Movement Labs' Token Launch & Ecosystem Strategy | Rushi Manche

If the token goes wrong, you'll have 1,000 "I hate you" comments and "You should go to death," and people will dox my address and send God knows what to my address. Or the token goes well, you'll be King Caesar and people will like, period, right? So there's really no in-between.

Any like contractors, consultants who actually were helpful in this whole process?

There's no contractors or consultants that know anything about this process.

Okay, that's what I figured.

But because it changes every month. What worked last month doesn't work today. Works for me, doesn't work for the next person because like the markets change, right? When the market tanks 50%, you're not getting the same deal you got 6 months ago.

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All right.

What's up, everybody? We got Rushi from Movement Labs. Big week for, for Rushi. What's up, fellas?

So, guys, I think we should do—

Rishi, could you— can we get the whole thing out of the way of the whole eyebrow situation going on on X? Like, can you just turn around for everyone?

How do we—

Yeah, give us the side-by-side look.

Is this the side-by-side look? We want to confirm it's a real Rishi on this pod. I don't know, man. I'm having doubts.

Yeah, no, I just gained weight. So that picture, that was from 2 years ago. I was in college and I was eating like dorm food, so naturally I was like nutrient deprived and also like obviously wasn't launching a token. And then like obviously like 2 years later I'm going to get fatter. I probably put on like 25 pounds and then everyone's like, oh, it's not the real— like, I can't even— I can't even— like, it was pretty funny because it was mostly satire, but people like generally hit me up and they're just like, yo, did you get like some— something done? Like, are you okay? Like, people were checking in on me, which is really sweet, but also like Guys, I think it was 25 pounds. I guess it was like that much.

But anyways, 25 pounds of muscle.

No, it's fat, bro. It's fat. It's fat. But I grew out the stache. I grew out the mullet. So I'm like, I'm transforming.

Why is the mullet so in with Gen Z these days, Rushy? Can you give us a little walkthrough of this?

It's like, I think it's like, it starts with Australians. I think Australia was like the main mullet-stache combo. And then like, I actually don't know where it originated from. It just like, it's a Williamsburg thing as well. Like, I feel like a bunch of like the New Yorkers, um, Williamsburg all have like the mullet-stache combos.

Well, I'm gonna call you Rushie Maverick now from going forward. Wanted to have you guys on to talk about, there's a lot that obviously went on with MVMT launching. Maybe we can take this opportunity, we'll do the regular roundup, but just, um, get us up to speed on what's going on in MVMT. I mean, that there was a bit, big, big stuff happening this week.

Yeah, I mean, I can kick it off. Obviously had a token launch, which was probably one of the most stressful times of my life. I think everything came kind of last minute and honestly did not expect what happened to happen. I think I'd be a fool to say like, oh, expecting it to all go happily and the reactions to occur. But I think like directionally, I can go into kind of token launch strategy and kind of what my philosophy was. But usually there's 3 main categories. You have the airdrop, you can't mess it up. You have like sentiment, which is public and private sentiment that you can't mess up. And then you just have like ecosystem and having that lined up day zero, which is like exchanges, market makers, protocols live day zero. So I think most launches usually tend to mess up 1 or 2 of those. And I think, like, I mean, we don't know how it plays out for the next few weeks. I don't want to knock on wood, but I think we kind of nailed, um, all three of the circuits, um, which I would say 70% luck, um, and 30% skill.

Um, but yeah, so I mean, look, every— the— since Trump got elected, um, a lot of teams have now, you know, and given where the market is, have thought about you know, hey TG, let's, let's go. I mean, the market seems to be very receptive. What's going through your mind? You mentioned it's, uh, probably one of the most stressful times. Like, walk us through maybe as much as you could into the inner psychology of like what happens there. What was the, you know, because a lot, a lot of people that might be listening here, including maybe you, Dino, as well, like are thinking about a TG token launch. Um, just tell us more about that.

Yeah, I mean, like, directionally, anytime tokens go up, markets go up, it's a better time to launch tokens. There's more liquidity in the markets, exchanges are more willing to open up the great gates, there's more buyers, generally participants. From a Trump point of view, I think regulatory environment improves a lot. Like, even our general counsels were like, yeah, like, the rules and statements that we were leaning on for the last 6 months maybe don't apply. Today and we're able to be more risk-on. Obviously we still have the foundation structures and most US companies are still going to approach that. But I do think it's pretty interesting. I'm hearing incorporations like Wyoming happening. I think there's a lot more— I mean, Coinbase itself, right? They're listing a lot more memes recently. And I actually am pretty bullish Coinbase as exchange leading up to this because a lot of organic volume, there's a lot of institutional volume. When you look at like even SUI success, right, like you had the VanEck ETFs and like the ETPs, and a lot of these are custody through Coinbase custody or done through Coinbase exchange. So we're seeing a lot of that with Trump coming to office and people buying more crypto. Inevitably, that capital is now coming through institutions that are BlackRocks, the VanEcks of the world, and they're going through US-based exchanges. So I mean, Yana talked about this, like, at Permissionless, actually. I think that it's a great time to be an American crypto company.

Rushy, can you just take us way more behind the scenes? Like, what actually was happening? Like, how crazy is it to launch a token? You said it was one of the most stressful or toughest, I think, work experiences of your life. Like, take us actually behind the scenes. Like, what happens for you that we don't see as the public?

Where do I start? Let me start with the team, right? So obviously when you're building together as a team, everyone looks to the founders kind of as leadership and kind of direction, right? So launching a token is lots of variables, usually because you don't really know anything until oftentimes a few hours before TGE, whether that's with exchanges, whether that's the market makers, whether that's the market conditions. There's a lot of variables. I think it's way different than like traditional stock companies. Like, I feel like— actually, I've never IPO'd a company, but I feel like there's a lot more regulatory, um, clarity there. Like, you'll have your, uh, announcement and kind of lock-in date months before, sometimes years before. Um, actually, I actually don't know what to talk about in terms of IPOs, but I feel like there's a lot more clarity in terms of regular stock companies. While crypto company, it's like you can find out what exchange you're launching on right before TG and don't really have much clarity. So from our point of view, I think the team was scrambling for the last 4 weeks because, A, you're trying to line up all your financial capital, your market makers and kind of that stuff. You're trying to rally our ecosystem teams and get them on timelines. You have investors asking, when token? When token? When token? You have community members asking, when token, when token? I think for like, movement, like, people didn't really know we were launching a token until like right up to like 2 or 3 weeks before when we dropped the tokenomics. I think we approach strategy a little bit differently because we kind of have a different architecture and kind of general different principles. But I think like going specifics, like the team morale was something that I didn't expect. Like, obviously, like, there's a lot of stress for the first last few weeks. So people were like working non-stop, but pretty much the entire team. Um, and there's a lot of burnout, I would say, that I didn't expect to happen, which is pretty natural, right? You go through a very stressful time, and there it's a lot of inner conflict management, external conflict management. Um, thankfully, like, Cooper kind of did a really good job with that. He's my co-founder. But, uh, that's something I didn't expect. Um, I, I— and then in terms of like kind of launch plans. Like, I would actually text Santi about this all the time, right? There's a lot of deals that go on in the background, and as a founder, it's very difficult to make decisions because you only get one shot at this, right? It's not like, oh, you raise a Series A, you have like 3 different investors, you have like 5 weeks to decide, and you have like, oh, you can do another round if you mess up, right? If you mess up your token launch, your company's screwed. Um, and that's kind of how it's always historically went. So when you have like the gun to your head And fundamentally, you're the face of the company, right? So if the token goes wrong, you'll have 1,000 "I hate you" comments and "You should go to death," and people will dox my address and send God knows what to my address. Or the token goes well, you'll be like, you'll be King Caesar and people will like, period, right? So there's really no in-between.

Well, Rushi, I mean, I think on that point, like, it's actually pretty difficult, and I sympathize with founders because if things go very well, I don't think you get nearly enough credit. It's sort of like, obviously, like, we expected this, you know. We— there's sort of this sentiment in the community where it's like, if there's more downside, uh, because if things go south, like, they only blame you and the team. Um, but if things go well, it's sort of like, like, yeah, like, obviously, you're like, you know, and they don't give you nearly enough credit. And I, I bet it's so stressful. I mean, I've had the privilege of just seeing the evolution of how much you've, you know, how much you've grown the ecosystem. And it's been, you know, years. And maybe just give us, for the listeners that don't have that appreciation, like, this has been a long, like, this has been a long journey. I think of you as one of the founders that I've just— the amount of hustle, like, constantly is just, this is relentless. But like, you get to a point of like TG and people just see that like tip of the iceberg kind of thing. But, you know, obviously timing is important. Obviously market conditions are important. But if you take a long-term view, like a lot of this has been cooking for years. So like from your standpoint, like just, just give listeners kind of more perspective on the whole evolution of what, how you got to, you know, to mainnet and like TGE, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, it's like we start like our origin story was kind of bad that we started like 2 I think 2 years now ago, we were just 2 college kids, like, literally the brokest kids possible. Like, this is a funny story. Cooper sold his car, I think, 2 months ago, 2 months into the company, because we couldn't afford engineers. And that's kind of the anecdote I say because it was literally trenches. We were in the dorm room as, like, our office. But yeah, I think, like, we were never going to— like, I always say this— we're never going to be the smartest technologists. We were never going to be, like, the BlackRock, ex-BCG, and ex-McKinsey, like, fancy resume. But I think what we always understood was community ecosystem, because ultimately a chain is only successful or platform is only successful if you have builders that are loyal to you. And I think I always point to Tully in '21 to this, where obviously Solana was doing really well. And then '22, '23, SOL crashed. But Tully's relentlessness never changed. He was always in the trenches with builders. You saw him, like, still talking about products, still talking with Jito, still talking with Kamino, still talking with these blue chip protocols. And the strategy was still there. You still had the multi-coin doubling down. You still had Alameda, or after FTX, obviously, but you still had the major market makers saying, here's why SOL is a thesis. And I think that kind of inspires me. I very— like, totally is a role model to me in that Solana is successful because you have pretty much now all of like meme coin trading volume on Solana. You have all the biggest builders choosing SOL as kind of the platform to build on top of. And that's kind of what led to my journey for Solana. So we understood that principle 2 years ago because we were early Move builders. We knew kind of what the ecosystem was like and we wanted like an opportunity for that community-first, the ecosystem-first chain that brings the Move language. And yeah, it's been a journey since then. I think when we first started off, we had 100 nos before our first VC yes. And we were going to give up so many times. But obviously that's like a corny story I can get into. But I think since then we've evolved a lot. There's a lot of criticism that comes with that. People still look to me and they're like, oh, he's young, he's just going to scam. Even like the Move Mansion thing, people thought I genuinely bought a mansion because I launched a token. Dude, it's physically impossible for me to move my paperwork that much. And I'm like, literally in my Williamsburg apartment. That's not a mansion at all.

I saw something around like, yeah, there's like rats in the apartment.

Yeah, there's a rat trap on the ground.

Richard, do you think being a young founder is— there's this like new wave of founders, I'd say, like you and like Dino and other guys. Like, would you say being a young founder has been an advantage or disadvantage?

Yeah, so I think in terms of being a young founder, there's huge benefits, right? Like, you touch on like a lot of, I'm gonna say, energy. That's only possible because like, I don't have wife and kids, I don't have like a mortgage to worry about. It's like, there's a lot of benefits in that, like physical energy and mental energy. I can handle a lot more than if I was like 20 years older. But I do think there's obviously a lot of downsides. Like, obviously on CT, people tend to like get jealous, I'd say. It's like, oh, this like kid made money, he's going to be a scammer and grift the entire thing. Right. Which, like, better for— we've seen stories of that happening, so I kind of get where they come from. But there's generally a lack of credibility. It's an uphill battle that comes with being a young founder. And I think over time that stuff waves around as you prove yourself and kind of get more validation from your peers. But that's what we struggled with when we started off. Right. Everyone thought, like, oh, these are just two idiot kids, especially in the bear markets. But I think as success comes and as you prove yourself, there's still going to be haters. Obviously, there's still going to be people that think, like, you're in it for the wrong motives, you're in it for the wrong intentions. But ultimately, like, that's every young founder. Like, Zuck got this when he made Facebook. I'm sure Vitalik got it when he was starting Ethereum. But I do think young founders are net good for the industry.

Rishi, can you take me into some of the other, like, backdoor dealings of these tokens that I think just, like, You know, I'm overly curious about them. I know Santi was advising you a lot on this stuff. So like Santi, it probably comes as second nature to you. But I mean, here's, here's one thing, like the exchanges, like I saw you guys listed on— you guys got a lot of really good listings like BitHum and Upbit and Binance and Bitget, OKX, like Bybit, Huobi, all that. I mean, you guys are listed on all the exchanges. Like what actually goes into those?

Yeah, I mean, the specifics are probably difficult to put on paper, but generally it's like you're trying to align different markets. So there's Coinbase, which is more for like the US markets. There's Asia exchanges that have more Asian volume. Obviously Korea. I think the most amount of volume is happening and moving right now is Upbit. Generally that we see that especially after launch. Again, like you can't really go into specifics here because a lot of this taboo, which is unfortunate truth. Like I think like New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ have more clear reg— guidelines and clear guidelines for how to approach that. Well, the exchange game is more of a dance. It's about who you know and kind of like the narrative. I'll focus more on like how to approach it. I think like first thing you have to realize that it's exchange business is a business. The number one volume, number one kind of guiding light for these exchanges is net new users to the platform. So something like Polymarket, Um, I don't know when the token plan is there, but that would inevitably bring a lot more users to exchange platform, platforms, because Polymarket is a breakout crypto app. People— any exchange that would list Polymarket would probably attract, uh, users that have never touched crypto before. Um, and then if you look at like the 50th EVML2, you're probably not attracting that much net new users, which I actually think is leading to kind of decrease in infrastructure listings. It's much more difficult to do that, but I think again, the number one goal for the exchange is more users, more volume. So when you're kind of designing a company and if your goal is to launch a token, the number one question you should be asking yourself is, how do I bring more volume to exchanges and what's my narrative there? And I think for us it was like, we got lucky, right? Timing, like, MOVE was picking up after since we were at all-time highs. So we now is like 4.5 cents. So like this move narrative was especially hot, right? And then kind of like the proxy is on comparisons, right? So what even traders do is like, okay, if this token is trading at X amount of valuation and this token is trading at X amount of valuation, this is what this upcoming token should do. And again, I don't think I agree with the principles always, and I wish there was a better kind of free market, but that's how it works, especially in a lot of these liquid fund trading groups. So the, I think from MoveIn was like, oh, Sui is trading this, Aptos is trading this, here's this shiny new coin that could potentially track this and bring X amount of users. And I think it actually worked out and people have started doing that. Whereas like other, other projects don't really have a comparison, so it's more difficult for them to get on these platforms. So yeah, I think it, it comes to a lot on like who you know and luck as well as your general strategy.

I'd like to maybe just double-click a little bit on the exchanges and like when you talk to them, like, is it, uh, you know, they, they obviously carry a lot of weight, I think, but there's also market makers. How do you, from a maybe general advice, but like, how do you in that position like, um, negotiate with them or, you know, get fair terms? And by the way, like, you could also argue in traditional markets, like, lead underwriters, the JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, whoever's doing your IPO.

Yeah.

Like you go back and they're like, Facebook is an example, was terribly mispriced.

Yeah.

And these people do it for a living and they'll tell Facebook, hey, we're going to— the range is like $18 to $20 and they'll go out to the market. They'll like, you know, talk to big institutions who's going to anchor the IPO. And then all of a sudden the stock pops from $18 to like $60. And I'm sure someone at Facebook calls JPMorgan and Goldman says, guys, what the fuck? We just left so much value on the table. But it's like a lot of— it's like really hard to predict, even in traditional, more robust markets you would think have better price discovery. But it's always like a bit of a, a bit of a magic, the black box that goes behind it. Um, what, uh, what does that process look like from on the crypto side? Like, is there some sort of formula that they apply, the exchanges? Is there some sort of metric or percentage of tokens that they need, or they, you know, what is it that they look for the most from your standpoint?

You guys are trying to get me in trouble, aren't you? I'm not trying.

No. And by the way, don't feel— I'm not asking for specifics, but I do like— like, I'm just going to put like different examples. Hyperliquid, like, maybe give to like zero interactions with exchanges, probably. And then you have Squirrel, which, you know, gave an feels like a lot of value to the exchange. And there's everything in the middle. I'm just kind of curious what goes into that.

I think our information is public. I think it was like 2%, something like that.

Okay.

I think, look, so there's a lot of different ways that the percentages are calculated. First of all, it's on how much volume and kind of your total TAM here, right? So like some of us, if you're like a user of a smaller protocol, like you're expected FTV is like $200 to $500 million, um, the small exchanges will try to get like cash out of you or something like that is what I've usually heard of, um, and the bigger exchanges won't really bother, um, usually like the larger scale launches that scale from like $2 to potentially $20 billion FTV, um, then there's like this concept, okay, you want to get, um, exchanges to value in terms of A, obviously trading volume, expected FTVs and stuff like that. But then B, how much can they give to the users per se? There's various negotiation process that happen through there. So usually you'll approach and then it'll go back and forth and then to get to the final destination and the final agreement, there'll usually be dozens of conversations. So it's just a negotiation process like I would say any other platform. I do think there's a lot of different variables because there's like launch pools, there's like direct listings, there's like premarkets, there's like, um, I think we had like this airdrop thing that was technically the classification for it. But, um, it is a tricky battle, I'll say. And this— any—

I think—

okay, I'll take a step back. Anyone that promises you they're going to be exchange consultant or they're like working to be advisor, run away, run away. I can't tell you— okay, this is actually a good point— I can't tell you how many times I've been approached by these advisors that will get you listed and advise you. They'll take 5-8% to resupply and they'll guide you through the process. They don't know anything. No one knows anything. It's all a black box. And if they know anything, they're probably going to jail.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. And any investor that claims to be able to do that is also full of shit.

So just—

Were there any outside folks who were helpful? Like, you know, you have your investors, like Santi, it sounds like was actually quite helpful. Um, but was—

I don't think it was, to be honest.

Okay. Well, anyways, were there, were there any outside folks that you hired? Any like contractors, consultants who actually were helpful in this whole process?

There's no contractors or consultants that know anything about this process. Okay.

That's, that's what I figured, but—

Because it changes every month. What worked last month doesn't work today. What works for me doesn't work for the next person because like the markets change, right? When the market tanks 50%, you're not getting the same deal you got 6 months months ago. So like, there's like this— so you have like these advisors that do like, oh, exchange go-to-market and then market making stuff. Is that— like, if you talk to any market maker, they hate those groups that do that because they usually squeeze the market makers dry. Um, so I guess we can go through that process as the next topic because the biggest issue is like, okay, you have exchanges lined up, but how are you going to set up like the market makers and stuff? So you have usually like there's two main groups. I won't name drop, but I think most viewers who are familiar with it know, um, they will essentially do auction. So they'll say, okay, we have 50 market makers and we're going to do auction for 6 market making, uh, spots, and whoever bids the lowest amount, um, will get access to this protocol's, uh, tokens, uh, market making. The issue that you run into that in the platform and why it's historically underperformed, I would say, in most cases, unless it's like a $20 billion protocol in which it doesn't really matter, um, is that if you squeeze every market maker dry, they have no incentive to actually perform. So what they do is they'll put a contract and say, okay, whoever bids the lowest amount for this contract wins. So then you get a bunch of these like awful market makers that are obviously just trying to make $100 grand per month basically. Um, and then they actually are not performing any kind of volume. They're radically underperforming. There's no monitoring on them at all. Um, and then on top of these, these providers and these advisors will be like, look, we'll help you navigate exchanges and talk to like the bigger exchanges and figure out negotiations. The issue is that they have no knowledge about anything that goes on, and oftentimes they're frowned upon. So if you're a viewer and you're listening to this and you're getting approached by these people, run away. Um, in terms of like counsel, I would say like there are like investors that provide advice, right? Because Santi's seen it, like seen many launches. I've come to him for advice actually before launch. I was like, yo, here's the current situation, here's the current deals we have, what do you think? But ultimately, Santi doesn't know what's going on. Like, he doesn't— like, I doubt he has launched a token recently. Right. But even like someone like— I think W has been really helpful for me. She's like— I call her my mom. She calls me fat a lot and then also says really helpful words. But she kind of gets especially the Asian markets and launch strategies. But even her, she doesn't— she can't go speak. Like, she doesn't know how the exchanges go, how exchanges go, because it is a black box. And if anyone was to actually get in the box, That's insider trading. So again, like, run away from any of these providers. But I would say there are good investors that kind of know a thing or two. And there are like investors that will push you to launch a token and be predatory so they can dump it in 6 months. But I think generally, like, long-term investors have seen token launches, have seen what works and what doesn't work. And I would try to get those in your corner.

Rushi, when you think about a lot of times in this process people focus on penetrating and being active in certain markets, like, hey, let's, let's focus on Korea, let's focus on the, you know, on, you know, Chinese market or, you know, some other market. Did that compute into your thinking as types of exchanges that you prioritized versus not?

Yeah, I mean, 100%. I mean, if I pull up the movement chart, I think the biggest, volume is still up today. Yeah. I mean, we all know the Korean markets have the most amount of volume, like Upbit, Bitthumb are phenomenal exchanges and great people over there. But it's just different kind of markets there, right? So I think Yanowitz pulled up. It's just ridiculous how much the volume is there today. I think when we first launched, it was $3 billion in volume for the first 24 hours. I think at one point when we launched, we were the number one token on Upbit. As well as just like—

Rishi, why is that?

It's just like right timing. I think the move narrative was good.

But like, why is the move— why is that narrative— is it so— is that maybe like because APTOS is so hot in somewhere like Korea, then, you know, they're kind of chasing the move narrative? Like, is that, is that kind of how you think about it?

Yeah, I think like generally like move is pretty big in Korea. Like we had APTOS as a big participant, we had Sui as a big participant. And generally they look for like the third incumbent there. I think just generally like the infrastructure narrative still makes a lot of sense and we've also done a lot of work. So like for example, we co-sponsored KBW, it was us and Sui as the main title sponsor. So like we have a lot of on-the-ground troops in Korea that have been kind of working. But like even like 6, 7 months ago, I think we were like, oh, Korea is a top priority for us and then we want to really make sure that we're getting into retail communities there. So we have a bunch of like Korean groups that do like local PR, local like marketing there, but also like we dropped a lot of resources to be a title sponsor for KBW. Yeah.

How would you, for people that, you know, might not be, they should go listen to the pod that we recorded. I think it was like almost a year ago or, you know, earlier this year. But how would you describe MVMT in 1 or 2 sentences?

Movement is an Ethereum scaling solution that leverages the Move virtual machine. I think our thesis is Move and EVM on ETH. We love ETH as asset class. We believe it's a great source of liquidity. We believe in the Move language and MoveVM and MoveProver. And I think like the rise of modularity has introduced ability to mix and match So when I built the first DEX in Aptos, like, I think Aptos is a phenomenal tech stack and phenomenal L1. But the biggest issue that we ran into there was, okay, like, how do you get liquidity to this thing? And with L2s, the whole concept was bringing Ethereum ETH L1 security and ETH as asset class natively to DeFi apps and DeFi ecosystems. And I think we took this hybrid approach. We're like, okay, we believe in high-performance execution environments. I think if Dino was here, we'd talk about fluent and WASM-based expressivity. But we still believe in Ethereum as S-class. And actually, our architecture has evolved a lot since then. We rolled out this fast finale post-confirmation layer, which people call sidechain. I'm like, okay, we can get into that narrative. But ultimately, what it looks today is scaling Ethereum through alternative rollup frameworks, alternative VMs. And I think that's the direction that's more fruitful. We saw like honestly too many even L2s where there isn't much product differentiation. And most of these token launches erratically underperformed. I think that's something that Hyperliquid also taught, right? It's like a unique product, a new community leads to good performance. While it's like you look at most even L2s today, the community kind of got fucked over and then just like the product wasn't uniquely different to create a narrative. So there wasn't enough like retail interest in it. Where something like Move, obviously, there's only 3 main Move blockchains on market. It's still relatively young. It still feels like Solana in 2021. People are still looking for the next SVM. And I think that's driven a lot of interest in the Move system.

Yeah, there's certainly been a lot of developments on Move, whether you look at Sui or Aptos, like institutional adoption, like stablecoins coming onto these networks. Growth has been pretty remarkable over the last like 6, 7 months. Um, from your standpoint as someone who I, you know, is like a lead evangelist for Move, like what are, what have been some of the, what have been some of the more, um, like interesting things that you've, uh, tracked or consider to be like really turning points in like increasing awareness and interest in, in Move as a language, but also in move-based chains?

Yeah, so I think every metric in crypto is now gamble. Like wallets, we know, gamble. Transactions, we know, gamble. Um, TVL used to be cool until the TVL points program started. So now TVL can be bought. Like anyone can get a billion dollars in TVL in 3 months. So I think the only left metric that isn't gamble is a fundraise ecosystem projects where private venture capitalists, public venture capitalists are investing and supporting ecosystem projects. And I think that's been kind of my north star because ultimately if you have a crew, a set of, let's say, 20 projects that have all raised private venture, that have 4 years runway, they're going to be there when the token takes 90%. They're going to be there when a major exchange collapses and there's a big depeg, right? Which again, going back to Solana, which is studying the playbook, right? In 2021, Solana ripped, FTX collapsed. You still had the 20+ projects that were dApps in the bear market that Santi and you guys probably invested in that were really high conviction in Solana. And then when Solana came back up, those guys like Jupiter is at $9 billion, Jito is at $3 billion as well. These guys have built their own teams, built their own developers. And I think that's how you actually grow ecosystem community. So I think for MOO developer ecosystem, like, one thing that we're noticing is like, hey, developer counts. Like, first, first year it was 3.5%, 6 months ago 7.5% of monthly active developers. Now we're at 9.7% of monthly active developers, or MOO devs, and next year we'll hit 14.2%. So the MOO developer growth rate has outpaced SVM, um, mostly because you now have, uh, 3 $10+ billion chains that, um, have done phenomenal in terms of user acquisition and obviously launching successful products. But B, I would say like people actually get the technology. People get like Rust-based programming is powerful. People get that you can build highly secure and high-performing apps in Move. And honestly, people love the language. So we've been noticing that there's more developers coming in from like JavaScript Web2 backgrounds, and then these teams are getting funded. So for Move ecosystem particularly, there is more venture-backed teams in the ecosystem than the Labs company itself. As of today. Obviously that will change over the coming months, but I think that's been a personal priority and accomplishment of mine.

Rishi, who do you think— I think the altVM narrative makes a lot of sense. It's like, I mean, my one-liner for movement when people ask me about it is like, you're letting developers build— Move is a good language. You're letting developers build and move, but basically settle back to Ethereum where like there's a lot of liquidity and dev tools and all that kind of stuff. But there's all these altVMs. It's like, Eclipse and Movement and Fluent and Maiden and Cardesi and Fuel. And I'm sure the— Initia. I don't know if all these fit into the same bucket. Catalyst. Like, there's all these things. How many winners do you think there will be in this category?

I think Santi said this like a year ago, like the modular expansion was like this unraveling of different ecosystem projects from DAs, different sequencers, execution environments, and then you have a consolidation. Which is, I think we're getting to consolidation era right now, actually. I think a year ago when the modular expansion happened and when Sandeep said this, it was like you had everyone and their mom raising a new round for the shared sequencer or the new DA layer. And there's like 8 DA layers that were funded and there's like 20 execution environments. And I think that made sense for the unraveling. And now people are like, oh wait, infrastructure is rather fatigued to a degree. People want apps, people want public launches, fair launches. People want like actual products. So now we're seeing consolidations, and the consolidation comes down to, uh, whoever's best community, because ultimately your community is your user base. Um, any chain or product that screws over the community fundamentally dies. We've seen that with recent launches. Um, and then B, it's on ecosystem where it doesn't matter if you build a chain. There's 5 billion chains have been launched. It matters on when you get next bull market, whether you get next like gaming app to actually get with the Godzilla, right? Or the off the grid. So I think now we're entering the consolidation era where there will only be— I think like everything happens in pairs. So you had like Optimism, Arbitrum, you had Solana, AVAX, you had Aptos and Sui. I think for like this larger incumbent, there'll be another pair. Hopefully we're one of the pairs, but obviously it's too early to say. I think even for DAs, you have like Slothian, right? So usually these things happen in pairs. So for the execution environments and for the VMs, that would probably be my bet where there's probably two novel alt VM execution environments that win.

Yeah, I agree with that. Are you competing for Ethereum's existing user base or like Arbitrum and Optimism's user base or Move and Sui's, Aptos and Sui's user base?

I mean, that's the thing about crypto, right? Everything's competitive with each other.

It's all, it's all, yeah.

Like it's ultimately a mindshare game and attention game. So I can sit here and be like, I'm competitive with BearChain. When in reality means fuck your best friends, right? So I tend to not look at that lens because if I'm competing for 15,000 developers, I as an entrepreneur is not really accomplishing anything. My favorite analogy, I say, is more developers at Facebook today than all of crypto. So, A, when people tell me, like, oh, EVM has won, I'm like, won what? That's a great line.

Yeah, that's a great line.

And then, B, I'm just like, okay, we're still so early to the point of, like, it doesn't make sense for me to try to get 10 developers from Scroll or 10 developers from Optimism, right? A, it's like TVL is a usually predatory metric in that if I put a points program up tomorrow, I'll probably get a billion TVL in a month. So I'm not in this game for TVL for token go up game. It's more about, okay, how do you get the next Polymarket and drive that adoption? Like Polygon POS, no one talks about it today, but it drives so much volume because you have Polymarket on And I would argue that Polygon POS is doing more success for the crypto industry than majority of EML2s that have launched, and even like altcoins. So like the narrative often doesn't correlate with kind of sentiment, but that's a different story. But yeah, I think like the focus and number one North Star for the, the winning apps or the winning systems is successful apps. Like Solana is winning because they have pump, because they have like— you have all DeFi products basically choosing to build on Solana. And hopefully MoveIn will be kind of the coming on for the next few months. Mhm.

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I think we, um, I definitely agree with, uh, that, um, idea. A lot of what I've been thinking about lately is like there's a great, uh, A16Z, uh, blog post, I think a year— like, uh, sorry, a month ago or two. And they're trying to like assess how many like real users are in crypto. And I think they come to a metric of like anywhere from like, uh, 30 to 60 million, or 30 to 40 million active users. And, and it's like a great post, we can link it. And I looked at that and I said, gosh, like, it's, it's, uh, it's not a lot. Um, and of course, like, there's like, I think it's somewhere between 17% if you look at like all active users, or like what crypto.com discloses as like 200 million users. The reality is it's vastly less than that. And to your point around Polymarket, like, I just think as an industry, like, we have kind of 4 years to really get our shit together and really drive like non-speculative use cases. And maybe that's deep in, likely deep in And like, yeah, stablecoins are great, but like for what? Like the non-speculative use cases of a stablecoin payments. And of course it has to do with a very good developer experience. You know, that was the impetus having you and Dino on because I do think it starts there, right? Like, you know, there's more developers that likely are going to be onboarded through and learn about Move. It likely is easier than Solidity. Um, and maybe that a lot of that started with like Libra and that consortium and getting people interested. And like, I would think that I'd be curious to understand from your standpoint if you, if you are seeing what type of developers are coming to the, to build on, on, on Movement. Is that, you know, projects that exist in other chains that appreciate the benefits of Movement, or is it also like net new that are coming from you know, Web2 that are saying, hey, gosh, like this is actually a language that I understand, uh, that is really secure and that I can get on board with like deploying on chain without feeling that I'm gonna get hacked. And like, you know, with Solidity, it's actually, you know, a problem, right? And with Move, it's really not. And so, yeah, I'm kind of curious, like how— two parts of the question. One is when you talk about ecosystem, how much of it is like, what are you seeing on the developer side? And what are you seeing then on applications and then users to drive the non-speculative adoption?

So I'll start with the application side. I think the main area that I want to enter now, and I think is we're entering, is the next Pinterest variation or the next Snapchat variation built with crypto. And we've been saying this for a while. Even like DeSo was talking about this back in the day before all that stuff happened. I think we're at the point where infrastructure is performant enough. You're not really bottlenecked by customizations. You want your own AppChain, go and call Dera, Conduit, launch your own chain. If you want like a different data layer, you can do that. If you want like different L1s, you can do that. You have all the infrastructure in the world. And now it's a question of, okay, what does the utilization mean? And I think where we get to is like when we're building Pinterest, when we're building Uber right now, there's no incentivizations for users. There's no baked-in incentivization models. Um, what crypto enables you to do is essentially when you build content or when you create, uh, something in the world, right now you can own the asset. And it's always been like the read, write, own, right? Own the asset and get rewarded for that. Um, and I think like there's early ideas for this. Like you had like the, the, the music— I forgot what it was called— but, uh, there's like this music to earn back in the day. And then you had Teleport, which is like this Uber to earn. And I think those were too early because, A, America wasn't ready for it. And I mean, I'm American, so I'm going to say a lot of these things, but I think it's going to start from America where we have Snapchat, Pinterest, these things being built on crypto rails, starting in Silicon Valley probably, or New York City, one of these hubs where they look at crypto as a way to monetize their likeliness and then distribute rewards on a discrete ledger. I think this is how it's always started. Like, you had like Web2 when you had original hardware being built overseas, but ultimately the software boom happened in Silicon Valley and happened in the States. And now the regulation's in town. Now we have new regime with Trump, and now that, you know, we'll have a lot more forward thinking for institutions and platform providers. Like Stripe just acquired Bridge, right? Now you have those APIs a lot more accessible. So now that developer experience, A, from infrastructure level is 10x better, but now from like a sentiment point of view, it is now cool. You go to Berkeley, I was talking to someone yesterday like, Cal— like Berkeley Blockchain Club. The Berkeley Blockchain Club has like doubled in like student population, is now one of the top clubs at Berkeley. And most of the startups now coming from like the Berkeley Accelerator are thinking, hey, how do I get crypto involved here? Obviously that means obviously Bitcoin being an all-time high helps, but it's also like, look, I can potentially launch a token, um, and get obviously liquidity much faster. But in terms of like go-to-market, I can incentivize my users much quicker than going public on 10 to 15 years. Um, so I think this ties into different models that Santi, you're working on private equity side where you have, um, kind of Web2 companies right now that don't really per se have ability to IPO. Um, venture in Web2 is underperforming anything. Web2 venture, uh, that Web2 venture is getting their ass kicked. Uh, so now you have like this, these really promising Web2 companies that now see crypto as A, ability to distribute value, but B, ability to incentivize their users. So I think there's going to be these unlocking point where you have existing Web2 companies that will go through private equity or go through crypto consultants to launch more tokens. Like, I do think there will be Web2 companies that have been blocked by IPOs that now will turn to tokens. Like, we can meme about Enron, but maybe that's like the direction, right? And then now you— and then you have new builders that, that previously didn't look at— like, looked at crypto as a scam, basically. But now you have Stripe APIs for bridge, uh, stablecoins, which now enables you to do payments. Uh, that stuff didn't exist 4 years ago when people were talking about music to earn and Uber to earn. Uh, So I'm looking for the next Pinterest in crypto.

Yeah, I think, I think university clubs have always been really, um, really important and have kind of flourished. Um, and yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, uh, it's not just like launching a token. I think like there, there could be a lot of variations where companies use tokens. I mean, I guess you, you use a token to acquire users, or you use an NFT. By the way, it could be an NFT The simple hack is like most, most B2C companies do not understand or have a direct relationship with their customer. Like put a QR code in the store. When someone sees a QR code, they're going to scan, they get something for free. It's common psychology, like business sense. And as soon as they, they get airdropped something, they're going to want to onboard it to Fantom because they want to see what they're getting. It's like the unboxing thing. And that's an NFT. Once they do that, you can stitch digital with physical. You can retarget that customer. You own that customer relationship directly. What does that do to your P&L? It lowers your customer acquisition cost. Like, I mean, that alone, that alone takes us 10x to where we are now in terms of users, in terms of activity, non-speculative activity. The LTV of that user is going to stick around on-chain no matter if Bitcoin's at $100 or, or back to $30, you know what I mean? Like, the problem we have as an industry is that that 20 to 30 million users that a16z is pointing to is not very sticky. Because if Bitcoin's back at $30, yeah, that number is going to go down.

Well, also, like, 4 to 5, those users, we kind of know what those users are, right? Like, yes, like, you, you use the DEX, the 50th DEX on this new shiny L2 and get their token. Like, Yeah, yes, you can call that user. It might be some like farmer like Indonesia doing it, but it's not really like a, like a power performing user that like the industry, like that creates sentiment, right? So I think like the real users that we're targeting, it's like the application users. I don't want, I don't want to talk about chain users. I refuse to talk about like active wallets. I think that's the stupidest thing ever because you can go to a bot farm and like pay someone like $100 grand a month and do that and like pretty quickly. Um, I do like, uh, you remember that Libra, that Libra chart?

They had like every company from PayPal to Uber.

Yeah, like big consortium chart.

That's supposed to be a moment.

Yeah, yeah, like that's what I want, and I think it will come back, like, because all those companies are now reactivating their interest in doing this. I don't think, uh, I'm not of the mind that like these businesses are no longer skeptical about the industry. They just they have internal working groups and have had for a while that now are like, okay, the design space is opening up and maybe that takes another year. Once Trump gets elected, maybe there's one pioneer out there that does it. Stripe doing this bridge acquisition is like going to go down as an Instagram kind of moment for the space. PayPal launching their own stablecoin is huge, right? Then you see a path towards every company launching their own stablecoin to circumvent the 2 to 3% merchant processing fees. But yeah, like Polymarket is very volatile in the sense of election drove a big part of the adoption. But there's just so many. From your standpoint, like you have like an ecosystem, you have a treasury now that is not insignificant. How do you put that to work? Like, do you have internal priorities that you say, hey, listen, we're going to grant and we want to really own this category? Like we want to own payments, we want to own social, we want to own NFTs for business. Like, is there something internally that you guys really want to own?

I've been at treasury for 3 days, so I'm still putting that together. But I think, like, okay, I'm going to start on the original point you made on the DM chart because I have it pulled up in front of me. Like Lyft, Shopify, I'm looking at the list of these charts and I think, like, The two main market signals I would look for is when Lyft or Uber integrates some kind of crypto integration, and when Pinterest or a Pinterest variant emerges to market crypto. I think those will be the two signs that the adoption is here and coming. I think Stripe doing it is the big moment that you touched on. And then you have, going back to the original chart, you have Spotify and some of the folks that once they do it, I think Shopify already did this with Solana. Um, but once you see like the Shopify, Lyft, Uber, one of those doing it, the pinballs all fall. Because as soon as one of them does it, and as soon as them like, even like merchant costs, right? So like, uh, the ability for like Uber drivers to get paid USDC so they're not getting hit with like transaction fees. Uber and Lyft would save like 3 to 5% and not give it to Visa and MasterCard and instantly outcompete other rideshare platforms. And I'm sure they're talking about internally. I'm sure like there's smarter people than me going through this, but it's instantly a 10x accomplishment just by accepting stablecoins. And I think that will be the unlock that hopefully happens in the next 2 years. And I think, like, going back to our strategy, like, I think, like, one thing that we're, like, I'm really bullish on is, like, this younger audience of developers. Because when we look at, like, Web2 and look at Zuckerberg, look at Pinterest, all these other ideas— I keep bringing up Pinterest because that's, like, my dream crypto app. Those are all younger founders. The founders are, like, 21 to, like, 25. They don't have the best brand name, they don't have a million dollars to pose, but they have this hunger and fire. And I think that's something that I'm really passionate about personally, is like, if I can go to— I know the whole concept of big infrastructure companies going in blockchain clubs has always been bad. It's always been like, okay, this big Ethereum Foundation, somebody's going to sponsor a hackathon at Berkeley, get a few grants and call it a day. But the issue is that no one really cares about that. These builders and students are going to do it. Get $10 grand and then go get a job at McKinsey. That's what I'm trying to avoid. I think like my next phase is like, what me and Cooper did really well is that we were able to start moving because we had like originally two advisors, investors, not advisors, but investors that were like, hey, you're really smart, you're really talented, build this thing. And actually is the Ava Labs people. Luigi and team were like, look, you, you're really smart, you're brilliant, move. We wanna move Subnet. And what they did is they essentially provided end-to-end support. And that means responding messages, explain to me what crypto was, basically how running a company was. And I hate the whole process of formal accelerators and hackathons because it doesn't feel genuine. I think what these builders are missing is that lack of connection to someone who's made it, who's done the kind of zero to one, and then B, kind of understands how to navigate all the difficulties of starting a founder, starting a company as a written-off founder. Um, so I think like, I don't know how I'm gonna do it actually. I'm still trying to process this, but we do have resources, right? Um, and now it's like, okay, we have, we have a lot of ideas. We want like that Lyft integration, we want that Spotify integration, we want that, uh, like kind of consumer app that we built that we're really interested in. Um, how do we incubate and accelerate those? And I think the age group that no one's touching is like the college dropout mentality. And I think that's going to be my focus for the next 6 months.

Well, certainly they look to you as inspiration and very aligned with your story. Look, I'm not here to give advice, but in my conversations with foundations and just looking from the outside in, it is— if I were in their seat, I would be way more aggressive. Because if you have that amount of treasury, the community grants and the ROI of that is very unclear to me. I would be very focused in being very targeted and saying, going to a big company and saying, hey, listen, guys, here's the playbook. Like, literally drop them a— be like, this is how you do it. Like, let us do a pilot for you. We'll put it all on the table. Dev resources. The chain that's done it probably best, in my opinion, is Avalanche for finance. They just have a ton of people working from like Citi. They somehow like recruited everyone from there and they've gotten BlackRock and KKR and Accenture and all these like they've owned kind of the fintech vertical. And, you know, with Avalanche 9000, I mean, I didn't fully appreciate, but I've had so many conversations with them now. I actually see Gianluigi again today and it's like, and Morgan, it's, it's pretty impressive what they've done. Not to say that you couldn't go after that, but like I think if you, if you really wanted a Pinterest, go to Pinterest. The stock is down. Like, you know, there's all these public companies, like, they're all struggling the same stuff. And it's— and you simply just go to them, knock on their door, say, guys, this is Move, the language. This is movement. Um, there is a user base that exists in crypto that is young, potentially high LTV, that you haven't been able to track. And you could acquire on-chain. And then there's also a user base that you already have that is going to really appreciate the crypto stuff, the NFT stuff that is fun, engaging. And the combination of all that takes your business from 1 today to 1.5 or 2.

Yep. And I've talked to Luigi a lot about this, and I think that the biggest issue that they run into is like these things move too slow. Like you want to talk to JP Morgan, it takes 4— like Morgan's a phenomenal— like she's been crushing over there, but she's mentioned like it takes forever for these things to move, which is like, again, there's probably better— like, I think Ape Labs and that team is doing a phenomenal job, but I don't think I'm going to be good at that. I want to test, burn, and try something in 6 months because ultimately the way I live, I've always run movement, is through the 90-day principle. You have 90 days to prove yourself to the market and stay relevant. So every initiative that obviously have longer-term initiatives with the foundation, and that's going to be something we talk about, but I'd rather be on like, you have 90 days. And I think this is actually what private equities— I came, coming back to this, very interesting. Like, if you can acquire, uh, or like semi-acquire a struggling Web2 company that has a lot of potential, that has a team that doesn't really have ability to— has been around for 10 years, hasn't been ability to get liquidity, you can say, look, it's very, very easy for you to add crypto to ecosystem and become a very prominent crypto app. Um, like we like talk like like, like mortgages, right? The whole like house process and buying a house— buying a MOVE mansion is very, very difficult to do. I don't even know how to buy a MOVE mansion. Um, if some way we could settle those with crypto and go to like this— the dying realtors and dying, uh, settlement groups that for these house manufacturers and these, uh, these contractors, you're solving a multi-billion dollar market, um, in 3 months.

I mean, uh, yeah, thank you for laying out the thesis.

LP should invest.

Yeah, no, no, no, listen, no, no. Well, but you know, the business I'm looking at has 22 million subscribers.

Yeah, and that's the thing, those 22 million are more real than whatever Jason—

that higher LTV because they're going to be sticky. They don't care if Bitcoin's at 100, 200, or 30. You're servicing a core product, you're settling on-chain, it's invisible. You want to activate them, with other things, great. You know, you want to serve some NFTs, yeah, lower your customer acquisition cost, uh, loyalty programs, retention, you upsell them stuff. I mean, honestly, I mean, again, but I do think that, um, I'm glad to hear you say it because I do think we have 4 years to figure this shit out. If that 20 to 30 million number doesn't grow by like 2 to 5x, We're gonna— who knows what the next administration is going to look like? Who knows a number of things? But the best we can do, going back to like Uber, like Uber was so successful in spite of the amount of, um, fierce regulatory backlash and lobbying efforts against it in everywhere in the world, from Colombia to the US to Europe, because it was— the consumers love that product. If you're a politician and you shut it down in Paris, you heard from every constituent was like, what the fuck? Bring it back. And you had to prioritize the taxi lobby or your constituent base. And ultimately, because it was a killer product, Uber prevailed. And we have 4 years to get to that spot. And so I would encourage you to think about— yeah, I think the position that you're in is good because you're tapping into something that the market has already seen. That Libra chart, I think, is so powerful. When I first heard the pitch for Aptos, which I was an investor in, I am an investor in, it was like, it was that. It's like, bring that back. And the benefit of now is to, I don't think it's gonna, to your point around like Avalanche saying that it, it has taken a lot of time. There has been a lot of inner internal resistance of businesses, just innovator's dilemma. They don't want to change processes because they are making money and they don't necessarily care. But there, I think there's like a lot of other businesses that are kind of broken or really hit a roadblock. And because the regular— because you have a president that is buying stuff on-chain and has an NFT collection, I would bet that they would move marginally faster.

I think like going back to Uber example, like if you went to taxi companies and told them build Uber, they would never do it or adopt ridesharing. They'd never do it. But because Uber came to market and was incumbent small scrappy startup that scaled, taxi drivers had to succumb. And now like taxis, New York taxis are in the Uber app, right? So same way, like, I don't think it makes— I actually disagree with the approach of like going to JP Morgan and getting them to like, as getting into— because I think that'll take years versus you get a competitor. And that's what I'm focused on. Get a competitor of 10 college kids that are going to build the next, uh, like scrappy, uh, banking startup or the next real estate startup. Uh, give them crypto VCs, put crypto, uh, backing, um, launch a token, um, and have it compete with the Web2 incumbents. And I think we've seen this before. We've seen like Web3 Spotify, Web3 real estate, and like all these things had come to market. But I think like that was the wrong time. You couldn't really do that 5 years ago. And I think that's when Audius was— that's what the name Audius was doing this like 5 years ago. It didn't make sense to that. Like crypto is like not in the right space. If you try to pull off Audius today, you actually— actually, Anil from Delphi and I've been jamming on this and we want to do something together on this. But like, for example, like house music creators, like there's really shitty marketplace for them right now. Um, and right now they're getting kind of screwed by big labels. Um, so like my job and like kind of what I'm interested in is empowering that group of like 10 college kids to kind of take on those incumbents, build like the next Uber, like kind of Genesis. And then that creates pressure because if you're a big company and you see like this smaller crypto company is getting TAM and stealing market share, you're forced to start taking more seriously. Whereas like if you go to the big organizations and say, hey, JPMorgan, can you think about crypto? They'll be like 8 years down the line, put on roadmap, even though they have like a 200-person team. Yeah, but I think you need both. I think Avalanche needs to do that to build awareness. But I think like where we exist is like we're never going to be Avalanche. Um, I love them, but we're— this is kind of where we can accelerate. Yeah, no, absolutely, man.

Well, we're rooting for you, and if we could help, you know, we're here. Of course. Um, what, uh, I mean, we talked about a lot of stuff. Anything else that we— you want to talk about generally, or, um, both of you?

Rushia, are there any, uh, like, things that you saw people bring up on movement on Twitter that you want to dispel?

Um, there's no mansion. There's no mansion. There's a rat-infested apartment. Um, yeah, I think like I mean, our architecture is uniquely different. Like, yes, doesn't mean to go token before chain nonsense, but I think like people have kind of delved into kind of what we do. Like, we have this fast finality layer that requires deposits, and like, it's honestly like mainnet's coming in like, say, 2 or 3 weeks, I'd say, where you can have all the apps, ecosystem live. So it is easy to be like, okay, launch token before mainnet, call it a day. But you'll see in the next like few weeks that there will be of Iberic system, all those L2s that I think the Ethereum scaling roadmap for the last few years has been definition-based. And like Noam Klatzschers and Mihnter Gruel have been back and forth, and now he's on Fluent. So that's going to be fun for me. But we've been back and forth on rollup definitions. And then my counter to that is like, dude, I don't care. All these L2s have spent the last 5 years, have spent billion dollars in venture capital and defining what rollups mean. And I can't name one app on any of these rollups. And I don't think anyone will ever use any of these. I think Base, cool. They have Coinbase and they'll continue to crush. But beyond that, I'm not really excited about anything that's being built on any of these L2s. I don't know if you guys are. Whereas like Solana, these alt L1s, even BearChain, right? BearChain is still EVM on Cosmos, so you still see some super cool apps being built there. Again, I'm not in the business of rollup definitions. If you want to come after me and call my rollup fake, call it sidechain, I don't really care. I think what gets me excited is like the next 6 months, 8 months when we radically accelerate and have crypto apps that people use. And I'd rather be a sidechain with the top apps in crypto than be an L2 according to the Ethereum gods with no users.

100%. Yeah, cool, man. Well, congrats on everything. I know it's early. I feel like these events are just like such a legal headache and dealing with the exchanges, and now you can get back to actually building some cool shit and talking to some—

Time to get started.

Yeah, good developer. So congrats to Rushi.

When are we going to have a Move conference day or a Move, you know, Slack?

We're in Denver. In Denver, we're having a pretty big— I mean, we did one with Aptos actually in Thailand. We had like a day that was pretty good. But we're probably going to do one.

I remember being at the one at ECC in Brussels.

Yeah, yeah. So we're going to do that one in Denver.

Rushi, you guys should do one at Permissionless in Brooklyn in June.

There we go. You have to shell Permissionless.

No, dude, I've had that.

It's coming to Brooklyn. We don't want to go to Denver.

It's coming to Brooklyn. I think like, I'm just kidding.

I love you, Denver.

We want to go pretty hard at permissionless as well.

Let's go. Rushy, how does it feel to be like 23 and have a boatload of money to your name?

22, but it's not liquid, obviously. And like, you could go down 90%, but also it's like, again, one of the things about being young is I don't really need it. Like, I'm fine with my Williamsburg shitty apartment. I think more so it's like I'm not really happy until we're the next Solana and we actually have tangible outcomes. Like, I want this Libra chart to come alive and that's my goal. Yeah, the DM chart into existence.

Yeah, into existence. That's my focus too. Like, we, we have 4 years to figure shit out and grow that 20 to 20 to 30 million users to over 100. And if we don't do that, none of this shit will matter.

Yeah, I mean, also we talk about even wealth, right? Solana is Solana because they actually have people using their chain, right? So I think from my side, job is getting started. Token is going to go down 50% next week, go up 50% next week. I don't really know. But I think ultimately if we had builders ecosystem, I think one thing I'm proud of is the community was stoked. I think community members made like $10,000 and $15,000 each and people were generally very happy. I think that builds loyalty, right? I think Berniski tweeted about this the other day where it's like, um, like it was a quote from one of our community members and it was like, dude, like that stuff builds loyalty because historically L2s have kind of been like, oh, I'm gonna launch token, trade down 90%, dump on community, and then the chain dies and people wonder why no one uses it. Well, now it's like we have millions of people that made a shit ton of money off of us, um, and hopefully kept or whatever they did with it, um, and will be loyal to move any system even when the token goes down 90%. Yeah, cool.

Rishi, congrats, man.

Thanks, been a treat following your progress, man. Keep evangelizing and let's make that Libra chart great. Meme it, will it into existence, and I'm counting on you to do that.

Thanks, man. You too.

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