Tempo Testnet Goes Live, Burnout In Crypto, and Farcaster’s Pivot | Weekly Roundup

Saying that it's not anything more than, call it, financial infrastructure, it's hard to see how you make that argument today, right? Like, that is where most of the interest lies. That is where much of the investment dollars go. But that's inclusive of dollar access to people who might not otherwise have it, right? That's inclusive of, you know, microfinance. It's inclusive of self-custody, right? And so all of those things are part of the core ethos. But yes, at the end of the day, Crypto today is in the, call it, financial infrastructure money movement phase, and that means that it is unlikely to fill, you know, the hole that some of these, you know, call it early libertarians, were really focused on.

This episode is brought to you by Zashi Wallet. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. We got the gang together finally. Santi, Rob, what's happening, guys? How you doing?

Doing well. Excited to, to see you back. You know, are you excited that we let you back?

That feels good. Feels good. I didn't know. I mean, Seems like you guys have been thriving over here without me.

I mean, engagement doesn't lie. So we just got to see that chart of the engagement just continue to trend up.

Speaking of engagement, Santi, you are farming the engagement on Twitter these days, my friend.

What is, uh, I just want to know, guys, did you make it past the first round at an investment bank? Because if not, I think you're going to have to drop Yano because Rob, I know for sure joined. I don't know if it was a major investment bank, but it was an investment bank.

The amount of people. I don't know if it's a small investment bank.

I don't know if you ever heard of it, uh, Santi.

Um, is it Goldman?

I forget which one.

Now I feel like an asshole. Like, I know already, like, you know, I'm new to this.

You're about to get memed too. You know the memes? I— the amount of memes I saw of Santi, it's like, did you know I worked at JP Morgan?

Like, we, we had a— the classic, like, Patagonia vest. We had a Patagonia vest, like, you know, ETH is overvalued, price to sales ratio. And anyways, it was fun, you know. I, I can't say I sort of knew that when I hit that tweet and I have 5 minutes in, I'm like, yeah, this is going to be copy-pasta for sure. And lo and behold.

So people wanted to know, was this just a whole, was this a marketing thing that you and Hasib lined up? Cause you and Hasib were, you know, back and forth and bantering, but you know, people were quickly realized that Hasib, you know, and Rob and Dragonfly led your guys' last round.

So we had a, we had a, an LP potential LP kind of says, hey, like, Are you guys okay? Like, is your lead investor— I'm like, did you listen to the debate? Um, no, I mean, this is what I love about zooming out a little bit. Like, Rob and I talked about in the last pod, like, there's very few people that I think you— the best relationships are one where you feel like you can attack an idea without feeling like you're gonna attack a person. And I felt that level of comfort with Dragonfly since the very beginning. I was just like, I don't—

I—

you never want to have someone that you feel like you're walking on eggshells. That they're going to cut it to you straight. And, you know, Hasib and I have different opinions about valuations in crypto, but that's totally fine. I know Hasib is still out there. You know, he now is still— he went on Milk Road and do a podcast and still engaging with the crowd where you can't debate him. I just, I just, I just dropped the bomb and I walked away. I'm like, guys, you know, I know where I stand. I'm not going to like—

you know what this reminds me of, Santi? The whole time is that there's a tweet from this guy Julian Shapiro that I think perfectly summarized what was happening. He said, this is how Twitter works. You get free distribution and the ability to start a movement or attain self-promotion despite being, you know, you could be a nobody and you can still start a movement. The cost, guaranteed uncharitable criticism and bad faith attacks. The power of X belongs to those willing to stomach the cost, embrace it, or others will. And I was thinking about you when I read that.

Thank you, sir. Yeah, no, it's, uh, I, this is probably the first time that I've been Um, got attacked from all kinds of sides, but it's great. The best one, the best one, shout out goes to, uh, this guy Gabriel Hines. He puts out heaters. Time, like, every day he's posting out a video. I mean, I'm close to hiring his social media manager because he's just on fire. He had a great one about Forecaster, had a great one about Polymarket fake volume, all stuff we're going to talk about.

I listen, Gabriel, actually, like he had this thing before he was doing like, uh, he had like, he was doing this with like swords and katanas and like, and he's shirtless in every video. Is that right? Is that always shirtless?

He lost a lot of weight. It was like a, it started, I think, as like a weight loss thing and a motivation for himself to lose the weight. And actually I think he's great. I think he's great. I'm into it.

Um, it's sort of like Get Rich Nick, which is like maybe like the best brand on Twitter right now. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. Best is an interesting word there. The loudest brand on Twitter.

I mean, people hate him and they go into his, but his shtick, he keeps like rerunning it over and over again. And it's like millions and millions of views.

Yeah, he gets it.

Yeah, he gets it. This is sort of what I came to the conclusion is like, if you think you're going to show up on X to have an intellectual discussion, you're very, very wrong. I mean, the content just gets rage bait and, and, uh, you know, polarize. The more extreme your view is, the more it's going to get picked up. And I sort of— there's, there's no point of having an intellectual discussion. I mean, it's just like, it's not what gets highest engagement. And it's just a big problem that we have, I think. Like, enter prediction markets, assuming you believe that their volume is real, which we'll talk about in this episode too.

You're really trying to bait here.

I mean, let's talk about— it's a small thing. Let's talk about the Polymarket data for a second. I care less about the I mean, basically for, um, I don't know, Rob, if you want to give a quick overview of what happened, but one of the things I'm curious about is like, it seemed kind of like the Dragonfly versus Paradigm, uh, debacle on Twitter, less of the Polymarket/Kalshi. But yeah, maybe if you want to give a quick summary from your end of what was going down.

Yeah. Um, I don't, I don't know if I have anything good to say. Uh, listen, the reality was, is like, you know, the paradigm—

No, you're, you know, you're thinking it, uh, right.

So the Paradigm Data guy came out and he said, hey, listen, like, uh, some of the dashboards like, uh, like Blockworks are, you know, maybe overstating Polymarket data because they're, um, you know, it's kind of complicated the way that, uh, the Polymarket data infrastructure works and the way you read the smart contracts. And it might be some of these people might actually be double counting any single transaction because they might be counting both the taker and the maker, right? Um, and like, okay, totally, uh, makes sense. The reality is, and Jason, as I'm sure you can talk about this a little bit on the Blockworks data side, like, that's a, a common, uh, refrain in conversation around a lot of different types of trading that happens on-chain, right? Is how you think through, uh, for, for especially for derivatives, how you think through notional volume, which is like, you know, if you trade a dollar at 10x leverage, is that, you know, $10 of leverage of volume versus a dollar of volume? And then you have to think about like both the maker and the taker side and what is the right way to report that. There's people who do different things. Um, the— like, that's like a fair conversation to have. I know you— one of your data guys, Jason Yanowitz, was asking questions about it to the Polymarket team. They had kind of told him how to think through the different data infrastructure. Um, and then the entire Paradigm team, I think literally almost everybody, uh, came out and, uh, retweeted it, uh, with various degrees of like probably market, uh, one like, oh, there's a bunch of wash trading, which he, the data guy, put in his, uh, in his, his tweet as well. And then, um, various degrees of like, oh, like a couple people, I think actually I saw, I think, uh, one of the, the GPs there tweeted that Polymarket itself was like purposely double counting, uh, their data, which is obviously not what the original, uh, finding said. It said that some of the dashboards were maybe doing it, um, and that Polymarket was, was actively telling people the how to read the data, uh, if they wanted to. Um, and it basically seems like a coordinated hit against a, you know, competitor, uh, that of a, you know, a large round that they just led out in Dekaushi. Um, and frankly, like, you know, whatever, I'll just say it, like, they just have to do better.

Like, it was just like, yeah, I mean, this is kind of the thing I wanted to do. I cared less about the Polymarket data problem because that, like, I think we, we fixed that. Allium fixed that. DeFi, like, a lot of people, that was a quick thing. There's a bunch of different ways.

And all the Dune dashboards already had it right. Like, a lot of the other dashboards already had it correct. The people who were—

there's just no data.

I recorded.

Different interpretations of what poly— of what poly market volume should be. Notional, taker, or maker, basically. And so I think what we're doing is just showing, showing all three versions. My question for you two, um, is how in— this brought up a more meta point of like, how involved should VCs be? And, uh, for their portfolio companies, basically. So you've got the kind of— I think people were upset with Paradigm because they're like, it felt like a little over-involvement, basically. Um, I'm just— I'd love to get your guys' take on that.

Listen, I think, and maybe I'll just start because I also want to make the point, right, Kalshi, uh, we can't actually verify their data on-chain because they're not really on-chain and Polymarket is, but they report.

Well, on that point, Rob, is what about Kalshi is crypto-native? I'm curious.

Well, you know, they're taking— they're trying to move more on crypto now, so they hired John Wang, and there is a lot of work today to, to get more crypto-native. And so I don't want to discount that. Uh, but basically all of their order book today is entirely off-chain. They, they do some settlement occasionally, um, for different types of transactions, but they basically just report notional volume, right? And so let's— to the example I gave earlier, which is like I bet a dollar at 10x leverage, or at least the way it works for Kalshi, I bet a dollar on something that is only 10% likely. I'm buying, you know, 10 shares, so it's $10, right? And so, uh, it, it, I think, you know, to your second question, Jason Yanowitz, how involved should VCs be? Uh, I have been, and I think people know that I am this way, and Hasib is this way, maybe, maybe Tom less so. Like, we're big proponents of our portfolio companies. I invest in people that I believe in. I invest in people who I like their ideas. I invest in people that I, I want to see them succeed. And so I'm actively out there all the time talking about my portfolio company founders. Uh, and you know, I'm very clear that yeah, I'm invested in Polymarket. I talk about them a lot. I'm very clear that I'm invested in, you know, Inversion, Wasanti, or I'm invested in like Rain or Agora or like all these other guys, right? And so I think that's really important to do. And I think, you know, anyone expecting the VCs not to talk well about their portfolio companies is just, it's crazy and it doesn't make any sense, right? And I think, um, Sahir from, uh, from Split Capital had this tweet a couple days ago or like, you know, why do people expect the VCs like not to be talking about their portfolio companies? But if I, if I flip that around and I say, okay, well, a coordinated attack against a competitor of a portfolio company in which I basically misrepresent what is happening, which I, I think is an inarguable and fair statement to what happened there, uh, that seems like a step too far and not something that, you know, I'd be willing to do. And I think people need to, need to do better. Um, I think there's a really interesting conversation here about what Keith Rabois is doing around Airwallex as well. Uh, but, um, I don't— that, that's my perspective, uh, and probably all I'll say on the matter.

So, uh, look, I mean, I, I definitely agree with Rob's point. Like, VC should be supporters publicly about their portfolio companies, and there's ways of doing that. Uh, you could argue that, uh, going in, uh, trying to discredit a competitor is probably not the best. Like, out of all the things that you could highlight out of a portfolio company, maybe going out and criticizing a competitor is not the best look. And, and I just think like you invite more criticism where you could be talking about the positive stuff that, you know, Kalshi's done. You know, it's made some key hires, it raised a round. Like, um, it's more of an interesting dynamic. Like, this poly market, like, this prediction market war, it reminds me a lot of like Uber and Lyft. And where does it end? I do think that there's a broader conversation around monetization of like we— Jan, in the prior episode, we were talking about Robinhood potentially displacing Kalshi and Robinhood contributing a ton of volume to Kalshi. And I think Rob made a comment around, hey, we got into talking, hey, if you're a lead investor, how much of that was disclosed ahead of the round? And I think does it begs the question, did Paradigm feel an egg on its face? And so it went out and like, it's just like people can now make a storyline. It's easy to like now construct that narrative, which is Which may or may not be true, right? Maybe they did know about it and maybe they were like, hey, what probably would've been a better thing if you're Paradigm, which by the way, I think Paradigm is one of the most actively involved VCs in crypto. Dan Robinson single-handedly, like just probably built a large part of Uniswap V2 and V3. Like they just have a, and Georgios is like, they have probably one of the most—

I mean, Tempo, Tempo, which we should talk about later. Yeah.

Tempo. So I just think this is like off, off brand in many ways. And it just, I don't know, I can't explain why this— I know like Kalshi and Poly— like there's a lot of rivalry there and heated kind of, I think, you know, we, I don't need necessarily think we need to talk about it here, but, uh, it never ends well in my opinion.

Yeah. I think it is important to note, like, listen, they've done tremendous amount for the space and for Ethereum specifically. And especially on the technical side, the research side. Uh, they, you know, Dan and team and Georgios, like they're, they're, they're, they've been, I think, just huge contributors for a long time. So, you know, really important to note that and not trying to kind of beat up on them, but I just, the whole thing, I think, left a bad taste in my mouth. And, uh, I think some of the others around the, the, um, the situation. And so, uh, I think as anybody knows, uh, I'm not one to, uh, to hold my tongue.

This episode is brought to you by Zashi Wallet, your gateway to buying, storing, and spending encrypted Bitcoin. Zcash is decentralized digital cash encrypted to preserve agency and safety. With a fixed supply of 21 million and a proof-of-work consensus, Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin. With Zashi Wallet, you can swap Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency into Zcash and stay shielded by default. Thanks to Zashi Wallet for making today's episode possible. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

Let's shift gears. Let's talk about the other thing that Paradigm did this week, which is, uh, Tempo testnet went live. Um, so for people who missed it, so, uh, the, the list of partners was probably the most impressive, like, launch list of partners I've ever seen for a crypto company. It was Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, you know, Brex, Gusto, Kalshi, Figure, Ramp, Mastercard, UBS. And I think a lot of people were, there's actually a summary from this guy Phil, who kind of highlighted some of the things with Tempo, right? 500 millisecond block times, fully EVM compatible, no native gas token, an enshrined DEX. A new transaction type that has native transaction batching, native gas sponsorship, native support for WebAuthKeys and FaceID keys. And yeah, I think actually the, I would say the industry reception to this was, I would argue, very positive. And I think people were very impressed and maybe a little taken aback by how quickly Tempo has been able to get to market and get to market really impressively. That was my under— that was my take reading a lot of the, I mean, kind of talking to people, you know, developers who are looking at this and other founders who are thinking about building on Tempo is I would say, uh, very, the reaction was very impressed. Um, but I'd, I'd love to hear your guys' take on this.

Well, also, uh, Klarna, who I think announced 1 or 2 days ago about their full plan, like their stablecoin, Klarna, you, was it Klarna USD is going to be on Tempo. I'm paying a lot of attention to that, but, but yeah, I mean, it goes back to—

Santi, did you see that Klarna is launching a wallet? They just announced this with, um, yeah, with Privy.

With Privy, that's right. Yeah. So the acquisitions that Stripe made are starting to make a whole lot of sense. I think it, um, going back to what does this mean for like, like people talk about monetary premium. What's interesting here is of course no native token. So gas is paid in stables. That's something that, you know, makes a lot of sense, candidly. And yeah, we've talked about like reasons why like Tempo probably doesn't grow, like it's handicapped in terms of growth because like Stripe is there and that's like, you know, there's reasons why you wouldn't want to deploy. But yeah, I mean, you, you, it begs, again, it begs the question like what is the moat of these systems if someone like Tempo can very quickly have this type of traction and convince a probably do better BD muscle than, you know, other networks. And what are the true moats of these systems where you can have someone like that launch your own? And, you know, of course it has the weight of Paradigm and Stripe, but it's very interesting what's happening in real time, to be honest.

Yeah, I don't have a lot to add. I mean, listen, I think the initial documentation that they set out, like, does look super impressive. Clearly They've done a great job here. I think the, the speed has everybody really excited and impressed. It's, it's very impressive. It's probably true that a lot of the core infrastructure was stuff that Paradigm was already working on through Reth, uh, and so that's probably part of the speed. So, and maybe somewhat unclear how the timeline worked there, uh, but you know, there's nothing bad to say about what's happened here, um, and what they put out so far. I think Santi's point around like, you know, just what does this mean for the mousetrap that Stripe has and, you know, the broad set of companies that they've acquired and like the use cases that they want to enable on blockchain rails. It's— I— my guess is they're able to put force a lot of people onto Tempo and this is going to be very successful for them in a lot of ways. I think it's probably going to be one of those situations where it's kind of a call it a, a commoditized complement, i.e., right, like they will essentially give away, you know, Tempo for free, right, when all of the things that come with Tempo— but they will do it if you're, you know, paying for something else within the Stripe ecosystem. I think there was a little bit of back and forth earlier this week around how Stripe was charging people like $1.50 or something for a stablecoin transfer And, you know, clearly I think there was some misunderstanding around, you know, what that means, because people are saying, oh, well, like, you know, if I move a dollar, you know, stablecoin on Solana, it's like a fraction of a penny. And so how are they going to compete this way? But clearly, like, that's not how pricing works in payments, and there's a broad set of things that go into that around authorization and, um, and settlement and interchange fees, etc. And yeah, clearly my guess, and I, I think I gave this example on a prior podcast, but you know, one of the things we had heard before was that, you know, Bridge and Stripe won a deal against another provider called BVNK because they had showed up and they said, hey, we will give you Stripe authorization for free, right? And so what we're seeing here is like a clear, you know, just strategy around building the entire stack and, you know, giving certain parts of away for free to be able to— and building the best possible product to be able to win the whole deal.

So let me, let me pose this question. All right, go, go, Santi.

I was gonna say, this is a classic bundling we're seeing, by the way, which is like the multiple Stripe. Now, I, I, I'm gonna have to drop in a minute here, um, because Rob was late to the podcast because he was at Columbia evangelizing and converting unpaid interns. Nonetheless, nonetheless, Stripe, $100 billion secondary market equity. Good luck trying to get your hands on it because it's hard to get. Tempo raised at a $5 billion valuation, I believe, and raised like $500 million. If you go down the list of L1s now, I'm not even sure they're going to have a token, right? It's like Base, Coinbase, similar dynamic.

Probably I would guess both Base and Tempo have tokens at some point.

Let's just assume they will. But like, that's what I'm saying. Uh, would you rather own Stripe equity at $100 billion or Solana, that's $80 billion, or Ethereum at $380 billion, or BNB at $120 billion, um, or even Monad and some of these emerging kind of, uh, L1s, uh, that, you know, both you and I, Rob, have exposure to. What's it trading at now? And I, I'm gonna keep playing this game on podcasts until people like just kick me out, um, But Monat's trading at $2.6 billion. Would you rather own Monat at $2.6 or hypothetically Tempo at $5 billion?

I mean, it's a tough question. I think to your point, we actually just talked about this at the Columbia class I was guest lecturing at. So we had the— I got the exact question around like, how do you think about Tempo and how do you think about Tempo relative to public blockchains? And, you know, will there be a lot of payments that come onto Tempo, and will that take over stablecoins? And I'll give the same answer here, which I essentially gave in this class, which was that I expect that Stripe is going to pull a bunch of volume through Tempo. And I think there's no doubt about that. It's probably the best, most innovative payments company of the last decade, right? And John and Patrick Collison have done an incredible job, and they're clearly doing a great job with this, right? But I do not believe that if you think that stablecoins are going to come on-chain in a real way and payments are going to come on-chain in a real way, that over time Visa will want to send transactions to Tempo, that Adyen will want to send transactions to Tempo, that Checkout.com will want to send transactions to Tempo, right? And so what does that mean? It means it's a bundled product, to the point that you said earlier, Santi. But it is unlikely to be, call it, a, you know, permissionless, all-weather use case for anybody type of chain. Which means that one of two things have to happen. They either have to meet somebody where else, they have to have some sort of interoperability, or there will just be a lot of silos, right? And that might be part of what happens here. And so I expect that, like, for instance, like Monad is, is leaning really heavily into payments as well, you know, in a world where, you know, people care about meeting somewhere that is, you know, coordinating trust and that isn't an interested party, maybe somebody like a Monad would make sense, or Solana for that, for, for that fact, because they are, you know, very focused on this as well. That said, like, you know, the easiest mousetrap right now is to take an existing distribution, pull them through your funnel, pull them onto your, your blockchain, and we're, you know, in the near term, we're gonna probably more pay actual real payments volume on Tempo than we will have seen anywhere else in crypto at this point.

Uh, I'll get tired of saying this, but we're gonna go back to the most valuable companies in crypto are Tether and Binance, right? And they don't share much of that revenue on-chain. Like, they, they have spillover effects, but I think this might be one example where we keep going back to this token equity and where value accrues in the stack. And I think you're now seeing in real time, like, Stripe and even Coinbase, like, they're using public infrastructure to monetize their real business, equity business. And I, you know, I think it's something that begs the question around, yeah, all this payment volume is likely going to come on-chain. Yeah, stablecoins are great, room temperature semiconductors, but you're seeing a very, very savvy founder-led organization appreciate that and then reap the benefits for their core business. And You know, I don't know what kind of— it would be actually pretty interesting to see what kind of deal they struck with Green Oaks and those guys that put in $500 million into Tempo. Surely there was some discussion around the token. Surely there was some discussion around rev share and whatnot. Uh, but they're also investors in Stripe, as I understand it, right?

I feel pretty confident. I mean, Tempo will have a token.

Yeah.

I think there's actually a PolyMarket, um, on this now for when they'll have a token.

I'll leave you with this question, Jens, because I got to draw up, um, there's a great— there's a, there's an interesting post with Ryan, Ryan Watkins, who's coming out and saying, you know, change his tune on Ethereum. My question to you, gents, I submit, is Tempo World War III resistant infrastructure?

It— why? Because that's Ryan's point about Ethereum for why he's bullish. Is that why?

I think you should pull up his thread because it was a lot of, a lot of interesting stuff in there. But I'll just—

I'll say this, and maybe, maybe I'll get a bunch of, you know, like, Ethereum bulls, uh, in my, you know, tweets after this too. But, uh, I'm— I am certain that no blockchain is, uh, World War III, uh, resistant at the moment.

So, hey, man, Santi, all right, do well.

All right, thank you. Take care, guys.

Rob, last, last question on this note. There's a Does it feel like the mega— so you don't think the mega— all right, here, here's the two camps I think people are in. One, one camp was Tempo Tech quality and architecture is like this, both the simplicity and the buildout speed is the most, one of the most impressive things in crypto this year. The other side of it is, ah, crap, it feels like actually the mega conglomerates are just going to win here. Whether it's Stripe or, yeah, sure, maybe Audien, Audien's not going to send their, you know, payment flow to Stripe. To, you know, Stripe's Tempo chain, but maybe they're going to launch their own chain and, ah, crap, what are we doing here as crypto natives?

Yeah, I mean, I've been a proponent, I've been writing about this for a while, that I thought, you know, call it full general purpose chains were probably unlikely to win the, like, you know, payments use case, right? Because that is not like, you know, call it full decentralization and, you know, complete trustlessness is not actually what the end customer cares about. In this case. And so I think for a lot of use cases that are serving corporates, it is probably likely to continue to be true that a lot of that flow, a lot of the interaction with blockchains happens on either corporate-run chains or happens on maybe not corporate-run chains, but, you know, purpose-built chains that are, you know, maybe sometimes it could also be an L2, right? Robinhood is trying to do that. But I, I do believe that a lot of blockchain activity is going to exist on, you know, non-public Ethereum, non-public Solana, non-public Monad, whatever else, and is going to, you know, be abstracted away by corporates who have some stake, right, and are able to control the experience that they're providing. So I've been talking about that for years. I've had Solana bulls in my, my DMs and in my mentions for a long time about how wrong I was about that. And I think we're starting to see I was probably right about that. Uh, but all that said, I am a general believer that more and more things happening on blockchain rails is good for all of us. And as rising tides lift all boats, this will be good for Ethereum over time. And, you know, I'm just happy to see that the smartest people in the world are innovating around using this technology, which I think is, you know, kind of strictly better than the current infrastructure that we have today.

This episode is brought to you by Zashi Wallet, your gateway to buying, storing, and spending encrypted Bitcoin. Zcash is decentralized digital cash encrypted to preserve agency and safety. With a fixed supply of 21 million and a proof-of-work consensus, Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin. With Zashi Wallet, you can swap Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency into Zcash and stay shielded by default. Thanks to Zashi Wallet for making today's episode possible. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

We should spend a bunch of time on, uh, based on the point I just said to you around on Nick Carter and Ken Chang's, uh, post this week as well.

Yeah, let's go there. So, um, yeah, let me, let me pull up the post for people who didn't see it. So basically this guy, um, Uh, what did, what did Ken build? He built, uh, Avo, I think it was.

Yeah, he was, uh, an early engineer at Ribbon, which ended up becoming Avo, right?

At Ribbon. Yeah, that's right. Here, let me pull up this tweet.

All right. And for people who don't know, Ribbon was essentially a vault that you could put money into that would give you yield based on continuing to, uh, write options, essentially. So it was one of the first option vault products in crypto. Early DeFi summer type product. And then they kind of turned into AVO, which was a perpetual product.

Yeah. So, okay, so Ken wrote this, this piece, I think last week said I wasted 8 years of my life in crypto. And roughly the summary is that VCs have just obliterated a ton of money backing stupid projects and all we've really done— well, it's not even about the VCs. It's about I wanted to build this decentralized financial system and all I really got was this like hyper-financialized, massive global casino. And did, we didn't really change the world at all. We just built this huge, I think his words, biggest online multiplayer 24/7 casino our generation has ever concocted. Um, it's just a speculation and gambling hyper system. That's really just a mirror of what the economy is now. And, uh, I think a lot of people took this as like, uh, this was, there's always, I feel like every like once a year there's like a post like this. Where it's someone kind of— I'm not going to use the word crashing out, but it's someone who says like, you know, what are we doing here? Like, I'm kind of throwing my hands up and giving up. And I feel like this was kind of that post of the year. And I think Nick Carter— there are a lot of responses. Joe Carlson or Joe Gunter had a great response to it. And Mason, I think Pantera had a great response. And I think Nick probably had the best response, but would love to hear your— yeah, your thoughts on this.

Yeah, to your point, you know, this happens a lot, right? And, you know, one of the things that I think is worth pointing out here is, uh, this also used to happen to me all the time, uh, when I worked on Wall Street, right? Is you would hear people, you know, they would leave the bank or they would leave the hedge fund and they would say the same thing, right? Like, we're moving, you know, numbers around a screen. It has no positive impact on the world. It's all a big casino. Uh, you know, I regret spending my time here. And so this is a, I think, a general plight of people who work in what I would call, um, finance, right? And like financial infrastructure and people who— this whole job seems to be, or often seems to be, around, you know, building products to make money, right? And so I think it's important to probably pull that out a little bit and realize that this isn't a crypto-specific point. Now, that said, in crypto, we obviously, we're a bit of an intersection of the technologists and the financiers. And it seems like we've had, depending on the year, uh, you know, more of a Silicon Valley ethos or, you know, call it maybe a cypherpunk ethos. Then some years we've had more of a Wall Street ethos. Today, definitely like the Wall Street, you know, finance side of crypto, I think has taken hold more than, uh, more than the Silicon Valley cypherpunk side. And that does mean we've had the corporates and we've had Stripe and we've had Robinhood and we've had, you know, the DTCC and all of these guys trying to use blockchains. And so that— and, and because of that, we've also had more focus on the financial products, so the perpetuals and, you know, the things that people call, you know, the casino, right? You know, even, you know, Polymarket and Kalshi, there's all this conversation right now around prediction markets on whether or not it's gambling, right? Which is I think gambling is clearly not correct unless you mean that all financial markets are gambling, but it is a financial product. It is an exchange, right? And so all I would, I would really say is that— and Nick did a good job of laying this out— is that crypto is a weird intersection of a lot of people and a lot of ethos. And if you came into this around— you're an anti-state libertarian and that you wanted to have, you know, call it hard money again, and you were really worried about inflation You know, it's hard to say that, you know, crypto hasn't let you down, right? And I totally agree with that. But if you came into this world and you said, I like to build at the bleeding edge of new financial infrastructure, then you're probably happy on where we're going right now. And calling it a casino is something that, you know, I think is pretty flippant when you look around, like, everything that's happening in the space right now. Like, they literally just talked about Tempo and Stripe. But saying that it's not anything more than, call it, financial infrastructure, it's hard to see how you make that argument today, right? Like, that is where most of the interest lies. That is where much of— most of the, um, the investment dollars go. But that's inclusive of dollar access to people who might not otherwise have it, right? That's inclusive of, you know, microfinance. It's inclusive of self-custody, right? And so all of those things are part of the core ethos. But yes, at the end of the day, crypto today is in the— call it financial infrastructure, money movement phase. And that means that it is unlikely to fill, you know, the hole that some of these, you know, call it early libertarians, are really focused on.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really well said. I mean, I think crypto really is just, uh, gives you a tool to build a new financial system. And some people are going to build, uh, gambling platforms and some people are going to build like you know, 100x leveraged casinos and some people are going to build payments rails and some people are going to build on-chain credit and some people are going to build perps. And it just, it's whatever you do with the technology. And I think there are, he is hitting on a point though, which is I think there's strong founder burnout in the industry right now. And I, what I've noticed, cause I'm in all these, you know, founder group chats and all this kind of stuff. There's two very different groups of founders in crypto right now. They're the people who are building for where I think that they think that their end customer is kind of the anon trader on Twitter, right? It's the people who are going after the target audience of probably who trades on Hyperliquid. That's a really, really, really good area to build for if you want to make money quickly. There is a, there's a reason people build for that. It's a really hard customer base to build for if you want to build a business that compounds over, you know, 5, 10, 20 years. Uh, it's just a really tough core customer base. Um, even Hyperliquid, I think Hyperliquid's amazing. Jury's out on if, you know, these, like, if we then go find a new perks platform. Um, and so, yeah, I think, and then you, if you contrast that with other founders, like, you know who's not burnt out right now? Like Michael Shaulov at Fireblocks, Jeremy Allaire at Circle, Paolo at Tether, um, even like, you know, in, in, in the companies that are less big than, than, you know, Fireblocks and Circle and Tether, it's, uh, there's all these up-and-coming founders who are building in the space that you guys are funding, right? Like, whether it's RWAs or payments or credit, it's just a different core customer. And I think for founders who are feeling a little burned out, I would really spend time thinking about like, if we did enter a long phase of consolidation, let's say we did enter, you know, hopefully numbers go up next year, but if we did enter a long period of consolidation in crypto, have you found the problem that you're genuinely excited about solving for the next decade? And if you haven't, you, you will, you will end up like Ken Chang here. You will, you will get burnt out. And if you have, it doesn't really matter what's happening with the numbers or with your finances or if you can raise money because you're working on a problem that you actually genuinely care about solving.

Are you burnt out? Like, what do you feel right now? Cause you seem energized to me.

I'm, I'm energized. I'm, I'm actually really energized. Yeah. I would say it's funny. My, um, uh, someone who knows Mike and I really well. So this is actually December, in 2 weeks we'll have hit 8 years of Blockworks. We've, we, there's ebbs and flows, right? Like we've been really burned out at periods of time. Usually we're not burned out together. Usually one point Mike is burned out and I'm energized, or I'm burnt out and Mike is energized. Uh, someone who knows Mike and I really well and has, um, has seen us build Blockworks said, I've never seen the two of you so energized at the same time. Um, or I haven't seen you guys so energized at the same time in, in a while. And I think it's because we found a pro— I mean, it's not public. The thing that we're launching is not public yet, but we'll, we'll share it soon. Um, the problem that we are trying to solve now is the problem that I would love to spend at least the next 10 years of my life on. And that's why, that's why it's energizing. And when you, when you're able to have, I think when you're able to think like that, it, it just unlocks a lot of clarity.

So yeah, I think to your, I think that was perfectly well said around, you know, are you solving for a problem that, and solving for a customer base that you want to serve over a long period of time, right? The, the incentives in crypto, and I think Ken kind of makes this point and Nick makes this point a little bit. Incentives have all been a little bit misaligned, right? Because it has often been— and they talk a little bit about this with the VCs— it was like, okay, well, you know, what are the things that have a lot of users and a lot of volume really quickly? Because that usually correlates to, you know, the token price doing well, which usually correlates to the VCs making money and correlates to the founders making money. And all that can happen relatively quickly because we launched these tokens while these companies are still early-stage startups, right? And so that misaligned incentive, I think, has caused a lot of people to build to make money and venture capitalists to, you know, back things to make money because, you know, that's what my LPs asked me to do and that's my business, but aren't necessarily things that people believe are, or they want to spend their time on, or they believe in, right? And so to your point, the more you can spend time on the things that excite you over a long period of time, And the more freedom you have to do that, like that, you are going to be better off. And I, one of the things that I would say is, you know, if you look at the early days of fintech, right, or the most recent fintech wave, you look at like Robinhood, which started, you know, call it 12 years ago now or 13 years ago now. And for years there was all this talk about how Robinhood was just gamifying trading. They were making it a gambling platform. It was a net bad for everybody involved. There's just absolutely no reason this thing should exist. Why are we doing this type of stuff in fintech? Right. And Vlad and his, and his co-founder spent, you know, call it the last 13 years building what is now probably the newest generation of a bank for people of our age. Right. And, you know, building like now broad, broader financial access, broader financial products, and really trying to create the next generation financial institution, right? And I think in many ways, there are a lot of crypto companies that are going to follow that same trajectory. And so just, you know, finding a wedge product that maybe has, you know, call it more speculation in it and allows access for humans to do the things they want to do, right? We are not forcing humans to do anything else, uh, but to build for, you know, call it a broader mission. That's something that if you can get excited about, it makes complete sense. And I think, you know, people are going to do it over a long period of time.

Yeah. And the last thing on this note is, um, and I do want to talk about Forecaster. I want to get your take on it is I, I forget who said it. Someone said crypto is the ultimate Rorschach test, right? It's like, it's, um, people project their own belief and fears and hopes and biases into whatever they're building. And if you see, uh, crypto is just one big casino and it just like, I actually think that's more indicative of how you kind of view the world. And it's a bit of a pessimistic view on the world. Yeah, things are becoming super financialized, like hyperfinancialization. Yes. Tough to put that genie back in the bottle. If you see, if you're just, if you get really pessimistic about the future, when you think about that, I feel like that's more indicative of just your underlying views about how you viewed the world. And yeah, like, are you an optimistic person or a pessimistic person? Are you a hopeful person or, or not? Like, are you fearful or? Excited. And I think that one easy way to hack that, if you are not naturally an optimistic person, is to actually try to maybe think about who your, again, who your customer is actually. And if you go talk to a lot of the traders, like, I feel like there's a, if you go to, if you go to talk to a lot of the kind of anon traders on Twitter, they genuinely are pretty skeptical, pessimistic people. They're great. They've made a lot of money. They've done extremely well for themselves. They're pretty pessimistic, skeptical people. So if those are your core customers that you're talking to every single day and that's making you miserable, it's going to make your company miserable. You're not going to do well. It kind of all feeds on itself. So that's just the thing I would think about.

Yeah. And I'll, I'll make one broader point, which is I don't really think this has anything to do with crypto, right? Like hyperfinancialization is not a crypto-specific point, right? There's, I think there was, um, an article—

pull up any sports game and you'll see, uh, gambling on every, you know, in, in the words of every announcer, right?

So everything— I think there was— I saw a tweet yesterday that was for the first time ever, and it's now ticking up that like young men are seeing sports gambling as a bad thing, but they— it wasn't— or they're more likely than ever to see it as a bad thing, but that wasn't true until recently, right? And the Uh, and then, you know, obviously we just talked about Robinhood and how, you know, significant amount of its volume is in, call it, these zero-day options, right? We've talked a lot about, okay, well, prediction markets are, you know, a way for people— they're very social. People like want to have conversations around, and they want to use Polymarket as a sort of a, a way to engage with their friends around, you know, certain, you know, call it, you know, current events. But, you know, it has added, you know, finance to that. And now the way people engage with social media is now all around financialization as well, right? When we think about the payments that you get on Twitter, or, you know, there's a lot of what we've seen, uh, on, on TikTok and others. And so I think the reality is, is that we've broken— we've created many more ways for people to engage with finance and we've opened up the aperture. But I think that does have people— that does wear on people a little bit when everything is about finance. Crypto is an easier way. To create a permissionless, you know, financial product. But it is just part of the cultural zeitgeist that is happening right now. And everything in life is a pendulum, right? Hyperfinancialization is a pendulum that will probably swing back the other way. Some of the people that were most bullish, you know, hyperfinancialization, uh, you know, a few years ago, I'm actually here seeing some, you know, things that were written on Twitter over the last couple of weeks that are saying, okay, well, like, now I'm betting that, like, we start to go— the pendulum starts to come back the other way. And You know, there's— we're seeing, you know, uptakes in religion and uptakes on people trying to turn off their phones and uptakes on people trying to, you know, uh, do other things that, you know, had kind of, you know, gotten, I guess, much further, uh, into, you know, the culture that, you know, people don't always think are good for you. And so I don't know, I think crypto is in many ways just a reflection of, you know, the users, to your point. And its users are, you know, 25 to 45-year-olds who are, you know, educated and, you know, often in the tech or finance industry. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah. Yeah. That, but that's changing. That's changing. Actually, this is a, maybe a good segue. I don't want to spend too much time plugging our own thing, but we launched, we launched this thing called Lightspeed IR today, which is an investor relations platform. And kind of the core reason behind it is what we're talking about, which is there have been these phases of crypto, right? First phase was like the bootstrap era, super retail-driven, Bitcoin talk threads, Discords, Telegrams. Like really fun era, like very important era. But from an institutional perspective, entirely uninvestable, I would say. Then came kind of the second phase, which is maybe like 2017 to 2023. This is kind of like the scale-up era. And this is like exchanges professionalized, custody got solved, DeFi protocols found product-market fit, and really like on-chain businesses started to look less like toys and more like companies, I would say. And I think we just entered phase 3, which is the institutional era, right? We've, we're talking about Stripe's chain. Robinhood has a chain. Klarna has a wallet and a stablecoin. Banks are issuing stablecoins. Prediction markets are integrating with real news outlets or major news outlets. Uh, there are real, real revenue and cash flows are accruing on chain. Um, and actually what comes along with this is the marginal buyer is changing. So the marginal buyer, basically the flows from the last decade came from 2 places, retail and crypto venture. That was like all the flows in crypto, retail and crypto venture. Now the next dollar is coming from liquid token funds, multi-asset hedge funds, asset managers, uh, macro shops, family offices. Eventually, I would argue even pensions and endowments. We saw Harvard just increase their Bitcoin exposure 3x. That'll eventually crypto, uh, trickle down to crypto tokens. Um, and so anyways, long story short, we launched this investor relations platform. We think it's way too hard to diligence tokens today, way too hard to look at tokens. Everything's really fragmented. You don't trust the numbers. Um, and so we launched a, so that's on the investor seat for companies with, for protocols with tokens. It's really hard to keep track of your investors, right? You don't know who holds your token. You don't know if they're located in Singapore or Abu Dhabi or New York. You don't know if they work in crypto. If they don't, there's no way to communicate with your, basically with your shareholders. Um, and so we launched this platform, so we're excited about it. You guys should, it's, you guys should check it out. I don't wanna shill it too hard on this, but yeah, lightspeed.vip. If you go to lightspeed.vip, you can get, we're launching it in Q1, but we're giving a couple people early access. So yeah, lightspeed.vip, there's a button, it should say get access, click it, apply. It's cool.

All right. When I, when I do it after this, you're, are you gonna gimme access?

I'll give you access. I got you. Okay. I got you.

Perks.

Perks, baby. Perks. Yeah, it's cool. It's, um, It's like if you run a fund, our hope is that Lightspeed IR kind of becomes your, your hub for Solana information. And if you're building on Solana, it kind of becomes your hub to connect with investors. And so, yeah, we're excited about it. We think, we think broadly zooming out from our platform, because people can go check it out if they want. Broadly speaking, I think investor relations is not something that's done in crypto today very well. There are a few teams that do it. Maple hosts quarterly calls, like, you know, I've seen some people do quarterly calls and quarterly reports and things like that. I think we'll wake up a, you know, I think 2026 is the year that, uh, investor relations becomes a core function of teams. I think it becomes a team, a team inside these companies, just like it exists in normal capital markets, right? You have an IR team, you have a comms team, a marketing team, product team, an eng team. You also have an IR team. I think that'll end up happening in crypto.

I mean, it has to, right? And to your point around the people that you talked about, a lot of them are, you know, people that have real revenue, right? And real cash flow.

Yeah.

And that are trying to build for the long run.

It's a way they should do it cuz it's a way to stand out if they're actually building something real. Like I was, I was, uh, I saw Brian Pellegrino, um, of, from LayerZero on a podcast. He's like, you know, our, our target is getting to $100 million ARR in the relatively near future. That's, that's a real business.

Yep.

You gotta talk about that. You gotta talk about that and communicate that message to investors. So. This episode of Empire is brought to you by VanEck's On-Chain Economy ETF, NODE. If you feel like you are constantly missing alpha, never have time to scroll through crypto Twitter, NODE is for you. NODE is actively managed by an experienced team with years in both tradfi and crypto. That team at NODE looks to capture the most powerful trends across all of crypto while actively managing volatility as markets evolve. Super important in today's environment. Check out Node's track record so far at vanek.com/empire/node. That's vanek.com/empire/node. You can also— a little easier— just click the link in the show notes. Thanks to VanEck and VanEck's On-Chain Economy ETF Node for making today's episode of Empire possible.

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Let's talk Farcaster. So, Dan, so, um, Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster, um, posted on Farcaster and said, uh, yes, it's basically state of Farcaster. Let me pull up this post. It says, state of Farcaster, December 2025. We've been working on Farcaster for 5 years. The goal has always been to build an at-scale decentralized social networking protocol with a billion people using it. Hard problem. And while we've made progress, we're still orders of magnitude away from achieving the goal. Since the early days, we've believed two things matter most: sufficient decentralization and product-led protocol development. Uh, we spent the last 4.5 years with a social-first strategy. We shipped a working version of the protocol that was sufficiently decentralized. We allowed multiple independent teams to permissionlessly build on it and integrate it. However, despite many different attempts, we haven't been able to find a sustainable growth mechanism for the Twitter-like social network. I.e., we have not found product market fit. And so they're actually, they're pivoting. Um, they are, he said, uh, we're focused on building a great wallet and we'll get more people to use it. Every new retained wallet user is a new user for the protocol. We tried social for 4 and a half years. It didn't work for us. Wallet has been growing, so we're doubling down on that direction. Um, so TL;DR, Forecaster raised like, I think it was 150, 200 million to go build a kind of decentralized social platform.

I think it was 180 in total across 2 rounds, yeah.

180, okay. Um, raised up $180 million to go build this new social platform. Hasn't really got track— too much traction. I think probably around 25,000, 30,000 maybe monthly active users or weekly active, you know, kind of, they've got tens of thousands of users, not hundreds of thousands, not millions. Um, and yeah, they're, and they're, they're pivoting. So they've got this wallet that's, it's a great wallet experience. I've used it a few times. Um, but they're pivoting to build a wallet. What do you think about What do you— I guess when you see— I don't know, are you— first off, are you guys investors? And second, what do you think about this pivot?

So we're not investors. Uh, I think, listen, the pivot makes complete sense to me, right? And so, you know, they last raised, I think it was $150 million bucks around early 2024, right? So we're talking, it's been, you know, call it a year and a half to 2 years since they did that. The— there's been a conversation for a long time, this was all the way back to 2021 around this, call it, you know, and honestly actually way before that, around, you know, what I would say the Chris Dixon view of the world, the read-write-own view of the world, right? Where it was, hey listen, if I can have ownership of underlying protocols and networks, um, I can have ownership of assets that aren't just monetary but allow me to participate and other types of networks, and then they are— I'm more likely to incentivize to do them, right? And so that means that blockchains will not just be good for monetary assets, but they'll be good for all types of assets, right? And Forecaster was kind of built on this idea that you could build a better network of socially like-minded people, uh, and a better social graph through decentralization and through the use of tokens and, um, yeah, etc. And, you know, a lot of really, really smart people, uh, believed in that future. And it could be, by the way, that they're just too early, right? And so, you know, that round that they raised $150 million at, I think Paradigm led it, Ben Dreesen was in it, Han, Union Square Ventures variant, you know, Coinbase and Ribbit and Multicoin are also investors, right? Like, there's a lot of really incredible investors in there. But what we've seen so far is that, you know, there just hasn't really been, um, an uptake for that reason on any of the social products. The products and the way people define how they're— where they spend their time when it comes to social is, are they addicted to, in some way, this product? Because are they meeting their interests and their friends and serving the, you know, that dopamine hit, uh, where, you know, in a way that is, you know, new and novel, right? And so if I think about the history of social, you know, what we essentially had was that, you know, Facebook allowed us to build a, a social graph with our friends, right? And to see what our friends were saying. Instagram allowed us to see a social graph with our friends, but to do so with a picture format. TikTok came along, Twitter came along, and TikTok came along and they allowed us to see a little bit of different types of graphs, right? Because now it was more of an interest graph, right? Like it's not just, okay, what are my friends doing? But if my friends are interested in something, then maybe that is interesting to me as well. And is there a way to, you know, build my, build me the excitement around using this platform because of that? Farcaster always seemed to take the point of view that they were in some, many ways recreating what already existed, but doing so with a different ethos. And in my experience, that is just not how product works, right? And that is not how people get, decide to use something new. And so you have to build something new and novel. So it hasn't worked and that's fine, right? Like, you know, that's the history of startups. And so this pivot, what it really looks like to me is they're embracing what is working, what— which is people want to engage in financial activities on blockchain rails. And that actually, frankly, could be a good top of funnel for them to make the social work, right? And so actually, like, in some ways people see it as— or I've heard some conversation around, oh, well, they're, you know, kind of going away their original ethos. But if the ethos is to get people to use their social product Well, it might be true that, you know, this is more social than ever because finance is part of being social. So I think it's a great, uh, pivot for them. I— listen, you know, I have, um, nothing but, you know, well wishes for them. I'm not really a Forecaster user, but I've got an account, and, you know, I hope it goes well for them.

Yeah, yeah, I have similar thoughts. I mean, one is just social is really, really, really freaking hard. Um, you have massive incumbents with crazy network effects like TikTok and Instagram and stuff like that, and it's like Yeah, you just have to, you have to have a differentiated product or find a niche or you're not going to win. And you said that people repeated that ad nauseam, so I won't say anything else on that. The other big bucket though is I think we have been overweight on people wanting to own their own data. Remember if when Forecaster started it was, hey, you can port your social graph, you can port your— imagine if you could leave Instagram and go join TikTok. I forget what that, like what that pitch even looks like now because it doesn't even make fully make sense in my, make sense in my head, but it's like, uh, the portability and monetization of your data, um, was I think one of the core premises of, of Forecaster. And it turns out either people don't care about that or people don't care about that yet. And I, I, it does feel like to me the world's actually going in the opposite direction. I was just spending a bunch of time with, um, on, have you heard of Wop? W-H-O-P?

Yeah, I've got a I know somebody that works there.

Yeah. So they're, if you haven't heard of them, they're an incredibly hot startup. A lot of people like, yeah, a lot of people are talking about them. They just hired this very good machine learning person from Facebook, got a lot of attention. Anyways, they let people, one of the, uh, hottest ways to make money on WAP is actually just like sending your own data to these AI companies. and people get paid to do that. And I actually think that's the way the world is trending, is people care way less than crypto people like to think about, like their privacy and their data. And actually, if you can get paid for it, we'll, or, or gain publicity or reputation or power or money or whatever it is, you'll give all your data away. Um, and I mean, we're giving data right now to, we're going to publish this on Twitter. We're giving that to Twitter for free. Why? Engagement. And distribution and things like that. And so, yeah, I think this idea of data portability and monetization just maybe isn't as strong as crypto people thought it would've been originally.

Time and again, we have seen for mass appeal products that, you know, having privacy does not matter. Right. So if it is a product that requires you to go to, uh, get a large amount of people to use it, that then kind of creates this like flywheel or this moat. There's— it's just privacy is not a wedge, right? Privacy matters for subset of people, it mattered for a lot of, you know, really crypto natives, but it just hasn't matter— mattered for mass appeal. And I don't think, you know, maybe we'll get to a point where we'll be under such mass surveillance, which is kind of already happening, but people don't seem to care. But maybe we'll get to a point where in the future, you know, call it, you know, a mass, you know, conglomerate of people care about that, but it just hasn't been true yet. And so it could be early, but it's not, it's not a wedge. And if people try to pitch me on that wedge today, it's, it's really hard for us to get excited about that and eventually outcome.

The last thing I'd say is whenever we've built bad products at Blockworks, it's because we sit on our high horse and think that the market could want this potentially. And whenever we build really good products and end up making a lot of money, it's because we just go talk to our customers and ask them what they want. And then we try to build the best product in the market for that. Actually, someone who's kind of taught me this is the, uh, like guy at Athena. I think, I think Athena has not tried to reinvent the wheel too much. They've just, they just make marginally better products than all the time than everyone. And what I'm thinking about, right, the reason I'm kind of bringing Athena up here is I was just looking at, uh, their Hyena product before this podcast is like, um, if you're trade, it's not some revolutionary product, but now if you're trading perps, um, and use USDC as collateral, you can earn interest. It's a very small thing.

Um, USDT, you mean? USDT.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Um, you can get paid S-USD rates to trade the same perps as if you were trading with USDC as the collateral and getting no interest. And it's just a very small thing, but the market wants it. So anyways, I don't mean to shill Athena there, but it was just like, it's a, it's an example of like, just go talk to your customers and I think build what they want and try to solve their, their, their here and now pain points. Yeah, I 100% agree.

And that's, you know, obviously what Forecaster is doing here, right? They're, they're going and finding the customers where they're at instead of trying to build a product for where they want the customers to be. So, you know, congrats on them trying to, you know, they're making this move. Yeah.

Content of the week, Rob, what do we got?

Content of the week. All right. I will— I last week I showed A Very Jonas Christmas, and I don't know if you, if you heard that, and I got a little bit of hate for, you know, my, my Christmas movies. So this week, uh, I would just say I'm in a rewatch of Succession right now. I feel like I've got a little bit of time around the holidays here, and I, I forgot just how funny Succession is. Like, it is just so funny. And so, um, that's my, my content of the week— rewatching Succession.

I have a, I have a movie for you which I think you will like. Um, it's kind of thriller-horror-y. It's called The Menu. Have you ever heard of this? It's, uh, I have. I've seen it. Yeah, you've seen it? Do you like it?

Yeah, the menu is cool. It's like a cool movie. Yeah, well, because I, I will also say, and I'm gonna get now hate for this as well, um, I also consider myself a little bit of a foodie. And so I've eaten at a lot of like, you know, a lot of restaurants that I think that that movie is, is trying to make fun of.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So anyways, that was the movie. It's, it's a decent movie. It's called The Menu. Rob, good to be back with you. Booted Santi this week. Maybe next week we'll get the three of us.

You know, I am excited. We should go do an in-person around the holidays. Let's do it.

I think let's do, uh, I think next week we will do our predictions podcast.

All right, let's do predictions in person next Thursday.

Done. Lock it in. All right, folks, have a good weekend. See you Monday. Thanks.