War Stories From a Crypto Founder | Kain Warwick

What's the end goal? Is it still to take down the centralized exchanges?

100%. The world will take down centralized exchanges. Hyperliquid has reinvigorated this decentralized platforms can win thesis, but the job's not done. Like, there's a lot of work, right, that needs to happen. We need to get to a world where people can interact with crypto in a non-custodial fashion as easily as they can do it in a custodial fashion. The world is going to be permissionless. There's no question of that. It's just a matter of time.

This episode is brought to you by Zcash. 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 their 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. Caine, man, the myth. What's going on?

Hey, what's happening? Everything. Everything's going on. Chaos.

Is it your birthday?

It was my birthday yesterday, actually. Oh, day before Halloween. So my birthday for you today. So you can say happy. Nice.

I can celebrate it here.

I'll celebrate my birthday over there.

Why do you put your birthday on your Twitter? You know, that's like a big OPSEC thing.

Dude, my passport got like leaked in a—

Oh, you're way past Twitter birthday.

Like, I might as well just have my banner be my passport, an image of my passport at this point. So yeah, that ship sailed, unfortunately.

What do you do for OPSEC? Do you use ledgers or do you— are you just like in a, I don't know, enterprise institutional Coinbase account or what are you doing these days?

I have Everywhere is like, make it as hard. Yeah, make it as hard as possible. Put stuff in as many places as possible. To the point where like, you know, I don't even know some of the stuff. Like I literally, I had a meeting, I like once a week, my family office gets together. And on like a Wednesday afternoon, and this is Bodhi. This is no, so Bodhi is my prop fund. It's, it's So, so Bodhi Jordan, the co-founder of Synthetix, and I started in 2019, which was like, I think the first investment we made was in The Graph, which is a pretty good one. And I remember in 2020 or something when the token launched, I was like, I think this thing's worth like $20 million. Like, what, what's going on here? You're locked for years and years. But yeah, so, so, so we started that prop fund in 2019. Um, in 2021, Jordan, uh, resigned from Synthetix and like went full-time running the fund. Uh, so he has, um, there's two books, there's Liquid and Venture book, and he has about 10 staff that he runs, um, between Lisbon and Dubai. Um, so we do a lot of venture stuff, uh, a lot of Liquid stuff. Um, it's, it's good fun, but this is just like my personal, like, family office.

Tax planning and estate planning.

It's the most boring stuff, right? Anyway, so I was like, I feel like I can't find any crypto. Like, what is going on? Like, have we, have we used all our liquid crypto? Like what? Like I'm literally like out of ETH. I'm like down to like not much Bitcoin. And you know, we've been cycling stuff into different things and different, different deals and various places. And the guy who runs my family office was like, no, no, we've got Plan T. You just don't know where it is. And I was like, okay, that's good.

Yeah, you think that's good until you wake up like you're Shohei Ohtani and your translator walked off with $30 million.

Literally. Well, okay, so you think it's good, except I have a very, very large SNX long open that I started building up So basically I went to my family office and I'm like, I don't have enough SNX. Like, I'm super bullish. We're going to run this back. Like, I want to buy more SNX. And they were like, absolutely not. Like, we refuse to allow you to do that. And I was like, I was like, you know, like, what? You have to let me buy SNX if I want to buy it. And they're like, I'm sorry. Like, you have enough SNX, you're fine. And so I was like, all right, fuck you. I'm going to trade it on perps. And so I built up over the course of like, I don't know, maybe a month or two months or something like that, a big, big SNX long. And it's on Infinex perps on Hyperliquid. And we have a dashboard which shows like the live tracking of all the positions. And it's like not even close to liquidation. But, you know, after 10:10, I'm like, an hour could wipe out the world, right? So I'm a bit like on edge walking around. Anyway, into the office, I walk past this big dashboard which has like all the metrics, whatever. And I noticed that the open interest on our positions has gone down by like a couple mil. And I was like, did I just get liquidated? And even worse, right? So I pull out my phone and I look at the price action and I forgot that I changed it to the daily chart. I usually sit on like the hourly chart, right? So it's on the daily chart. So the first thing I pull up is the wick down to like $0.40 on Hyperliquid. And I was like, oh, It was just a data, it was like a data thing and like then the, uh, the API.

So you didn't get licked?

I was fine, but I was like, all right, I gotta put more margin in this thing. Yeah, I'm living on the edge here.

What do you think about, um, like investing versus building companies now that you've done it with, um, yeah, Bode and Synthetix and Infinex? Like, I, I think a lot of founders, especially people who have been in the industry, I mean, you've been in it been building for like a decade. I've been building for 8 years. I think a lot of people have been building for like, let's call it 5+ years. Something goes through their head where they're like, ah, maybe I want to get into the investing side of things. They start dabbling with angel investing, usually in like year 3 or 4 or 5 of the industry. Maybe they want to go launch a fund. You did it with Bodhi, like Leschner did it with Robot Ventures. Like, what are your thoughts on just, I don't know, that dynamic?

Yeah, I have this debate in some of my like Telegram chats all the time, right? Like, um, I still think that if you have access, right, so if you are a top founder in a cycle, right, let's say you're like, you don't have to be a main character, right? But if you're a top founder, maybe like top, top, you know, 10, 20 founders, the deal flow that you get is so positive EV in that cycle, that like, it makes no sense not to just ape everything, right? Right. So that's like the first cycle, right?

You think it's still positive EV or you're saying that—

I think it's massively positive. Yeah. You know, like someone turns up and says, hey, do you want like access to MegaETH and Monad and Plasma?

And yeah, I agree.

And like whatever, whatever the— because there's a really good filter, right? Where you're like not well known enough that you're getting like all of the deal flow. You're just getting people that are like switched on enough as in founders that are switched on enough to know, you know what, I'm gonna go to Guy. I'm gonna see if I can get Guy on my cap table, right?

And venture firms come to you being like, hey, this founder is really good.

And it's like, you know, yeah, because they want, they want like that name recognition of another founder recognizing a founder. And, you know, and I think, you know, especially in the early days, like I spent a lot of time with my portfolio companies, like helping founders, etc. And, and, you know, that is also really positive, right? Because, A, you get like, you know, a lot of very interesting kind of feedback from people that are like in the trenches as well with you. Right. Which is, which is super valuable. So, you know, like I talk to Namik all the time, right? And, you know, I talk to Keone, you know, every once in a while, probably every 6 months or something. But if I need to talk to them because I've been been there when maybe they had a question about something and I'm like, hey, why are you guys doing this? Or like, what's going on with this thing? It's really nice to have that access where someone will DM you back and give you that kind of feedback on something. So I think there's not just like the financial side of it, there's also the connectivity to other founders side as well, which is quite beneficial. On the second cycle, though, especially towards the end of the first cycle, like into the second cycle, flips from positive EV to you can't just YOLO every deal that comes in front of you because people, they've seen you're an angel. They see you're a soft heart, right? And like, I think you could say this probably for like both me and Stanny. Like Stanny has done every single deal in the history of mankind, 2021, right? He's like on every single one. And you know, might not be big checks, right? $10K, $20K, something something like that. But they add up. You do 125K checks, like, it starts to, you know, not be amazing. And, and so I think that there is a window of opportunity as a founder where, like, you've just gotten to the point where you're kind of a little bit famous, but only people who know know. Once you get too well known as a person who's a soft target, people just come out of the woodwork, like, you know, hammering you.

What do you do now? You just throw it to Bodhi Ventures and Jordan?

Yeah, someone pings me and says, hey, I got a great deal, whatever. Like, I probably get, I don't know, 5 cold DMs a day on Twitter, uh, with deal flow, um, because people know that I write checks.

So they see you on the— they see you on the VC list or something.

Yeah, it's easy, right? Like, especially after Polymarket. After that Polymarket, uh, someone tweeted out like the Polymarket seed investors, it was like me, Meltem, Leschner, Stani, and I think like a bunch of people saw that who may not know who, you know, like I am or—

Okay, this guy just made a bag. Like, let's—

Yeah, yeah, this guy has got some cash. Let's go and try and get some.

Are you going to do that? Are you going to sell your Poly? Are you going to do the tender in the Poly— the Polymarket tender?

Yeah, it's funny, right? Like, so, you know, we did the seed round. We have been pretty significant significantly diluted over the course of like the subsequent rounds, like probably like by 80% or something, I would say. I mean, it's still, it's still a multi-hundred X bagger, right? It's a crazy, you know, and especially back then, like the, the round, that first round was like $10 mil. So it's not like someone could put a million dollars in or something like that, right? Like, you know, like $10, $15, $20, $50K. Um, maybe one confirmation put in like a couple hundred or something like that, but it wasn't like people were slinging, you know, $2-3 million checks around. Um, so my view at the moment, um, you know, I've been, I've been death riding Shane's cracked career for the last, like, whatever it is, 6 years. Like, I'm not ready to get off this ride. I, I want to see it out. And I think the interesting thing about Polymarket is there is a chance that they do something wild like tokenized equity or like an equity token or an IPO with a token.

I mean, that's the thing. It's like, I think all eyes are on them because they've got a, you know, what, $15 billion valuation now, or supposedly, um, on the equity side, but they're also going to do a token. So it's a lot. It's kind of like what they do ends up setting the tone for like what Ripple does with Ripple Labs. And maybe that's a bad example, but Uniswap and Uniswap Labs and Uniswap is another very interesting one, right?

That like, you know, I've got a bag of UNI that I've been kind of, you know, holding for dear life, right? And, you know, I think there is definitely momentum for governance change. You know, I've tweeted about this a few times, like the governance nonsense that went on from like the end of DeFi summer to probably 2023, you know, which was just a like, you know, kind of survival mechanism in many cases, right? Trying to, trying to, you know, create as much cover fire as possible for people who are building, building this stuff when the Democrats are trying to kill everyone. Um, like, you don't really, you know, when you look back on it, right, like, uh, there's not many bright spots in that whole exercise, right? Um, and, you know, the problem is optimizing for the wrong things. It wasn't, you know, at first governance was like decentralization, trust minimization, you know, credible neutrality, like all of the good stuff. And then it became like just a shield to protect from regulatory overreach, right? Once it becomes a shield, it's not going to be optimized in the right way. And I think there are a lot of kind of perverse incentives at play and things that go stop there.

Yeah. Hmm. What do you— what are you— do you, do you trade on Polymarket?

Yes, I do a little bit. I think, like around the election, I had a couple of, a couple of little plays that I made. Not too big. But, you know, we, we started building an integration, as in Infineon started building integration of Polymarket. I think that there is, in the nicest possible way, a lot of UX innovation that could go into prediction market.

Can you trade? Can you play with markets on Infinex?

Not yet. Not yet. We've got like a very, very early alpha. But as soon as we started building the alpha, we reverse engineered all the APIs. And then I started talking to someone at Polymarket and they're like, actually, we've got a better plan, like come and do this thing. So, so we rebuild everything. It'll probably come out after TG is my, is my hot take.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes— you're TG or they're TG?

Yeah, they're TG. Who knows, right?

Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, I find them especially— something about this market, because this market is so, so dead, um, for, for tokens. I find the— I find prediction markets to be a much more interesting markets right now. And I, I actually think, I think the UI is crappy but also very addicting. Um, whereas it's like, what It's just, you can so easily just start, you can just, yeah, I mean, you can click, like, I don't know, I find it very addicting.

I mean, so I didn't bet on this. I wish that I had, I was a bit lazy. And this is like, this is, you know, one of the things that I kind of strongly believe, right, is making it very easy to just kind of have an opinion and express it is one of the most important things. And at the moment, like, it's still a bit cooked, right? Like, you got to have funds sitting there or you got to bridge or whatever. But the thing that one of my groups was talking about for the last week has been the mega ETH final allocation, like how much, how much will it go to? And by like day 2, I was 100% convinced that it was going to go over 1.2. I wasn't sure if it was going to go to 1.4. In the end, it missed 1.4 by like $10 million. And so that, that bet was, you know, there wasn't a ton of volume. I think it was like maybe half a mil or something like that. But yeah, it was, it was definitely those are the types of things that like, it just, you know, we're already watching all of this stuff, right? Like, this is like the thing that we're watching. And then to be, it's like watching sport, and you can now bet on the team.

I actually think the market that they need to lean into even more is basically what I'd call like crypto rumors.

100%.

Is this company raising? Is this company going to do their token now? Like, I like the market. Is Infinex launching a token in, I think, this year is the market, right?

Well, yeah.

So the market is, uh, what's the likelihood that you guys launch a token in 2025, I think is the market.

Well, yeah, exactly. So, so, you know, like at the moment it's literally a coin toss. Like if we can, we'll do it late December. I don't think we're going to get there. Um, but you know, there are some, things that could push that forward. Like, no one knows. Like, genuinely, the world has no more information. Like, you know, it's really going to come down to, like, timeline. We want to do it as soon as is practicable, which means, you know, in the next 2 to 3 months, which means it's, like, right on the edge. It just happens to be randomly right on the edge of, like, that cutover between 2025 and 2026.

So I think there's such a fun feedback loop that's happening though with, um, I don't know if you listen to the Coinbase earnings call today.

I didn't listen.

A friend just texted me and said, hey, did you listen to the Coinbase call? I said no. He said at the end, Brian said, I'm looking at the Polymarket odds about whether certain things will be said, so I'm just going to say Bitcoin and ETH a couple of times so that those things hit yes. And I'm like, I love that.

I know, right? Well, I, the, the other one that was interesting was the Xi, uh, Trump handshake. Like how long will the handshake be, which is just like giga autism, right? Like, why?

Like, like, no different though than in football. Will it be heads or tails, or will the, will the, will the national anthem be more than 2 minutes?

Like, yeah, exactly.

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Honestly, when I launched, like if you go back to like May 2023 or even earlier, maybe I think it was like March, April 2023, where I first had the idea. I had a dream. I woke up and I was like, I know, right? Yeah. Not quite like Satoshi told me to buy Bitcoin level dream, but like I had a dream and I woke up and I was like, I was like, that dream was like really unsatisfying. It was this like sense of frustration and dissatisfaction with like where things had gotten to. Like we just hadn't we hadn't been able to kind of nail what we were trying to nail with Synthetix. And they had just at that point, only like 4 months before, launched the new exchange, right? Like Synthetix V3. And it just, it wasn't great. And I was like really frustrated. I was like, we got so much wrong about that. They spent 9 months like rebuilding it, optimizing it, and just didn't land. And I was like, there's something wrong here. And so I had this intuition of like, there's something wrong. My first, like, 10 guesses of what that thing was were like way off base. At the end of the day, the thing that was wrong, like, I was like, we need to be more centralized, we need like decentralized infrastructure, centralized front ends, et cetera. I had all of these ideas. But at the end of the day, I think the thing that eventually, after like multiple iterations and trying things, which, you know, again, this like over 2 years ago now, right? Which seems crazy that it was that long ago. But, but yeah, like, we— I got to the point where probably early this year we were like, okay, it's bringing everything into a single platform that's non-custodial, that just makes it easy to do stuff on-chain again. Like, doing things on-chain had become harder and harder, and, you know, people got tired of like messing around with gas and bridges all of that stuff. Um, and so yeah, we, we— I think we got to a point where, um, we, you know, um, we, uh, we really were confident in the thesis, like a thing that let you do everything on-chain, um, on any chain, on any dApp, etc. But even up to the start of this year, even up to July of this year, I was pushing back so hard on no browser extension. I'm like, browser extensions are the past. We're not doing browser extension. Like, that's like 2018 nonsense. And then we did a browser extension because it's the only real solution to the problem today.

What do you— what's the— what, what's the end goal? Is it still to take down the centralized exchanges?

100%. And, and, you know, like The world will take down centralized exchanges.

It's in there. Why are centralized exchanges such a big problem for people maybe who haven't thought about that problem?

So, so centralized exchanges are the thing that allowed us to climb out of the primordial ooze, right? Um, you know, if you think about in like, uh, like, you know, kind of evolutionary terms, right? Um, early crypto was like peer-to-peer single-celled organisms just like floating around in like a hot lake somewhere or whatever, right? And then centralized exchanges emerge.

And I don't know why I just pictured Charlie Shrem there, like climbing out of the ooze, right?

But, but all of a sudden the world like, you know, reconfigures itself and these centralized exchanges pop up and They were the thing alongside dark markets, right, um, that, that drove that first wave of adoption. Um, and why did they work so well? Because they were just much easier. Like, LocalBitcoins is awesome, super cool. Um, it was never going to scale to billions or, you know, trillions of dollars, right? And so centralized exchanges came in, solved that problem, and they were so good at solving that problem that they dominated the world for like millions of years. Right? But it's not a satisfying solution to the problem, given that the underlying thing that they're, you know, letting you interact with is supposed to be decentralized. And so you're interacting with this decentralized infrastructure, permissionless finance, all of these things via some guy's like database in his basement, which is wild, right? But we just didn't have the technology to do it better. And now we do. But they are so powerful that we need something and, you know, something needs to happen to kind of shift this and, you know, make it possible for decentralized platforms to win. And, you know, a lot of people think we're, we're already there. But if you look at even, you know, Hyperliquid versus Binance, right, like we're still not there yet. There's still a long way to go. There's still a lot of work to do. Hyperliquid has reinvigorated this, you know, decentralized platforms can win thesis. Um, but the job's not done. Like, there's a lot of work, right, that needs to happen. We need to get to a world where people can, uh, interact with crypto in a non-custodial fashion as easily as they can do it in a custodial fashion. Once we're there, then we're there. Then it's like, then now every— and, and the thing that I think is driving this is this proliferation of assets and opportunities that are on chain today that's gone 10, 100, 1000x since 2020, since DeFi summer, right? The opportunities are really on chain now and everyone knows it. And all the centralized exchanges are responding to this. Binance, Coinbase, everyone's trying to figure out what their response is to this shift. The world is going to be permissionless. There's no question of that. It's just a matter of time.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I actually think the, um, Mike and I have been talking a lot about like the mega trend that Blockworks will be riding for the next decade. And I'm pretty convinced at this point that the last 10 years was assets moving on-chain. The next 10 years will be basically full businesses and companies and revenue moving on-chain. And that'll come from assets moving on-chain too. But yeah, you see it in companies like, yeah, Coinbase. I mean, Coinbase is clearly internally like desperately, maybe desperate is the wrong word, but like scrambling to move to become an on-chain business instead of a, I mean, the centralized exchanges are basically just Web2 businesses.

Yeah.

Private database businesses that operate in crypto. So yeah.

But not just operate, that own and control crypto, right? Like we've been in this kind of, uh, prehistoric era, right? Where, uh, The way that you interact with crypto is via a centralized entity for 99.9% of people, right? It's only this cycle that cracks have really started forming. And that's why every centralized exchange is working out what their posture is to this new world. Like in 5 years' time, I'm very confident that we don't have centralized exchanges the way that we think of them today. They have evolved into some new form, which doesn't mean you won't a Coinbase or a Kraken or a Binance. I think that those businesses will exist. They will just be in a very different posture.

Yeah. Do you have— do you kick yourself at all for— you guys started kind of with a wallet. Do you kick yourself for not having just started with— I mean, you can't just say do hyper liquid, but like, do you ever kick yourself for being like, oh crap, we could have just started with a great trading platform?

You know, the funny thing was that like, I, I left Synthetix, right, um, and, and let the engineers who are working and product, um, product people who are working on that platform, let them optimize in the way that they wanted to optimize. And unfortunately, this is one of the challenges, right, that they, they were optimizing to be too permissionless, um, with no compromises. Um, and I think that what we've seen is, as much as that is triggering for, you know, the ideological, you know, wing of, of, uh, you know, Ethereum, right? Um, and even Bitcoin, arguably, um, that, that it's really hard to build something and one-shot it. It's really hard to build something and just land the perfect thing and be like, here is my perfect permissionless thing. Um, and it's, it's even harder, I think, to, you know, look at Ethereum. Ethereum has somehow threaded— this is why Ethereum is such an impressive thing to exist in the world, right? It's somehow threaded this needle of being like decentralized enough to not get captured over the course of the last decade, right? But also evolve and iterate. Like, that is a wild achievement, maybe more important than like even the network itself. Very few things are, have been able to achieve that. And so, you know, my shift, I think, in my thinking has been that if we acknowledge the fact that centralized entities dominate crypto, dominate our lives, right, if we're going to attack them, we need to have a path that is a credible path forward. Right. So it's okay to have some centralization and iterate away from that over time and become more permissionless. Because if we have 10 different super apps that are all iterating, trying to solve this problem, right? We only need one to win, to blow away all of centralized exchanges.

I agree. Why don't you just merge Synthetix and Infinex and have Synthetix be the thing that— what you're doing with Synthetix right now is taking on Hyperliquid, right? But then it's like Hyperliquid is embedded into— it's like, I don't know, I'm trying to put myself in your shoes because Infinex is building perps on top of Hyperliquid. But Synthetix is competing with Hyperliquid. You're at an office right now where you have Synthetix employees and Infineon employees together. I don't— yeah, why don't— like, why are you doing this with two separate companies? It seems like you're making— it seems like you're making your life tougher, basically. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know about that. Right. Like, I think that there is something that is very important about specialization. Right. This is trying to build the best Perp DEX, on-chain Perp DEX. Right. And it's not even really competing with Hyperliquid. It's competing with Binance. Hyperliquid is competing with Binance. Like, the—

yeah, we're all competing with Binance. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, we've only captured a tiny fraction of Binance's market share. Right. So, you know, Hyperliquid, if you compare it against centralized exchanges, is like still, you know, for OI on most markets, like not even in the top 20. Right? Um, so there's still a lot of work to do, and, and my view is we need multiple Perp DEXs to try and take down the centralized exchanges, the same way we need multiple super apps to try and take down centralized exchanges from like a custody and storage perspective. Um, so it would be a huge distraction and waste of time and effort for the Infinex team to be so focused on one narrow vertical, which is, uh, which is, you know, building a Perp DEX. The job of building a super app is incredibly hard. We've demonstrated that over the last 2 years, right? But our job is not to build protocols. Our job is not to deploy contracts on chain. Our job is to integrate things and do it in the best way possible with no compromises. Synthetix is there to build the best DEX with no compromises. And if you put them together, they'd both be compromising and it would end up being a worse result.

Yeah. Why is— so you published this piece TGE death march a week or two ago. Why is now the right time for a token?

I think we are just about to get to the point where Infinitex can actually take over your on-chain life after a lot of work and effort. And, you know, we've had good features, but we haven't been able to credibly say, you know, like, throw away throw away MetaMask, throw away Rabby, throw away your Ledger. You can now bring all of your stuff into Infinex and do everything that you want to do more easily using Infinex than whatever you're using today. And we— until we felt comfortable to be able to say that, it didn't make sense to do TGE.

Was there one thing, like, was it the support for, you know, 20 chains, or was it the browser extension, or was it the vault?

Like, was it browser extension plus wallet import? Those are the two things.

Browser extension plus wallet import. Wallet import is like wallet import and like seed phrase. Oh, oh, oh, yeah. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. You can, you can import your existing MetaMask wallet. You don't have to transfer or deposit or move stuff around. You go, I'm done. Like, and we saw this with MetaMask and Ravi. Ravi was able to like absolutely, you know, like chop a huge chunk of market share away from MetaMask with, in the nicest possible way, not that much better of an experience, right? Infinex is an order of magnitude better than the existing experience you have with Phantom or MetaMask. The fact that you have a platform that can manage all of your assets and can bridge and swap for you really easily, the fees are much lower. Like everything about it is just much better. But if you had to convince people to deposit all of their assets or move all their assets from all their different wallets in MetaMask into Infinex, we tried that. It didn't work. It's too hard. It's too, too much effort. But just import your seed phrase and, you know, and again, we saw this with Ravi, we saw this with Fantom to some extent, right? Like Fantom was able to pull a lot of assets out of the Ethereum ecosystem just by making it really easy to bring your wallet across.

Yeah. How do you think about the role of a token? Is it a cap? Is it a capital raise? Is it like an incentive mechanism to take the action that you want people to take? What is the role of the token?

So to go back to your point about on-chain businesses, right? Infinex is an on-chain business. So the role of the token is a way to capture the value of revenue that's generated by the platform and distribute it. It's just a coordination layer for the financial engineering of the thing, right? Um, so, you know, my strong view is that, uh, token buybacks with revenue are the optimal structure. And having tried it in different ways, we tried dividends with Synthetix for a long time and it kind of worked, but, um, it, it creates, uh, a strong disincentive for passive holders who are not like actively doing things in the network to hold the token, um, which, you know, I think we know from TradFi, like most people are passive holders that aren't active holders. It's a small minority of people. So we need to be able to, to, you know, accommodate and incentivize passive holders holding a token and feeling like they're getting a benefit from the thing that they're supporting.

Yeah. The number one thing that you guys will incentivize for the token in what I understand is like phase one is importing the wallet.

Is that right? Yeah.

Got it. Got it.

So, you know, we've had a really interesting few weeks, right, with like MegaETH and Monad and the airdrop and all of this stuff. And so we've been watching really closely how people have been reacting to these different schemes that MegaETH and Monad have cooked up. And it's been like just invaluable data.

Yeah. What have you learned?

I think the most important takeaway for me from Monad, definitely, is complexity without clarity creates a lot of frustration.

And you think Monad struggled with that?

I think they did a lot of very complicated and complex things, which could have been fun, but were instead frustrating for people.

Is that a message more about Monad as a whole? Not just—

look, I mean, I'm a Monad investor.

I'm a fan.

And, you know, again, like everyone, everyone who does something big in crypto, you're going to have some wins and some misses, right? It's fine. Like, you got to, you got to put yourself out there. And I think, you know, the fact that they've gone hard on this has been— attention is the most important resource in crypto, right? So from that perspective, it has been wild.

Even the 3-day campaign, I was clicking my boxes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, it's funny though, right? Because my, my kids have pudgy penguins, so they got a Monad airdrop, right? So my son, the last 3 days, has woken up. He's like, can we open the boxes? I'm like, what boxes are you talking about? He's like, he's like, the Monad boxes. So like, it's working.

Yeah.

Like, he knows Monad now, right? He's a fan. But then my daughter opened one of her boxes and got like 35 Monad, and she's like, I'm going to throw this computer out the window. And I was like, okay, that is so— she was raging. And so, again, I think going back to the point about complexity without clarity, it's fine to make people jump through hoops and delay gratification and spread out the attention or whatever. But when people had no idea what was going on, like, is day 2 the worst day? Is it the best day? Is there something else coming? I think creates this very high likelihood of disappointment because people inflate what may be coming, and then the reality is disappointing to them. And I think that, you know, one of the solutions to that is like being really clear about what the rules are and what will happen. And if you don't get what you want, at least you're not disappointed because you kind of had a sense of what was going to happen ahead of time. You can introduce a little bit of variability or RNG into it. But if it's RNG with like complete opacity, I think people get frustrated because then they roll the— like, if I say to you like, okay, here, I'm going to give you, you know, some dice and roll it, right? And you roll a 12 and you're like, yeah. And I'm like, actually, 12 is bad. Sorry, bro, you're out. And you're like, what the fuck? Why is 12 bad? Like, I rolled 2. I rolled double. I'm like, yeah, you're supposed to roll snake eyes. And you're like, fuck you.

Like, I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

I would have rolled snake eyes if you told me. It's like, no, you wouldn't have. It's RNG. Like, you just rolled 2 dice, but like, you're you're just mad because you're like, why?

So, so you want to be more— you want— but it's tough though, because you want to be— you, you want clarity, but the— but you can't give too much clarity so that it gets gamed.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

But here's the thing. You can't game a fucking dice roll, so why make it opaque? You know what I mean? Like, if someone's going to roll like, you know, a 20-sided die and if they hit a 20, they get $1,000, and if they hit anything else, they get nothing. Fucking tell them. Like, it doesn't need to be a mystery of like, oh, you got a 20, what does that mean? And then you come back tomorrow and we'll tell you. Like, that I think is honestly to autists like super frustrating.

Yeah, I think so too. This episode is brought to you by Zcash, the decentralized digital cash that is encrypted to ensure agency and safety. With a fixed supply of 21 million, and proof-of-work consensus, Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin. Buy, store, and spend encrypted Bitcoin using the Zcash-powered mobile wallet Zashi. To find out more, visit their website or click the link in the show notes. Thanks to Zcash for making today's episode possible. Shout out to today's sponsor, Katana. Katana is a DeFi-first chain built for deep liquidity and high yield. No empty emissions, just real yield and sequencer fees routed back to DeFi users. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana is launching with notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho, Chainlink, and more. Katana's 1 billion KAT campaign is live. Bridge and deposit directly into vaults in one simple click and start earning immediately on your Ether, Bitcoin, USDC, and more. Follow the link in today's show notes to get started. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. I know there's a line in your TGE Death March thing that said, hold on, where is it? We will incentivize users to switch to Infinex by importing existing wallets and connecting socials. Tell me why connecting socials is so important. And my theory here is Building on-chain kind of sucks because you don't know your users, you have no user data. And connecting socials is just the easiest way to get user data to know that if— is this person in the US or in Australia? Is that, is that right?

I think it's, it's part of it. At the end of the day, you know, I said this earlier, like, attention is the most important resource in crypto, right? So people, some people have attention. Some people have, you know, the potential to drive fees or revenue, right? Some people have both, but oftentimes they don't, right? Like sometimes, you know, there's anon whales that do a ton of volume on Hyperliquid and have no audience. They don't have a Twitter presence or Telegram or whatever. They might be in like private groups, but they're not going to drive any attention to the project, right? And so Knowing what the attentional value of a social account is, is, is really important. Now, this can be gamed, right? So when we did our first campaign of connecting Twitter to Infinex, one bot farm connected 10,000 Twitter accounts in the space.

Who's running these bot farms?

I don't know, dude. It's crazy. Like, And, you know, it's like anything, there's levels, right? So like, this is an unsophisticated brute force, like 10,000 Twitter accounts, right? Then there was another one that was like 3,000 that was much better orchestrated, right?

Like, did you have your like crack data guy helping you figure this out?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just like absolutely eviscerates these guys. And then, you know, as you go up the levels, the civil farms get better and better. Like their methods get more sophisticated and they get harder to track, etc. But most people are just like super low effort.

Yeah. Hmm. Okay, so that's phase one. You incentivize so people connect their wallet. What is— how do you think about like the second phase?

So, so this is very much like work in progress, right? Like, like a thing that we're iterating on. And for what it's worth, I'm still waiting to see like the final result, you know, the Monad golden ticket thing, like mainnet day or whatever. Like we're going to hold off and try and gather as much data as possible and see what—

What is that? Do you know? No notes.

No notes.

It's crazy. That's why it's provocative.

I know, right?

But that's fine. And that actually, honestly, I don't hate it. It makes you stick around. It makes you log in on mainnet day and be like, what did I get?

What did I get? But here's the problem. Here's the problem, right? You give someone— you give 10,000 people a golden ticket right now.

Everyone gets a golden.

You've created like a massive expectation up here, right, that you inevitably will not be able to deliver. Like, how much is a golden ticket worth to you? Like, for me, a golden ticket should be a million bucks. If you don't give me a million bucks, then I'm fighting the shit out of you.

I think you Ponzi scheme it and you keep it going as long as possible.

So that it's like you got a diamond ticket, you're going to turn into a diamond ticket.

You make a trade next week on, on this DEX, you know, you double down. And then if you—

then you turn into— then you honestly, you turn into like, you know, Eigen or one of those like, you know, campaigns where it's just never ending. You're grinding, you know, into oblivion. And again, the bigger it gets, the more people you attract, the more disappointment you're going to create. Right. So one of the, one of the things that I think has been very interesting this cycle is the evolution of the airdrop meta, right? So I'm sure you guys know this because you have data people. We definitely know it. I think most projects who've done an airdrop know this, right? 98 to 100% of people dump airdrops. Like almost no one doesn't dump their airdrop, right?

98%.

Dude, it's crazy.

I didn't actually know that. I didn't know.

Like when you, when you look at some, like I saw some data a couple of weeks ago where, where someone wanted, like, over time, like, as you get, you know, maybe on the first day it's 80%, by the time you get to day 30, it's like 95%, and then event, you know, eventually everyone sells, right? Which, it makes sense, like, no one's going to marry an airdrop bag for the rest of their life, right? Eventually they're going to sell it. Um, so almost everyone sells. So if almost everyone sells, um, and the original intent behind an airdrop was you know, go back to the ICO meta, right? Haven did an airdrop. The reason why we did an airdrop was to drive attention. We wanted people talking about the project. People thought there was going to be a big airdrop, which there was. They came and talked about it, drove attention, created a flywheel, etc. That's how you break through the noise floor. Then it kind of evolved to people thought you were buying loyalty. Like, I want to buy Yano's love. Whose loyalty? What? Like crypto Twitter, like crypto users, right? Like, I'm going to give you $10,000 and you're going to like the project, right? But if you dump it straight away, like, you might kind of be like, oh, by giving an airdrop, you're buying loyalty.

I understand. Yes. Yeah.

That was like, I think a lot of founders genuinely believed that that was what they were doing, right? Optimism definitely did. And, you know, I was close to that one, right? Like, there was a view of like, we're rewarding the community. This is a reciprocal thing.

Well, that came out of Uniswap, which is people— I mean, there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of— probably hundreds of like, you would see these Twitter posts every day was like, I— that changed my life. I am forever indebted to Hayden. And I think other founders were like, I want people to say that about me.

Yeah. The problem is, you know, you can only do that so many times, right? You can't be indebted to 10 founders, right? So, you know, Hayden kind of captured that wave and that's kind of it, right? So, okay, If everyone's going to dump your token, no one's going to hold it. Everyone's going to forget about you because they're just chasing the next one. Then what is the point of this exercise? Right. And so I had this tweet thread a couple of weeks ago where I said, I think the evolution is the point of this is it's blood money, it's protection money. You're basically paying— I'm paying you to not FUD me.

But what if I sell the token?

You're still probably not going to FUD me. You're just not going to care because you pay.

Yeah. Oh, I see. Yeah.

You're like, in like, I don't need you to shill the project. I just need you to not FUD it. Right. And expectation. And this is, you know, human expectations evolving over time. Right. The expectation is if Monad gives you no dollars, you, Yano, an important guy, then fuck those guys. Kiyoni, fuck Interact, and I'm going to FUD them. And maybe you don't do it on the timeline. Maybe you do it quietly in like a back room, but like you're going to be like, how dare you not pay me my— the money that I'm due.

I mean, Monad is actually a really interesting case study because that round, what was— everyone did the round.

$300 or $700 mil, something like that.

I think mine was $600, but okay, I forget.

I always say whatever it was, I didn't do it. Yeah, I did the earlier round.

Everybody, everybody did it. And they were only taking small checks. It was like $10K or $20K. And I've been thinking about that round. Um, cause we've been thinking about like what, you know, fundraising and what that could look like and what's the strategy. And do you go to 2 venture funds or do you get 1,000 angels on board? And Monad just got everyone, not to love them, because if you, if you know that you're one of 1,000, you, you don't care, but you, you have, you have like soft affinity for them.

Yes.

Like I have strong affinity for teams where I've pre-seed. I know I'm one of like 4 angels, like ride or die for that founder.

You know, we did a similar thing with our Patreon sale. We got like 500 of like, you know, Monad got like 100 or 200 or something. We got like 500. We got almost everyone. We got Stani, Robert, Toly, Raj, like almost everyone. We went and rounded them all up and made them buy patrons. Vitalik bought patrons, like it was pretty crazy.

You convinced me in a taxi cab. And yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And so, so everyone, so, you know, we got everyone to buy a patron NFT, right?

Yeah.

Which they—

you guys did very good social proofing too. You had the— you had like it was like right after I bought it, like my face went up on the website. I was like, oh, I see what's happening here.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, so now, right. We probably don't need to airdrop to you because you're 4x up on that trade, right? You bought a couple of patrons, you're like 4x, 8x up. It feels good. And the thing is, you know, you can give someone free money or you can let them buy something at a cheap price. And so this is the counterpoint we're seeing with MegaETH right now. MegaETH is like, we're not going to airdrop shit to you guys because you're just going to dump on us, but we will let you buy tokens cheaply. Right? And so, you know, that is a very different approach to the same problem, right? But the end result, as you say, same thing with Monat. It's like Kion is a good guy. I'm not going to FUD him even if he makes a mistake, right? Someone else makes a mistake that didn't give you any money and you're like, burn the guy, like, burn it down. I don't care. Like, I don't like— and especially if someone fades you, right? Especially if someone gives money to other people and not you. Someone does a big airdrop and you get nothing, then you're like, all right, now it's on. Like, and, and so this is where airdrops, I feel like, have, have kind of evolved, where there is a sense of entitlement in like the crypto Twitter inner circle, right? That like, give me money or I'll burn your store down. I don't know, anything could happen.

You know, I've been following Monad and MegaETH, and I actually kind of like the, um, Yeah, I like both of them. I like Monad a lot, you know, but I can't say bad things about—

the system works. The system works. I love boxes.

I love that I got a box. I do like that MegaETH is not just giving people money. I think there's, you know, we saw this with our conferences, like we've played with every conference ticketing strategy in the game. And at one point we were like, well, sponsors are where the money is. Let's just get thousands of people to fill a room. Let's give them the tickets for free. When you give people tickets for free, the no-show rate on an event is 65%. Yeah. If you make people just pay $10, the no-show rate falls to 15%. Yeah. So, and $10 is no matter—

it's literally the difference between zero, right? It's like choice paralysis, right? Like the difference between zero and $1 is a lot, is like, it's a, it's a not a quantity.

We could have charged $1 for the ticket. It's just that taking out the credit cards. I actually really like what MegaETH is doing.

And so, you know, again, giving— like, the problem with giving out a bunch of money in an airdrop is it's hyper inefficient, right? So it's not so much that we don't want anyone to dump the token, right? That, that I think is like everyone's going to dump the token. So if you're going to do an airdrop, everyone's going to dump it, right? So you can't prevent people dumping on you. What you don't want to do is leak a bunch of value to Sibyls and bot farmers and terrorists and all of these people that are just going to dump the token that have no value. Like it's just, it's just a very high cost that you will never recoup, right? If you could go around, you know, and this is where like it's kind of frustrating, right, that, that Elon unwound some of the crypto integrations that happened on X, right? Like imagine if you could go around and just airdrop directly to all of these Twitter accounts. You just go and make a list of every Twitter account, how much attention they have. You give Kobe a million bucks so he doesn't FUD you. Then you go through and like Tully and Vitalik.

Do you think, do you think Kobe is the most valuable person on crypto Twitter?

100%.

Do you think that? Do you think who's the second and third?

I think, you know, there's different, different types of value, right?

There's different types of value for everybody, but then there's COBE in a class of his own. So maybe a different question is like, what? Oh, sorry.

So like, I would say Vitalik is the second most, right? And used in the right way, Vitalik is more valuable than COBE, which is what makes it— it's Optimism, MegaETH, like, like, you know, Vitalik is a scarce resource in a way that COBE is not as much, right? Like COBE's on the timeline, interacting with people, ratioing.

It's more the Vitalik blessing. Vitalik blessed this project.

If you get anointed by Vitalik, right, that's a different thing, right? And it's interesting, right, because you look at, like, Tully and Raj, for example, they do a ton of seed investments similar to— like, Vitalik did a ton of seed investments in the early days, right? But Tully and Raj do a ton of seed investments in the Solana ecosystem. So it becomes not as much of a scarce resource, right? But if Tolly writes something about your project, like takes the time to like write a couple of tweets about it. That's ultra valuable in the Solana ecosystem. So, you know, different people for different things. But yeah, this cycle, Kobe is in a different league.

Why do you think that is?

I think there's a lot of reasons, right? UpOnly from last cycle was like the thing that everyone would be talking about almost every week. Right.

But it was the thing because Kobe was already Kobe.

I don't— I think it was a bit of both. A bit of both, right? Like Kobe was already Kobe for sure. And, you know, but Up Only, I think, cemented, especially for people in that cycle. Right. You know, the hardest thing in crypto, like most people—

those are still legendary episodes with Suzu and— yeah, yeah.

Like, but most people are washed after one cycle. Like most people, you like, you hear about them, you know, people like 2017 cyclers, like 2021 people have never even heard of them, let alone someone from 2025.

Yeah, a bunch of people that you can be like, oh, of new people if they knew you and people were not, were not aware, unfortunately. And I was like, wow, that's nuts to me.

No, 100%. Like DeFi Summer, like I know it was a thing, right? And you know, the reason why people wash out is like if you're not grinding and I wasn't. I took a year off and that year that I took off, like late '21 into '22, like, that's like, you can't get that back, right? So I think, I think, you know, Kobe's consistency, same thing with Stanny. Stanny's been consistent.

Kobe took a solid year and a half off too.

He did. He did.

I think my take on Kobe is because of how much money he's turned down. And it's in an industry like so awash with under-the-table deals and money and stuff like that. I think— remember when Kobe sent someone like $10 million or he like burned $5 million? And yeah, he's— I don't know. I got in a Twitter spat with him over our Movement Labs piece.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh my God, never again. He's—

he's the man. He cooked you guys so hard.

But you can't, you can't win. He's—

no, no, no, you can't win.

It's arguing. He's a man of the people. He's— it's arguing with Trump. Like, it— you can't use any logic. It's—

you—

it's a— yeah, I don't know. It was very interesting learning that I will not do again.

Yeah, no, do not take Kobe on a timeline, right? And, and, you know, I think the thing about Kobe, um, not to, to glaze him too hard, right, but like, uh, he is incredibly funny. Like, he's—

right?

And so he's funnier than you, so you're not going to win on that dimension either, right? And like, in Twitter, like, if you're in a Twitter feud and someone, you know, cooks you with a one-liner, like, it doesn't matter. Like, it's over.

Like, I was trying to use all this logic, and then I was like, shut it down for the day. Just shut down.

Yeah, just shut Twitter down and move on with your life.

Maybe on that— all right, go, go ahead.

No, no, that's it. Like, just like—

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I think honestly, it's, it's who you know, and who you pay. You're seeing people from 2017 crash out now on their third cycle, which is typically when it happens, right? That's right. And so, you know, it's who, it's who's in your circle of influence. Right?

Like, in your circle, last cycle, you're saying?

Yeah, a lot of those people crashed out last cycle, right? Like, you know, people that I was paying attention to in like, you know, 2015, '16, '17, or whatever. And like, in 20— I remember some people crashing out in like 2017, 2018, like big, like big Bitcoin guys. But then you go back to like, like 2021, and so many Bitcoiners crashed out, dude.

So yeah, they did. Yeah, they did.

But if you weren't paying attention to them in 2016, 2017, if they weren't the accounts you're following, then you could be totally forgiven.

Last cycle sucked to be a Bitcoiner. It was the worst cycle ever to be a Bitcoiner.

And they just crashed out hard, right? Like, um, so, you know, I mean, it's like for so many reasons anyway. So, so I think like it depends, but doing 3 cycles in a row is insanity. And I, you know, I look back on, on, um, 2021, 2022, um, and I, I had a tweet thread about this. Like, you know, when I started, uh, when I started Synthetix in, in 2017, I had already been running another startup for 3 years straight, like grinding hard, right? So it wasn't like I, I just came out of like a consulting job and, and was like, I'm gonna get into crypto, and, you know, was like on the bench ready to go, fully powered up, right? Like, I was already cooked by the time I, I started Synthetix, but I felt compelled to kind of jump in fully into crypto, but I had done like 4 different startups before that. So my kind of power meter at 35, after doing 10 years of startups, was like not super high. And so post-DeFi summer, yeah, I washed out hard. I was like, I don't want to work anymore. I've been working forever. Like, what's the point? Like, you know, like, I've worked so hard, I've gotten to this point, like, you know, the thing's working. Like, let some other people grind for a while. And I took time off, which was not good for me mentally. It turns out that I kind of need to grind. And I lost my mind. But that late '21 into '22, losing that period of time and not paying attention to the space, not building, not you know, not paying attention to the meta, etc., set me back massively. And so I've been having to like work so much harder. Really?

Oh, you don't think it was helpful to get a mental break and clarity and read the book on the hammock? I know that's not what you did, but it's not what I did.

No, I went on a fucking drug binge for a year. Right. And so, you know, which is not great for you, but like, you know, I think—

Caine, was that correlated with having more money than you ever thought that you would have? Was it more like, what was money? No, no.

Like, it was, it was correlated with having more, more flexibility, more, more, more opportunity to be chaotic. Right. You know, previously I was always like this simmering boil of like drug addiction. Right. But it was kind of tamped down by like a balance of like, well, I've got to work. I'm grinding. I know what I'm trying to get to, right? I'm trying to build something that's really valuable and I'm going to keep grinding until I get there. And it was like a little bit of a relief valve, right? Like drug addiction was just like, get a little bit of, you know, let some of the steam out of the cooker, right? And then I got to 2021 and I was like, well, I don't have to do anything anymore. I can do whatever I want. And that mantra of I can do whatever I want because I could was the thing that almost killed me. Because just because you can do whatever you want doesn't mean that what you want to do is good.

Did you say that literally about almost killed me?

Yeah. Like when I went to rehab, the first week that I was there, one of the guys, one of the therapists there was like, you, the trajectory you were on, 2 years, you're dead. And I was like, you don't know me. I'll be totally fine. I was like, I've been doing drugs for 30 years, bro. You like, get the fuck out of my face. Like, literally, like, I was like, so pissed, right? Which is always an interesting, you know, did you—

I don't know if this is too personal, by the way. We can, we can say whatever. No, it's fine. You do. Did you have to go? Did you do rehab and then relapse and then back to rehab? Did you relapse?

No, no, I actually managed to go to rehab once and learn my lesson or something. Right. And, and so, but it was funny, right? Like, I was in rehab rehab for 6 weeks. And I later spoke to the guy who's the founder of that place. And he was like, after you left, there was you and another guy that forced us to realize that 6 weeks is not enough. And we now have a 12-week program. He's like, I'm actually surprised that you survived out in the world after you left.

You are back.

Yeah, dude, like, literally, like, because, because like 5 weeks in, right? I was like, okay, okay. All right. Maybe I can't, like, maybe I can't drink and do drugs anymore. After 5 weeks, I was like, maybe, right? Like, maybe. And then I was like, no, I'm definitely going to drink again, which was insane, right? Because, like, the drinking would lead to doing drugs, and then, you know, it was the whole spiral, right? And so the idea that, like, I could go out and, like, have a few drinks was like insane.

And so yeah, so I'm actually surprised that you came to that conclusion in 5 weeks. That to me feels, yeah, very—

it was intense. It was so like, honestly, and like, you know, but the first 4 weeks I was like, as soon as I get out of here, I'm gonna do some ketamine and drink a bottle of champagne. It's gonna be amazing. Like, I'm like not convinced at all that there was anything wrong with anything that I've been doing. I was like, I just need a little break just to like tone it down, and then we'll be back, back on the, on the streets again. Like, it was crazy, right? Um, and, and so, yeah, so, and the crazy thing is, um, literally like 2 years to the day, one of my closest friends who was an addict with me, one of my like, you know, big addict friends, died like 2 years later. And so, you know, I was like, I was like, holy shit, like, that guy was right. Even though there's a part, there's still a part, like a brain damaged part of me that's like, that guy, like, he doesn't know me. I could have kept doing drugs. I would have been fine. I would have been dead. Like, there's no question. There were multiple times where, like, it's crazy that I woke up. Like, crazy. So, yeah.

Do you believe in the idea that everybody needs a vice?

No, I don't think so. That sounds like coke to me.

Yeah, yeah. What do you do now to channel energy, to let the cooker off, or whatever?

Well, you know, I'm back to like, uh, grinding again, you know, like 18 hours a day. Um, but the difference is, and this is a big difference, right? Um, my, my kind of way of handling any stress or whatever— I didn't feel stress, I just like tamp it down, right? Then go and drink or do some drugs or whatever to like just try and dissipate it, but it didn't work. But I thought it did. But I was completely disconnected from any sense of my own feelings or whatever. I was just like an automaton, just going through life doing stuff. And this time building a startup, there's a bunch of people around me, and I'm just much more aware of the people around me, how they're reacting to things, much more aware of my own biases creeping in. It's been much, much easier to do a startup not being a drug addict, which shouldn't be controversial, but like, you know, it's kind of wild I was able to pull it off the first time. But, but yeah, it's definitely been easier, I would say. Yeah. Like, dude, not being hungover. I'm never hungover. I never wake up. I used to wake up. You cannot even imagine the level of hangover that I was able to sustain. Like, dude, I remember one time I was in New York for SmartCon for the Chainlink thing, and I'd been partying for 2 days straight, and I rolled out of bed on 2 hours sleep and got on stage. The video is out there somewhere. Like, if you can find that video, it was like from 2021 SmartCon or something like that. Like, how I was saying anything that was even close to coherent I have no idea. Like, I have no idea. And I'm sure if you go back and watch it now, you'd be like, that guy probably did some more drugs or something.

I don't know.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah. Is it easier to— as someone who's on— you're on, I don't know, you're on your 6th startup or 7th startup. Is it easier to— does it get easier?

Basically, every startup is different and you make different mistakes. I've made different mistakes this time than I did in the past. One of the biggest mistakes that I made this time was, you know, I'm not resource constrained, right? I can do— I could, you know, kind of swing for the fences. It's a little bit like having leverage trading, right? If you're forced to spot trade because, you know, you're just trying to build up a bag and, you know, you've got conviction and it's a slow kind of process, you accumulate some BTC or whatever, it's much less volatile. But if you are trading on leverage, or, you know, you're swinging for the fences, it's much more volatile. It's easy to kind of go down the wrong path. It's easy to make a bad trade, get on tilt. So that's definitely been the hardest part, I would say, of building Infinex is like I haven't been— I had to learn to enforce kind of discipline and resource constraints on myself because I don't have them in the real world.

Right. You, you're not self-funding anymore, right? You put in like, what, $25 million of your own money, but you're not self-funding anymore.

I'm not self-funding. You know, we raised, we did the NFT sale. The first, the first 18 months, I put about $20 mil in. Um, I can do whatever I want, like, but that's tough. Like, again, anytime if I'm within 100 feet of you and hear me say I can do whatever I want, run. It's going to get fucking ugly.

Or just like chain you down.

Yeah, tackle me. Even better. Tackle me. Tackle me.

Maybe we can wrap by talking about this cycle because it's been a funky one and you've seen many of them. So Berniski tweeted the other day, said private market valuations like this, like these have always come near the top for crypto. And you said near being the critical word here. Maybe just expand on like where you think we're at.

You know, again, I think, I think Towards the end of any cycle, and this cycle has been going for 2 years now, right? Started in the trenches in Solana in 2023, the first green shoots, right? In the same way that like early DeFi, a few things started to kind of, you know, come out of winter in early 2019. I think it started in 2023. So it's been 2 years. So if you've been in the trenches that entire time, like, well played, because that's hard, right? People are getting to the point in the cycle where they're exhausted, right? And, you know, the vicious irony, if you haven't been through a full cycle before, if you've only, like, you know, come in at the peak of 2021, dealt with a bear market, and now you've been going through a bull market for 2 years, you think that a bear market sounds good. Like, you think, like, oh man, like, this has been so exhausting. And then 2 weeks into it, you're like, actually, fuck this. This is terrible. I hate it. But I think we're at that point in the cycle where people are starting to be like, just let, just let me get off the merry-go-round for like a minute. The problem is when, when you do, then you're in a bear market for 2 years and everything's harder.

And, you know, do you think it'll be as hard? Do you think that they get, you know, because 2022 was, was, and 2023 sucked. But it was far less hard than 2018 and 2019.

Agreed. It just depends. I mean, depends on which cycle it is for you. If you, you know, if 2021 was your first cycle, you full ported in like August 2021, bro, '22 was a bad year for you. Like, it was a bad year. Yeah. So, you know, depends on the baseline.

That's fair. That's fair. What should, what should people who are listening, who are excited about Infinex but don't really know what to do as the next step, what should people do? Should they import their wallet? Should they like swidge? You guys have swap plus bridge swidge. Should they switch some money over? Like what, what should they, what should people do?

So all of this stuff is going to be released in the next like 2 to 3 weeks. So, so, you know, you can kind of front run it a little bit by setting up your Infinex account. But when we get ready to do this big bang launch where, you know, you can import your existing MetaMask wallet or Phantom wallet or Rabby or whatever, and you can start actually bringing your activity over to Infineon and start doing the things that you are currently doing somewhere else on Infineon, that's when we're going to put, you know, full force of everything behind it. So if you're watching this and you want to front run it, then get an Infineon account and like get acquainted with the platform, but you won't be able to do all of this cool, fun stuff that we're talking about, the browser extension, etc., until like probably, you know, mid-November, another couple of weeks.

Yeah, I would actually, if there's people listening to this who are building things in crypto, I would recommend just setting up your Infinex. It was when you and Igor showed it to me in Singapore like a year ago, maybe not at this token, but the one before. My reaction, I remember I was with Oscar. We were like, oh, I didn't know you could do this with an on-chain app. Like even the finger, the fingerprint thing on my MacBook. Like I was like, oh, I didn't, I didn't know this was possible. So yeah, I would recommend people just use it just to just almost see what's, what the future starts to look like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Agreed.

Agreed. Caine, thanks, man. Always good seeing you.

Awesome. Yeah. Great to chat. Talk soon.