Phantom CEO: The Next Chapter For Phantom | Brandon Millman & Donnie Dinch

That's actually the big opportunity we see. Like, that's like with Fantom moving forward is that the initial mission of building like a great wallet to bring, make crypto accessible to everyone, I think mission accomplished in a lot of ways. But now it's like, how do we leverage crypto to build like the next generation consumer finance platform?

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All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. I've been waiting a long time for this one. Very excited about it. We have Donnie. who's the VP of strategy at Fantom, used to run Bitski, uh, who you guys know and love, and also Brandon, uh, who's the CEO and co-founder of Fantom. So Brandon, Donnie, welcome to the show, guys.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Yeah, excited about this. Um, I actually wanted to— we'll talk about the future of Fantom and all that kind of good stuff. I wanted to start with the old days of crypto because Brandon, you were at 0x. Donnie, you guys started Bitski in 2018. How has the What did you— what do you think you guys got right about how the industry evolved and what did you— where has it evolved where you're like, I didn't really see it going this way?

Well, yeah, first of all, thanks for having us. Yeah, a bit nippy here in New York.

Yeah, yeah.

Bar cry.

Yeah.

Welcome to town.

The West Coast. But yeah, it's always, it's always good to be back. And yeah, tons of crypto people here.

Yeah. Where are you from here?

I'm from New Jersey originally.

From Jersey.

All right. Yeah.

Donnie, where are you from?

Pittsburgh.

Nice. Yeah. Nice.

You don't want to build in Pittsburgh?

No.

Crypto capital of the world.

I think it's like sunny 30 days a year there. Not great.

Yeah. Nice.

But yeah, we can talk a little bit about sort of the olden days a little bit. Yeah, I got my start in crypto in 2017. Like you mentioned, very, very early stage DeFi startup at that time called 0x. Yeah, I remember there was like a Telegram group where like some people were kind of like spitballing about like what we should call this budding industry.

Yeah.

I think DeFi stuck. There was like some similarity to like the word DeFi and all that.

But by the way, I was in a similar group for naming what NFTs were called.

Do we think we got that right or wrong?

Hard to say. Hard to say.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, yeah, that was, that was a crazy time where, I mean, obviously the industry was a lot smaller back then. We were celebrating, you know, like 1,000 user milestones and things like that. And yeah, I think one thing that really struck me, especially, um, from, from 0x's mission was that they, they really got right was that the world was moving towards this more tokenized format and that we were accelerating towards a world where, you know, the world is going to be tokenized and all value is going to flow freely on blockchains. And so I think that, yeah, that part we got right back then. I think the part that we really got wrong at 0x in that time was, I think, a lot of dogmatism around the Ethereum ecosystem specifically and how, you know, back then it was, you'd pretty much get, you know, you pretty much get shooed away if you were like to whisper any of the name of a different chain that was not Ethereum.

Kicked out of the group chat.

Exactly. Yeah. Made fun of, bullied. And yeah, I mean, and we, you know, we got a little bit of that when we started Phantom, right?

When did you guys start Phantom?

2021, early 2021.

Was this because you were just a MetaMask user and you thought it was bad and you wanted a better thing, or what, what was the—

Yeah, I mean, it, that's the long and the short of it basically. I mean, I think we, we spent close to 4 years building apps and protocols on Ethereum and at 0x and basically realized that, you know, MetaMask specifically was actually holding a lot of the industry back in terms of like, there's only so much, there's only so much that we can do as application developers, you know, MetaMask and sort of the wallet layer had to hold up its end of the bargain to really properly onboard users and properly educate them. And so we felt like, you know, that wasn't really happening. And so the best, the highest leverage way that we could apply ourselves to accelerate the entire industry was by really fixing this, usability layer, like at the very top, which we felt what basically lived in the wallet.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's, I'm happy to go more into it, but that's kind of why we got started.

Yeah. Donnie, what do you think? Building a wallet is so, so fricking hard and you did this for many years. What do you think Fantom did that, 'cause there, there are so many people who had the same thesis, like you guys on the same thesis, like wallets kind of suck, let's make the wallets better. And Fantom has kind of run away and I feel like won that. Like what do you think from an outsider's point of view, someone who's competing against them for many years, what do they do?

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. So when they were at 0x, I would, you were on the Matcha team, right?

Yeah. I worked on, well, Chris, so we had 3 co-founders. We all came from 0x. Yeah. Chris was sort of the general manager for Matcha at XYZ. And then I was sort of the on-point person for 0x API, which is like the the actual smart order routing engine.

Got it.

That's behind it.

Got it.

0x alumni. Good, good alumni list.

Yeah.

It was Linda, Tom, you guys.

Yeah. Gold Sky. There's a couple other ones that I'm missing, but Blowfish, would you also— Blowfish, of course.

Oh, I didn't realize there were. Yeah.

Blowfish. Yeah. That was Fabio. Fabio and I actually went to college together. And then he was the first employee at 0x and that's One of the reasons I actually found my way there in the first place. Nice. And yeah, Fabio, we brought him back.

Yeah, yeah, it's great.

Well, so to answer your question, to kind of answer your question, Matcha was this sort of like Bitski. Our whole thing was that yes, wallets suck. The approach that we took was let's just like make it so people don't need to understand what a wallet is at all and let's abstract that complexity. Let's build the Gmail for wallets. And actually one of the first customers of that product was this team, Matcha, at, I think our first dollar of revenue came from you guys. And I think the big delta between what we built and what Phantom built is I think Phantom just did a much better job of serving the existing market. I think that we did a, we looked in the future of like where we thought the play, like the space was going. And I think ultimately we got that right on the wrong time, wrong timeline.

You tried to build for like the normie user.

Yeah. What basically what we're seeing today, like where you're seeing like, you know, these products like FOMO or even Moonshot last year, like these things that are abstracting away the complexity of what's actually happening, but still providing this fun experience. But Phantom just did a really, really good job of nailing the core market and then also, you know, making a really good bet on Solana. I mean, that was a, that was a, I mean, that, that, that worked out really, really well.

Yeah, I'd say that was the primary sort of, that was the thing, masterstroke in the beginning, which was very, which was a very deliberate and sort of premeditated thing where we realized that a lot of folks were trying to, they, you know, it was a very obvious thing to compete with MetaMask and they were sort of the ultimate sitting duck in a way where they, you know, they just had a reputation for having bad UX. And so if you could just fix the UX, then you could beat them. Right. But I think a lot of folks tried to do that exact playbook and then it didn't work out. And so, you know, one of the things that we realized was that how, how powerful the pole position is in the wallet arena and how, how much network effect there is actually around that, both from a developer and user perspective, but also from like a brand and trust perspective. Like, and so there's momentum that goes with that.

And I think Fantom did a really good job of capitalizing on the initial momentum that they built when they launched. Just, you know, being a part of Fantom and seeing like, or paying more attention in real time to the adoration from the community, I think it's, it maybe goes unspoken a little bit just how much that was sort of like just a baked in sort of fundamental way that the company was built and the product was built, that it was just very empathetic to what the users needed and listened. And, um, like you basically didn't let go of the momentum and energy that you guys captured early on.

Yeah, it was a, it was a little bit of an atypical startup experience, I'd say, where when we started, I think typically in startups there's sort of the, the idea maze wandering where you're trying to figure out the right thing, you're trying to find product market fit. But for us, we kind of just, it just happened like right out of the gate. And then ever since then, it's just been about like trying.

Was there one thing that happened? Like, did you get the blessing of Rajen Tole, or did you get the tweet from the Solana founder? Like, what kicked it off?

I mean, yeah, I mean, honestly, it was just, we just started tweeting and we just started tweeting. Uh, there was this kind of very early dynamic, uh, between us three when we started where Chris, you know, I'd wake up and check Twitter and Chris basically had signed us up to build something that we hadn't even started building because he kind of like would tease it in the design and then people would get so hyped for it.

You're like, oh crap, we're gonna build this this week.

Exactly. And so we were just kind of like, kind of do that, like one-up each other throughout 2021. And but yeah, I mean, the initial signal really just came from Twitter, I'd say, in terms of like people, we just really struck a chord. People were like really, really wanting something like this. And I think specifically with Solana as well, I think we did a really good job with that, with early Phantom product, just highlighting the speed, the speed and cheapness of Solana as well. So I think a lot of diehard Solana folks were like, oh wow, this is the first product that's really you know, putting the best foot forward for the ecosystem.

So I'll say one other sort of intangible part about this is that Solana wasn't the only chain to claim to be faster or cheaper than Ethereum, but it was the only one that had like what felt like a AAA like wallet experience. And I just felt like the combination of what Fantom built actually helped Solana get off the ground as well. I don't think it was just the other way around. So the alchemy of like success in crypto, like there has to be a lot of things that go right. And yeah, it seemed to be what happened here.

Yeah. How important was it to have a designer as one of the co-founders?

Yeah, I mean, extremely, extremely important. Yeah. You know, in terms of our specific— I mean, our whole mission at Fantom is to accelerate the adoption of crypto, but our specific role in that is to fix this usability layer that You know, we've all, we've all been talking about how UX and usability is so bad for so many years. And so really trying to fix that. And so because that's our approach, it was pretty much, you know, very necessary for a designer to be there from the very beginning, just making sure that—

And that's Chris, right? Chris is a product person, designer, product person, designer, uh, all-around renaissance man.

So I think, yeah, unfair to paint him just as a designer, but, uh, definitely a generational design talent.

Yeah, nice. Maybe let's get— I want to get into, um, something Donnie said about maybe what you guys got wrong at Bitski, which is building for the normie user versus the crypto-native user.

Yeah.

Um, this is something basically for the last 50— since, yeah, since for as long as crypto has been around, anyone who has built for the normie user has failed.

Yeah.

Building, I think, going deeper down the stack and deeper down the crypto-native user base has, has always worked, um, better. Do you think that is a Do you think that that is shifting now? Like if you're talking to a new founder today, would you recommend like, look, just focus on the crypto native user, the normies will come and use what the crypto native people are using? Or would you focus on the normies now?

I think that the ecosystem is a lot different. So you look for these signals, like the thing about that, the big head fake in crypto around 20, 2020, I think, was the pace in which NFTs captured the cultural zeitgeist. And in a lot of ways today, we see what I thought NFTs could do for bringing crypto to get used by a lot of people. Effectively, I think stablecoins are going to execute on that quite well. And so you kind of, you kind of try— success in crypto is a function of the shots on goal that you take, the number of shots. And I think that Um, we're now in a place where there's a maturation in infrastructure where you can build some, I don't know if normie is the right word, but more like internet native as opposed to like crypto native. And so when you look at things like specifically meme coin trading, meme coin trading was like an abstracted experience where people doing it mostly didn't care about the underlying blockchain aspect of it all. Just this idea of trading something of value, uh, that you thought the internet was going to think was funny for a couple of days. Um, I would say that because of tools like, you know, uh, Relay or, you know, Phantom Connect, which we can talk about, or these other sort of, uh, these, these infrastructure services that kind of abstract that, I think it's easier to reach a broader demographic. And I think that it becomes less about, uh, the specific crypto-native use case, though. I mean, I don't know if you have a different take on that, but it is, it's, it's not to say that there isn't things to build for like the crypto-native specifically. But we've just, we've gotten to this level where the space is just elevated, like further away from the metal than it was maybe 5 years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think generally that all resonates with me. I'd say, yeah, infrastructure over the last, yeah, call it 5 to 7 years has really gotten better in a number of different areas. I'd say there's the actual, I think a huge thing that happened was that fast and cheap blockchains got solved. And that really opened the door for crypto on mobile. Crypto on mobile was extremely cumbersome, or Ethereum was just not the right platform for mobile. Yeah. Or to build apps on mobile. So I think that was a big unlock. And then also obviously as, as Donnie alluded to the whole stablecoin infrastructure, not only from a tech perspective, but from a regulatory perspective as well, I think all of those things combined make it pretty much the best time to build something for a more normie audience. But I will say, I think folks will, I think the best results are going to be from folks who can take what's going on in a crypto-native context and kind of the bleeding edge, but then making sure that it's accessible, safe, and easy to use for the more normal audience. So it's a little bit of a, a new culture trap.

Let's, um, I was listening to a podcast you guys did a little while ago. You described Fantom as a consumer finance platform for internet natives. Let's, I want to go deeper into thinking through like what that world looks like because there's many angles. Like I'd say the people winning that today are probably Robinhood and Cash App, I would argue. Um, Coinbase doing a great job. You also, then there's all these like more what I'd call crypto native companies, Fantom, you guys are probably leading that. There's also other people, right? Like Axiom, I think has done a decent job. MetaMask has a big user base. Like, how do you think about who wins that? I mean, you guys think you win that game, but like, how does this space develop?

You want to go first?

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I think that this idea of like building a consumer finance platform on crypto, the big unlock is stablecoins is sort of the atomic unit of that. It's the bridge of taking all the assets and all the things that you've acquired on crypto and putting them in a place or in a mechanism that allows you to spend them at, you know, Chipotle or wherever you want to do. And so I think that the crypto native companies have an opportunity right now where there's this opportunity window where the Genius Act has passed, the blessing of like our government for stablecoins existing is there. It's probably, probably have a few more years before anybody asks a lot of questions about anything. Um, the services like getting debit cards and things wired up to stablecoins is, is, you know, that's all very possible now. The trick is to do it with, with an existing scale. And I don't know that there's another crypto company, uh, that has a more active on-chain user base than Fantom right now. And so for us, when we think about this consumer platform right now, Fantom is a very much risk-on experience. You come in and you kind of, you know, do this, do that, speculate on things. We'd like to offer a bit more of a sustainable long-term experience where there's more risk-off things to do. And I think that we already have this like inherent hook of people opening the product. And so for us, it feels like a bit of a no-brainer to offer a broader set of things that you can do with your money. And I mean, we can get into the details of like, you know, Fantom Cash and the stablecoin as well.

But yeah, I mean, okay. So as it, from a user's perspective, I'll tell you guys what I, for me is the inhibiting factor. I want to hear how you guys think about it. So I'd be comfortable putting a million bucks into Robinhood because I'm like, I don't know, it feels safe and secure. I don't want to put a million bucks into Fantom.

Yeah.

Now, um, how do you grapple with— am I just like, am I wrong? Is it safe? Like, how do you grapple with that idea?

First of all, that's a, it's really funny because a lot of people don't feel comfortable putting like $50,000 in Robinhood, like just because it's mobile and it feels like free and loose. And so I think that there is this sort of like generation—

millennials and Gen Z are now over that hump.

Like mobile first is going to win, like whether it's totally, totally.

And I think, uh, I think that the younger tranche of individuals probably feel that way about Fantom and, and where to some extent. I don't think Robinhood feels boomer to them yet, but, uh, I, I think that that's just sort of a Lindy effect that we just have to kind of play with. We're just going to have to like work through.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I, yeah, like Donnie said, I think there is, there is a, there is a generational aspect to it where I think we are shooting for this sort of past millennials and even past Gen Z a little bit.

Yeah.

To sort of like Gen Alpha. And I think in general that that group and cohort is going to be very comfortable with using things on the internet. Yeah. So there's that aspect. But then I think that there's a lot of other things that around, yeah, user safety, onboarding, etc. I think a really big one is really getting the on-ramp and off-ramp experience correct. Because right now when you put $1 million into Fantom and you want to get it out, it's actually a pretty cumbersome process where you have to go, you pretty much have to go through a centralized exchange and all of that. And I think that's just, it's just putting more and more barriers to you feeling like more comfortable using this as a broader platform. And so that's how I'd say another big area to really get right.

Who's your on and off-ramp provider right now? MoonPay? So how do you do that?

So currently in the app, it's kind of an aggregate. So one of the big challenges with running a crypto product at true global scale is with the on and off-ramp thing. It's, it's, it's coverage in different countries and reliability and all that kind of thing.

So, oh, you can buy from Robinhood. I just pulled up your app.

Yeah, yeah.

Pay with Robinhood.

That's interesting.

So we have a, we have basically a sort of an aggregated experience where it's like depending on where you've been in the world, Transact, Moonpay, Coinbase, Sharefour. I see it.

Exactly. Oh, that's cool. And you show the prices of all of it.

But if you're, you're in Europe, you know, that list will show Revolut and things like that. However, now with the introduction of this Phantom Cash product that we're releasing soon and we kind of announced a couple of weeks back, it's going to have completely native on and off-ramps that are powered by Stripe that are all built into the product, white-labeled. You know, it feels like any other fintech app, right? You don't have to go into some weird pop-up. Or anything like that. So we'll have those. And then obviously the card as well acts as like a bit of an off-ramping mechanism as well.

Yeah.

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Let's talk about Cash. Why did you guys get into the stablecoin space? Um, or, and, and maybe for people who missed it, what, what is Cash? Maybe we can start there.

Yeah. So I'd say there's two things that we, that we, um, announced a couple weeks back. So, uh, Fantom Cash is going to be a brand new in-app experience. It's going to be its own new tab. And it's essentially a cash count slash, I'd say, quote unquote, neobanking-like experience in the app in that it's all denominated in US dollars. You can deposit your paycheck into there, you can spend using your card, you can send to your other friends on Fantom or other crypto, you know, native addresses, or you can send to bank account. It's all kind of abstracted. You're just dealing with sort of internet cash. And so that's the product that we've built. And then it's built on top of a stablecoin that we designed in partnership with Stripe and Bridge called CASH, all capital letters. And that's sort of the stablecoin that underpins it. So those are the two things that we released.

And the big idea behind CASH You know, there's a lot of stablecoins out there. There's a lot that we could have chosen from. Um, they didn't quite do exactly what we needed. The big thing was that we wanted to create a stablecoin that was actually used by people in like daily habitual use cases, like grabbing a coffee, Lyft, whatever it may be. Um, so, uh, we wanted to partner with someone where we'd have immediate merchant distribution with a stablecoin. So Cashes will be accepted at all stable or all Stripe-powered merchants. So that is a baked-in way that we can start to live in this world where your crypto is now usable in real life.

Yeah.

The other component of Cash is that we wanted this to be the stablecoin that anyone could put, like, build into their product. And so the yield rewards go to the originator. So any developer can sign up to be an originator of Cash. They can bake it into their product and they collect all those rewards. So in some ways we kind of think of Cash as a bit of like a public utility that anyone who wanted sort of their own stablecoin or wanted the benefits of having their own without going through the rigmarole of making their own. So, you know, we've sort of a leader in the space and kind of felt it like something we could give back.

So this is Bridge's product and you're just the first customer? Is that the right way to think about it?

No, I don't—

Well, so Bridge and Stripe developed this open issuance protocol, which is a a platform for anyone to design their own, their own stablecoin.

This is the Cash protocol.

I don't know. So this is the Open Issuance.

Okay.

It's called, so they have a platform called Open Issuance where you can work with them to develop a new stablecoin. So we, we worked with them to use their platform to design this stablecoin called Cash.

It was the first stablecoin on Open. Yeah, it was the first one.

I see. I see. And then Phantom Cash. Okay. Oh, I get it.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nice.

But just to kind of emphasize what Donnie said, so when we started building this consumer product around stablecoins, you have, there's a decision point where you have to decide which stablecoin are you going to build on top of?

Totally. Totally. Or do we work with a provider or, or any?

Yeah. Yeah. And so, and there's really only two choices. There's USDC, which is, you know, it has ultimate utility, has adoption everywhere. It's, you know, it has liquidity everywhere. However, it does not have the customizability and control that you might want, especially in the realm of developing a new business on top of it, right? You can't really, you can't really get the yield from the stablecoins in a way that you might want to if you're building a new product on top of stablecoins. And so once people end up, you know, doing that calculus, they're like, okay, What's the other option? The other option is to launch your own stablecoin. That's a— I think most folks don't appreciate how much of an operational challenge that is to get, to get to the same kind of utility as, as USDC if you want it to be ubiquitous.

And that's why people work with USDC is 'cause it's an operational headache to—

Exactly.

Yeah.

So Cash, the stablecoin, is basically a bit of an in-between where anyone can sign up to become a distribution partner. So you can build an app on top of the Cash stablecoin, you can have users onboard to Cash, et cetera. All those Cash stablecoins that you're responsible for breathing into life through your app, you, you get the yield on it.

Oh, the developers and the businesses keep the net revenue?

That's right.

Exactly. And they, they can then choose how to use that revenue.

They can share it back to their users. They could keep it. They could.

Yeah. Right.

And this is kind of counter to some things you've seen like in the hyper liquid space when there was like the USD8 and like, you know, 50% going back to the ecosystem. We kind of took the path of we don't want to decide where the yield goes.

You decide. Right, right. That seems like the natural evolution of what stablecoins will look like.

When we thought about Cash, we basically looked 10 years down the road and like, what would stablecoins look like? And we just kind of burned things down to that point. Yeah.

Can we talk about decision making inside of Fantom? Shifting gears a little bit. Yeah. And using Cash as an example, or we can talk about hyper liquid and perps or whatever. But how do you make a decision like this at the company? Like, is there a bit like, do you get a 3-person team together? Do you get 20 people together? Do you have— is it decision by consensus? Do you make the final call, Brandon? Like, I'd love to just hear the nitty-gritty of how you, how you do something like this.

Yeah. Well, yeah, it's a, it's a hard one to answer and it's something that we are always tuning as the company is evolving, right? Like, so now, um, How big are you guys personally? Phantom is 160 people now. 160? Yeah, uh, we really had a bit of a growth spurt the past year. So I think when we started, it was— the year is less than 100. Yeah. And similarly, when we started, kind of decided that we're going to do this cash thing, that was like at the end of last year before this spurt. So anyway, so point is, it's, it's a bit of a— it's an ongoing iterative process. I will say it's it's very intuition-based, like in terms of what to go after and how to navigate. I'd say for a long time, it was a little bit of like 3 co-founders acting as a 3-headed hydra, kind of guiding the company. And I think at an early stage, it has to be like that basically, where it's, you can't really get too bogged down in the writing a million McKinsey-style case studies on what's the next trend? Like, you know, we've been in crypto for a while. It's very intuition-based, but now we are trying to scale that out and actually build more of a proper leadership team that can help guide things from the top that way. But anyway, so I don't know, there's a couple aspects to it, but generally it is, you know, because we're in there and really in the trenches, so to speak. There is a sense of like just kind of, just kind of knowing what to do.

Yeah, I'll add to that, that I think there's a, there's a component of this that is very much intuition and the ability to, to, to build a consensus around an idea, um, and to bring people along. I think that ultimately though, what it comes down to is that this company has a set of strategic pillars that we sort of live and die by. And as new ideas and shots on goal come to mind, to the extent that they like fulfill the opportunity in those pillars, we get tighter conviction on like executing on those things. And, you know, I think I mentioned this earlier, like any, any company, like any company is, is success. Their success is defined by the number of shots on goal they can take and their hit rate on those. Like if we, if we want to like as a, as an early stage startup, if we want to continue to have exponential growth, we have to take these sort of like out, like these upside, like optimized for upside opportunity bets. And so at any point in time at the company, if we're not doing that, we're basically not trying, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Do you— how do you guys align the company now that you have 160 people? I have a lot of friends who are running— have gone to— they're running 50-person companies, 70, 80. It's fine. You can manage it. And then once you hit around 150, it becomes a lot tougher to manage. How do you align the company towards those strategic things? Like, do you use OKRs? Do you have quarterly priorities? Do you have annual goals? Like, love to just hear about the planning process.

The meme from like Charlie from Always Sunny, like with the lines on the wall. It's like every, every 2 months.

Yeah.

Just like reauditing.

Well, I think for us, you know, part of the focus just comes from having a very dialed in sense of like, hey, we're, we're, we're working on this, we're single product. Um, and we're all working towards this same core user as well, which is this consumer, um, consumer mobile. And so, um, yeah, I think that, that inherently makes it a little bit easier to align folks. Um, and the company is very product driven. We're, we're developing, you know, we're We're shipping at the end of the day a product. And so in terms of OKRs, I think again, it's like an iterative thing that we're always figuring out. Sometimes we have just one single North Star, which nowadays is monthly active traders.

Monthly active traders.

Yeah.

Not users. What's a trader mean?

A trader means that they've actually, actually performed like a swap or like a perp action within, within like a Phantom property within the app, so like the swapper or whatever.

So if I go to Phantom and I deposit $100, I'm not a monthly active trader?

No.

Once I make a swap, I'm a trader.

Yeah. So I think monthly active trader was a good proxy in terms of just engagement as well, because just people opening the app and just looking around, it's valuable to some extent, but we really want to be helping users drive behavior and helping users, like, you know, perform the actions that they're trying to do. If they're just opening up the app and not doing anything, it's, it's, it's probably because we failed somewhere.

Yeah. And a big part of that, like, monthly active traders is a great example. It's not that everyone on the team is trying to do something that like they're not trying to like directly maybe affect trading, but the assumption that is if each team is doing what they should be doing and they're executing on their own set of goals, that the result, the net result of all of this is that monthly active traders go up.

Yeah.

So any, any ways that you guys run the business that you think are really unique to Fantom? For example, I have a friend who, you know, one week of the month they do no meetings.

No.

So no meeting week. I have another friend who have no product managers. It's only designers and engineers. Like any quirky things like that for how you guys run the business?

Well, we, we have no meeting Thursdays that we ignore.

I know we try that every year. No meeting Wednesday, no meeting Friday, and then it—

Yeah. I don't actually know who that applies to. We do an offsite every 6 months in person and we do that. I don't know if there's anything overtly quirky.

Yeah. I mean, it's— as far as startups go, you know, as far as crypto startups especially, it's a little bit more on the vanilla side. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, it seems to be working. So we do do like Don said, we do do this Every 6 months we'll bring the entire company in person somewhere. That has been extremely key, especially in a remote environment.

Is it very biz, like, you know, quote-unquote business focused, or is it more like bonding, build empathy team?

It's like a half-half. Well, it's actually maybe like 25%. It used to be, I think, a little bit more structured.

Yeah.

But now it's probably like 25%, like get everyone aligned and then it's just coworking time, like in activities.

Yeah.

And, and I will say one thing that I, that you just, you reminded me because we are remote, one thing that we've seen huge lift on in as far as just morale and output over the past year is that we've really, really pushed individual pods and teams to get an, like an onsite together, uh, on the kickoff of any new like initiative or project. We find it if they're together for like a week or two that it, it basically accomplishes 8 weeks of—

We're doing the same thing. Yeah, exactly. I, we also find it's very hard to do. We're remote as well, but like big product conversations are easier in person.

Yes.

So just getting people together for that.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, one of the, just very candidly, one of the conversations that we have always is how do we, how do we like build and grow like a defined culture in a remote environment where new people are joining in Zoom? Like let's say you and I are having a conversation about product quality and Brandon's like sitting next to us. Maybe he's not in the conversation, but he overhears it and he understands that like product quality is important. In a remote environment, only the people on the fucking Zoom call know about it. And so it's hard to sort of figuring out ways to disseminate like these values in a non-explicit way is, you know, we haven't cracked that yet.

Yeah. Without it being too so forced or feeling corporate, like here's your, yeah.

We repeat our values every meeting.

Yeah.

Yeah. What value are you today?

Yeah. Um, all right. Back to, back to some of the product stuff. I'd love to get your take on, um, uh, let's talk perps. So you guys launched, um, you guys launched with Hyperliquid. I was trying to look at some of the data. I think you guys are one of the biggest, if not the biggest affiliate or like driver into Hyperliquid right now, other than the Hyperliquid platform. And so gut check me if I'm wrong on that, but would love to just hear like maybe why, two things, why you launched perps and then why launch with Hyperliquid specifically?

Well, yeah, for, for Perps specifically, you know, the whole MO of the company again is to, we're trying to take what's on the bleeding edge of crypto and the true like crypto native innovations and package them up for a broader mainstream audience to use in a safe and easy to use way. Perps, I feel like, are one of those like really illustrative examples of something that's, was born in a crypto-native context, something that crypto people love to do, but may not be typically accessible to a more normie audience. Right? I think when, if you try to throw a quote unquote normie into a Perps advanced Perps trading interface, you know, they're going to get scared and lost pretty quickly. And so, so the whole MO is like, okay, so how do we, how do we take what was traditionally been as a very, a very scary and unapproachable experience and then deliver it to it? So that's why we decided to tackle the problem of perps. Um, and especially in a mobile-first way, I think that no one had actually cracked like mobile perps. Yeah. Um, and you guys launched only with mobile, only with mobile. Yeah.

Was that to drive more users and downloads of the mobile? Product?

Well, mobile is our, I mean, mobile is our pretty much the entire focus of the company currently. It's the biggest.

Oh really?

Yeah. It's interesting. I think when most people—

Oh, Sacha, I'm like an old crypto. I'm scared of mobile products still. I gotta get over that. I gotta, I'm gonna download Phantom right now. I gotta get— Yeah.

Put a million bucks. You should. I mean, maybe this, maybe it goes about, yeah. Like the, the extension is, uh, it's like the, it's like the, the albatross around our neck.

Like I don't use any mobile crypto products, but, but people give me like, you know, we hire these like 23, 24 year olds. They're all, they're 100% mobile.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

So I mean, yeah, I'm downloading it. The vast majority of our users and usage is, is on mobile. Um, and that's happened, you know, over the last, over the last number of years.

Um, you spend all your, you guys spend all your product conversations are focused on mobile.

It's very mobile centric and mobile first, at least.

Yeah. The next year of roadmap, I don't think I've seen any mockup for extension.

Anyway, so yeah, we felt like there was really no mobile perps product out there that really hit the nail on the head. So we decided that we were going to have a crack at it.

Why didn't you build it internally?

Build? Well, I mean, it's, well, yeah, so there's the decision to use Hyperliquid. So I think, I guess there's a couple different things we could have done there. We could have done a PerpSec on Solana. We could have tried to build our own, or yeah, or there was Hyperliquid. In general, our— in general, we always try to use something that's on the market already because it helps us. Not only does it help us get to market faster, but it helps us. Then we can help contribute back to the ecosystem as well. And it sort of has this compounding effect where—

Well, that's counter to the stablecoin. Strategy, right?

We tried to use something on the market. Yeah, it wasn't— we couldn't find anything that filled like the requirement.

Yeah, I'd say Hyperliquid.

We did a thorough look. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, Hyperliquid was really interesting in that, I mean, from a numbers perspective, it's pretty hard to argue. Like it has the— has liquidity that, that rivals, if not bigger than centralized exchanges. It has— it has an ecosystem-based approach where people can add new markets and things like that, right? You're not constrained to just a a small set. And so, and yeah, building some, building with something on the market helps you get to market a lot quicker. I think we wanted to test a lot of hypotheses around user experience with perps and stuff. It was, it was a lot of kind of stuff that hadn't been tried yet. Anyway, that, that's a little bit about why we decided to—

why didn't you work with a more like Solana native, quote unquote, like, I don't know.

Yeah.

Jupiter or Drift or something.

I mean, that definitely would've been our preference, honestly, because it does the whole bridging. Experience still.

I imagine it's much more complicated to work with, to do high-quality bridging.

It's, yeah, I mean the bridging experience through, well, luckily nowadays there, there are good bridging options, but I will say that is pretty much still the whole bridging step. And even though we, we don't call it bridging, we call it depositing and we abstract as much.

Who do you work with on the bridge?

Oh, there's, there's two folks that are the biggest sort of bridges on, on Hyperliquid, which is Hyper UNET.

Oh, Hyper. Yeah.

And Relay. Yeah. So you use kind of a combination of those depending on what kind of deposit the user's trying to make. Right. Are they trying to deposit SOL or whatever? Right.

Why couldn't you work with Drifter Jupiter?

So that would've been our preference, but it, it really just came down to what was going to be better for the end user, which in my mind was all about, especially in the context of trading, is how do we get users access to the most liquidity, the most liquid books, best price, which therefore best prices. And then on top of that, Hyperliquid also has this really— HIP3 is really interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

In that they're taking, they're taking a whole ecosystem-based approach to a Perp DEX, right? Drift, they're great, but they're just one team. And it's going to be very difficult for them to compete with this whole army of people who are you know, spinning together their, you know, individual teams are raising their own money and all that. Right. So it's, it, so it really just came down to what we thought we could, how we could deliver the best user experience.

And just to jump in, like, that's very much maybe a bigger, I think that's, that's actually a pretty big deal in that Phantom has been historically associated as a Solana wallet. And I think this is a really kind of a testament to the focus of the company is less about Solana and more about the users. And so I think, you know, there was some positive feedback around like crypto Twitter, the fact that we used Hyperliquid for perms, but it's really like, what is the best service for the users? And you know, there, it just happened to be that it was on Hyperliquid. But I think it's really important is like people think about, you know, what Fantom prioritizes moving forward. It's always the user.

Yeah. Do you, when you make that decision, can you then go to Jeff and the Hyperliquid team? Like, do you try to negotiate? Okay, so when you own the distribution, you have a tremendous amount of leverage in conversations. I imagine if you wanted to, you could have gone to— maybe you can't do this to Hyperliquid because they also have leverage, right? They're also a big platform. So it's kind of, you know, tale of two equals here. But can you go to folks and be like, hey, we're going to initiate support. Like, we want a really high affiliate fee. We want you guys to give us $5 million to initiate coverage. How do you think about to charge or not to charge?

Well, tactically use leverage.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think that that's— we try to play the long game, but we— but like not using leverage when you have it is, you know, probably a mistake generally.

Yeah. Yeah.

So what did you do in Hyperliquid's case? Did you say, hey, give us like a really high percentage of affiliate or—

Well, for Hyperliquid, I think they, they already had kind of built-in mechanism. Which is the, the, the builder code system and the referral code system. So they kind of already had set up their ecosystem for this.

Yeah.

I think when we approach early partners, we're really, we're really trying to build a long-term partnership with a lot of these folks and we're trying to work with folks who are going to be those long-term partners. And so I think when we try to, when we approach relationship building, it's usually not like, how much money can you give me? Like out of the gate, it's like, how can, how can we basically band together to create like a net, you know, net positive for both. And so that's, I think that's mostly what we're trying to, when we, when we have these early conversations with folks, we're trying to understand what their long-term mission is, how it aligns with us and how we can just both get there faster.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of the things that we want to exist still don't exist in that we like to have these conversations with potential partners to say, hey, if you could, modify your offering a little bit like this, or if you could provide this API or slightly like we can get the experience that we want. And I think having the leverage to get those engineering teams to move is often like sort of the, the more strategic play in those places.

Yeah. Yeah. Just working with folks who are going to, going to be able to take our direction and feedback as like sort of the experts of usability and actually help.

An example of this, just candidly, is, is the on-ramp stuff that we're doing with Stripe. Like this is a, this is a net new product for them and we're, you know, very much a design partner and, and Knowing that we have the distribution that we have, they're, you know, taking, putting the proper amount of resources on it.

What about new chains? Because you guys, you guys support, I think, 6 chains right now. What is Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Sui, Monad, Base, and Base. How do you, how do you make, how do you decide who to go to? And do you like, why don't you just do more? People will pay, chains will pay a lot of money for Fantom to initiate support. I bet someone would pay you $10 million, $20 million, maybe even more. I don't know. Do you, how do you think about that decision?

Well, I mean, again, it, you know, not to sound like a broken record, but it really does come down to the user experience first and what we're trying to enable there.

But isn't it a better user experience to have all the chains?

Not necessarily. I don't think, I think it's actually a lot more confusing. I think we're trying to create like a very opinionated curated experience for the user where we think these are where the best ecosystems are and the best things to use. And you know, there's a real cost to adding support for these things in the way that we want to add, like when we, when we add, when we, when we add support for something, we're, we're going deep on it and we're pushing the envelope on it, especially in user experience. And so, I think it's kind of against our MO to like just start adding like whatever random chain, cuz then, then the experience really starts to degrade and then you're left with insert RPC URL here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's, you know, that's what it ends up degrading to. And so anyway, that being said, you know, we're not against expanding or anything like that, but it's just a lot more of a deliberate— Yeah.

Yeah. And I do think that it creates drag on pace when you're supporting multiple chains, multiple signing windows, all these different designs. Like there's just a lot that we have to be really, really thoughtful about rolling out to new chains. And to be clear, like they might pay 10, 20, 30, whatever they might, but we still generate, you know, enough revenue from the products that, that, people are using today that, um, we, we don't— doesn't move the needle as much.

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On the revenue side of things, the majority of the revenue is swaps and fees and perps, like, you know, trading and fees and stuff like that. What percentage of revenue is not fees? Like whether it's ads or affiliates or I don't know if you even run ads, referral affiliate, like, yeah. What percentage is non-swap?

I think it's relatively low. And I think that that's probably the big opportunity that we see moving forward. Is like, how do we get subsequent revenue streams that not only are just, you know, diversified from, from swaps, but also more predictable?

Yeah. Recurring. I mean, we saw this one. I was thinking about— I was going to bring this up, like when Coinbase went public, the Wall Street counter to, you know, their— them being good business was non-recurring revenue. And you've seen them in the last like 4 years really improved their recurring revenue.

Close to 50%. Yeah.

So what are you guys doing there?

Yeah, well, yeah, like you said, I mean, yeah, Coinbase, I think they really, they really wrote the—

I've noticed you guys been hiring a lot of Coinbase people, so.

Yeah, yeah, well, that's a, that's an interesting one. But in, yeah, I think Coinbase wrote the blueprint a lot. I think Fantom looks very similar to Coinbase in 2018, for example, where in, in, in their case it was 90%, 95%, you know, of their, of their revenue was fees-based. And then they made this very deliberate motion to get into other areas, whether it was subscription, premium type of, you know, accounts, stablecoins, obviously. So, you know, our, our big bet on Fantom Cash and cash is sort of analogous to their USDC bet in a way.

Yeah.

Where it, it does give us the ability to, yeah, mature the business and, and add this extra dimension that's more durable and predictable. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think if you look at Fantom Cash, it is a, it is a pretty stark departure from the risk-on experience of trade, of just speculating and swapping. We look at that as a much more broad surface area for us to add new product lines that we can monetize well. So if you look at, um, I mean, if you look at Chime, if you look at even what Robinhood has done, I think for us, putting, making sure that we have the, the brand and the, the identity of like, this is now not just a crypto app, but it's a money app, really opens the, it really opens the opportunity for us to like take even more shots on goal.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm, uh, I mean, Empire listeners are really sick of hearing me talk about Robinhood, but I'm like, I love, I love what Robinhood's done. I mean, I think they've just done an amazing, they've probably been like the best execution team in the fintech personal money space.

Listen, we, we have a picture of Vlad on a dartboard.

So, well, they're the best outside of Phantom, I should say. Um, we do consider them to be, but I think they execute, they build good products and they execute very well. And they've started pushing beyond trading. Like I keep getting pinged that they have a great mortgage product, apparently. Yeah. And so how do you think about like non— what feel like non-crypto use cases, like taking a mortgage out? Like, will I ever be able to get a mortgage through Fantom?

Probably. Yeah, I'd say that is definitely, I think, the world that we're going for, but more accelerated and using all of the powers, superpowers of crypto to kind of get there faster.

Right, so you'd use, I don't know, Morpho or Aave or Kamino or something like that instead of just—

Yeah, I mean, whether or not it's a provider today, I think that that's the, that's like the long-term bet that, that we can actually build a better financial services platform with crypto rails underneath. Not like, and we could move quicker than regulated entities in the US as they are today. So a great example is how fast we were able to get perps to market versus any other product. Um, the other, the other advantage when we look at, you know, our opportunity being crypto native is that it allows us to spread horizontally international much quicker. So there is a, you know, you asked me earlier, do I have any kids? 3 and a 5-year-old. I expect them to basically managing all their like finances moving forward on like a crypto, like crypto rails based product, like Fantom.

And then they'll just have a, they'll have a credit, the Fantom credit card.

Yeah.

I paid for a coffee this morning with a Fantom debit card.

Oh, you have, I didn't even know you had a card.

It's part of Phantom Cash. Yeah.

Oh, nice.

Yeah. It's not, it's not out yet. It's, uh, oh, I gotta get one. All right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

DM me.

Yeah. Nice. Oh, that's, that's very cool. And then, so you'll, you can, you, it's a debit card, not a credit card, right?

Yeah.

So you, you, you debit, it pulls straight from your Phantom wallet.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, that's very interesting.

Yeah. Obviously I can show you later.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, but, but towards just to cover this point.

Yeah.

Yeah. We, that's actually the big opportunity we see. Like, that's like with Phantom moving forward is that You know, the initial mission of building like a great wallet to bring— make crypto accessible to everyone, I think mission accomplished in a lot of ways. But now it's like, how do we leverage crypto to build like the next generation consumer finance platform?

Maybe let's go there a little bit more. The user that you've been serving is the, like the individual, the retail person. How do you think about the— let's call it like your dream customer, maybe it was like $0 to $10 million, but if someone was trading like $20 million or $50 million, they probably use a, like, a pro platform. How do you think about serving that user?

Um, well, generally, you know, the— we are very consumer-focused, so I'd say it's, you know, it's very unlikely for us to start branching out and like providing like an institutional product or something like that. Or— and again, you know, Robinhood's a good example in that they, they stayed very consumer-retail focused. And still are basically for the entire life of the company and have done quite well. So yeah, we're doing, you're doing something similar. However, pro trading is a very interesting vertical within crypto and crypto, the superpowers of crypto actually make it so that you can produce a pro trading experience today using crypto without having to build a full exchange. That was not possible in the past, right? So when Coinbase came out with Coinbase Pro, they bought a whole separate company to do that. It's a whole separate book. Right.

Togomi?

I forget. It was GDAX originally.

Oh, GDAX.

Yeah, yeah. I don't remember what the original name before that was, but, but yeah, nowadays, you know, because you have the open permissionless protocols on on blockchains, you can develop a pro trading interface without necessarily having to rewrite the entire backend from scratch. Um, and so it does make it a little bit easier to start experiment and, and kind of, you know, address some of those other customers. Um, so yeah, a little, a little bit of an alpha leak, but we are going to actually be releasing, uh, a Phantom terminal trading experience next week, uh, that is geared more towards pro traders.

Nice. So next week this'll come out on November, I don't know, on Monday.

Yeah.

November 10th. So you're releasing it, is it next?

On that Wednesday.

Oh, nice.

If all goes well.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's actually, it's actually been a long time coming. It's, we acquired this team on Solana called Sniper, Really great team. They built a pro NFT trading experience and then morphed that into a pro meme coin trading experience. And then we snapped them up to basically transform that into more of this pro trading Phantom Terminal experience. And yeah, that's coming out.

Nice. So this will be Phantom's trading terminal.

That's right.

Yeah. Nice.

And I think And I think over time, a little bit more of where sort of to our conversation earlier about extensions and web and everything, you know, I think more and more our, the web version of Phantom, I think is gonna be pushed more towards this experience.

Yeah. How do you think about, let's, let's talk M&A and acquisitions. You guys have made, I think it's 4 acquisitions recently.

Yeah. 4 or 5.

Is that right? 4 or 5. Okay. Do you, do you get, do you have a roadmap? And you go find the company? Like, are you like, I want to go build a terminal and you find SoulSniper? Or do you, do they come to you and you're like, oh, that's an amazing idea. That's a good price that could integrate.

Well, so when we, when I'd say there's kind of two things that we're trying to accomplish with M&A. So the first is kind of like what you mentioned, like a, yeah, we, we know we want to get into some specific strategic area. And so we perform a, you know, build, partner, buy sort of analysis. And if we decide, hey, the fastest way to get to market and most efficient way to get to market is to buy, then, you know, that might be one reason. But I'd say another, another big reason we do M&A is to recruit great talent and just make sure the best of the best are working here. Yeah. And obviously we have one of the fruits of that, Donnie, who's sitting next to me. He was CEO of Bitski. And yeah, that's just been a really awesome, that's just been really awesome for us. Just to your kind of question earlier about how do you continue to like scale the company or how do you continue to operate the company as it scales? Yeah, I think the M&A and reintroducing, introducing foreign founder DNA into the company actually was very crucial for that. Yeah. Just make sure that we were not kind of—

That's what I caught up with a friend the other day. They've made 8 acquisitions.

Yeah.

And Uh, they, he's, I said, what, like, why do you do it? Why is it, I mean, you're giving up equity, you give up money. He said, the number one thing that you get is you inject founder and energy into the company at key within key products and, uh, areas that we need to grow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was very interesting. Take Donnie. What about you? I mean, you were on the other side of it. You guys got acquired.

Yeah. I mean, I think it, you know, when we went through an M&A process, there were, you know, there was some interested parties in what we were doing, and Phantom was without a doubt the smallest company, um, but had what we thought was like the best product, the biggest upside, uh, in a place where our team could make a lot of impact. And I think, you know, having gone through an acquisition in the past in 2014 and having some— I don't know, just, it wasn't the integration phase, wasn't like stupendous. Uh, it was kind of night and day joining Phantom. I think that Brandon, Chris, and Francesco are very low ego, uh, founders that were very open to kind of accepting this graft of a new team and new DNA. And, um, and it really didn't take long to get like just totally dialed. Um, so I think that I'm sure some of the other founders would all say the same thing. I think that, uh, doing M&A well is not a given. Integrating the teams well is not a given. And it's something that we put a lot of effort into. We have a head of corp dev that, that, you know, makes sure a lot of these things go smoothly. But, you know, again, we're still, you know, 160 people. I'd imagine that, you know, there's more M&A on the, you know, coming. And you would imagine— I'd imagine, I'd imagine, you know, I'd imagine. And I think that it's interesting here.

You guys have a head of corp dev. 'Cause usually you don't see that at a company of 160 people.

Well, I mean, to Brandon's earlier point, I think we were under 100 at the beginning of the year and headcount, you know, outside of getting our recruiting engine like really tuned up, you can attribute a lot of that to acquisitions as well.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I will say, you know, when Donnie first joined, it was very anxiety-inducing for me. So I was like, this, this, you know, we have this, this other CEO coming in.

The other founder is going to see how all the flaws of how this works.

Yeah. He's going to see like how, yeah. And then, so I think my initial instinct was like, yeah, like I'm, I'm the CEO. I know, I know how to run this company, but then I was just like, wait, let's just let Donnie cook for a bit. And, um, yeah. And it just has been awesome. So that's very cool. Yeah. That's very cool.

Um, what do you think you guys will— I'm sure you know, but any hints on what you'll acquire next? Not, you don't have to name companies obviously, but like, uh, parts of the stack.

I would say that in order to grow to what we want to be, there's just new muscle that we need to like, that we need to create teams that just don't exist right now or kind of are being scrapped together. So to the extent that we can find strategic targets to help us get to that, You know, sure, we can maybe build a team over 6, 12 months, but if we can get to a place where we have a functioning unit that adds new muscle, um, I guess that's a—

I guess that's about the detailed— Yeah, very good. I mean, I think, um, in general, anything related to the trading business, you know, yeah, that's a, that's a big umbrella in which, you know, we're always looking to add firepower and muscle. And I'd say, and then the other big area is sort of what we describe as money movement, stablecoin-related tech, especially on the fringe of fiat to stablecoin. I think getting that experience, the onboarding, offboarding internationally is going to be a big challenge. M&A is probably going to be potentially a tool to kind of get that to work. So yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the money movement thing is a good point because it's a bit of an expansion of like the core focus of what historically has been Fantom. And a lot of what we need to do isn't necessarily massively, massively innovative, or we don't need to reinvent the wheel. So to the extent that we can find teams that have executed that quite well, um, kind of behooves us to see if there's a deal to be had.

That's great.

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Will you guys ever launch your own chain?

Probably.

John is like, I'm not taking that question.

I'm punting on that one. I don't think so. I think I've been pretty anti, I think, no, I don't think so. Yeah, I think for us, it just the launching your own chain is kind of, is antithetical to the open permissionless nature of crypto, I feel. And so I think we're always going to try to just reinvest into Solana and the other ecosystems that are already built on. That's my general—

Do you think another, a non-Solana chain will ever, do you think someone will eventually overtake Solana or do you think Solana is the final? And I mean, you guys support Sui and Manna, Polygon, but do you think Solana has won or do you think someone could overtake them?

Well, it depends on what, game they're trying to win or the other chain. So I think Solana really captured the fast and cheap narrative. There was a bunch of people who were joining, who were going fast and cheap, and they won that. That's pretty clear. However, there's a lot of other chains. Hyperliquid is an interesting example. They're not trying to go for fast and cheap. They're trying to be the best perps DEX experience. And so I think these more verticalized, like domain-specific chains, I think might potentially take off. So there's the stablecoin payments related ones like Tempo, ARK, et cetera. But I think I'm pretty bearish on like someone just trying to compete with Solana just on the vectors of fast and cheap. I think that's over.

Yeah, I'm actually, my co-founder Mike posted something. He said, I'm fairly convinced that in 10 years there'll be no general purpose chains. They will all specialize to some degree. For instance, if you look at Ethereum and Solana today, Ethereum looks to me like RWA issuance chain and Solana looks like trading consumer chain. Miles and I called this quote sector-specific block space 2 years ago when we did our AppChain season of Bell Curve, which people should listen to if they haven't yet. What do you think about that idea? Sector-specific chains being the things that end up winning?

Yeah, I think that aligns, that aligns with kind of what my take just now around like, yeah, sector-specific, domain-specific. I think, yeah, especially with chains that are trying to Do some sort of interface with the traditional world. So specifically payments, right? There's just certain laws of the universe that they're just not like a general purpose chain is just not going to be able to get around. Right. And so folks who are just really like listening to the DoorDashes of the world and whatever to like, and, and sort of making sure that we have a solution for them. I do think there's room for those types of ecosystems. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that fully. Yeah.

How influential has, have Stripe— no, no, have Sequoia and Paradigm been in helping you guys scale Phantom?

Well, yeah, they played very different roles. So yeah, a16z is also 3 major investors, a16z, Paradigm, Sequoia, all very different. a16z is an amazing company factory. They have sort of every resource and sort of niche resource imaginable. Like if you're trying to hire someone in whatever, Uzbekistan, like they have a guy who's like just for that.

I always say it's like a spa for companies. It's a nice menu.

Yeah, you kind of have the, yeah, the bottomless menu. So they have been really great in just making sure, helping us really go from 0 to 1 and just all the basic company stuff. Where Paradigm comes in is really like helping us navigate the crypto native aspect of everything and sort of the micro of choosing which partners and how to look at things because they're so deep in crypto and they understand the nuance. And then yeah, Sequoia, we're still, you know, we just partnered up with them earlier this year. So we're still figuring out how to use them the best, but you know, they're pretty much, uh, you know, the number one VC in Silicon Valley of the world, et cetera. And so the doors that they open are, you know, pretty much limitless.

Yeah. I'd say the Sequoia impact or influence also is because it's not extremely crypto native. I think that they're sort of kind of bring the angle of thinking bigger in the upper bounds of the opportunity. Like that's, it's obviously when you invest at this scale, it's kind of what they're excited about. But it's a nice contrast to, you know, being very crypto native in the Paradigm perspective as well.

Yeah. Good combo.

How does, one of the fun conversations that people like to talk about on crypto Twitter is like this, you know, their words, not mine, kind of cabal that's forming around like Stripe, Paradigm, Sequoia, Bridge, Privy. How does that actually manifest?

With the narrative?

Or the fall.

No, like, like if you look at the, if you look at the, yeah, like if you look at the cash stablecoin, right? Like this was done, you've got integrated into Stripe, you know, Bridge is the backbone.

Like, yeah.

How did I like, so you go to Paradigm and you're like, hey, I want to go build a, get in the stablecoin space. They're like, boom, got it. I got the guys. You got to go work with them.

Well, it's not like, it's not like they're forcing us to go in some direction, but just naturally they, they help us, you know, talk, open the doors to talking to all the right people. Um, and so naturally once you start just talking with these folks and partnering with them, you, you know, you end up being able to, yeah, just make the best informed decision, I'd say. But I wouldn't say that there's anything like, there's not some architect.

A heavy hand.

Yeah.

No. As far as I'm aware.

I mean, but what—

Matt is just like—

Yes.

Yeah.

But in lieu of that, I think it is just sort of like a relentless focus on some outcome. And so for us wanting to do a stable that was accepted in retail and used with debit card and like everywhere, it became clear that, and we started thinking about this prior to like the Bridge acquisition closing. And so meeting with Zac early on, talking about this idea, figuring out how we can make it work, how we get the economics to work. I mean, these conversations started in January, like in earnest of like, how do we do this? But it was just a relentless focus on this is like, this is the outcome that we want. And it just happened to be that the people that fell in line to meet that outcome, you know, they're all, you know, kind of.

We're working with Stripe because they're the literal best at money movement in the world. And they're not just a stablecoin issuer, they're also a merchant network. Yeah, totally.

Do you, what do you think 5 years from now, tempo, will look like. Are you bullish on Tempo?

Yeah, definitely bullish on Tempo. I think it's still extremely early. Obviously it's not even out. There's some light documentation. So I think I really like their approach in that it's very, they are working with the industry and folks again, like DoorDash and others who are actually, you know, they're actually trying to solve some real problems. So I'm bullish on, on their approach. How it's going to end up long-term, there's so many twists and turns it can take. It's, and then obviously ARK, I think is going for something quite similar as well.

It's good to know that bullish on the idea that there's an iron in the fire that is addressing the payment scale concerns for stablecoins. And I feel like Tempo is obviously well positioned to do that. So bullish on Tempo or someone else that gives as much of a damn as they do about nailing that product.

Yeah, I want them to pop off and succeed because payments is probably, I mean, that's one of the very original crypto use cases. Payments, peer-to-peer cash, electronic cash. And so I think anything that's, anyone's working towards like actually helping us fulfill that. you know, we're going to help start.

The holy trinity of the year has been stablecoins, perps, and prediction markets. You guys have talked about the stablecoins, you talked about the perps. What do you guys think about what you'll do with prediction markets?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's, again, you know, our whole MO is taking what's, what's going on, the cutting edge of crypto and packaging it up. So I think you'll see us doing something similar, sort of a phantomification of of prediction markets, so to speak, where we take— right now it's, it's a very hot topic, but most people are still not really trading and it's still pretty— if you try to use like one of the direct interfaces, it's still pretty confusing. And so, yeah, how can we really take that and, yeah, give it to our user in a way that they're, they're going to be— it's going to be safe and easy for them.

Yeah, I think that prediction markets as a use case is something very aligned with our audience. And at the same time, we'll have derivative value with a broader audience as we continue to grow. I think, you know, we talk about this, you know, the holy trinity, but prediction markets, I think, are mega macro trend that I think will be an abstraction that a lot of people like interface with for years to come. We're pretty excited about it.

We're taking it pretty seriously.

Yeah. There's only two companies you'd work with, probably Kalshi and Polymarket. Do you have thoughts on, yeah, I mean, you don't have to say who you're going to partner with, but like, how do you see those two in your head?

Yeah. Yeah. It's really, it really has evolved into a bit of a two-horse race. I think there, there was maybe a window earlier this year where there could have been a third or fourth competitor, but I think there was an inflection point that happened. Yeah.

And now they've run away.

Unfortunately, that inflection point happened. And so, yeah. And that's kind of sort of the reality now. And you know, they're both my, you know, basically what's going to happen next year is going to be a DraftKings versus FanDuel style mass media.

I agree.

Off where there's Super Bowl ads, there's whatever, and you're just going to be sick of hearing it by the end of the year. Right. And so, so yeah, just, just observing that carefully and trying to understand, you know, how we might best. Position ourselves or not?

Yeah, I think the way that we're thinking about who we want to work with, I think how they think about the market today, how they think about the future of prediction markets. And there isn't as much dogmatic interest in, from our perspective, it's more about how is this being, is this being built by a team that understands like the full scope of what they're actually building and the implications broadly in like the financial markets. So, um, yeah, we're, we're excited to continue to figure it out.

Nice. Cool.

Yeah.

ETA on that?

I don't know.

3, 4 and a half years.

Yeah. Yeah. Potentially.

Nice.

Yeah. Yeah. Not, not too far.

That's great. Um, what's your ratio of designers to engineers?

8 to 1, 7 to 1, something like that.

Yeah. 8 to 1, 7 to 1, something like that. Yeah.

6 or 7 to 1.

Yeah. I mean, we have a bunch of different—

And what's your ratio of product people to— what's your product to design to engineer ratio?

Is it maybe 2 designers to 1 product or something like that? PM?

Yeah. Yeah. 1 PM, 2 designers, 8 engineers roughly, or 1 to 6. Yeah.

Yeah. Call it that. Yeah. Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. Questions that nobody cares about except for me.

No, no, it's good. No, no.

I mean, this is things that I'm thinking about.

So it's—

I saw this question.

We often do our thinking in terms of ratios because it's like, it's a, you know, we're building the machine. The machine is a pipeline and you just kind of have to make sure. Yeah. When the designer starts popping out designs, like there's an engineer who's ready to take them, right?

So yeah, I actually think looking at ratios is probably the best. Find companies that you are inspired by and actually look at the— don't look at their headcount, look at the ratios. It's probably a better way to think about it. Um, uh, liquidity and exiting. Have you thought about IPO versus token?

Um, well, yeah, I think in general I view Fantom as probably one of the very few true on-chain consumer companies that can go IPO, that has the right potential profile. And so when we think about the trajectory in building the company, we do, we do hold ourselves up to the IPO bar in terms of like, we want a certain operational maturity. We want a certain revenue quality and diversity that like meets that bar. Whether or not we're pulling the trigger on it is, I think, obviously there's many different factors. There's the market, there's blah, blah, blah, right? I think for us, we use it, we view it as if it, if it is the right tool for us to accelerate our mission, we're going to reach for it. But it's not, it's not necessary, especially now, especially nowadays where obviously Stripe is the poster child example of staying private forever. But especially nowadays where in private markets you do have, you do have access to funding. I mean, we have access to A16Z, Paradigm, and Sequoia. Between them, we have access to as much private funding that we want.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, going public, you know, why are some reasons you do that? Yeah, either for additional funding, there's some potential brand, um, like some positive brand association with being public, which is actually questionable. I think in this day and age, actually, it's like, what would, would a, would a crypto person trust a public company more than a more crypto-native company, private company? Um, but then, yeah. And then, but on the flip side of that, obviously it's a huge operational burden to become public, right? Totally. So, Those are the different factors that we juggle.

Will you, one thing that I'm paying attention to is just companies that have basically both a token and will IPO. Like, I think, you know, we were talking about Polymarket. Yeah. Like Polymarket is probably going to IPO and launch a token. That's very interesting. Like Uniswap, right? Uniswap Labs equity is valued at 1.5. Their token's valued at 3.5. Ripple just raised at 40. And they've got a token valued at like $150. Or even you could say the exchanges, right? Like Coinbase is public and Base is going to have a token. Kraken will be public next year and Inc will have a token. What do you think of this dual model?

Well, I mean, it's definitely completely uncharted territory. I think it's pretty hard to, I mean, once you have a token, you have this responsibility to the stakeholders and holders of the token that you can't break. And so, and then obviously when you go public as well, you, you have that. And so I feel like we were talking about how the operational difficulties of going public and a lot of that has to do with reporting and how you're interacting with stakeholders. With a token, it's like layering another one of those on, like probably time, like in difficulty times 2 or 3. And so What am I trying to say? Yeah, it's uncharted. I think it's, it's going to be quite difficult to pull off correctly. I think, um, and there's a lot of risk to it.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, one thing that we think about internally is like whether or not we IPO is like getting a path to like IPO readiness and just so we have that sort of hygiene in our company. Um, that's a pretty tall order. To think about having like IPO and like token readiness at the same time sounds difficult as shit. Like that doesn't sound like, that doesn't sound exciting. And listen, it's a funny question to ask because I haven't really put a lot of thought into why other than like, you know, someone needed the token early on and then they've changed their, but yeah, that sounds, it sounds like a very, very difficult thing to do well.

Yeah, I'd say again, like if, if we do, if we did feel like a move like that was going to help accelerate the adoption of crypto, help solve the usability problem, I wouldn't see why we wouldn't consider it. But it is, it is something that introduces a huge amount of risk into the company. Obviously there's all the, the whole regulatory aspect of it, but just managing a live token is, I mean, we saw something like this happen actually at 0x very early on. It's like, when it goes well, it's great. However, when it goes poorly, you can create all these effects where like you create like an undying hater base, right? Like if you just— and it could not even potentially be your fault, just could be like a function of like, hey, you launched the token, next day Trump is, is like turning on some tariffs, then you may have just accidentally killed your company in that moment.

Yeah. Because people hate you.

Yeah.

Like the token went down and they're like, well, it's obviously it's not completely your fault, but they don't care.

They don't care.

So I think for us, like there's a lot to lose to do that incorrect if we did something like that incorrectly. So anyway, that's just, you know, what swirls around in my head when I think about that.

Yeah.

Maybe the last thing that we didn't talk about is just Phantom Connect. So maybe Donnie, if you want to get into that. Would love to hear about it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, one of the big components and one of the big trends that we've seen in the space, obviously one that we were excited about early on in Bitski, was this idea of sort of an abstracted wallet experience. Um, and Phantom Connect is Phantom's take on that. So, um, we've spent a lot of time building, uh, and fine-tuning an infrastructure, an internal key management stack such that we can provide you know, a turnkey-like experience for all Fantom users. And so moving forward, this will be the default wallet type when people sign up for Fantom. But, uh, what's unique is that you'll be able to have a sign in with Fantom button on any product. And when you do that, you, that product will have access to that user's wallet information. You can request scope access to sign on behalf of that user. And so it's basically one of our core, you know, we talked earlier about our strategic pillars. One of those is to own the entry point. And so Phantom Connect is sort of a first step in really moving in that direction that we want to be sort of the underlying wallet infrastructure for everyone.

Oh, that's really interesting. So instead of logging in with Google, you log in with Phantom.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. We were actually just talking about that 'cause we've got our research and data platform. Yeah. And it was, feels funny to just have a login with Google on it. Yeah. And we were wondering if you could do a login with wallet and we didn't.

Yeah. Yeah. But the way it's going to work is that you can have, you can have Fantom on your phone.

Yeah.

For example, and then you go over to your laptop and you go to whatever site, you know, what's OpenSea or something.

Sure.

And you go, you go to OpenSea and you, you press login with Fantom and then your, your money is there. The same money that's on your phone, it's all synced up. And so yeah, log, sign in with Fantom, Fantom Connect. It's, it's more about creating this ultimate vision of like, the native internet financial account. Yep. And like being able to log in anywhere and bring your money with you to any context.

So yeah, and I mean, this has obviously been something that's been keeping me up at night for the better part of a decade, but I think that the other cool feature about this is that for new products that want to just have like an email login, they can do that and it'll create a Phantom wallet for the users on half of the app similar to like a Privy experience. But if that, if that person logs in with an email and there's already a Phantom account associated with it, it'll detect that there's a Phantom account and you get to log into your Phantom account.

That is very interesting.

Yeah. Huh.

Oh, that's very, really cool.

Yeah.

One thing that's tricky about building products in crypto and on-chain is you have very little info about the users sometimes. Like you don't know their name.

Yeah.

You don't know their location.

You don't know anything.

Well, maybe you do know their location if you be like, yeah, you can get it, but Um, how do you, how do you get the user information from people? Or how do you think about how to do that?

So, I mean, one, there's certain things that we ask for, we, you know, username, whatever, whatever information a user wants. Right now on Fantom, you can have a profile, you can put whatever you want to in it. Um, for us, we see the opportunity. Facebook did something very similar in the early 2010s, like where they productized login with Facebook and they productized your friend graph, you're able to take these things to a lot of different new apps that you were using. And what it did was create like a really like, you know, strong ecosystem of helping companies get from zero to one to building network effects early on. So we see a similar opportunity with people's wallets as well. You've already, you know, you have Believe, you have FOMO, you have all these different types of products that are out there that we think would absolutely benefit from being able to immediately bring in their, the network effects that Fantom has. So now that's what information a user wants to share, that's kind of up to them. But anything that we can do to help build sentiment so that developers can build better products, I think that's something we're excited about.

Nice. Yeah, I think in general we always try to have this privacy principle in mind where, you know, you can always use Fantom without providing any, you know, as just a raw seed phrase. Yeah. A wrapper around a raw seed phrase. But if you want to start to augment your experience a bit more, you can, you know, you can sign up for a username, you can start following some other people on the app and get some of those social mechanics going. So, nice.

And Fantom Connect, then beta now, start to be rolling out more towards the end of the year.

Cool.

Donnie, Brandon, thank you guys.

Yeah, thanks for your time.

Yeah, this is fun.

Thanks for having us.

Cool.