47 - The Fourth Crypto Cycle | Chris Dixon, a16z

🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️ AAVE - BORROW OR LEND YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🚀 GEMINI - MOST TRUSTED EXCHANGE AND ONRAMP https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 📈 KWENTA | DEVIRATIVES TRADING WITH INFINITE LIQUIDITY https://bankless.cc/kwenta ------ The Fourth Crypto Cycle | Chris Dixon, a16z Crypto Fund Chris Dixon is a general partner at a16z, a famous private American venture capital firm that has specialized in technologies related to the growth of the internet and computation. Chris transcends the pre-internet, post-internet, pre-crypto-and post-crypto worlds of investing and venture capital, so his perspective is rich, deep, and consistent with the themes that transcend these revolutions. Coming from a16z, Chris approaches this industry from a technological perspective, rather than a monetary one, and seems to be steering the a16z Crypto Fund ship in the direction that typical silicon valley venture capital investors focus on: how can blockchain technology meaningfully impact the 4 billion users of the internet. This conversation with Chris was fast-paced and vibrant! Tune in to hear one of Tech's most experienced investors! _________ 📺 BONUS FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS! Episode 47 Debrief: David and Ryan discuss their post-episode thoughts https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-chris-dixon-episode If you want to hear David and Ryan discuss their post-episode thoughts, subscribe to the paid version of Bankless newsletter. This is where David and Ryan post BONUS content that goes alongside the free side of the Bankless program. _________ Resources mentioned in the podcast: The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle https://a16z.com/2020/05/15/the-crypto-price-innovation-cycle/ Crypto Fund II https://a16z.com/2020/04/30/crypto-fund-ii/ Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things https://a16z.com/2020/10/18/doing-old-things-better-vs-doing-brand-new-things/ What is Blockchain: Computers That Can Make Commitments https://a16z.com/2020/01/27/computers-that-make-commitments/ Crypto startup school - fantastic educational content (particularly for builders) https://a16z.com/2020/12/28/crypto-users-guide/ ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, just a quick disclaimer before we get started. None of the following content should be taken as investment advice and A16Z investments are discussed in this podcast. Please see A16Z.com/disclosures for more important information. Alright, let's get into the episode.

• 0:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, awesome episode today. Who did we have on?

• 0:50David Hoffman?

  Chris Dixon of A16Z, the leader behind A16Z's crypto fund. Chris Dixon is an early pioneer in the world of the internet and then also the world of crypto. He has seen it all and he comes into crypto using that perspective. He's very much a technologically minded person. It was really valuable for me to see and hear about Chris's perspective as to what is unique about the fourth cycle of crypto. We talked all about Chris's mental models and what he is excited about that he sees coming on the horizons in this industry. Ryan, what were your takeaways?

• 1:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I was just fanboying out to talk to Chris because he's written a lot of great articles that I've read over the years and really shaped my mental models for how to spot the next big thing. He wrote an article called "The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like A Toy." Maybe you've read that or heard people reference that article. It's just a great way of identifying new trends essentially and new technologies that are on the horizon that are contrarian, that people start discounting. So it was fantastic to see the world of crypto through his eyes, which we really got an opportunity to do. And David, I don't think we completely agreed on everything. I think that like our way of...

• 2:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thinking about things or the bankless way of thinking about things is a little bit different. But what we wanted to do was was see crypto through through his eyes. And I absolutely think we achieved that. David, we're doing something else with this episode for the first time in on an ongoing basis, which is you and I are having an extra conversation after the episode. The types of conversations you and I usually have, but that aren't recorded that are kind of private. And we are releasing those to premium bankless members. Can you tell us about that?

• 2:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's been a reoccurring theme. Every time we finish up a podcast with a guest, we would hop into Discord and be like, yo, you want to talk about that? And then we would talk about it for like 20 minutes. And I thought some of those conversations that were just between you and me were some of the most valuable. And, you know, I want to make those conversations public. And so that is what we are doing. We are making those available to people that subscribe to the bankless program. So if you are a bankless subscriber, there is a premium feed. There's also a video, the same thing. One's a video, one's a podcast, and you can get it into your podcast player. If you are a bankless subscriber, it's about 20 to 25 minutes after every single episode. So just a little bit of bonus content for the people that subscribe to bankless.

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if you want access to this after the podcast conversation, go to shows.banklesshq.com. You'll get access to that conversation. You'll get a private RSS feed and a link to the YouTube video.

• 3:35David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, really happy to make those conversations available to the people that want it. Let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Chris Dixon. But first, we're going to take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Synthetix is Ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol. What does that mean? Synthetix is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets, which are assets that are priced via an oracle rather than bids or asks. Traders can use the Quanta exchange, which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by Synthetix. Traders on Quanta can trade synthetic tokens like SBT, C, S Oil, or S DeFi. Because Quanta is powered by Synthetix, traders experience zero slippage on

• 4:20David Hoffman?

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• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 5:38Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 5:56David Hoffman?

  All right, guys. I hope you're ready to get into the podcast because that's what we're about to bring you. Chris Dixon of A16Z Crypto.

• 6:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we have a special guest today. We want to welcome Chris Dixon, who is an investor and partner at Andreessen Horowitz. It's a VC firm that probably needs no introduction. He leads crypto investing there. Chris is someone who shaped my mental models for how to see the next big thing while everyone else dismisses it as a toy, including crypto. Chris, welcome to Bankless. How are you doing?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I'm great. Thanks for having me.

• 6:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris, you are a seasoned VC. You were early to the internet, you were early to crypto. Now you're on Andreessen Horowitz Crypto Fund, leading that. On Bankless, we're really on a mission into the crypto frontier. So we're investors, yes, but we're also users and builders. And what we're hoping to get out of today's conversation is to get like your mental models, to understand what you think crypto holds for the next decade. I mean, we've just kicked off this decade. So you know where we want to start is actually at the high level, the 20,000-foot view in crypto. What is going on here? Like, what is crypto? What's happening here?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, the way I kind of look at the like, so, okay, so let's step really far back. Why, when you go and you and you look at a movie from the 1990s, does a lot of things look the same if you go back and look at the TVs and movies from 1990s? Like, the cars look the same, and the appliances look the same, and the washing machines look the same, but what's very, very different are computers, right? Over the last 50 years, we've had a very rapid acceleration of better and better computers, better and better connectivity, more and more apps. To me, the most important question when analyzing the sort of past and future of technology is to dig deeply into, you know, what are computers?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  How do they, how does each computing cycle develop? What are the ingredients that go into that development? I see crypto blockchain very much as a new cycle of computing that fits into that history. So that history is, you know, mainframe computers in the 50s and 60s, PCs in the 70s and 80s, internet in the 90s and 2000s, mobile phones 2000, 2010. Now, I think we're, you know, on the cusp of a whole bunch of exciting things. There's stuff going on in AI, machine learning, there's stuff happening in virtual reality, in augmented reality, self-driving cars, et cetera. But to me, the most important, what I'm most passionate about, and I think will be one of the most impactful areas of kind of new computing, is around, you know, what you might call blockchain computers, right? And this can be anything from

• 8:51Speaker 02

  An application-specific blockchain computer like Bitcoin, right? So Bitcoin is a computer that has a specific application, i.e. you know, sort of global censorship-resistant store of value baked into it. And it's a very important, obviously, innovation in and of itself. And then you have things like Ethereum, which are more generalized, general-purpose platforms that'll let you, you know, fully program on them. And then you have a whole bunch of other kind of interesting things getting layered on top. And I think of it, now just sort of drilling into it, I think one of the interesting things you can ask is, when you sort of try to analyze what has happened and what will happen, is where are we in the evolution of the cycle? And I think we, you know, are, I have, I've written a lot of blog posts and things about this, if folks are interested. But I think most of these kind of computing cycles go through multiple phases.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  The first one I call the kind of gestation phase, the second one, the second one is the deployment phase, like, you know, I think a really interesting question, and we can talk about this later, is where are we in that cycle? What are the other key innovations that have to happen? One of the really important things that happens, and I think we're starting to see it now in any of these kinds of computing cycles, is you get a reinforcing feedback loop between infrastructure and applications. So, you know, as the first iPhone started off with relatively few applications and kind of weak infrastructure in terms of its cellular connectivity, you know, kind of weak camera, things like this, then as, you know, as some applications became popular, like Instagram and Snapchat, that in turn created an economic incentive for Apple to go and invest and make better cameras.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  And so you had this sort of nice kind of ladder effect, reinforcing feedback loop where the applications got better and the, and the infrastructure got better. I think we're kind of starting to hit that in crypto right now. Anyways, that's, that's a lot right there to start with, but, you know, happy to, happy to dive into the area.

• 10:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so we want to get back to cycles, because you've written a lot about this. And I think everyone's wondering, like, okay, we're 10 years into this, where are we in the cycle? But before we do, let's talk a bit about what's unique about these, this next era of computing, right? So you took us through the progression, we had mainframes, PCs, mobile, internet, right? And each of these computer paradigms, eras, had special things, you know? PCs brought compute to your home. The internet networked all of these computers together so we could, like, you know, communicate across the world. What is special about these new computers that we call blockchain or crypto-economic computers?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think this is one of the reasons people are so thrown off by this. So a lot of the people at, you know, at let's say a company like Google who are very, who rode the last two computing waves, right? And who very intimately understand the transition from, for let's say, desktop to mobile computing. A lot of those same people don't really fully grok blockchain computers. In fact, a lot of them are actually hostile towards it. And I believe the reason for that is blockchains are, they, in some ways, they fit the pattern in that they're, you know, they, a new type of computer that has new capabilities, new sets of trade-offs, et cetera. But the, the dimensions along which blockchains offer new capabilities are different than what we're used to, right?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  So in the past, what we're used to is computers getting smaller, more mobile, higher performance, more connected. Blockchains, I, I, the way I like to describe it is they are computers that can do a new thing that can never be done before. And that specifically is they can make commitments that, and commitments that

• 12:18Speaker 02

  cannot be overridden by the owners of the blockchain, which of course are just, you know, is a community and a network, cannot be overridden by the developers behind the applications, that you can trust based on the code itself, that whatever those commitments are that are relevant will be honored. And so specifically, let's take Bitcoin, right? Some of the commitments Bitcoin makes, there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, that you cannot double spend a Bitcoin. There's a whole set of things that, the kind of commitments that Bitcoin makes, which in turn give people confidence that Bitcoins could have value, right? If it wasn't for like, for example, the scarcity limit, the 21 million limit, presumably people would have much less faith that Bitcoin would be a good store of value, right?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  So, so how do we, why do we trust that commitment? We don't have to trust Satoshi. We don't have to trust the core developers. They may all be trustworthy, but it's just not really relevant, right? We can just simply look at the network if we're, you know, you have to know how to program and things, but to do that. But if you, if you do, and you can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone to do it, or whatever, but you can go and look at the open source code and you can say, okay, I understand how this works and I trust this commitment. And this is a, this is a commitment. Um, that, and let's, let's contrast that, for example, to say, let's say I have Chris coin, or let's say Google has Google coin. And Google says, you know, I, I will only ever have 21 million Google coins. Well, if that's, you know, if in the case of Google coin, you have to believe Google will do that. And they won't change management, they won't change their views and et cetera, et cetera.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  And that's why there's never, as my knowledge, been a private company that's, you know, successfully issued a currency, right? Because

• 13:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  And by the way, I would add, Chris, not only not a private company, uh, I would argue in history might, might bear this out that there's never been a government, a centralized government who over the long term has been able to keep their, their hands away from sort of inflating the, uh, their, their, their monetary system.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I think until, I mean, I think, I guess, yeah, I think that's probably right. I mean, we have 50 years now that we've been unpegged from gold, right? I guess before we sort of did that through pegging to gold.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  But yeah, I think that's right. Well, and look, and it's a, it is, this gets into a whole set of issues. There's a lot of people that, you know, probably aren't crypto enthusiasts who believe that the, you know, that the Federal Reserve having the ability to kind of issue more currency is a feature, not a bug, you know? I think a lot of Bitcoiners would say it's a bug, not a feature.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  I, it's like putting, I don't want to, you know, I think this, this gets into these, all these kinds of economic things, which I, I would just say that, that the, you know, that I'd sort of, sort of punt on, I guess. But, uh, um, but the, I guess what I would say is that this ability to even make this kind of commitment is a brand new thing, right? And it, and it has to do with, it comes from the architecture of blockchains, right? Which is, blockchains, the way I kind of think about it is, in a traditional computer, the hardware governs the software, um, in the sense that, um, you know, if Google has Google coin and they ultimately control the servers, they can just change the code on the servers and make Google coin have more, you know, than 21 million coins or something, right? What, what blockchains do architecturally, and this is through the consensus mechanism

• 15:19Speaker 02

  and the kind of game theory on top of it, is it inverts the power relationship between the hardware and the software, right? Um, and so what, what ends up through the consensus mechanism and the, and the network on top, the software layer governs the hardware layer. Um, and so even if, you know, a Bitcoin miner or an Ethereum miner, validator miner, Changes their mind or whatever unless they, you know, there are caveats here if you have 51% etc. But in the, in the, in the general case, the, the hardware providers are governed by the software. And that, and that is a brand new thing that never existed before and creates these. And by the way, let me go back to the commitments thing. One of the things I think as, as the space is evolving, we're learning is what else can you do with a computer that can make commitments?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  So, you know, one thing, obviously, the first application is you can create a global censorship resistant store of value like Bitcoin. What Ethereum says is, hey, we can generalize this and let people kind of come up, developers come up with new things. And those things can be anything from, you know, new tokens on top, obviously like ERC20s etc. But also protocols which make commitments. So, you know, I think it's very important that, that you take a protocol like Compound, you know, which is a lending protocol on top of Ethereum. It makes commitments about things like the take rate, right? So, you know, a, a very longstanding tradition in technology is for somebody to build a platform and then kind of change the rules of the platform as things happen, as, as it becomes more and more popular, right?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  This happened very famously with Facebook and Twitter where they had big developer systems and then they changed the rules on them and changed the take rates. It's happening today with Apple, you know, Fortnite and Apple are having this big battle over, over the platform rules and Apple etc. You know, one type of commitment you can make with a blockchain is you can make a commitment to developers and say, you know, we're going to keep the take rate at this level. We're going to make the API work like this and you will always have access to it. You can always trust it. You don't have to trust Robert, you know, the founder of Compound. You don't have to trust the investors in Compound. You can look at the code and trust the code. This is a brand new and very, very important idea. So I would argue that the reason I like this framing, computers that make commitments, I realize it hasn't caught on yet,

• 17:23Speaker 02

  is it, is it expresses, I think it will catch on over time because it expresses the, the incredible generality of this breakthrough of what, what blockchains can do. It's much more, it's a much broader, I think. And more profound breakthrough than people sort of initially realize because they they we haven't fully explored all the different kinds of use cases, the new things you can do by making commitments.

• 17:49David Hoffman?

  So Chris, this focus on blockchains or computers that can make commitments and speaks to the generalizability of a blockchain, right? And to me, that and I'm slightly worried that that puts the image into a into a reader's head or a listener's head of something along the lines of like blockchain, not Bitcoin, which I know that you are not in that camp of. But I'd also think that you do believe that there is extended utilities out of blockchains that aren't just something like Bitcoin, right? So maybe you could

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:17David Hoffman?

  talk about that that contrast, like, what does blockchain not Bitcoin mean to you? And where are the real values that you can we can get out of a blockchain that, you know, isn't just Bitcoin?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Well, I think you guys know the history of this. I think it's the the the challenge here is that these terms have dip are sort of overloaded and have multiple meanings. The specific phrase blockchain not Bitcoin, in my recollection, that became popular in like, let's call it 2014 through 16. And it was specifically referring to mostly private blockchains. So, you know, the idea was, OK, Bitcoin is too weird. This is the blockchain not Bitcoin kind of movement, right? If you will. Bitcoins are too weird. But there's certain pieces of the technology we can factor out and sell to banks or something like this, right? I was never a proponent of that. You know, you can go back and look at all the

• 19:11Speaker 02

  things I've written and talked about over the last seven years. I've always felt like the value in blockchains is in the sort of public blockchains. So, you know, a lot of what blockchains are today, like if you look at something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, they're networks. And networks are valuable when they're public and used by billions of people. And so to me, that's always been the case. So I think there's a little ambiguity in that in that phrasing. So I would call myself like I'm a believer in.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  I think kind of like the strong pure form of blockchains in the public sense. And, and I think, you know, like Bitcoin, and that, that, that means things like Ethereum is an example. Like, we're big believers in, have been for a long time. And I think there'll be many more blockchains like that. Um, I think, I, I think we're kind of like, uh, public blockchain maximalist or something, if you, you know.

• 20:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  What, what, one mental model, actually, that, that came for me, that helped me understand this a little bit, was this idea of strong versus weak technologies. Because this kind of, this, um, I guess this notion of blockchain, not Bitcoin, it's not the first time we've seen this kind of idea play out, right? This pattern sort of repeats almost with every technology.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  For sure, for sure. Yeah, I, I, I've seen, I've seen this many times over the years. And so I wrote a blog post about it, people are interested, called Strong Versus Weak Technologies. And, you know, it, it's, there's always this tendency. So, so my argument essentially in that blog post is, is technologies always come in pairs. And, and there's always sort of the, the pure, what I call the strong form, and then there's sort of a weak form. And, and the reason that the, they come in pairs, and, and so, as an example, um, Tesla is the pure form. It's a pure electric car. And then, you know, a hybrid car is the weak form. Um, uh, years ago, like when I, you know, I was involved in, in kind of web two internet stuff, where things like YouTube were the pure form. It was a new, uh, video platform where anyone could upload things. And then the weak form was all these, uh, software providers who would build software

• 21:02Speaker 02

  and sell them to CBS and existing movie companies. And the idea was, um, you know, you can't go and, and create a new media form. You have to just sort of be up to technology provider to existing media companies. Um, the, uh, uh, anyways, this blog post I go through. Another example I use in the blog post is, uh, the iPhone. So if you go back for, there's a whole decade before the iPhone, when everyone sort of thought that mobile computers had to look a lot like desktop computers. They had to have a full keyboard, they had to have like a Windows start button, they had to have all these things. And the iPhone was really the first one to say, now, what would happen if you go from first principles and you design the ideal, uh, first, you know, kind of mobile phone from scratch? Um, it had these obvious drawbacks, like, and the, and the quote I used in the beginning is involving Steve Jobs.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Uh, people were like, how are you going to learn how to type on a screen, et cetera? And what, what, what ends up happening, though, is that when you create the pure form of the technology, and it's kind of, um, you know, first principles, ideal form, um, that at first, it looks, uh... Like it's going to require too much change in the world for people to adopt it. But people end up adapting around it. The technology is so powerful and so important that the world adapts around the technology as opposed to the technology adapting to the world. And I, and I, and so like in that, and this is, I'm sure we'll talk about DeFi today. Like, I think that's a, DeFi is a great example of it, where DeFi is, to me, is, is the right way, if you were, if you started from first principles and said, how, how will you, should

• 22:32Speaker 02

  you do finance in a world where we have ubiquitous internet access and, you know, blockchains? Like, it's clear to me that DeFi is the way you would do it. And that the, all of the sort of legacy infrastructure would, would kind of look like a ridiculously bad design.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  It may take a long time for that to, you know, that whole vision to be fully realized. But my experience has always been that the, the strong form wins out. But then what happens is people, people see the strong form, they realize, oh, that's great, but is there a kind of a hack, kind of hybrid version that we can, that it will get adopted sooner? And so you see these things come in pairs. And I guess the point of that blog post is, I always believe in the strong form. It may take longer, but in the end, that's the right architecture and will be better for the world and people will adapt around it.

• 23:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  For Bankless listeners, another term we use to describe these things is like, like crypto native, right? What you're talking about is like the native version of these things.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  We, we talk about that all the time internally, like, and to us, the, the opposite of crypto native is skeuomorphic, right? Which is sort of taking, uh, this is the thing where you, you know, you take a, uh, you make the, you know, the early light bulbs, they, they shape them like candles, right? So like, cause they make people feel like more familiar with them. When in fact, that's not the optimal shape for a light bulb. Um, and this is what hap, you know, early internet, people, people didn't know how to really use this new software-based two-way medium. And so they kind of made it like magazines, right? Um, so the first 10 years of the internet were all just sort of people taking non-internet ideas and putting them on the internet. And it, it wasn't until the next wave that, um, people started to realize that there's

• 24:04Speaker 02

  sort of these internet native things, like, you know, like social networking and YouTube. You know, I, my understanding is that early, early films, you know, around The like nineteen hundreds or late nineteenth century were, you know, they filmed them just like plays because they didn't know, you know, it's like that's what they had. They had plays. They put a camera and they did a play. And eventually they figure, hey, you can have a close up. You can do this. You can do that. So the skeuomorphic stuff is always appealing at first because it feels more familiar. And sometimes it's a good kind of marketing thing. I mean, like Steve Jobs always, you know, loved skeuomorphic design because it made people more, you know, like the the book, the book app would have like a wood grain bookshelf look to it or something like this. And this is sort of a way to onboard people and get them more familiar with

• 24:46Speaker 02

  technology. And then eventually you kind of kick away the ladder and let them go into the real thing. But for sure, yeah, crypto native is a very important concept to me as well to us and our investing philosophy.

• 24:56David Hoffman?

  On the bankless program, Ryan really likes this metaphor where if you're playing, if people who are familiar with the civilization game where you are unlocking this, this tech tree. The way that you seem to be describing this is humanity has unlocked the ability to create computers that make commitments. But to me, that seems like a means to an end to achieve other goals. So with, and as the, the lead behind the A sixteen Z crypto fund, it seems to be that you guys would be going after the, the whatever the, the end is. So what is the end? What is the thing that humans can unlock now that we have computers that make commitments? What are these new technologies that we're going to be able to receive as a result of this innovation?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Well, so one mental model I have is kind of concentric circles. And so I kind of think of it at the center, you have Bitcoin, right? And that's its own important innovation. And we could, you know, you could spend an hour, obviously you could spend a hundred hours talking about that alone. I assume people have, you know, your listeners already are familiar with it. So I sort of see that at the center. And by the way, I'll talk about this thing, but okay, let me just finish this. And so Bitcoins at the center, then around that I see kind of Ethereum and DeFi. And, and, you know, and that allows you to do all the things I think your listeners are familiar with, like lending and AMMs and just like all these kind of new, really cool things. I think that the next circle, you know, hasn't really arrived yet, but will, and that could be, you know, I think.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  There's going to be a lot of interesting stuff around NFTs, gaming, video games, which I think relates to NFTs in a lot of cases. There's what we call Web three, right, which is sort of things that products that are more familiar from the Web two era like social networks and marketplaces. But architected in a new way where they're owned and operated by the community as opposed to being owned and operated by, you know, a company. And so I think of it as kind of concentric circles of different things and I can, I'm happy to talk about each of them, but I think each is very profound. This is one of the reasons blockchain is so profound. I think each alone would be a massive innovation. Bitcoin would be, DeFi would be, Web three would be, you know, NFTs would be.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  You know, by the way, there's probably five more circles I haven't thought of and maybe a bunch of people haven't thought of. So, you know, I think we're pretty early. My experience with these new computing waves, like I was pretty early in mobile and investing in things. Was that, you know, I, I got some of the things right, but there were a whole bunch of things people thought of that, that, you know, no one I knew had thought of at the time.

• 27:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, so Chris, I want to ask about that, like, so these circles that you're talking about and this whole thing that we call crypto or blockchain. How big is this? Like, how big is this going to get, right? Like, it's very hard to, to, to estimate. Some people end up like underestimating it, some others, you know, end up overestimating it. But you've seen some eras of compute sort of play themselves out. What's your sense of how big this thing is?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Well, if you believe the, I mean, it, so I, you know, I mean, I'll speak personally, I, you know, I was working in traditional venture capital and I'm still part of Andreessen Horowitz. But I, you know, I, I switched my and focused my entire career on, on our crypto fund. So, you know, I mean, I just, I think that speaks for itself. But, but, um, you know, I certainly am a big believer. I think that, um, I look a couple of things I'll say, like one caveat is it's really, I, I found that. It's very, very hard in technology to estimate kind of market sizes. And historically, frankly, I think most, me and most of my partners at Andreessen Horowitz have got, have underestimated the sizes of them.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  So, you know, that big caveat, and by the way, the big caveat is timing. These things, you know, sometimes they can take much longer than people hoped. You know, a cautionary lesson for me is I was very excited about machine learning for a long time. I started a machine learning company. I used to be an entrepreneur in 2008 and sold it in 2011 and thought, you know, it was never going to happen. And then machine learning obviously happened in a big way, like starting in 2013. So the timing of these things is very hard. You know, I think the strong form of blockchain is not only, not only does it allow technology to deeply penetrate industries that have thus far been recalcitrant to technology like finance. So that like, number one is it can start to enter

• 29:06Speaker 02

  new areas. Number two is it can dramatically expand market sizes so that now anyone with a smartphone, which is, I don't know, something like four billion people, has sort of democratic and equal access to basic financial services. An example, funding, you know, all sorts of other interesting, you know, new monetization models like NFTs, things like this. So there's that. I think you could see, I could see a world where it's crypto is not a, is not a part of a venture firm. It is the entire venture firm in the sense that this is just a new way to build startups. It's a new and better way to build startups is to build, build them as protocols where they're owned and operated by a community. I think it will look, I think there will be deep skepticism 20 years from now to use a social network that's owned by a company. In the same way that, you know,

• 29:50Speaker 02

  I wouldn't want to use email or web browsing that's owned by a company. I'm very happy that those are open protocols. And I, you know, I think we, for a variety of reasons, like the internet took a, kind of took a wrong turn, maybe 10 years ago, and allowed what should be very core protocols to be built in this centralized way. And I think, by the way, we're now starting to see a lot of the issues with that. There's a lot of people very unhappy with those experiences. Developers unhappy, there's users unhappy. There's a whole bunch of kind of second order consequences as a result. So I think the strong form is this is just simply a new way to build tech startup. And it's a much better way to build them. And it's a much better way to govern them.

• 30:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris, do you think this is, do you think this is what you're talking about? Many in Silicon Valley have sort of missed it, right? So like many engineers in web two tech Yeah, companies like Google and such. It's my impression that a lot of VCs, quite frankly, have missed this too. Not yourself, of course, and not A16Z in what you're doing. You guys have a crypto fund, but like many VCs have been slower to latch on to the ability of maybe human beings to create like a digital store of value. Like the concept of Bitcoin even has been sort of, I would say slower in Silicon Valley circles than possibly in other circles.

• 31:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And do you think the reason for this is that this is all happening at a deeper level? Like you have to start questioning like, okay, what's the denomination of money, right? Like this is not fintech. Fintech takes the banking system, the existing banking system and creates like a digital layer on top of it. This is like, oh, we're getting to the core, the deepest layer here and we're talking about replacing the underlying banking protocols? Wow. Do you think that throws people off?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. So I think, I guess I would say in Silicon Valley, I think the Bitcoin narrative is pretty widespread at this point. Like it wasn't five years ago, but now I'd say it's generally accepted. I am surprised how few people in technology even know what DeFi is. I know very few people that have dug into it and don't think, like everyone I know who's dug into it thinks it's amazing, basically. But a lot of people simply haven't dug into it for whatever reason. Like I think there's a bunch of reasons why. By the way, like a whole bunch of the rest of the technology world is doing very well right now, as an example. There's a ton of interesting stuff happening. Like I don't want to dismiss that. There's a ton of interesting stuff happening in, you know, in kind of traditional infrastructure,

• 32:18Speaker 02

  meaning like, you know, business software, SaaS software. You know, at the firm, we have a bunch of interesting investments and because I hope there's just a bunch of exciting stuff happening generally in technology. So that's part of it. I think part of it is just, you know, it's kind of, as you know, it's a rabbit hole. Like if you don't go down the rabbit hole and fully understand it.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  And really like, I think, for example, the idea that, that, you know, Uniswap, Compound, etc., are fully autonomous, um, protocols that where the code itself, um, you know, contains money and makes decisions and it's really, you know, it's not like AWS and just running this, you know, just sort of a company running it. That concept, I think it's just a very different concept. And until you like really kind of get into it and experience it, um, and really sort of deeply understand it, it's just, it's just kind of hard to grok. I don't know. So, but I think it's just a matter of time. Um, the same way with Bitcoin, right? It just took time. Um, and, and I think, you know, over time, people will dig into, I think, you know, it's probably going to be this kind of staged thing where you first

• 33:22Speaker 02

  dig into Bitcoin and then you sort of dig into Ethereum and then you start going down the next rabbit hole.

• 33:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let, let, let's keep going down the rabbit hole then. So we started with like the, the 20,000 foot view and kind of your mental model for the space and this, the idea that we now have unlocked, humanity has unlocked the ability, uh, for computers that make commitments. And this unlocks a, a whole bunch of other things. Um, let's get into like maybe the 5,000, uh, foot level of actually investing in this space. Like why investing in crypto is different. I thought it was interesting that, uh, A16Z, like two years ago, right? I believe it's two years ago, maybe a bit, uh, over that, you guys decided to start a dedicated crypto fund, right? And so you started your first one, that's 300 million. Congrats. And the second one, for our listeners, that's 515

• 34:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  million this year. So two funds in this space. But what struck me is this is not in kind of the, the consumer side of things, right? Um, you have a fund for consumers, uh, for consumer sort of applications and startups. And it's not even in the fintech side. It's its own thing. Why is crypto investing its own thing?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  It's a great question. I mean, part of it's structural. And so, um, I don't want to, maybe if I go too deep in the weeds, it's kind of boring for listeners. But the, the short answer is, uh, in order to own, so I, I believe that the best way to have exposure to crypto is to own tokens and coins, not equity. Um, and in order to do, to have a fund that does that, just from a regulatory compliance point of view, you have to be what's called an RIA, not an ERA. And this has to do with kind of arcane laws in part of Dodd-Frank. You know, this is the set of laws that governs investment firms. And so when we started the crypto fund, you know, we knew it had to be an RIA and we didn't want to make the whole firm an RIA.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Cause it has this sort of additional compliance overhead, things like that. So we started off like that, like fast forward, we ended up making the whole firm an RIA. There's a whole bunch of other differences though, besides the regulatory side, there's, there's

• 35:23Speaker 02

  a whole bunch of like in terms of logistics, there's auditing, custody.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  There's, you know, governance, staking, validating, just like, you know, we have a whole data science operation that's kind of different than traditional venture.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  There's also just the type of analysis we do, you know, like a lot of it will be kind of like traditional venture in the sense that you, you know, bet on teams and products and breakthrough technologies. But then there's also this whole thing of analyzing the kind of token mechanics, right? And that's different. There's the team, you know, I, over time I've learned, I just wouldn't have been my reason in the beginning, but now it is, is that the, the team recruiting people. You know, I think the, if you, you know, if you have the, if your listeners have the chance to talk to some of my colleagues on the crypto team, they'll, they'll find that everyone on the team is a real true believers. And we really look for that and we want people that, that, that want to be bought in and frankly, like the economic incentives that we offer them are, you know, profit sharing in the crypto fund and they really want that. And so that's important too.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  So I'd say it's a bunch of things, regulatory, logistic, and then kind of, I don't know, incentive alignment, I guess.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, but I do think the interesting question is if, if we're right about being bullish about this category long-term, will it kind of re-intersect into what is now kind of, you know?

• 36:45David Hoffman?

  Well, that was my question, like the question of if we're right and this is a software like eating the world right now, software eating finance, then almost all of the other funds within A16Z and VC funds become crypto funds in a sense, right?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:01David Hoffman?

  Like, it's like, like-

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Closer to some of this stuff might be closer than we think, like fintech, if you take what's called, what people call, we call fintech, which is not crypto, so we have a separate, in our main fund, our non-crypto fund, we have a fintech practice. So we have three partners there who do fintech and that stuff like a firm, TransferWise, you know, there's a whole bunch of really interesting companies in there that are kind of, you know, there are apps you can download that kind of provide better experiences than existing banks. I think that we're, you know, I don't know if we're that far away from those protocols, for example, integrating with, you know, DeFi protocols. So you could imagine a fintech, a lot of these fintech companies need capital, need to borrow capital to do what they're, you know, whatever they're doing, like you look at a firm or something, they're lending money out, but they have to themselves go borrow money to do that.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  And today, many of them go to Wall Street and other places to get that capital. You could imagine, I think relatively near future, going to a blockchain to get that capital.

• 37:57David Hoffman?

  Chris, you know, we call this is the DeFi mullet. It's fintech in the front and DeFi in the back.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's good. I think the, and so that, I guess what I'm saying there is that they could, they could play very nicely together. The fintech companies are very good at user experience, building world-class applications, you know, client-side applications, right? All that kind of stuff that frankly, the crypto side is not as good at right now. Like those two could, the peanut butter and jelly could fit together very nicely there.

• 38:23David Hoffman?

  Hey, guys, there's so much left. In the second half of this interview, we ask Chris about the themes behind A16Z's second crypto fund, the crypto fund that Chris is leading right now. Then we get into a very interesting conversation about the cycles of cryptocurrency and how the fact that in contrast to other emerging industries like AI or VR, the fact that there are price charts to go with this industry really changes how this industry behaves. And then we also talk about the Web3- Technology that might be ready to finally solve society's growing demand to become independent from these web two gargantuan is the technology ready. What is Chris looking at? There's so much left in this interview.

• 39:08David Hoffman?

  Don't go anywhere, but we have to take a moment and pause to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Synthetix is Ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol. What does that mean? Synthetix is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets, which are assets that are priced via an oracle rather than bids or asks. Traders can use the Quanta exchange, which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by synthetix. Traders on Quanta can trade synthetic tokens like SBTC, S Oil, or S DeFi. Because Quanta is powered by synthetix, traders experience zero slippage on their trades. No, I didn't mean low slippage. I meant no slippage because that is the power of the synthetix platform.

• 39:53David Hoffman?

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• 40:32Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 41:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Monolith gives you all of it. You need to download the app at monolith.xyz to get your bankless Visa card. It's optimized for European listeners. They'll be coming to the US soon. And when you get that Visa card, the Monolith card, tweet about it. When you do, I love seeing people unpackaging their beautiful bankless Visa cards. It makes me realize that the revolution is here. Search Monolith in the App Store.

• 41:37David Hoffman?

  Chris, let's talk about the incoming fund that is coming into A16Z. What, what main categories are you guys focused on with this fund?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Oh, so yeah, so we, I think you're referring, so we're now on our second crypto fund, which we started investing out of a few months ago.

• 41:52David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  So we fully invested the first one. I guess up till, I don't know, the summer or something. And yeah, we're investing in a new one. Yeah. So I, I think that, like, I think, so you said, what categories?

• 42:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah. What are the theme, what are the themes that you guys are going after? What are the various theses that you guys have your fund based out of?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'd say like, I, I'll, I'll tell you, and we do have theories. But I will also say that I've learned maybe the hard way in venture capital, that you have to be prepared to throw your theory out the window. If you meet a great entrepreneur with a great idea, right? So we, we, we obviously as kind of, you know, people excited about the space, develop theories and themes and things like this. But fundamentally, I think of first principles venture capital is investing in great people, you know, and great ambitious people with, you know, who want to change the world through technology. Right? And if we meet someone like that, and if they don't fit into a theory of we have, then so be it, you know, and we'll, we'll, we'll bet on the person over the theory.

• 42:48David Hoffman?

  By the way, on that real quick, what, what if you don't know who they are? Pseudonymous.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  It's an interesting question. We've, I mean, I think, I think if it, if they'd written the code and we could look at the code, you know, like, as you guys know, all these things happening with in DeFi, like. You know, the sushi swaps and all that kind of stuff like the pseudonymous. I think we'd be open to that, you know. I think in that case, we'd be buying tokens, right? So that would mitigate the risk of, but we can do that. We have a structure now. This took us a long time to get to it, but we have the structure now where we can just go buy the tokens on exchange or OTC.

• 43:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I guess the fund provides you that flexibility, which is, which is cool, but, but

• 43:26Speaker 02

  And like Bitcoin is pseudonymous. So, you know, as long as we can see the, I think, you know, it'd be a little bit different in staging. It'd probably be post-launch as opposed to pre-launch.

• 43:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, right. But, but, but go on, we were talking about sort of the, the general areas.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so, I mean, look, you know, so concentric, going back to the concentric circles, like, you know, we continue to believe in Bitcoin. We continue to believe very much in, you know, Ethereum. I think that Ethereum scaling is going to be super interesting, as you know. I, I, I alluded earlier to this, what happens when you, so if you, if you look at every, kind of the, the metrics behind different computing adoption. So PCs in the eighties and mobile, you know, from 2008 on or so, they, they start off kind of linear and then they hit this exponential growth. And why do they have the exponential growth? Part of it is things like Moore's Law, you hear a lot about that, you know, you can pack more transistors on a semiconductor.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  But I think the really, the core dynamic is you get, you enter this point, kind of you enter the tunnel at some point. And the tunnel is, there's a feedback loop where the applications get better and that, and, and demand for the applications goes up. And that in turn drives investment in the infrastructure. And as you build better infrastructure, that in turn makes more applications possible. And I think that we're, I, I believe we're entering that tunnel now in the, in the kind of Ethereum DeFi space. So, you know, as you know, you know, summer of DeFi and all the other kind of activity since drove up gas prices, which in turn really kind of accelerated the need for things like Layer two, ETH two, like all these kinds of scaling.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  And also, by the way, other, you know, sort of quote competitors to Ethereum or complementary chains, et cetera. I, it, it, so I think that will be a super interesting area for the next two years is like finally.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Finally getting workable production, release, main net,

• 45:23Speaker 02

  you know, real scaling solutions that can be used by end users, right? Like, and just all that will get accelerated because we need it now, right? We didn't really need it two years ago in the same way.

• 45:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  We talked about store value as a category. We've talked about L2s as a category specifically for this second crypto fund from A16Z.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  When I said scaling, I think there's three aspects to it. There's Ethereum itself, which, you know, I'm excited about ETH2 and all the progress there. There's Layer 2, like optimistic rollups I'm very excited about. And then there's other blockchains, and I don't think of them, and people often call them like, you know, competitive ETH killers or competitors. I think there's a very plausible future where you, multiple blockchains are interoperating and providing different purposes. So as an example, I think it's plausible that you would have a different blockchain for video games, for things that where, and the reason you might have a different blockchain for that is it's a different set of trade offs where you value performance more, but maybe trust less.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Maybe for a video game blockchain, you don't need to have sort of nation state censorship resistance, but you do want to make sure that the take rate is committed to and won't change so the developers feel confident building on it. But then maybe you want a way to reconcile so that a user can take their NFTs and use them on a gaming blockchain and, you know, trade them, et cetera. But maybe then they want to sort of put them back on Ethereum in order to use them in a DeFi context, as an example. Like, to me, that's the kind of big dream. You know, you have ETH with sharding, you have, you know, rollups on top of it, and you have other blockchains for other purposes, and they all kind of interoperate.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  And so when I say scaling, I mean it in that very broad sense.

• 47:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we had a conversation not too long ago with one of the folks at a VC firm called Paradigm, Charlie Nois. We were just talking about this idea, right? That the idea that because these crypto systems, these blockchains, require economic security, the value Of the underlying token matters a lot because that impacts the ability of like that impacts the amount of assets essentially that that they can host, right? So Bitcoin is harder to attack because it's more valuable as Ether becomes more valuable in the future, it becomes harder to attack, it can host more value, it can be more like a global settlement layer. Therefore, all of these blockchains that are trying to compete in the, you know, circle,

• 47:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  let's broaden it from store value, like the money circle or the DeFi circle, right? If you're kind of combining those those ideas together, the underlying asset of those chains is competing as a monetary asset. Call it store value, call it a reserve asset, something else. What do you think of this idea? Because this would kind of imply as well, possible category winners, because there's obvious network effects there. Do you think that Ether has to be a money in order to be a DeFi chain? Do you think other blockchains are competing with Ether as a money?

• 48:21Speaker 02

  So I, I, it's very interesting. I think there's a bunch of ideas in there. One is this idea that you do need a certain minimum value of Ether, right? And of the sort of, of, you know, to, to guarantee the security of the network. I would argue the security, the sort of trust in the network is a function of multiple things. One is the price. The price is important because you can, you can very precisely reason based on the price about the, about the, you know, how much it costs to attack the network, right? And the higher the price, the higher it is to attack it, and therefore the more secure it is. I think there's also just kind of a general Lindy effect with blockchains, meaning the longer they've been around, the more likely they will to be, to continue to be around. But kind of a twist on it would be sort of the longer they've been around and not hacked at layer one, the more you can trust them, right?

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Bitcoin and Ethereum have never been hacked at layer one. And, and, you know, Bitcoin is, you know, 10 plus years, Ethereum five plus years, like that, that's a very important fact. And you could, you could create a new Ethereum today, and if you don't have that five year history, you're just not going to trust as much, right? So I think the price matters for trust. I think the, I think the community and just sort of the optics around the community, you know, like how, you know, I won't say negative things about the, but we know, we all know of other blockchains with just sort of bad optics, which then created kind of a negative community and a community that wasn't as trustworthy. So I think there's a lot of interesting things that go into the trust. I'd say it's the value. I think it's the Lindy, how long they've been around and not hacked. I think it's the quality of the community. But those are all really important things which are, which are new to blockchains, right?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  You didn't have that kind of, that didn't matter with iPhones, that you trusted, right? I mean, I mean, it matters, but you know, it's a different type of trust. So now, I think there's a separate question you're asking, which is, does Ether have to have a monetary premium? Is that maybe another question?

• 50:01David Hoffman?

  I'm happy to ask it.

• 50:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, yeah, and it's kind of rolled up into that because, right, it would, like, if we're thinking that the largest total addressable market size is something you said earlier, is probably a store of value, some multi-trillion-dollar reserve asset for the world, right, like a Bitcoin could become, or an Ether possibly could become. That's, you know, part of the bankless thesis, anyway. Then, like, the blockchain that has an asset at its base, that has that monetary premium, should have an advantage in having the highest security, right? And so, is that an important factor? Are blockchains also competing along that dimension? They're all trying to compete, their asset are trying to compete for monetary premium.

• 50:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if they're not a monetary premium, right, if the question of how do you value a token? How do you value Ether, right? You know, maybe it's just like a capital asset, and it's discounted cash flows at the end of the day, right? Or maybe it is that, plus, it has a monetary premium, some reserve-type functionality. Just curious how you think all these blockchain assets are competing?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  I think, so, I've heard this argument before, that the only things, like, I know people that have crypto funds, and they only invest in things that they think will have monetary premium.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  And it's a fairly common thesis out there. I, you know, I think that, okay, I think that, you know, Ethereum could fulfill its vision and be kind of a global, you know, kind of computing fabric, settlement layer, incentive layer.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  You know, Ether could be valuable enough to secure the network. And I think it could do all that without having a monetary premium, so I don't think it's necessary.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  I don't know. That's my, I mean, I just think the opportunity to be kind of this technology fabric that every,

• 51:52Speaker 02

  you know, that once, you know, we now have eight billion, we will have eight billion people using the internet and, you know, or, you know, some whatever seven, six, seven billion and we'll have an order of magnitude more devices connected to the internet. And if all of those things kind of interoperate or incentivized through Ethereum, like I just think the opportunity is so big on its own. And, and the way you'd value it in that case is supply and demand and just that it's, it's this computer you want access to and there's a limited number of ether and you need to have ether to access it. And so,

• 52:22Speaker 02

  you know, I, I don't know where it nets out, but it seems to me like a very big opportunity from a venture perspective. So I guess I just, yeah, I don't, I, I, I don't think, I guess like, like I'd say this is another just sort of general philosophical difference that in the space, you have people that kind of come at it from an economics point of view and they think about these concepts like monetary premium. Then you have people that come at it from a technology point of view. I'm very much on the latter. And it may, it may be a blind spot, frankly, I don't know, like I could be wrong, but I look at the lens, everything through the lens of the internet and I see, I see crypto and you know, what Ethereum is doing and what a bunch of other kind of protocols around Ethereum are doing as, as, as the internet finally realizing its, its kind of full

• 53:03Speaker 02

  potential. And I see this as dramatically increasing the scale and scope of the internet. And I don't know, I don't need to add in a monetary story, I guess, to feel like it's already a gigantic opportunity.

• 53:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Chris, that is why we brought you on. We want to understand how you see crypto, your lens. And can, can we talk about DeFi for a minute?

• 53:24Speaker 02

  One thing though, the caveat, like I very much could be that I, you know, like I admittedly look at the world through like an internet lens and through a technology lens and I may have very well have blind spots on this other stuff. And so I will, you know, and I'm sure that, you know, I'd look, it's one of the great things about investing and about entrepreneurship and about technology is that you can have a bunch of people with different views and, and, you know, and that lets you kind of build an interesting, diverse ecosystem, right?

• 53:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So in your lens of the world, Chris, what is going on with DeFi? How's this part of the internet story? Like, it seemed to have exploded over the last, you know, two years. It's been around probably longer, arguably, and we would probably say this. Bitcoin was an early instance of DeFi. But really with Ethereum, you have these kind of money Legos, these composable protocols, all in one network. What is happening with DeFi? How do you look at that category?

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been very exciting. I mean, you know, part of it for me is just the excitement level is like how, you know, it's gotten to the point where I can't even, even if I spent full time on it, I don't think I could follow all the developments.

• 54:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know the feeling.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  That's, to me, always a great thing, right? Is you're sort of just like fire hose of interesting stuff and just like very creative things going on. And there's just a whole bunch of lessons. Look, I think there's, I think, actually, I would argue you can look at DeFi from two different lenses, okay? I'm full of frameworks here. But the product kind of lens of like, okay, Compound is a lending platform, you know, Uniswap is an AMM, and you can kind of look at it as a product. You can also look at it as a new way to build a startup. Okay? And that way is that the, you know, the owner, the startup is owned by the community. Like, I think the Uniswap retroactive airdrop is a very fascinating thing, right? Imagine if, you know, Uber, you know, Uber launched, I think, in 2010.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Imagine if in whatever, three or four years post-launch, they retroactively gave out 15% of their cap table to the drivers of Uber. Like, that would have been a momentous thing, a momentous kind of way to, you know, share the, the, the growth of the network with the user base, right? Like, that just happened with Uniswap. That's fascinating to me. Those, you know, the new governance kind of models, which I think, you know, kind of Compound, I think, was the first one to really kind of implement that, that fully baked, I guess maker really was maybe the first. But we now have like a real model for how to do governance and how to do token distributions and how to do kind of the whole thing, right, on the backend.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  I think that's very important because I think you could take kind of like, let's say, what Compound is doing on the governance and ownership side, and you could really kind of like cut and paste it and make a social network with that same governance structure as an example. So there's many, many interesting things happening here. On the product side, I think the composability that you alluded to is probably the most exciting thing. There's a period, this is ancient history, probably to your listeners who are younger. It was in like 2003 to 2008. And if you go back and read like all these blog posts, I wrote some, Fred Wilson, people like that, we used to blog about. One of the big things everyone was excited in that era of Web 2 was essentially what we now call composability,

• 56:40Speaker 02

  which was the idea that everything would have an API. And they called them mashups back then, Google mashups, it's funny. Mashup, there were all these like, you know, there are startups, Mashery, and there are venture funds with mashup theses and things like this. And the idea is you could take these things and recombine them, and everyone was super excited about it. Unfortunately, that didn't really happen. Why? A lot of it's the business model, right?

• 57:06Speaker 02

  You know, Instagram, Twitter, you know, they famously, you can't embed, at one point you can embed Instagram photos on Twitter and they disabled it. Why? Because their business model is ad-based and there's all these incentives to keep people in the silo and not to let them kind of, you know, kind of cross-populate. So a lot of it's, I think, the ad-based model, which I just think was a kind of, just a wrong turn on the internet, an unfortunate turn, and I think created all these kind of weird perverse incentives.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  So anyways, there was all this excitement about it, and then it kind of fizzled because the business model, we don't really have APIs anymore. We have APIs like Stripe and Twilio, which are paid for by businesses. We don't really have consumer APIs. You can't just kind of go, you know, Google Maps, you know, for a long time was free and they changed it to charge a lot. That's happened too. People have gotten, developers have had so many experiences now where the... API is the, you know, the, either like function calls were removed or prices raised or whatever. They've just so many instances of this that it just, you don't build setups like that anymore. And it's just really a shame because that means everyone's out there just building their own silo. Right. Um, there is sort of composability on the code side, right?

• 58:14Speaker 02

  I mean, GitHub, open source, one of the, it's one of the really kind of, I think, under remarked on things in, in the history of tech is how successful open source has been. You know, the vast majority of the software in the world is open source, including, you know, almost all your software on your Android phone, a lot of your software on your iPhone and almost all server side software these days is open source. That's an incredible story. Um, you know, uh, this idea that, that, you know, people get together on the internet and create software for free. And that would become the dominant model.

• 58:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I've, I've heard you talk about the, the importance of public goods as well, right? Like you're, you're a VC and you care a lot about pri- private, uh, capitalism, that sort of thing, but there is some value in public goods.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Oh, very much. I would, I would liken it to a city. Okay. So if you read like, I'd recommend if you haven't read like Jane Jacobs is, you know, brilliant, uh, kind of anthropologist of cities. Um, and she, she has this great book where she, a chapter of a book where she analyzes a city block. Um, and what makes a healthy block versus an unhealthy block. And, and the key part of the healthy block is you have this, you have this interplay between the public and private, right? You have the streets and the sidewalks which are public, um, and that creates foot traffic and that foot traffic sort of, there's a network effect with foot traffic. If you see a street with a foot traffic, you feel safer walking on it. Um, tourists go there. That in turn enables private businesses, you know, the tourists are there. Now you can have a whatever, you know, a gift shop or something, right?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  And that gift shop in turn, you know, makes someone want to put a restaurant there and that restaurant in turn makes somebody upstairs want to put a, you know, gives them the economic incentive to put a, put a, put housing up there or something, right? And so there's this very important interplay between the public and private and the public enables the private, right? What we have now in the, in the web two world is we have these five big silos like GAF, you know, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. And they're like Disneyland or something. It's where one company controls the whole thing, right? It's like the difference between, you know, Paris and, and Disneyland or, you know, a theme park, right? Cause, uh, uh, theme parks are fine, but the, the problem with theme parks is there's no, there's no bottoms up organic growth, right? It's all top down planning. It's a, it's a little like, you know, like kind of central planned.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  City and that's why they're kind of lifeless and frankly limited in what they can do because you know, you just can't

• 1:00:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Live there.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  The way that one central actor is going to compete with the whole world.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Kind of going out and doing creative stuff in the way that great cities are right. And so the first year of the web was like New York City. It was like Paris, right? The second year of the web was like, eh, in some ways it's better because we had broadband and mobile phones and all these other things and those made it better. But in terms of the model, it was very limiting. So I, yeah, this is not, I'm, I don't believe in like open source and crypto because, you know, I, I mean, I do think they'll create a better world, but it's not just because of that. I think that will enable capitalist innovation on top. And I think, you know, the two combined in the same way that a great city, if you combine those two, you know, can have a great experience for everybody. I think the same applies to the internet, right? So yeah, there's not, there's not just sort of like a socialist kumbaya.

• 1:01:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  But this is what's so refreshing when you say about the states we're in, in crypto is that like that works like Bitcoin, that works like Ethereum, they are public goods. Like anyway, it's permissionless. It's, it's closer to TCP IP than to Facebook.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  I mean, look, the fact that these, as you said, this, you know, pseudonym is some random person on Twitter. I'm sure a lot of these are like teenagers in like, you know, and like maybe the developing world or wherever they might be like, and they are on a level playing field with, you know, someone like me sitting in Silicon Valley. And that's, I think that's a great thing for the world. It's, it's more meritocratic and I think it will create much, much more innovation. I mean, a lot, you know, so much of the history of, you know, the Wright brothers were, uh, history of innovation is, is, is, uh, people on the fringes, right? It's the Wright brothers where they literally had a bicycle repair shop. I mean, we, I think we all learned that at school, but you actually go read the history of it, like all of the experts said that air travel was, flight was impossible. And you literally had to have, you know, bike repair people in Dayton, Ohio, who actually went and did it.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  And this through of, you know, you know, whatever early trains and early telegraphs and just, you go through the history of innovation. It's always somebody on the fringes. And so if we expand the fringes, right? If we make the whole world the fringe, we're going to have way more innovation.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  So I, you know, I, I think it's, it's for sure. And I, I don't think, you know, I think, I think of it as sort of Ethereum is doing for Ethereum, Bitcoin, and all the other crypto protocols are doing for services, kind of what open source did for software, right? So like, like what, another way to look at the history of track is. Software got commoditized, it became open source, right? And as a result, all of the software companies moved up the stack to services. So like Microsoft today, we call themselves a services company, not a software company. Right? And now, but, and so what, but what they did is they went up to the services layer and then they, and then they kind of replayed the old kind of lock-in game they used to play with software and they figured out how to lock people into these services through the data and other kinds of things. And so now what we're doing in crypto is we're doing to services what open source did to

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  software and we're going to go and we're going to create open protocols that replace those services and, but then in turn allows another layer of innovation to happen on top of it, which, you know, which, much of which will be capitalist, you know, and private goods in addition to public.

• 1:03:16David Hoffman?

  A frequent theme that we discuss on the Bankless program is how the people of the world and maybe especially the United States are, in my, in my opinion, and our opinion is, are really ready for a grand perspective shift. There seems to be really shifting undercurrents that people really want something new and something different and they feel locked into their current lifestyle. And I think the big web two gargantuan's like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, et cetera, are really part of the culprits about that. And we also see some of that playing out with how Congress summoned some of these, these big leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Jeff Bezos to Congress to answer for their sins of being a massive monopoly that is really constraining upon the people of, of the United

• 1:04:00David Hoffman?

  States and, you know, the world, the world at large. And then you've alluded to this a little bit in this podcast so far and as well as your, your previous content where you think that there is room in, in this DeFi or crypto or, or computers that make commitments world to start to offer alternatives to that sort of technological stack where, you know, we are, we don't have to be locked into this Disneyland because yeah, as fun as Disneyland is, if you make me live inside of it every single day, it's not going to feel like a paradise, it's going to feel like a hell.

• 1:04:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't want to live in Disney, David?

• 1:04:32David Hoffman?

  I don't want to live in Disneyland, no. That's too much, too much Disneyland. So Chris, from your perspective, what can we build with these new tools, these computers that make commitments that can help supplant some of these web two gargantuan's that are starting to have dictatorship over our lives?

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that, I think, for example, social networking is something that could very easily, I mean, we already have two giant social networks that are open, which is the web and email, right? Email is an open protocol social network, that's what it is, right? And, you know, there's no reason why we can't extend that model to other types of social networking.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Now that we have blockchains, I think you couldn't have done it without blockchains. There's a whole bunch of reasons why, you had nowhere to, so pre-blockchains with open protocols, you had nowhere to keep state, you had nowhere to save data, right? On the web one, the only place you could actually kind of save data was DNS. So DNS is effectively a database, it's a mapping of names to IP addresses. That was it. I was there for this, like 2007 and eight with RSS. People were trying to create versions of RSS that, where you could have like a name, I could be C. Dixon on RSS, I could have a follow graph, but there was nowhere, literally nowhere to store that. There was no public state, right, in the first year of the internet. Now we have public state. That's a massive breakthrough, architectural breakthrough, which means we can now create, you know, RSS with, you know, follow graphs and with all sorts of other extensions to open protocols.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, there's a cultural gap right now, I think, between the open protocol kind of web two people, like the RSS people and the crypto people. And just, they just haven't kind of, haven't put those two camps together in the right way yet, but I think that will happen.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  And so, you know, look, I think a world where, you know, like, not everybody should have access to social networks. If you're, you know, espousing, you know, hate speech and violence and other things, you should not be on those platforms. That said, should that decision be made by an opaque product management group at a private company? Or should it be made through some more democratic process, right? I would argue the latter. These are very, very important networks. I mean, the internet, essentially, the killer app of the internet is networks on top of the internet, social networks, marketplaces, et cetera. It's really, it's a network of networks. And until recently, we had really one, we had two ways to build it. Either the web one way, which is a stateless protocol, or the web two way, which is a company owns everything.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Now we have this new way to do it, which is, it's a, it's a stateful protocol, it's a public good with advanced capabilities that are similar to the web two kind of systems. And that, I think, we could have, we could, we could have a, I, I hope that entrepreneurs start to sort of explore this space and start to develop. You know, new alternatives. So people do have a way to choose, like I would like to exit a lot of these incumbent systems. Now, all that said, there are things like, you know, the hardware side, for example, on the iPhone. And it's those are, you can't, it's very hard to have an open source model kind of displace that.

• 1:07:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  But this is the the web three circle, right? So I mean, you talked a lot like we've seen a lot of money use cases do fairly well in crypto, right? So obviously Bitcoin, Ethereum, and its world of DeFi protocols, and even like stable coins, you know, planting payment systems, that sort of thing.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  And that might be enough. That might be enough. Maybe web three is unnecessary for this to have impact.

• 1:07:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you still think there could be some web three stuff coming out of crypto, just not yet?

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  I don't see why not. Well, you couldn't do it yet because the performance, right? Because what like you can't. So if you look at what's happened so far with DeFi, I mean, DeFi, there's a reason DeFi is the thing that kind of that works so far. It's because it's the only thing that that it's the only thing where, you know, if you pay a dollar a transaction, it's still worth it, right? You can't have a social network where you pay a dollar a transaction, right? So I don't think we've even run the experiment yet because we haven't had a blockchain that has the performance required for anything beyond financial applications.

• 1:08:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we are, we are 1990s internet before broadband.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Look, I'm not saying a hundred percent chance it'll work. I'm just saying, I don't think we've really run the experiment yet until we have a blockchain with, you know, sub second transaction finality supports, you know, I don't know what 10s of thousands, hundreds of millions of transactions a second, you know, probably, you know, something that's rivals AWS in terms of gas costs or, you know, kind of cogs. I don't think we're really running the experiment yet, right? But the good news is I think we'll have that soon. And I think it's partly driven by things like DeFi and Bitcoin and all these other things that are happening, right? Like it's sort of this bootstrapping mechanism. Like it's not like we tried and we had all these credible web three things that didn't get adoption, right?

• 1:09:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the other question in people's mind, right? We've been, we've been talking the 20,000 foot view and the 5,000 foot view of, you know, where things look in the future. A question in people's mind is, okay, Chris, where are we now? Like, I think listeners here, people hear crypto people all the time talk about cycles. We're almost like religious about these cycles, right? Even like the Bitcoiner community has got a four year halving cycle. But there is something to this notion of of cycles. And you wrote a post about this. Why do crypto people always talk about cycles? And like, is there something to it?

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I think that an interesting question is if if other areas of technology such as AI and mobile phones, if they had tokens associated with them, like if there were an AI, this is hypothetical, but if there were an AI token in the last 50 years, I think you would have seen similar cycles. And if you have people in AI, they all talk about the the summer of 1970s and the winter in the 80s and the summer in the 90s, the same kind of talk, right?

• 1:10:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  They just didn't have price charts to, you know, like to show the enthusiasm.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  Instead, it was like government funding and other kinds of things. But if you had price charts, right, I think you would have seen a similar thing. By the way, go watch, I think it's on iTunes, the, you know, it's a documentary about, was it General Magic, right? The, yeah, they were, they tried to create like potentially an iPhone in 1993, right? I mean, so you had mobile phones in the 80s, 90s. These were credible, venture backed, you know, these were not like fringe things. These were real things. So I think you would see, I think this is, I think what we're seeing is now it's legible, right? Now it's, you see the prices. And I think it's more complicated than that, too, because the prices actually also feed back into the reality. And that's sort of what the blog post that Eddie and I wrote, if you can find on our site, website, it's, it's, it's the price innovation crypto cycles. And we tried to dig into

• 1:10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll have it linked in the show notes.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the, we, we tried to dig into was, it is because you actually do have these prices, there is a little bit of a more, I'd say, an amplifying effect versus the AI and mobile kind of hypothetical cases I gave, which is the price, you know, draws. So we kind of argue, Eddie and I argued in this post, that the, as the price goes up, that draws more press attention, which in turn gets more innovators and entrepreneurs interested in the space, who in turn come up with new ideas, who then plant the seeds and build things, which then eventually kind of flourish and drive the next cycle, right? And so we kind of argued, and we did this, Eddie's, Eddie did really the bulk of the work, this sort of data analysis work. And it was a truly, we didn't really, you know, we had this hypothesis, we didn't know if the data would back it up. And we feel strongly that

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  data did back it up, that this, you really can see that pattern in the data. I think one really interesting question now, if we are indeed in a, in an up Price cycle right now, to me, the prices are less interesting. What's really interesting is will this lead to a new wave of entrepreneurs entering the space? I think the big thing I'm looking for is more people entering the space, more talent entering the space. And I don't, I haven't seen that yet this cycle. I think it's too early. I think we'll see it. I think if things, you know, I think that we probably hopefully will see it over the next six to 12 months. But I remember in like 2017, all of these like high quality entrepreneurs, whether they were sort of existing entrepreneurs or new entrepreneurs, you know, were coming in, coming people like us. And they were saying, hey, I've got a brand new idea, right?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  That was how, you know, I remember when Robert walked in the door of Compound, we did the seed round, the A round. It was just a brand new idea. It was like, hey, Ethereum, I don't know what it was, 2016 or 17, I think it was a seed round. It's like you could, you know, Ethereum is this cool new thing and you could build a lending platform and there wasn't even a word DeFi, right? And, you know, he had been, Robert had been, he had sold his prior company to Postmates. He was a, he was a non crypto entrepreneur, entrepreneur before. And just that kind of thing, like, you know, hey, I just sold my company to Uber and now I decided crypto is the future. Like, I hope that happens the next year or two. I haven't seen it yet very much this cycle. Maybe it's just too recent and, you know, whatever the world, the whole bunch of stuff's obviously happening in the world right now that is distracting people.

• 1:13:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where are you looking, Chris? Like, so you think this, this talent will come out of the, the similar places it's come out like previously?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  That's a good question. Like, maybe, maybe my mental model is wrong and maybe the, maybe the future is the, you know, the anonymous Twitter users. And they're the ones who are going to create, you know, if you look at Hedjic and, you know, Sushi Swap, whatever, like all the food, food tokens. You guys probably know more than I do of what the latest stuff, but like, maybe that's the future and I'm just using the wrong model there.

• 1:13:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is very strange where some of these projects are, are like coming out of even like projects like AVE, right? And just, you know, kind of really small team, like in unlikely locations, Synthetix team coming out of Australia, very diverse locations.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  I think it's also, you have to ask yourself, like, there's different types of innovation. So there's kind of more application layer and deep infrastructure layer. I think if you're going to do deep infrastructure, you're probably more likely to have to like have a long development cycle, you might need more capital, you might not be able to just kind of launch and, you know, get the community behind you. So, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like there'll still be people that, for some people in the space for whom the venture capital model in some way makes sense and they will continue to come to people like us. And that there'll be other innovation happening kind of with these more kind of ad hoc groups. But I think that tends to be more kind of app layer stuff as opposed to kind of deeper infrastructure stuff.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  But, but yeah, very much more global, as you'd expect, I think, right?

• 1:14:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's assume, Chris, we are entering a fourth cycle here, right? So we've been through three in crypto. I mean, some of us have. I wasn't there for the early one. But like, what is going to be unique about this fourth cycle? It seems like every cycle has had something different about it, right? You know, we talked about the second cycle a little bit, 2012 to 2016. There was a little bit of an altcoin era where everyone was forking Bitcoin. And there was a blockchain, not Bitcoin, sort of this corporate, private blockchain sort of initiative that gained some, I guess, at least hype. And then, but in the midst of that, the really interesting thing that actually happened that went under the radar was Ethereum was born, right?

• 1:15:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like last cycle, maybe the third cycle is a little bit of DeFi. Do you have any thoughts on what's going to be birthed or what we should, you know, look out for in this fourth cycle?

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the short answer is I'd love to tell you that I predicted the last, all the things you described. I find this space very hard to predict in this, you know, specifically around kind of, you know, I, yeah, it's just, it's just very hard. It's just, it's a very dynamic. I mean, that's what makes it fun and interesting, right? It's just constantly kind of surprising me.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  You know, I do, I do think the one thing I feel like I have a handle on that you can kind of predict is the tech path. Like, I always think of it as, how do we get a billion people using crypto on a daily basis? All right. And then work backwards, what are the ingredients necessary to get there? And, and I feel highly confident when I do that, the things along the way that you just need, the necessary conditions to get to a billion people, you know, those are going to have to happen. So like, that's why I think scaling, it just has to happen, right? And it just like, if that doesn't, if that's not one of the outcomes of this next cycle, like something went off, right?

• 1:16:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  What if, can I ask you a question though? So what if the notion of scaling is actually different in this space, right? So I've, I've almost come here, it's like, you know, I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist at all, but I've like, I've listened to them, right? And I think they had an interesting idea that well, scaling and using Bitcoin is actually holding Bitcoin, right? Is, is an interesting idea. If you, if you're talking about a store of value asset, we don't necessarily need transaction scalability. If all you need is sort of meme scalability and a whole bunch of people.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Gabo social scalability kind of concept?

• 1:17:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kind of, right? What, what if we're measuring scalability differently in this next?

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  Look, I'm totally bought in on the Bitcoin store value side, and I think Bitcoin is doing, the Bitcoin developers are doing exactly what they should be doing for Bitcoin. And, and I, and I frankly was kind of wrong about that years ago. Like, I now see their logic and I agree with them. That, you know, the block size, the sort of general kind of putting security above all else and focusing on social scalability. I think they're making the right decisions and I, you know, and I, and I, I think that's, I think it's just, I don't know. I think it's fundamentally different in other, you know, when you talk about video games or something, I just think the design requirements are different. And you just, you just, you just can't, you know, you just need to have, you know, if you're going to have a billion people doing some activity, you need to do it in a way that, that, you know, on a system that can handle that.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  So, you know, maybe it's too simplistic, but I, I think in other areas, I, I totally buy that with store value and it may be true with other kind of monetary focused applications in crypto. I think in other application spaces, which I still believe will, will be relevant here. I think you, you know, you do need a kind of more traditional technical scaling. So I think scaling, I think, like, I think onboarding more people, I think,

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  you know, better user interfaces, user experiences, I think the, you know, Making more progress on the kind of regulatory front, getting more entrepreneurs in the space. Like, I think these are all the things I would like to see this cycle.

• 1:18:33David Hoffman?

  So we've talked about a number of different domains and I've read some of your work, Chris, and you've talked about, you know, perhaps even social tokens and gaming tokens and NFTs. What do you think is going to come first? Like, what do you think is the most assured thing? Like, from my perspective, the NFT world is bubbling and it seems to be very, have very strong product market fit, but yet it still hasn't broken through to the real world. The gaming token asset seems to also be a very promising thing. What do you think is assured to come first and foremost?

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  You're talking specifically on gaming?

• 1:19:06David Hoffman?

  For this fourth cycle of crypto that we think we're about to go into, like, of all the different categories and all the different sectors, what do you think is the most assured bet to have strong product market fit for the typical user, the typical end user?

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  I don't know if anything's assured. I'll tell you my candidates, which is, I think, NFTs in the, and I would say there's two, a couple of different senses of entities. There's the creator sense of like, a way for creators, people that are artists, musicians, you know, video game makers to, a new way to monetize, right? That, to me, is a very, very important and big idea, because so many of those creators are right now locked into centralized platforms that take most of the money, right? And so, you know, so there's, and there's a bunch of interesting startups working on that. There's the video game side, and there, there's actually, I'd say, sort of two different approaches. There's things like what the Dapper CryptoKitties guys are doing. They have a product called NBA Top Shot, which is doing very, very well, where they sell

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  collectible NBA cards. And that's, I think, it's, I think people underestimate how well some of these NFT companies are doing right now. A lot of the data is public, you can look it up. But like, really, they're quite popular.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  So I think that's an interesting thing, kind of, let's call it like, kind of, sports and gaming collectibles. I think there's another kind of angle, which is taking existing games and allowing them to have secondary markets. There's a, there's a investment we have called Forte, which is doing this. They're actually going out and partnering with games with large audiences already and letting them take, letting the users take those assets and move them onto a blockchain and trade them and take them from one game to another. So that's interesting. I think there's a set of things that I, that we think of as payment blockchains. So this is like a company we're investing in called Cello. This is, I think, what Facebook's project, which we're also investors in, DM is doing, which are blockchains that take the insight that to have a payment system,

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  you want to have both a stable currency and a, and a high throughput, low latency, kind of, core blockchain experience. And they're building blockchains from scratch for those concepts. So I think, I think payments, I think it goes without saying, store value and DeFi. So I'm just not talking about, like, obviously, those are like the core areas. But I think the kind of new areas that might become in the kind of part of the, of the core would be NFTs for creators, gaming, video games, payments, you know, from, from new, new payment focused blockchains. What else?

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  Am I forgetting any areas? I think Web 3, probably too early, it's probably next cycle, not this cycle, but, but maybe. What else? I think those are probably the candidates. I can't, it's hard for me to handicap within that. There's definitely a lot of chatter right now about NFT stuff. NFTs would be beautiful, because I, I, for a long time have felt that there's this very,

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  like, like, almost a tragedy that's happening right now in the creative world, where, you know, you now have the ability to write something or create a piece of music that is instantly, you know, instantly goes to literally billions of people, right? So in, it should be a golden period for musicians, podcasters, you know, creative, you know, artists, writers. It is a golden period, by the way, for video game makers. They are doing phenomenally well. But they're the only ones, and, and they're, they're the only ones doing well, because they're the only ones that have sort of a direct relationship with the users and aren't mediated through platform, for the most part.

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  So, you know, one of the reasons that like creative, you know, NFTs and new ways to monetize for creative people is so exciting is I think that could finally unlock like what I think of as like kind of the true business model for for those activities where people can directly monetize in a way that's free from kind of platform take rates and interference. So we'll see. There's a bunch of smart people working on it. And we see, you know, and the early traction is impressive.

• 1:22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Every cycle, Chris, you know, regulatory plays a role. Recently, Finson proposed a rule about, you know, withdrawing to self custody wallets implementing some AML KYC. I know you guys had a letter about that. You know, you don't need to ask about the details of that letter or that rule necessarily, but just your general thoughts. Is regulatory going to be a headwind or tailwind for us this cycle?

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think a lot of it is the what, you know, I, you know, I'm hoping the new administration will be friendlier towards innovation. The last one definitely was not. I would call them friendly towards big business and not towards technology or small business. So, you know, I think a change is welcome there. The, yeah, specifically on that issue, like I'm not the expert, but we have looked, we invested very heavily in it. So besides my partner Katie Hahn, who's has deep kind of regulatory and government experience, we recently hired Anthony Albanese, who was the chief regulatory officer at the New York Stock Exchange and has a long and, you know, and distinguished history in kind of the both the intersection of crypto and regulatory. He's going to lead up a lot of

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  our regulatory efforts. We have other folks on that team, Jeff and Miko, who's who's great, and we're going to invest more there. So we're, we think of it as a major area of focus and investment. In terms of specifics, yeah, like we have, we publish it all. It's in the letter. We think we have a lot of really strong arguments, but probably I defer to my smarter regulatory partners.

• 1:24:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Excellent. Well, Chris, this has been, you know, fantastic. I'm, you know, I'm curious, you, you've written so much about the next big things, like starting as as toys, right? The idea that, you know, you should be looking at what smart people do on the weekends as their hobbies. I'm curious, what do you do on the weekends? Do you have any hobbies outside of crypto?

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Good question. Yeah, I read a lot. I read a lot and I read probably my main hobby is reading besides, you know, seeing family and friends and things like that. And I read a lot and I specifically, I read a lot, actually lately it's been science fiction. Before that, I'd say I've read a lot of history.

• 1:25:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are the last few good books you've read?

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  So like I just, I'm ashamed I hadn't read this before. I just read the Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov, which is amazing, mind-blowingly good, and I can't believe I hadn't read it before.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  I read, what am I reading?

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Like, I kind of basically do it by author. So like I had a period where I went and read all the Philip K. Dick books, and then I read a whole bunch of the Asimov books. And I'd read Ray Bradbury before. Then lately, I was reading Robert Heinlein, like if you've read like Starship Troopers and a bunch of other things. A lot of, I've read a lot of history of technology books. You mentioned civilization before. I think of it a little bit that way. Like, you know, you take each tech in the tech tree, and I kind of went, I spent like years on this actually, and I went and kind of read about each of them and how they developed. And spent a long time reading about, I really highly recommend, I don't know if you have text we can put on after this, but a series of books around like the 19th century. Actually, I mean, if we had put links with this podcast, I could include some.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Amazing book. Actually, just on Twitter, I recommended to Adam Draper, and we have a tweet thing about it. It's called The Company. It's very relevant to crypto, I believe. It's the history of the limited liability corp. I'll just, if I have a few minutes, maybe I'll finish with this, if you guys have a few minutes. So the, so kind of think of it, 19th century, in summary, is the big thing that starts, that kicks it off, you know, steam engine, all this other stuff, and electricity, but railroad boom in the 1830s, started in UK, spread to the US. The big problem at the time, though, was limited liability corps were, they only existed if you got an active parliament. You had to go to parliament and get them to declare you have a limited liability. You couldn't just go form one, right? So what

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  you had to do is you had to form partnerships. And, and the way it worked is you had unlimited liability if you were part of the partnership, which means if somebody got killed on the railroad line or something, you'd go to jail, right? And so what that meant is that all of these companies were like eight people who really knew and trusted each other. They were often families, right? And you basically had an era of just partnerships. And what happened is, All of these cities, every time two cities would connect a railroad, their economies would like, the GDP would like, you know, go up 10x, right? So every, every pair of cities wanted a railroad. And so they'd all go to parliament and eventually parliament, there was this line around the block to get a LLC. Why did they want an LLC? They want an LLC so they could go and they could, they could aggregate capital, right? So you can go to other people who don't know you that well. And you can say to them, hey, you may lose your money, but you're not going to go to jail.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Right? Limited liability, this concept, but it was a very controversial concept. It took, fast forward, it took 30 years or something for them to, for people to finally allow this to be like a standardized thing. Because people thought, oh, limited liability, there were all these, what's happening today with crypto? It was like, literally like newspaper articles about how like, oh, this would, this would, you know, lead to the end of the world and criminals and all this, you know, the usual kind of things they say about new technologies. Um, it turns out though, if you, if you, if you, you know, by having that, by allowing for limited liability corps, um, you, you then allowed for the aggregation of capital and the creation of stock markets, right? Cause you know, if you look today, like if I give stock to Apple, I don't take, I can lose my money, but I don't go to jail if iPhone blows up or something, right?

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  Um, and so I guess what was interesting about that book to me was, you know, I knew the railroad was a big deal. The telegraph was a big deal, you know, all of Edison's inventions, a light bulb, like there's a whole bunch of exciting stuff that happened in 19th century. But I think you could really argue that the limited liability corp was one of the major tech invention.

• 1:28:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that, that is such a hidden gem because there, there is a lens on this whole crypto space, especially what's happening in DeFi, that this is just a disruption of the way we coordinate capital.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  I think that's right. I think it very well could be that, that's what I was trying to get at before. Maybe I didn't fully explain it, but like this idea that DeFi, there's really two sets of innovations. There's sort of the capital formation governance side, and then there's the product side. And I almost think the capital formation side might be, as you say, the most, like what we look back on, that you can get a bunch of people together on the internet that are, you know, anonymous or pseudonymous or whatever, and they can put capital together and code together and do all these things and have it owned and operated by the community that, you know, and then, and then what you do is right, if, if the, the partnership were 10 people, the, you know, the limited liability corp allows you to have a million shareholders or something, you know, crypto will let you have billions of users who own the systems they use.

• 1:29:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And by, and by the way, they're connected to a, a financial system and it's completely global and permissionless to anyone with a keyboard, right?

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  And completely meritocratic and, and, and open and open source and you can study the code and it's just the way it should be done. It's just the right way.

• 1:29:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very good. So what is the name of that book, Ian? We'll include in the show notes, but I want to make sure.

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  I'll give you, I'll give you a link. I have a set of 19th century books. It's like going back to civilization, you think about the tech tree. That's basically the way I think about the, the book here. The 19th century book series is like the, the series of unlocks.

• 1:30:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Chris, this has been a fantastic conversation and thank you for leaving us with some resources. We greatly appreciate it. You know, last thing, I wanted to hear a little bit about your A16 crypto startup school because that is a fantastic resource as well. I mean, folks that listen to Bankless are continuously leveling up on crypto and DeFi and everything. And this is a great resource. What is that?

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is something that we did originally. It's gonna be in person and then the pandemic happened, but it was, it was, it was, it was a free school, of course, that was sort of taking all the things that we'd learned and, and giving them out to the people that attended the course. But then we, we videotaped everything and it's all on our, on our website. It's all free. Great people like Brian Armstrong, Balaji Srinivasan, Dan Benet, a whole bunch of other great people there. Maybe we can include a link here with the podcast. And this is really, what we try to do is sort of, it's the summary of like, kind of, you know, all the things we've all learned in the last 10 years in the space and like hoping that we could package it up and share it so that the, you know, that we can kind of, you know, help, help a

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  lot of the people that I think were there and people that, you know, were excited by it or, or people that are interested in crypto, but, but maybe intimidated by it or don't fully understand it or don't know how to start a company there. So we wanted to kind of give them a, a little bit of like a guidebook. So, so, you know, that might be something that, that your listeners, you know, especially if they're starting out in crypto. I think even people that are more experienced in crypto, like you can know the crypto side and DeFi side, but like, how do you go create a company? What are the regulatory implications? How do you think about recruiting? How do you think about, there's just all sorts of other logistical questions. And we tried to address a lot of them in that, in that course. So.

• 1:31:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Fantastic resource for you guys. Chris, thank you so much for being with us on Bankless. It's been such a pleasure.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you, guys. Really appreciate it.

• 1:31:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, listeners, action items. So a few things we will include in the show notes. The first is read a whole bunch of the articles we referenced in today's conversation. The crypto price innovation cycle, doing old things better versus doing brand new things. These are some of Chris's articles. We'll include all of those in the show notes. Go check them out. Go read them. Also, we'll include a link to the book that Chris mentioned, the company, and also a link to Crypto Startup School. So that would be number two. The third thing is, guys, we are in a crypto bull market. It is the bull cycle. And so that means we need your five-star reviews on iTunes, right, David?

• 1:32:35David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. We are trying to get to the top of the iTunes business and investing categories. And we are a little bit in a stalemate there. We have not climbed as fast as I would have hoped. So we need your help to climb the iTunes charts faster. And the way that you do that is you give us those five-star reviews wherever you listen to podcasts. If you could please take the time to get that done, that would really help spread the great gospel of crypto to more and more ears.

• 1:33:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, risks and disclaimers. Of course, the assets we talked about today are risky. None of this is financial advice. DeFi is risky. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.