopefully you're rested.

Yeah, we got homework, baby. We got homework, baby.

Let's go.

All right. I have the Blockworks All Hands now. I got to jump.

I am going to sleep. It's midnight.

Nice. Peace, sir.

All right.

Thanks for watching today's episode. Just wanted to quickly mention that the wait for crypto's killer app wave is nearly over thanks to today's sponsor, Anoma, the universal intent machine. To stay up to date with Anoma, you can follow them at x.com/anoma or sign up for the newsletter. Anoma.net. Thanks again to Anoma for sponsoring today's episode.