Managing Emotions in Crypto Cycles

A day that you're holding onto something is a day that you're buying. So think about it, every day that you hold something is a day that you buy that position at that price. Overall, I think you should constantly, maybe not daily, optimize for mental clarity. Whatever you do, pay attention to the things that give you more mental clarity and pay attention to the things that disturb, cloud your judgment, because this industry's not easy. Markets are not meant to be easy, otherwise everyone would be making money.

This episode is brought to you by Sei. Sei's V2 upgrade introduces the first high-performance parallelized EVM already live on public devnet. Mainnet comes later in Q2. You can follow along with the Sei journey on X @SeiNetwork. Sei is spelled S-E-I. Go follow Sei on X, @SeiNetwork. Hey everyone, Santi and I have been talking about Solana a lot recently and we're excited to have a Solana sponsor of Empire, Marinade. Marinade is a staking protocol on Solana and the only stake pool that delivers auto-rebalancing, MEV rewards, and automatic downside protection with their new protected staking rewards. Optimize your SOL stake with Marinade by hitting the link in the show notes. Big thanks to Marinade. We'll talk more about them later in the show. This episode is brought to you by Avalanche. Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure. Check them out. It's core.app/discover. You can explore Avalanche's subnet ecosystem at core.app/discover. I was playing around earlier today. Really cool. This episode is brought to you by Mantle. Mantle is an L2 backed by over a $4 billion treasury, obviously one of the largest in the industry. They recently launched their airdrop program called the Rewards Station to distribute both presale token allocations or listed tokens to MNT holders who stake their MNT. Mantle has nailed their rewards program recently. Would highly encourage folks to check out the Mantle Rewards Program at mantle.

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Mr. Man, how you doing?

It's been all right, man. We've forgotten about this podcasting thing that we do, but here we are.

Yeah, looking very European chic today.

Oh oui, merci, monsieur. Yeah, back in the hood.

Look, I got a plant.

You can see now this is a very COVID thing. You're like baking sourdough or something.

I never, I never fell for that trap. I didn't get sucked into that trap. Oh dude, I look very pale today and you look— I look paler than usual and you look tanner. The YouTube comments are gonna eat me alive.

Yeah, well, I've been, I've been more openly documenting my my workouts.

Yeah. What? So Philip, Phil said 100 kilometers, new PR.

I was almost bike yesterday. I did 50K in the bike today. Did 30K running 2 days ago. Just, uh, just cooking.

Doing good. Not too shabby. I hit, uh, I forget if I told you, I think maybe I told you, I was trying to hit the 800 club in lifting, which is, um, What was that?

Sorry, pounds, that is for our non-UK listeners. Yeah. Okay.

So I'm trying to hit 800 pounds by end of year and I hit it this week actually. So did you really? Yeah. 6 months early. Dude, the YouTube comments.

Um, people like, why the hell are these guys talking about like training? We'll get to that.

I forget if I read this one in, in the last, in the last episode, the Yano Santi handsomeness ratio is almost perfectly correlated With ETH BTC down only for Yano. Let's pray the bottom is in.

Wherever you are, salute. I'll buy you a beer.

Salute. How about this one? Santi showing another one of the sweater collections made by grandma.

I did. I collect. I collect a lot of things, by the way. This is like my sweaters.

Yeah, you do. All right.

I think I have more sweaters than like shirts, trousers combined. I have over 100 sweaters.

You don't have 100 sweaters.

Yes.

Why? You live in a place where it's sunny all the time.

I travel. Yes. There's some I haven't used.

Yeah. Do you do your own shopping?

Yeah.

Oh, I don't know about that.

We do.

All right, man, what are we talking about today?

So listen, everyone wants to know what's going on in the market. We've been in a down environment since March, April, give or take. No matter how you slice it, it's been pretty painful for a lot of folks. Yeah. And the, like, if you look at it like on a USD pair, it looks ugly. If you look at it on a Bitcoin pair, it looks uglier. It's an interesting time in the market because like Bitcoin's at $65K.

$65K. Yeah, $65K peaked out at $71, $72 back in March. $73K.

You look at the timeline and it looks like we're in like a post-FTX collapse. The world is imploding. Our main character, Ansem, is going through this sort of our key cult. He's been buried on the timeline. He's been crucified.

We got a little Ansem existential crisis going on.

You would think that it gets easier every cycle. And yes, it does, because you make mistakes. You like— I have a thesis for the cycle. But we're human. Investing is very psychological. It is still painful. It is still— you still feel these range of emotions. So anyone out there that is portraying themselves as this stoic character that doesn't feel emotion is just— I'll just— it's important to ground it to reality because you still second-guess yourself. You still wake— it's never easy. Because crypto is a very volatile market.

And, um, yeah, here, uh, I don't get the aspect of like the panic on the timeline though. I gotta be honest, like, I, like, are people just levered to the tits on some of these coins?

Like, you don't have to, you don't have to be levered to the tits. All you have to do is look at your portfolio value go down 60% in 30 days.

But it's like I don't know, people, are you trading around this stuff though? Like, I know Joseph, our producer, was like, I'd love to hear how you stomach the volatility and your process for decision making. I do want to hear the decision making side, but like, stomaching the volatility, I'm like, I mean, you just like, you just don't sell when these things go down 10% unless you, unless you do actually, unless you're always changing.

That's not necessarily true, right? I mean, it is impossible to one, speak What I'm doing may or may not relate to whatever the listener is doing because every portfolio is unique, every position is unique. But, um, historically you have the likes of, uh, by the way, being more smart here doesn't necessarily help. It actually might get in the way. Isaac Newton famously fumbled the bag of tulips. He called the bubble, invested in it, Sold, reinvested, like, had made early profits, gotten back into it, imploded. Literally, like, died broke, I think. Um, Stan Druckenmiller, one of the best investors of all time, got the tech bubble totally wrong. He was right on the thesis, he was down on the timing. He, for such a long time, shorted, um, tech stocks, lost like $100 million or whatever. Was really down and then unwound the short, closed it, I think went long the days literally before the top and the bubble popped, right? Um, you have, you know, long-term capital manage— like, what I'm trying to say is, you know, the common denominator across all of this is, A, being smart doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna, like, be more equipped to handle volatility. Two, it really hurts when other people are making money and you're not, which is part of the reason what explains this timeline. That I think is the Achilles heel of 9 out of 10 people, is seeing other people make more money than you.

Great point, I agree with that.

And that persists in any market environment. There's people making money in AI If you didn't long Nvidia, you're like, well, shit, I should have just sold all my crypto stuff, not deal with any of this nonsense, and just punted Nvidia. Um, and then this— the third point, which is probably more interesting, that I've been thinking about a lot is like, we're all here, we all believe in this stuff long term, but investing is a very psychological sport. And when you ask me like you're describing prior cycles. We tend to overfit now because hindsight's, you know, 20/20. And so like, it all fits, the story fits very smoothly in prior cycles. But I'll just remind people, like, in any market, bull market, you have these drawdowns of 10, 20, 30% on major assets, let alone everything that's alt and higher beta. So positions being down 60, 70%, does that invalidate the bull market? No, not necessarily. It has also been a very challenging crypto environment where it's like PvP. There's these hot balls of money that move around, and there's some great tweets that we can link in the show notes that actually try to quantify And I tend to think that we've been sort of in that environment where new— like, we had an influx of flows coming in last year, Q4, Q1. I don't think there's been new flows coming in. And so you have this constant rotation from FrenTech to memes to now something else.

Celeb coins. Yeah, right.

So anyways, all right, let me ask Let me ask you a few.

Yeah, YouTube comments are not going to like you on this one.

All right.

First question here would be, I'm looking at my portfolio and I would categorize it into— okay, so 3 buckets of the portfolio. So I've got like Bitcoin, ETH, Solana. Like, I'm just like, I'm holding these things basically. Actually ended up selling a big chunk of one of those for the other, which we can talk about if you're interested. So I've got Solana for Bitcoin and ETH. I've gotten— I'm more overweight Solana. Yeah. Than the other two. I'm more overweight Solana. Then I've also got another group of things that I think will do well. So I've got like AI, some, some AI coins like a Render or a Kosh. I've got things and this is like extremely non-financial advice. I have no idea what I'm doing. Things like maybe some allocation to like the move exposure, whether that's SUI or Aptos. I've got the AI exposure with like a Render or Akash. I've got the meme coin exposure with something like WIF. That's like the second part of the portfolio. Then I've got the third part, which I want to ask you about. I've got all these coins that I'm still sitting on from just the last couple of years, things like OG DeFi tokens or other L1s, and I'm not very excited about them, but I just can't bring myself to sell them. They're not that much money, right? It's not that much. And I'm just like, yeah, it's not a big difference. Like, man, if like, let me, let me, one example might be like UNI or something like UNI is probably not going to like outperform SOL here or outperform even maybe Bitcoin here. But because it's just like, you know, it just hasn't been a loved, a loved token. But I'm like, am I really going to sell UNI? Um, and I'd just be curious how you think about that, that third bucket of the portfolio where you're just kind of sitting on these things. Maybe it makes up a small percentage of the portfolio. Yeah.

Uh, are you holding that as a moonbag or to pay attention to the ecosystem or just for tax reasons?

I'm holding it because honestly, this is, this is going to sound like a really idiotic investment strategy. The idea that if Uni something, I'm just going to keep picking on Uni. If Uni ever ripped, I'd be like, what an idiot I was.

Here I am. Yeah.

Paying attention to Uni, super involved in the community, like going to the events, talking to the team, like, and I sold it.

So here's my two things. One, a day that you're holding on to something is a day that you're buying. So think about it, every day that you hold something is a day that you buy that position at that price. And so overall, I think you should constantly— maybe not daily, but I think you should constantly redraw your portfolio from scratch. Every so often, quarterly, monthly, annually, however you want to do it. I think it's important, probably shorter cadence in crypto, um, because things are moving fast. Yeah, uh, that doesn't necessarily mean that you change things, you just re-underwrite. So that's point one. By the way, a lot of DeFi tokens are looking pretty good. Like, if you look at Aave synthetics, like, it's just been like a— they're flat on the month, but they're not as volatile. They're actually, you know, they're just steady, slowly kind of accumulate. Like, you know, just— you could tell it's probably like a lot of funds accumulating these positions based on like charts.

Yeah, Uni's up, you know, from 4 to 10 in a year, like, just slowly going up.

But the second point is probably more important for for folks is you— I don't think you construct your portfolio for the upside case. I think you construct it for the downside case. And, you know, because if your logic and your reasoning is, I would hate myself if I don't have something because it didn't outperform, you know, the base asset, major asset, whatever your benchmark is, I think you should always be looking to outperform Solana or ETH or Bitcoin or all three combined. But, but, and so like, you're— I think in this environment, like, you have to constantly— and I tweeted about this the other day— it's like how I think risk is one of those things that we try to— it's not very properly understood. Like, most people equate risk to volatility, and it's not the same thing. An asset could be very volatile, doesn't make it necessarily riskier. Um, second, I think more importantly, I think risk is very subjective. Like, someone from the outside might say these goons are just talking about like relative risk within crypto, the entire asset class is shitcoin, you know. Someone that doesn't understand crypto might like look at it as extremely risky. Right, the same, like, you might look at biotech as extremely risky category. Like, what do you know about Phase 1, Phase 2 for a particular drug candidate? Nothing. But if you're in the field, then that has way less risk because you're a domain expert, you're living, breathing it constantly. So this is like the point that I think really kills you is, oh, people making money on meme coins, and then you You like, you're like Isaac Newton. You're like, shit, people want to get money in tulips. Like you need to get at some point, you just understand at some point it's going to get to you. At some point you're going to fall to it. So you got to hop on the bike because yeah, no, well, do you have like a small ticket for your sanity? I'm not here to tell you one strategy is better than the other. I think you, my most important takeaway for this episode is Optimize for mental clarity. Whatever you do, pay attention to the things that give you more mental clarity and pay attention to the things that disturb, cloud your judgment. Because this industry is not easy. Markets are not meant to be easy, otherwise everyone would be making money. And so I— that's the thing that I like. A day like today, like the last two days, haven't been easy. Have been very volatile, have made me question the portfolio. I've been transitioning for the last month into higher, kind of more defensive, into higher quality stuff, and pruning a lot of the portfolio. Is it the best decision? Probably not. I'm probably selling some stuff in there that's going to be a 100-bagger, likely. Um, probabilistically is a very, very low probability of that happening. But I just remind myself of the core principle, which is don't lose money. I always want to have money when other people are scared shit, and we're not in that environment. And the third one is I just feel better as soon as I do something. Like, I'm— I just feel— and I'm not And this is like something that I want to ask you a question. Like sometimes, like, okay, investing is not meant to be easy. Like, does that mean that we have to endure all this pain? And like, not necessarily, right? Like I sold part of a position yesterday and I've been thinking about doing it more aggressively over time. I haven't, I did it and I immediately felt some like relief. Famously Soros got every time he wanted to sell his cue as he got in, in 10 specs. Pain. It's just funny. But yeah, I think anyways, I don't know if any of that makes sense or if you want to talk more about it, but I'm not here to tell you what or what not to do. If you want to have these buckets, if you want to have a moon bag, ultimately, like, I would just— whatever is it that you do, I think optimize for mental clarity.

Yeah, I think the two takeaways there are one, every day that you're holding something, you're buying it. And to optimize for mental clarity and for sometimes— I mean, we talked about this a couple months ago when I was saying, look, sometimes I'm actually comfortable giving up a little bit of the upside because I'm running Blockworks. And like, that, that's where my mental— that's where I spend 98% of my brainpower, right?

So yeah, like, yeah, because I think you You have to get one or two things very, very right. Um, it's a sort of a power law distribution. Crypto liquid too, and, and privates. Um, but I, I think like what you just said is so important. Like, can you get yourself comfortable with the idea that you're going to give some of the upside and capture 60, 70, maybe 50% of the return. And if you can underwrite that and be happy with that and build a process around that, I think that if you can compound, then I think you'll be really well in the long run. Yeah, like, okay, it's not 100x, but if you constantly do 3x, like every 2, 3 years, like, yeah, you're good, you're good. Do the math and you'll do well. The problem is Right, like concentration. If you can do it in a concentrated manner, then all the better. And that— for that, I think you need a lot of mental clarity, a lot of—

how many, uh, how many tokens make up, let's say, the majority of your portfolio right now?

10. 10. On the liquid side, 10.

Yeah.

On the private side, I have a lot of positions. I mean, I'll I make— I'm very active there. Um, and yeah, how are the private markets for you right now? Uh, like, what am I seeing? What am I investing? Or how am I thinking?

Yeah, what are you seeing? Like, what kind of valuations? What's happening? Where— like, what ecosystems are you investing in? What kind of companies?

It's cooled down marginally. Like, okay, I'll fire off quick things. Ecosystem, a lot of interest. I think it's percolating. I think people are— so Telegram ecosystem is like an outlier. Valuations subsided a bit. Like, I think they're pausing this pace of like really high vals. And I think founders are getting a little nervous in terms of just closing these rounds. So they want to compromise on the price because when price goes down a bit, they're like, hey, well, this is an insurance policy. I'd rather just close around at— so one company revised down from 75 to 50, and I told them, guys, this is 50, 50 FTB. And they got it done. And I think, so yeah, I still am— look, my operating assumption is that any investment that I'm making now on the private side is going to be a next cycle kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we're at that point too. What— so when you see the Telegram, the TON ecosystem going like that, like, how do you think about buying TON, the liquid coin? Did you do the— did you do the discounted private thing in the—

I got an offer, but no, I'm not taking it. I did a lot of the— I actually don't have any exposure to TON. I'm looking at an L2 right now, similar to Movement, but kind of for TON. And the idea is that it's actually quite hard to build on Telegram. And like, there's a really good tweet about like this guy kind of went through all of the like kind of basic things Telegram, Rattan, and the ecosystem. I don't have any exposure to you.

No, no.

I tweeted out, I did a poll recently yesterday and it was like, you're a builder, where do you want to build next? And I appreciate it a lot, man, because I mean, you can only use 4. Thank you, Elon. So you're a builder. Can you just start working?

I saw this. I was like, oh my God, how many people just got pissed?

It was like, where is Solana here? Where is insert my bag? My guys, we all know where I stand on Solana. Let's, I listed Telegram, Aptos, Bearachain, and Bitcoin L2s. And yes, I could list Sui, Shiba Inu. Whatever, basic. This is the constraint that I had. Telegram came number 1 at 39%, followed by Aptos 31%, Bearachain 18%, and Bitcoin L2s 12%. Yeah.

So, okay. So I, I maybe this is a good time to bring up. So I just spent the last couple hours at the Monad's office. So Monad had this thing this week in New York called Monad Foundry. And they brought a bunch of developers in and a bunch of founders and people gave different talks. And so I was hanging with Eunice, one of the founders, and Keoni and Kevin, the CMS intern turned full-time intern of Monad. And I ended up meeting a lot of the founders who are actually building on Monad. So the first takeaway is like Monad has this actually booming ecosystem right now, the people who are, who are building on them already, which is really cool to see because they don't even have— I think mainnet comes in several months, actually. It's not, you know, we're not, we're not too close. The big takeaway for me is that there's 5 places according to all of the founders in the room. So this is kind of self-selecting for people who have decided already to build on Monad. Here are the 5 ecosystems that those folks debated building on: Monad, Blast, Base, Solana, and Barachain. Were the 5 that got brought up in every— probably talked with 12, 13 different founders, like different companies building on Monad. They've all chosen Monad, but of the ones that they decided between is Base, Blast, Monad, Solana, and Barachain. So now you're kind of self-selecting. Like, I'm sure a lot of people are building on something like Optimism or Arbitrum or Polygon or zkSync or whatever it is, but like, this was It's the kind of people who are building on Monad are choosing those companies. So I thought that was really interesting to just hear why they've done it. The like TL;DR and why they're building on Monad was for them, a lot of them actually came from Solana or debate. It was down to Solana versus Monad and they've been there in their experience building on Solana was too difficult. It's not about Rust versus Solidity. It's about something that I'm going to completely botch something about object-oriented versus something oriented. I need to understand it better. I'm not going to pretend like I understand it, but they just said it was a little bit too difficult for them. So Monad kind of gives you a lot of what Solana has with like Bastion, Goodchain, but on the EVM. So I thought that was interesting.

Interesting.

You're hiring an analyst. Yeah. So I saw this.

I get my best ideas when I travel. Shit, I should just travel. What did you say? I get my best ideas when I travel. Oh, this was this idea. Where were you traveling? I was traveling in family office, spent money.

Nice. How was any, any takeaways? I didn't talk about crypto.

Like, like there's just like presentations about where to invest and like the room was like family offices from EMEA.

So you're the youngest guy there? Yes.

Well, no, they were like, uh, they were like, uh, also it was meant catered for like, uh, the, the young people within the family office. So like the sons of, yeah, largest retailer in Spain and, you know, like largest real estate developer in Saudi and stuff like this. But I was, yeah, yeah, I guess I would say Gen Zero, which means like, it's like, so like it's my family office. Like, what do you mean?

Like your dad? Good to be Gen Zero. It's good to be Gen Zero.

I'm Gen Zero. And then I was the only crypto person there, probably.

So they didn't mention crypto?

They didn't. They talk about like AI and like futuristic stuff and where to allocate and nothing about crypto. Although there were a lot of questions from the, like, the people, the clients at the bank, uh, talking about, uh, asking about, hey, what about crypto?

You're hiring this analyst, right? So you said things he or she would do: A, manage their own liquid book. I'll give them $500K to $1 million to start, then they grow from there. They get to keep 20% of the profits. They stay on top of teams in the portfolio and they Provide research on emerging trends and ecosystems. I see this as a stepping stone. If they're successful managing their book, I'll help them branch off, launch their own fund, or just give them more capital. Looking for someone with experience, priority given to on-chain resume and excellent reference checks. Walk us through this decision because this is something that you and I have talked about for, I feel like, years at this point. You've been thinking about it, thinking about it. So what made you actually make this decision? Well, it's just easy.

I think it's just like no different than investing in an company, but I want to one, optimize for being surrounded with someone, or this could be actually, I actually foresee multiple interns or multiple analysts. So like, I want to have like a desk starting to most likely someone had a great tweet about like, why not just hire two? Which I think is a great idea. But yeah, potentially like oversee like two or three or four. And they just cover certain sectors that I'm not going to pay attention to, and they're going to go deeper, they're going to catch it faster. Um, and, and I think it's just a realization that there are people far, far better than me, uh, to do this in the, in the, in the liquid side of things. Um, and, and I want to learn from them. Clearly it's just an investment into bringing more brainpower into the organization. Yeah. That's really it. Because the thing I miss the most about being at ParaFi is just the constant, it's like every day kind of thing. And now I don't do it every day, but I do it like I have a network that I go to certain people, but it's very ad hoc-ish. And I appreciate that it's probably better to do it more frequently. And the only way to do that is to have someone internally.

All right. Any rules around what they should invest in or a free rate? You're giving them a million bucks and you're saying, go, go make as much money.

My philosophy is I'm not going to hire I'm not going to tell them what to do. I'm hiring someone that is smarter. I'm not going to tell Safa how to make money. Like, follow, follow, right? Like, best practices across risk management and security.

Do they get a salary?

Uh, nominal. I don't know. I'd probably— this is someone that has like already made some money and is looking to just, um, you know, get involved and maybe have allocation to private deals that I do.

Do you have an idea of where this person should come from? Like, should this person—

like, no idea. I don't care where they come from. No, I'm like, how many, how many applications?

Dude, you didn't even— you should have put a Google Form link or something.

No, part of the process is, can you get to me without me post— no, no, that's It's part of the reason, man. Yeah. Like, if you really are smart, something—

you'll get an intro to you, or you will find a way.

I'm not going to tell you how.

I saw, I saw someone commented and said, uh, where should I apply? And you said insert here. And I was like, yeah, that's good. Yeah. I'm like, find me wherever.

I back companies because they literally tweeted, like, commented on a tweet that I had.

Yeah. Yeah. We, I mean, we've, I've posted sales jobs before and people are, people will DM me and be like, what, like, uh, or people will comment and be like, where do I apply? I'm like, dude, we got, we got a careers page on our site with the job posted. If you're in sales and you can't figure that out, like, we got, we got bigger problems. So, okay. Who's, who stood out? Like any, are there, are there, I haven't even started interviewing.

There were like 2 or 3 people that came highly recommend from people that I respect. And they, the way they kind of formatted the doc. What they put in the doc was like very well formatted, very well organized. Like I was like, I looked at it for 2 seconds. I'm like, okay, I have a folder now. I'm just putting everything that I like on that folder. And there's a lot of unread stuff in that folder, but I'll get to it this summer. Yeah. Hmm. That's cool. Yeah, like, look, I've really—

it's a really good opportunity. I think so.

I think this is— I want to maybe— okay, not like Julian Robertson kind of stuff. I have no way, shape, or form to compare myself to Julian Robertson, but I want to incubate. I've helped start a couple of funds in the space. Like this guy Jason Yanowitz from Foleas Maple Leaf Capital. Him and I were chatting literally every day about DeFi and DeFi Summer to the point where I was like, He was at a hedge fund and he was producing really good research. I'm like, gosh, at one point we explored hiring him and then I said, you're too good, you should go start your own fund. And then I invested in his fund. I'm part of the GP, like, you know what I mean? We were big supporters and I kind of want to do that. I think the space deserves better managers. I think they're out there. And so the best part of our crypto is it's a space that is ever expanding. And I think, like, I look at, like, in any other industry, like, could you make a name for yourself and start a fund in your 20s? Difficult, right? Not impossible, just difficult. Of course, in hedge fund land, you make money great. But I think crypto is a different animal, and I think it allows for that. And people that really make— do the work and are, like, in the trenches, like, get handsomely rewarded. And I appreciate you're not going to be an analyst because you make more money by outside. So you have to be your own fund manager. And the structure that I envision is 80/20. Like, you keep, like, you know, you, you manage effectively. I'm an LP. Yeah. Okay. And then if they're successful, like, yeah, go, you know, go and start your own fund. Yeah. And I'll help you do it. I'll part of the GP for sure. And the thesis is that like, if you like, if I do this for the next 5 years and I probably maybe have like a program where I bring in 1 or 2 people every year, or say 3 or 4 people and you cut to 1 or 2 are successful, like, hey, you know, in 5 years you have like 10 people that started a fund. That's pretty cool. So yeah, I think that's kind of how I thought about it.

Yeah. You know, I've always thought this kind of apprent— I'd call it an apprentice model. Should be more popular. I think it's the biggest career hack that you can make is if I were, if I were 22 or 23, what I would do is I would email the top 50 people or 100 people who I looked up to, both in investing or I mean, for me, I wouldn't do investing. I would do like founders probably. So I'd email the top 50 founders. I'd be like, let me just come work for you. Give me minimum wage or give me whatever it is. Give me a highly incentivized compensation structure. And let me just come study you for 2 years. And then I, with the goal that I want to eventually go launch my own thing, but I just want to learn from you and study you. That's if I were going to, that's what I would do.

There's like a ton of asymmetry, positive asymmetry from like just emailing and doing that. Yeah. Because when you're in your 30s, no, it has to be when you're young.

Yeah. I mean, the Thiel, like you mentioned Julian Robertson and like Thiel Fellowship, I think the Thiel Fellowship came out of Like Peter Thiel would every year have a new, like, one or two apprentice— apprentices, basically. He's got all this other stuff with young— like, he takes the blood of 18-year-olds and stuff like that. But, uh, it— but it came out of the apprentice model, and, uh, he's like, this is working so well, let me just start a whole fellowship around this.

So, you know, yeah, that's kind of the goal. Um, so yeah, but I think it's someone that, you know, want to. I also don't want to micromanage these people.

I, you know, it's like, you don't strike me as a big, uh, manager kind of guy.

I don't want to, like, I'm answering all the calls that I have. I just don't want to have calls. I don't, I don't like having calls. Yeah. Unless I want to talk to you, I'll talk to you, but it's just like, yeah, I want to call someone, I just pick up the phone and call. But I don't like these calls. I hate calls, folks. Just if you want to get to me, chat. I love chat. Yeah.

That's, you're very responsive on Telegram. I'm super responsive.

Like, very responsive. Yeah. I just hate calls. They're so like inefficient.

Yeah, we just implemented no-call Wednesdays at Blockworks. No, not mandatory.

No, Monday through Sunday. Yeah, dude, no, no calls.

So we're hiring at Blockworks if people want to have no calls on Wednesdays, mandatory, no internal calls.

I'm hiring no calls ever.

Don't do this to me. Don't do this to me. R— yeah, I don't even want to talk about funds poaching analysts. Sensitive subject right now. Blockworks is a great organization. We got Permissionless coming. Go buy your ticket. Tickets go up to $499 soon. They're $199 today. Go buy your ticket. Just, just, yeah, just got to plug it. Salt Lake, why?

Can you explain to me why? Like, I love skiing. I think all the Snowbird—

I'll explain Salt Lake. I'll explain Salt Lake. I like very strongly believe that the best conferences— there are two types of conferences. There are conferences in cities that are like built around a city. So like we have that with DAS, right? DAS is in New York and London. It's super easy. You're working at the fund, you hop over to DAS from 2 to 6. Like, it's great. For what I'm trying to— what we are trying to build with permissionless, I think there's an element of going to a foreign place that is— it's actually nothing to do but that. It's actually crucial to the experience. Um, it gets you out of your comfort zone. You are fully committed. You're not going bouncing around really the city. Like, like our, like our best event ever was Palm Beach, permissionless in Palm Beach. There was Whole Foods in Salt Lake. True, true. You'll find me on Whole Foods drinking fucking cold brew. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, but like, I, I mean, there's a big difference between doing like a pro— like, I don't know, there's— there'll be an event. I mean, like Tokens and, and Singapore and ECC in Brussels. Like we're sending a bunch of people to both of those. Like, I think those are two amazing events, but like, I think there's a unique thing when you go to a city that there's not honestly a crazy amount of stuff to do. And it's a foreign place that like a lot of people haven't been to Salt Lake. We're trying it. I think it's, I think it's going to be really good. It's shaping up to be the best permissionless ever. It's really interesting to see the— Is it sponsored by Delta?

You should get Delta as a sponsor, man.

Like, it's like their— you know what we just got? Actually, you're not a big chess guy, but we just got, uh, Chess.com to partner on our— we're building a whole chess lounge. So we've got this— you're just building it?

Yes, 3 people. Ben, Ben from Verify.

How's it going? What's his—

what's his rating? I don't know, but he, he like, with the usual like crypto competition, I think he went pretty far. Lesnar, Kane, and, and Ben are really good.

Oh shit, I got it. Yeah. So we're going to have a big chess competition. We're going to have a pickleball competition, which is going to be popping, obviously.

We do.

I'll do a run club. I want that. You ever play paddle? Paddle's from— it's like a Latin American sport.

I don't consider myself Latin American, but yeah, sure. I don't mean— I have the sexist type of crush. I actually don't.

Was that wrong of me to say?

What? No, no. No, I just, uh, I don't, I don't, if I have anything, I feel like I identify American because that's the place where I've lived the most, uh, culturally too. Um, yeah, seriously, dude. Gosh. Um, although I've been doing a lot of podcasts in Spanish because I saw that one.

Yeah. Yeah. I connected you to, uh, that, that guy. Yeah.

Uh, I've done like 2 or 3 or more of those. It looks fine. Um, Yeah, I'll do Run Club so we can go running.

So this episode is brought to you by Sei. Sei's belief about the world, I think, is a good one. They believe that the EVM is here to stay. Agree with that. They believe that the EVM is going to look kind of like what JavaScript ended up looking like in the Web2 world. Agree with that. They also believe that the EVM in its current iteration lacks a lot of the performance and scalability that developers need. So what Sei has done with their V2 upgrade is they just introduced the first high-performance parallelized EVM into the market today. They've got lightning-fast block times and finality of just 390 milliseconds. What this does is it unlocks an entirely new design space with 100x the throughput of even some of the fastest EVM L2s on the market today. Sei V2 is now live on public devnet with mainnet scheduled for Q2. You can stay up to date with Sei on X @SeiNetwork, S-E-I Network. Big thanks to Sei. Hey everyone, Santi and I have been talking about Solana a lot recently and we're excited to have a Solana sponsor of Empire. Marinade is a staking protocol on Solana. I remember when they launched, I think it was back at a Solana hackathon and they were funded with this $80K grant. It's super cool to see how far they've come. They're the only stake pool today that delivers auto rebalancing, MEV rewards, and automatic downside protection. With their new protected staking rewards. You can stake natively or liquid stake with Marinade and get the same high-performance delegation strategy that thousands are using already to stake your SOL to over 100 of the best Solana validators. Marinade has been live for over 2 years and they have audits completed by 4 of the top security firms in crypto. The delegation strategy is a first of its kind. So if you're staking your Solana, if you want to start staking your Solana, if you want to get some yield, from your SOL. Start staking today with Marinade. Go hit the link in the show notes. Big thanks to Marinade for everything that they've done in Solana staking land. Go check them out. Go stake your Solana with Marinade today. This episode is brought to you by Avalanche. Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions the design space to explore new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure. Everything that Avalanche has been building the last few years has culminated in this moment where today you have institutions and developers able to essentially have limitless possibilities with the chain. They've enabled developers to build cross-chain swaps or create gaming environments where one subnet can unlock features in another or can use USDC as a native gas token. Onyx, for example, by JPMorgan or Citi or DTCC's digital assets or the Australian and New Zealand banking Group. They're all building on Avalanche evergreen subnets. Really cool stuff. Big thanks to Avalanche for sponsoring this episode of Empire. Go explore Avalanche subnet ecosystem at core.app/discover. That's core— c-o-r-e.app/discover. Thanks again, Avalanche. This episode is brought to you by Mantle. Mantle is an L2 backed by one of the industry's largest treasuries. At the time of recording, it's valued at $4.4 $1.5 billion. The Mantle ecosystem engages in a lot of early-stage exciting projects such as Athena and EigenLayer, and they give out actually the rewards to the Mantle community. There are two airdrops I want to tell you about. The first one, it was with Athena. They offered 2.5 billion Athena shards to holders of their native token MNT. So the reward station program distributes these presale token allocations to MNT holders who stake the tokens. The second one they have going on is with MISO, M-I-S-O, that gives out over 90,000 MISO tokens worth about $50,000 today. That starts on April 25th, runs through May 2nd. If you want to check that out, you got to stake your MNT and you can check out the reward station at mantle.xyz/rewardstation. Big thanks to Mantle for sponsoring Empire. All right. I have another thing to talk about. It feels like there's a, like a momentum or a narrative change or a zeitgeist changed where people are just sick of of the bullshit, like sick of the, sick of the airdrops, sick of the like overinvestment into infrastructure. I just feel, I feel it in the, in the air that something's changing. And I'm curious if you feel like sick of the, sick of the stupid shit. I'm not, I'm not saying airdrops are actually stupid. I'm not saying obviously infrastructure is stupid, but I'm just like, I just feel like the, amongst the crypto natives and amongst like the crowd that matters, people are like acknowledging, like, you know what, I think something does need to change. Do you feel that? Yeah.

Well, like, marginally, yes. I mean, I think there's obviously that chatter of high FTV, low, low flow. That discussion wouldn't be happening if tokens were going up, not down. But nonetheless, there's also like very limited design space. Of course, Kobe's ICO idea is really good. Challenge in the current environment. We've talked about this ad nauseam here. So it's sort of like, yeah, we can talk and bitch and complain about things, but work within the constraints that you have. I have optimism. I'm optimistic because crypto has become— the thing that surprised me the most is, speaking truly about zeitgeist, is crypto has become presidential. Like, holy shit. And, uh, oh, like, now Trump is really like now being very vocal about it. Is he gonna actually implement it, like, follow through if he gets elected, which I think he will? Uh, TBD. But look, I think it's, uh, it's important nonetheless. I think it's a win for the space. The courts have ruled in crypto's favor. The SEC just dropped their investigation into Ether security today. Again, these are the things that are happening in real time. People looking at prices down 20%. But you have these type of very important events that go unnoticed. And we're going to look back in 2 years' time and say, what defined this cycle? It was ETFs that opened the floodgates. It was a regulatory change, the political change in the most important country, the most important market changing probably 180, you know what I mean? Like in a very short period of time. Does that mean that we're going to have regulation tomorrow? No. But markets respond to that pivot. Not the actual implementation of the regulation. Now, I appreciate if we want to try to do ICOs and all this stuff, we're going to have to need clearer rules. But that sets in motion today more interest, more pilots, more, you know what I mean? Like, people that have been on the sidelines. So I think it matters. And so I just would caution people not to get too caught up in the movement, day-to-day movement of stuff. And just like, I, I think there have been really important stuff happening. The zeitgeist is that, I think, airdrops— I have my reservations. I think airdrops have peaked. Uh, 41% of people like dumped the ZK— what is it, the ZK Sync token— immediately. Common, common.

No, the layer zero one just had— I mean, by the time this is published the Layer Zero. We're recording this on Wednesday. We have to record it early. Layer Zero is tomorrow, so Thursday. This release is on Friday, so that'll, that'll happen by now. I could see the Layer Zero one because they've put in so much freaking work. I could see it being one of the— like, actually, I could see it being the last big one that's done in this type of way.

I'd like to—

I mean, actually, that's not going to happen.

Never mind, there's going to be more after that, but The thing that matters most is like when we think about airdrops, I think we can on the margin like be just more judicious of your team of who you actually give tokens to. Whether they want to dump it or not, no, but at least like give tokens to someone that has put in meaningful work. They provided liquidity, traded, improved your KPIs in some way, shape, or form, go at it. If they have done some softer stuff, less tangible, maybe not. Maybe keep that in treasury because you're going to need it in 5 years' time. It would be like, I don't know, it's difficult. But, um, the thing that I was actually rather interesting is Ondo did not airdrop. I don't think there was an Ondo airdrop, and they're trading and the token's done fairly well. Celestia airdrop token's done fairly well. There's a lot of noise when you think about price, right? In a 6-month period that has been very choppy. So it's difficult to make these conclusions that an airdrop was wrong and it led to all this price collapse. I was actually on a panel of sorts organized by Movement. Hasid was there, Reagan from Lattice was there, uh, Rushi of course was there, and like, uh, Smokey from Barachain was there and Yeah, they were talking about that stuff and yeah, can we do ICOs? And Kobe's idea is great. Yeah, we all agree that. And so what? We can't do that today. So what do we do? I think the most important thing is actually liquidity. People should go listen to that market maker episode that we had with Jenny from Wintermute and Second Line guys. Yeah, the most important thing is to have liquidity out of the gate. Because, you know, like, also I think like people look at the spike, right? Oh, there's all these projects of this Burj Khalifa, like, you know, this is low liquidity. Now what if you have like some sort of bonding curve mechanism, like where, you know, you, you have like better price discovery? That's kind of like Kobe's thing. I hope that come, but like that I think is a solution. Like if you have good liquidity out of the gate, you can absorb the dump and like it's a smoother, orderly shift of who wants to have these tokens. Also, like, here's an idea out of the blue. So if you're in the US, in some of these jurisdictions, like, claiming the airdrop has tax implications. Sometimes you don't want to claim it immediately, right? Now maybe it doesn't matter because you're in June and whatever, but, um, what if you could elect to like not receive the airdrop, um, transfer it, give it back, or just like, can we make airdrops more fungible in the sense of like, in a project, give many of options to people, um, like get an allocation, claim it today, uh, and it's worth so much, claim it in a year, it's so much, claim it in 3 years, so much, or however you want to do it, or like do these things like, like do tasks on chain. And then that like unlocks or I don't know, but I'm, what I'm trying to say is that's the other thing. Like, I feel like, um, can we get to a spot or would it be nice to like, as a recipient of the airdrop to have a menu of options? Cause right now you're not presented with the menu of options, like claim or not claim. Yeah. And the process there most likely is I'm going to claim and sell because it's a lot of money or whatever, or I'm not going to claim because it has huge tax implications and I don't want to be taxable, and I'm going to wait till January or whatever. But would it be— maybe for you, like, would it be nice to have a menu of options which says— I don't know. I don't know what those options would be. I can think of a few, but I don't know. It doesn't improve the liquidity. It doesn't improve the low flow. I think a lot of times you would just want to increase the flow and the easiest way to do that is just give a very healthy airdrop. Yeah. Recently had this discussion with the project that was determining what percentage of the token supply was going to go to the community. I'm like, why? Why? Why? Like, no. Like, how much are you keeping for yourself? You realize you wouldn't be building this, right? And they're like, oh yeah, well, you know, the good point. I'm like, no, like, you should own more of it.

But yeah, yeah. Um, you missed this podcast on Monday or Tuesday, but we had Regan and Mike from Lattice on the pod. Um, and it was really— it was the whole podcast. We chatted for like an hour about just like airdrops and like releasing tokens to the community and why you should even do it and mark what's wrong with market structure. And it was all, it was all about this really good episode coming out soon. You know, a trend I'm starting to see is in the same way there's been like these KOL rounds last year, they're starting to be liquidity rounds where the only people who can access the rounds at these like discounted prices are people who can bring liquidity. You start seeing this.

Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, yeah. Liquidity mining like worked beautifully. Yeah, people dump tokens, whatever, but like Yeah, like, you know, you had Compound and Aave get meaningful liquidity and like, yeah.

All right, dude, that's all. That's all I got. I went to the Coinbase event, but that was last week.

Oh, yeah. By the way, fantastic thread. Fantastic. Can you summarize, like, for people that didn't see it, what the takeaways were? I mean, we'll link it to the thread because people should go read it.

Yeah. Um, 3 things that surprised the most, your top 5. Okay. Uh, first, okay, so it was really good event. There was, uh, there were 600 people. It was 600 people, uh, at this Coinbase, just to like set the stage, 600 people, State of Crypto Summit by Coinbase. Um, it was like this invite-only event, a lot of institutional folks, policymakers, founders. Um, 3 takeaways. Okay. First takeaway was the CIO of the ETF business at BlackRock and then Cathie Wood both said the same stat, which was about ETF flows. And the number is 80%. And the 80% number is really important because the narrative on Twitter is that ETFs are here, institutions are here. They both made the argument. They said, look, we have all the data. The institutions are not here. 80% of people buying these ETFs are self-directed people inside of their own brokerages, otherwise known as retail. So, uh, no, it's, it's, it's self-directed. Yeah, self-directed inside of their own brokerages accounts. It's like, it's like your dad buying in, in his, in his Fidelity account. Um, and that's really, really interesting, right? Because I think there was, what, $12 billion of flows in 3 months, um, or so, something like that. I might be getting that number wildly off. Let's call it Um, most of the money on—

most of the money wealth is in RIAs and hedge funds and institutions.

Yeah, so RIAs control 40% of the wealth in America, um, and most of the flows have been— it's not pension, it's obvious, it's not, it's not any of the big players buying this. 80% of the capital has been self-directed. So that was the first big one. Second big one was, um, Brian talking about the Coinbase strategy. So Well, he said, let me see if I can get a quote. Actually, I don't need to quote this, but he said, look, there are someone's— Kathy and him did a fireside chat and Kathy said, Brian, what are your— what are you most excited about right now? He said, look, there are 3 things or 4 things I'm thinking about at the company. One most exciting thing by far is Base. That's the most important thing at Coinbase is Base. Numbers 2 and 3 are derivatives business and then our smart wallet. So you got Base at the top, then you've got the derivatives business and the smart wallet and the smart wallet, which makes onboarding much easier. And then he said, fourth is we're pushing international. So today, so the last piece of the puzzle for us is, is international. 17% of Coinbase's revenue today is international. It's the first, first quarter where international has grown faster than US was Q1. And so what they've just done internally is he was very transparent. He shared a lot about the strategy of the company, said they just picked 10 markets where they're calling them the go-deep markets and they're almost going to blitz these markets like Uber blitzed markets and just like really try to take over. Because if you look at— yeah, you can actually look at SimilarWeb for some of this data. Coinbase has like 90% of the market share in the US of exchanges in terms of like page— just in terms of page views and traffic and stuff like that. And even in terms of volume, they usually sit around 70% of US volumes. But international, they're like minuscule. They're very, very small in international markets. And so they're about to blitz the hell out of these 10 markets. So that's really interesting. And that's interesting because it's— Coinbase is obviously one of the biggest companies, but it has trickle-down effects, right? It starts to impact maybe how Kraken thinks about their business and how Circle thinks about their business. So that was interesting. I said one other quote was centralized exchanges will be great for a bit, but they're just a moment in time. Eventually it's all going to be peer-to-peer with no intermediaries and all on-chain. And it's just a pretty remarkable quote, I'd say, from the CEO of the biggest US crypto exchange.

And then his willingness, the willingness of Coinbase to reinvent their business model is impressive. It's amazing.

Yeah. So, and then the third takeaway was so the summit last year, I think last year was the first year they had it. It was all infrastructure. It was L2s, it was Base, it was infrastructure. This year there was, there were truly zero conversations about infrastructure. It was all about apps and payments and usage.

Um, it's getting its moment, right? Yeah. What is it? TipLink in Solana? Yeah.

I just feel like, I feel it in my gut. We're on the precipice of like an actual move into— I think, I think by— I think I'm 6 months early here, but like a move, an actual move into consumer. I think there's gonna be new marketplaces. I mean, we had GeoNet on the pod and like, Man, I was listening to that being like payments, DePIN, AI.

AI is later, but payments and DePIN is related because a lot of, a lot of activity on-chain will be by agents, not humans.

I think that's a next cycle. I think that's, I think that's going to be a next cycle thing. But like DePIN and payments. Yeah, it's just I remember this experience I had the first time I ever made a Uniswap transaction. And it was just so like, like just click, right? It was like the financial system will work this way. I don't know how long it'll take, but eventually the financial system will run on DeFi rails. I'm starting to have that for the first time since that experience. I'm starting to have that with Deepin a little bit where I'm just like, man, like—

Well, the thing about Uniswap is not so much like it's something— it's hard to appreciate, right? Because people was like, yeah, obviously this is how Robinhood works. The reality is no, like you have to explain it and counterparty risk and all this stuff. You know, and then more sophisticated people like, well, you know, a centralized order book model is superior than an AMM. And you get into this like, you know what I mean? DePIN is like so concrete. Like you want a data point? Yeah, it's a fraction of the cost, has better coverage. How about that? Zero. That's it. End of conversation. Like, yeah. So it's so in your face, so tangible. And And also I think bootstrapping networks is super capital intensive. And I guess it was a bit of an oversight, but think about the miner, like the hash rate, that alone, the willingness of people to bootstrap this incredible network that is everywhere, that people expend CapEx out of their own pocket, millions, billions of dollars. Yeah. Ready? To mine something that they had, think has value. Like compare that to like trying to bootstrap that network in a traditional way. One company raising money, venture money. It's super hard, right? Yeah. The challenge with GeoNet and deep-end networks is, by the way, no deep-end network trades at above a billion. Yeah. Not HiveMapper, not GeoNet, not— I think the market's kind of sleeping on it. I think that the challenge The market is not entirely wrong. The challenge will be the monetization aspect. How you actually can— because, you know, when people like cellular towers, look at American Tower, like hugely, like, prints money. Look at mobile networks, like, they make a ton, a ton of money. Can deepened networks translate coverage to revenue? That's the thing that I— as I was— you can get the supply side, you can incentivize, but can you actually get the demand side to buy this? Demand side, I think, is there more so the monetization aspect. Like GeoNet, like, has mapped and has coverage, uh, for GPS location data far more than like Web2 companies. Web2 companies make orders of magnitude more money. So at what point— and that's the question I forgot to ask Mike— but at what point can you start showing translation of you have all this coverage, how do you monetize? No, I think I think if the product is very good, the coverage is very good, the reliability is very good, the hardware is up to par, then there's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to charge maybe exactly the same or a slight discount because you have less overhead, right? As an organization. So you should presumably, yeah, the market should set that price. But anyways, that's the thing. Like, look at Filecoin revenue, Dropbox, and Box. Like, you know what I mean? Like, These are the comparisons that I think I'd like to bring in maybe more discussion to this at a later time. But that's the thing that I am just— that's, I think, what will unlock deepen more so from like a market standpoint, right?

Yeah. Anyways, good Coinbase event. Oh, also BlackRock CIO said, look, we used to think these networks would be— we'd end up going on-chain, but it'd be in these permissioned networks. Now we're 100% convinced it's going to be in permissionless networks. That was cool. Okay. Unfolding right now, there's this Kraken hack. You seen this? Yeah. Okay. So let me— I mean, I'm doing this in real time, so bear with me. But so Certik posted— Certik posted, we found a series of critical vulnerabilities in Kraken's exchange which could potentially lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, starting from a finding in Kraken deposit system, etc., etc., etc. I'm not going to read the whole thing. We can link in the show notes. But basically Certik posted that they'd found a vulnerability and they posted like the whole timeline and they said, in the spirit of transparency and our commitment to the Web3 community, we're going to put— we're going to public to protect all users' security, etc., etc. So then the CSO of Kraken, Nick Percoco, who's widely known as like being the best CSO in crypto. He's like— he's— Kraken security is— he's like— he's like the guy. He's the guy. Yeah, he's like the guy. So, so anyways, he posts, he goes, Kraken security update. On June 9th, we received a bug bounty program alert from a security researcher. No specifics were disclosed, but their email claimed to find an extremely critical bug. He says what we— what I know to be true as well. Every day we receive fake bug bounties. They get it, I'm sure, 10 times more than we do, 100 times more. But we get that every day. Found a bug in Blockworks. I'm going to change the whole website. You can't take everything seriously, he said. But look, we did. We assembled a cross-functional team. To dig into the issue. Within minutes, we discovered an isolated bug. This allowed a malicious attacker to initiate a deposit onto our platform and receive funds in their account. To be clear, no client's assets were at risk, etc., etc. We triaged the vulnerability as critical. Within an hour and 47 minutes, we had mitigated the issue. Here's where it gets interesting, though. The individual discovered the bug in our funding system and leveraged it to credit their account with $4 with $4 million— with $4 million in crypto. This would have been sufficient to prove the flaw, file a bug bounty report with our team, and collect a very sizable reward under the terms of the program. Instead, the security researcher disclosed this bug to two other individuals who they work with, who fraudulently generated much larger sums. They ultimately withdrew nearly $3 million from Kraken— from their Kraken accounts. This was from Kraken's treasuries. Not client accounts. And this has completely backfired on Certik. Let me just read some of these tweets. Certik are absolute clowns, deserve to be banished from the industry. I will never do business with them. I would never hire their current employees. Next up, too bad there isn't a way to short Certik. Step 1, steal Kraken funds. Step 2, fails— fail to report security flaw for 3 days. Step 3, brag about exploit to other researchers. Step 4, researchers repeat the exploit. And tornado cash the funds. Step 5: Go on crypto Twitter and pretend to be white hat and martyrs. So this seems to be really backfiring on Certik. I haven't fully dug into it, but I was actually at Blockworks Beer. Some folks were speaking not so elegantly or friendly about Certik. So yeah, this seems to have really backfired, but it'll be interesting to see this develop because I think Certik is the biggest smart contracting auditing firm in crypto today in terms of just size of company and revenue, not in terms of Spearbit. Like Spearbit's amazing. And there are, there are other folks have very good reputations, but I'm pretty sure Certik is the largest by, by size. Yeah.

I don't think that's like the best metric, but yes, I think you're right.

Yeah. I mean, they've, I mean, just in terms of, they've raised like $300 million. They're just a large run— the largest. Yeah.

They're like the EY, Deloitte of like—

yeah, they raised from SoftBank, Tiger. They've raised $290 million. Like, they're a big, big law firm. So, wow. Anyways, I don't want to end on a bad note. No, I had lunch with, um, Rich Woodman, head of strategy, head of crypto strategy at Google. Uh, Google is taking crypto very seriously, I would say. I think everyone's sleeping on that. Um, really interesting. They've got a quite a large crypto team. They've got 3 fully developed products, and I think we'll actually see Google push pretty deeply into— be more public about what they're doing in crypto. So that was cool. I saw that too.

Yeah. Yeah.

What else?

Well, I've been reading a lot. Physical Kindle. Amazing. What are you reading? I read a lot of the stuff that people posted on that thread. See, who was it? Someone recommended— oh, Robbie from Immutable said read 10x Is Easier Than 2x. That was a really good book. Like the title seems like, I don't want this.

The idea that like it's actually hard. It's all about— I could imagine what that story is about.

It's actually quite good. And then yeah, just been reading a lot. So it's nice.

I have the best AI thing I think you'll ever read. Or that's a ridiculous statement. The best AI thing that you've— that I have ever read. Okay. It's called Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. It's about 150 pages long. What? By Leopold Aschenbrenner. Xia Chun? I'm not sure. It is a series of essays about this guy's inside look into the AI industry. It— I've been— I'm on hour 5 of reading this thing. It's— I'm still not done, so it's taken me a while. I'm a slow reader, but it's really, really, really good.

Nice. I like that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick it up, read it this weekend. Yeah, I'm gonna try to lift whatever, whatever it is. Can you send me these stats and then I'll report back? Whoever the listener—

you can't lift. I just— like, I can't run, dude.

What makes you think that I can't lift?

I just, I just got a feeling. I don't think you got that dog in you. Listen, listen, listen.

You put a FRAC in permissionless, people do fights. Let's do a hit. Put it this way. Put a gym in the corner of permissionless instead of a stupid booth. That's actually a great idea. And let's pump because I'll pump the shit out of you, dude. I'm going on the record. I will— 8.05? Those are rookie numbers. You got to pump it up.

These are fighting words. These are fighting words. Wow. All right.

You ever seen the, the, the, um, Wolf of Wall Street? Those are rookie numbers. You got to— Those are rookie numbers.

Pump them up.

Try to pump them up. I'm just— Permissionless?

It's going to go down.

I will lift more than you in whatever combination, the 3 disciplines you want. You've vastly underestimated.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Oh, boom. Yeah. Was it? Yeah. All right. This is Ronnie Coleman. I bet Jason is listening to this being like, I'm going Ronnie.

I'm going Ronnie Coleman.

I bet he's listening to this being like, are you fucking kidding me? We have to put a gym on the floor for visionless?

Just a rack. Just a rack. Just like a, you know. All right. Let's go. And we have Mona, like, we got Toly, Mona, like, uh, Keoni, you.

Toly, when we talked to him, was trying to hit the thousand club, so that dude's all right.

Come on, whatever Toly, uh, lifts is the price target of Solana cycle. That's nice.

All right, game on. Oh, game on.

Oh, I'm gonna have so much fun. Let's do it. All right.

Good place to end it. Place to end it. Good chat. Good chat. I'm going straight to the gym. I'm going to the gym to cancel the rest of my calls.

Get that creatine and go straight to the gym. I'll see you later. All right. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to comment and shitpost it. We'll be, we'll be reading those.

Peace. All right. You heard about Sei a couple of times. Just want to give them one last shout out. Big thanks to Sei for sponsoring this episode of Empire. There are a ton of reasons to build on Sei. If you want to get in touch with them, you can reach out to me. I'll put you in touch directly with the team. You can also get in touch with them on Twitter @SeiNetwork. You can follow the journey @SeiNetwork. They are currently live. They've got Sei V2 on public devnet today. Mainnet goes live later in Q2. Really excited to have Sei sponsoring and partnering with us on this episode of Empire.