DC Investor | Layer Zero

DC Investor is an investor... living in Washington, DC. Makes sense. A lot makes sense about DC Investor and his practical, long-term approach to the crypto markets. He has worked hard for his money, and expects his money to work hard for him in return. With one of the best and varied NFT portfolios out there, as well as a sound thesis on ETH the asset, DC clues us in on his guiding principles and life lessons from a career as a W2 employee and crypto investor. There's a reason DC has been on Bankless five times. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ 📣 DHARMA | From Dollars to DeFi! https://bankless.cc/dharma ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​ https://bankless.cc/go-gemini%E2%80%8B 💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 DC Investor 9:36 Interest & Speculation 14:45 Risk Management 20:07 Conviction & Communities 26:58 The Crypto Moment 33:58 Early Internet Skills 41:53 Tech Changes Society 46:56 Investing, not Trading 53:04 Markets 1:00:30 NFTs and Signalling 1:09:58 Gaming 1:14:15 Digital Economies 1:19:16 Hobbies & Lifestyle 1:23:10 The Hoffman Personality Quiz 1:27:45 Closing ------ Resources: DCInvestor on Twitter https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor?s=20 DC's NFT Collection http://gallery.so/dcinvestor DC's Newsletter https://dcinvestor.substack.com/ ----- 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 I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because crypto is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm talking with DC Investor, who lives up to his name as a guy who has been in the investing world and also lives in DC. So, we go through that history of what it was like to learn how to be an investor while also being a W2 employee. And I think we, a lot of

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  people in the Ethereum community, in the crypto world, can definitely understand what it's like to go to work for their nine to five, and then really think hardly about how to make their money work for them, and how to make sure that their money is working, as DC said, as hard for them as they worked for their money. I really enjoyed their framing. We talked about DC's early exploration into using the internet before the internet is what it was today, while we, as a society, were still trying to figure out what the internet is, and how those behaviors and skills that he learned while navigating the early internet was able to be translated into the world of crypto. We also, of course, go into DC's first entrance into crypto, which

• 1:30David Hoffman?

  involved buying Bitcoin at the top, selling it at the bottom, and what lessons he was able to learn from that expensive mistake, which is kind of turned into a rite of passage for almost everyone in the world of crypto. We also, of course, talk about DC's background as it relates to NFTs, and if DC famously has one of the most stellar NFT portfolios that is out there. And we also get into the world of crypto gaming, and what DC likes to do in his free time. So, I hope you enjoy this conversation with DC Investor. But before we get into it, we have to talk for a moment about one of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor.

• 2:57David Hoffman?

  Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. The era of proof of stake is upon us. Proof of stake systems like Ethereum, Terra and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud and wasteful proof of work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators. And that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized. Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation. And that is what Lido is here to do.

• 3:42David Hoffman?

  Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof of stake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32 ETH and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32 ETH and you need to pool your ETH with others so you can access staking yields? Lido offers a solution for both. Simply go to lido.fi, choose which assets you want to stake and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible and is committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol.

• 4:24David Hoffman?

  So if you want to stake your ETH, Terra or Sol and get liquidity on your stake, go to lido.fi to get started. Hey DC, how's it going?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Hey David, how's it going? Man, doing well.

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  Pretty good, pretty good. I'm over here at NFT NYC, bummed that the NFT guy wasn't actually able to see you this weekend.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  I know, I wasn't able to make it this week, but I definitely hope to be able to make it to some events in 2022.

• 4:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, man. I want to start with DC Investor. Where'd that name come from?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  So it was just a handle that I had created back in the day, because a lot of the forums I had been participating in were kind of financially oriented. I was on forums like the Bogleheads, which is like a financial investment site, using like Vanguard funds. So I've always been interested in this idea of investing. And my philosophy behind that has been pretty simple. As someone who was a W2 wage earner for most of my life, for 15 plus years, my philosophy was always, if I'm going to work hard for my money, which I worked very hard for my money, I wanted my money to work hard for me. So I always kind of had my mindset of, I want to be able to invest and grow my earnings beyond just the work that I'm putting in directly.

• 5:40David Hoffman?

  And then what about the DC side of things?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  So the DC, I'm actually based in DC, and based in the DC area. And I've lived up here for about 15 years now, so it's pretty much my home. I grew up in southeast Virginia. So been in this area kind of my whole life. I'm about four and a half hours away from where I grew up. But I love the DC area. It's a great metropolitan area. I'm sure a lot of your listeners might even live there. But it's great because we've got kind of the hustle and bustle of a bigger city and the cultural and arts that you expect from a city like DC. But it's also like a lot more laid back and chill than a city like NYC, which I love NYC, I love New York, it's a great city. But every time I visit there, when I come home, I'm like, oh, it's nice to be back at home too, so.

• 6:26David Hoffman?

  Oh my gosh, everyone that I've been talking to here in NYC is saying the same, same exact things. This is the first week of NYC I've been learning to like pace myself. And also also learning like one week in DC, in New York is more than enough. It's more of a five day thing for me.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  But it's fun while you're there. There's no other city that has that feeling.

• 6:46David Hoffman?

  That's very true. Yeah, it's very much a play hard, work hard environment. Okay, so speaking of play hard, work hard, if you are, and you say you worked very hard being a WT employee, working hard for your money, and then obviously you want your money to work hard for you.

• 7:02David Hoffman?

  Has this been some, like a work ethic that you've had like your entire, entire life as in like you've always been focused on like, you know, going to work, doing your W2, and then funneling that into, you know, actually investments. Has this been, you know, who you are for like the last 15 years that you would say?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Pretty much. I mean, when I first started out working, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners can probably relate to this, I didn't have like a ton of money, you know, you don't have a lot of disposable income when you're coming out of college. And I came out of college, I had actually started off as a chemistry and comp sci double major, then September 11th happened. And I was a senior and, or I was a junior in college. And I switched my major on the spot to government, just because I wanted to do something more involved with that. So I changed my focus completely, did the whole government major in three semesters. And then got my masters in public policy. So I was kind of like destined for this track of working on public policy related issues here in the DC area. But when I first came out of school, it's not like I had a ton of disposable income, but I did kind of prioritize

• 8:03Speaker 01

  saving a little bit. And one of the, one of the pieces of advice that I try to give people who are younger, just getting into this and might have like professional jobs, is try to save some of that money into your 401k. I know this is the opposite of a lot of crypto people will say. But it's like, save a little bit in that because as you build up that lower risk asset pie, it allows you as you grow older to take bigger risks. That's kind of the philosophy that I approached. Investing with crypto investing and just stock investing. I wanted to build up that nest deck so I can take on bigger risks as I got older.

• 8:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, famously, people will always say, hey, if you're young, take risks, right? Because why not? Like you have, you have very little to lose and everything to gain. But, but what you're saying is, well, if you keep that steady 401k, you get to continue with that strategy for longer and into your life.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also like, I mean, I think a lot of people don't really understand compound interest and how powerful it really is. Like, everyone will say they get it, but like, until you like, look at the numbers and how like, saving a little bit when you're younger, how much more valuable that is compounded over time. So I think that's one piece of it. But I wouldn't say, like, it doesn't mean, like, don't take risks while you're young. It means, don't put everything into risky endeavors. Like, make sure that if you, like, invest in something that's more speculative or risky, you've still got something to fall back on. And I think that's what, that's kind of been my philosophy is, I always wanted to create that security, because that's what's given me the confidence, actually, to hold on to these crypto assets, because I don't really care about the volatility as much, if that makes sense.

• 9:35David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. One thing that comes to mind is, like, everyone in crypto is, and even, this is also true for the legacy stock market now, with this whole, like, the GME ape culture that, you know, has gone outside of crypto, is like, no, no one has enough patience for compound interests. Like, I know you say, like, you know, compound interest is very, very, like, you know, powerful, but also, at the same time, people are trying to, like, get it rich everywhere, not just crypto. Have you thought about, like, the implications of, like, what happens when, like, the culture around investing goes from, you know, steady, reliable, long-term compound interest to, like, trying to catch that moon bag?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  So I definitely have, and I think a lot of this has become, a lot of finance has become gamified, and it was happening even before crypto, and it really started, I mean, and by the way, the phenomenon that we're seeing, they're not necessarily new. I mean, if you go back to the 30s and the roaring 20s, right? And a lot of that was fueled, actually, by a overheated speculative stock market, which, which all of a sudden allowed retail participation. And retail was buying in, and they were buying into very high valuations, which kept going higher, because there were always new entrants coming in, right? But once the new entrants and the new money, and now it fueled one of the most lavish decades in, like, modern history, basically. You know, that whole period.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  And so, but when you look back at that time period, and you look at the parallels of today, and you see the same kind of, like, Gambling mindset, a lot of it is fueled by like the apps. I mean, even if you look like the way that the Robinhood app is structured for logging your trades versus like the Schwab app. They're they're different, right? They're they're aiming at different experiences and Robinhood is almost like trying to provide you like entertainment through investing is how I'd put it. And crypto does that too. So and I and I there is a market for that, but I do think if you have too many people with like the get rich quick mindset, like a lot of them are going to get burned badly at some point, most likely. I mean, just the the law of market dynamics says that like not everyone can make that kind of money over time.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  And it might happen, you know, definitely crypto has been cyclical in the past. We've seen bear markets ebb and flow. And I think we'll probably continue to see that to some degree, even if the bearish periods aren't quite as stark for some assets. They will still be very harsh on some assets. So I think that overall, that whole gambling mindset, all investing is a form of gambling. But I think it's just about how you manage the risk, which is what differentiates it.

• 12:02David Hoffman?

  There's a book that our mutual friend Eric Connor got me to read called Devil Take the Hindmost. I don't know if you've read, yeah, okay, it sounds like you've read it. Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  I I haven't read that, but I read a similar book, which is reminiscences of a stock market operator. So but Eric's book is on my list as well. And yeah, that whole, both of those are just about that whole period and how valuations just went crazy.

• 12:24David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. Devil Take the Hindmost is about like financial bubbles at large, like going back to, I think as early as like the 1200s or 1400s. And it was the biggest takeaway I had is that like financial bubbles that happen are like they're they are basically guaranteed to happen because they're based in like human DNA, right? Like the tulip mania, like there was nothing about tulips that created the financial bubble. It was all in the brains of the humans, right? And so like, it's kind of like programmed into our like our greed, right? Our greed factors. And like, I think it's like when enough people start to have that sort of like ape culture, that get rich quick culture, it starts to actually become part of the fundamentals of the market, right? Like, well, because you're aping in, I'll ape in.

• 13:08David Hoffman?

  And then because they're aping in, I'll ape in. But eventually like somebody is the last person to ape in, right? And then they mark the top. And like, but there's like this some some somehow like something about the rubber meets the pavement. And all of a sudden, it changes the culture around the people that are investing in it as it's just logically rational because everyone else is doing it to also do it. And it just creates like a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there is a rationality there because the number keeps going up. You're like, well, I want to be on board this train rather than off it. But the problem is that, you know, it's not sustainable, as you pointed out. I actually wrote a tweet kind of along, touching on some of these topics earlier today, and I I'll read it here because I said, more than anything else, being deep in crypto has taught me basically four things. One, all valuations are a meme, and some of those memes are more durable than others. Two, that there's a difference between a marketable product versus a true product market fit. And we have a lot of marketable products in crypto. We have very few products with true product market fit. The third is everything takes either much less time or much more time than you thought to happen in the world of crypto. Like, there have been some things that I'm like, oh, this will happen this year, and it takes like three years.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  There's some stuff that I was like, oh, this will take 10 years. It takes like three months, you know? I mean, literally, that's how crypto works. And then finally, the cyclical nature of human greed, which is we inevitably, as humans, get into these boom and bust cycles. We're chasing the the run up and then we're chasing the rundown. And, you know, you just have to acknowledge that that's how your own mind works, perhaps, and that's how others' minds are working. And you just have to adapt to that kind of environment.

• 14:45David Hoffman?

  So DC, when you were investing way back before crypto, again, back when you were a W two employee, and being an investor when you're a double WT employee is very much different than when, like, I would say, like, anything else, right? Because you're not paying attention to the markets, you're going to work, right? And then you come back and like, it has to be in on your own time. As you learned how to invest in that world, how much of that knowledge were you able to actually carry over into the crypto world? Or when you came into the crypto world, was it like a brand new game that you had to relearn from scratch?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I think there are a lot of parallels. It is a different game in some respects. So traditionally, those other types of investment markets that we're talking about, we're really talking about equities, right? And a lot of what I was investing in and still hold are diversified index funds. However, I would buy individual equities here and there. I would actually say that the public information asymmetry around those types of corporations. It's actually much bigger because there are insiders who have a lot more knowledge and crypto. Actually, it's more of an even playing field because more of the information is out there in the public. So that others can see it. But I think looking back on that time, um, you know, I a big lesson that I learned in participating in those kinds of markets. It's just appropriate risk management. And I've really carried that forward with me into crypto.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  And my philosophy with putting money into crypto is never put in money that is more than I could afford to lose. So I don't want to be economically bankrupt or put into like a really dire situation because I invested too much in crypto. That said, I've put a lot in crypto. I mean, I've and it's grown bigger, obviously, over time. But even my initial investments were extremely large as a percentage of my net worth. And I kind of just accepted. I was like, okay, I had I had gotten to that point in my life where I was like, well, I have enough saved where I can afford to take a couple of big swings here. For these higher conviction assets. And I think another big lesson that I learned from those types of markets is you really, there's value in playing the long game.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  And I think in crypto, probably what I didn't adapt to as well is how much money can be extracted in the short term, to be honest. And not necessarily that I want to get into that game because it's a little too, it's not the type of, I don't enjoy that kind of stimulation that much. Like, it's not that exciting to me to like buy into something. It's like, oh, at two X overnight, I'm going to sell it now. Like, that's just not that interesting. I would rather buy something and it goes like 10 X or 100 X over a few years. Like, that's just a more interesting and feels more sustainable to me. But I think like I was not prepared for how much just pure untethered memetics kind of drives value. It happens in financial markets, but those memes are kind of pushed on us by Wall Street. They tell us stuff like, oh, yeah, price earnings matters. That's what you should be paying attention to.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Or growth matters or or or value matters. And the narratives kind of shift over time. Shifting into a crypto mindset, it's like, okay, even assets with really strong fundamental value like ether, when it was like under $200. You were buying, I was buying. No, not many people were buying then, but like not many people really saw the fundamentals. So I've always been like, that was, that to me was probably the biggest asymmetric bet of my life was going big on Ethereum when it was under $200 during the bear market. Just because I knew it was undervalued for the fundamentals and it kind of ties back to that way of thinking that I just articulated.

• 18:07David Hoffman?

  With you said that the crypto markets are inherently more like fair because all the information is out there. Do you think that's like a fundamental truth about how crypto works? Or do you think that's maybe just true just because we're early in the history of crypto and everyone's still learning how to figure out what the hell all this stuff is?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I think part of it is fundamentally true. And maybe more of it than people realize because even as we scale up, I think a lot of activity is going to be done in the open. It's done on the public internet and people can kind of see and browse that information. I don't but I but I do think we run the risk of having more actors playing more centralizing roles in some of this. And I think that over time, and we already see that a little bit with sometimes you see like VCs getting better deals. And are they really bringing any value to the table? In some cases, not really. They're just like, they're putting their logo, the project is putting their logo on their website and saying, oh, look who's backing us. What they don't tell you is they're literally like in everything, right? And for those funds, they actually make a lot of their money on the upfront

• 19:09Speaker 01

  buy where they get preferential terms there. And I think like unfortunately, the way that the ICO mania kind of imploded in 2017, 2018, and the SEC action that resulted from that actually moved the industry more towards relying on VC funding. I think the pendulum is starting to swing back a little bit. But actually, like ICOs like in their premise are a very egalitarian way of like raising funds, not necessarily in practice in terms of what we saw. But the idea of anyone being able to invest in anything, anywhere without any barrier, like if you're a project and you need to raise $10 million, and maybe you want to raise it actually from users versus some VC that's gonna like, you know, pay you favors and stuff like that, you know, maybe you're better off actually raising

• 19:53Speaker 01

  the money from 10,000 people and giving more people the opportunity to participate. So I do I do hope that we swing back more towards those models. But we're gonna have to fight that kind of centralization risk like any industry, in my opinion.

• 20:07David Hoffman?

  You said the whole like buy something, watch it two, three X, sell it in a day later, day or two, a day or two later is not interesting to you. And I think what you may mean by that is that, well, if you're making those trades, you don't care about the asset. You just want to, you care about the candle, right? Whereas if you buy something and you're holding it for a year, maybe you actually are like intrinsically curious about the nature of that asset. Like, there's something to read about. There's like things to unpack and explore. Was there ever an asset, first off, is that, would you say that that's true? And then was before crypto, when you were still investing in the legacy stock market, was there an asset like that,

• 20:49David Hoffman?

  that you like had a true deep conviction in? Or was that something that you more recently discovered in crypto?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  You know, just going back, I think that if you look at crypto assets as a whole, they're more speculative in their nature than a lot of fundamental investments, right? So when I think about like, why I'm interested in crypto, I am still looking for that fundamental value personally, as someone with that kind of mindset, going back to my stock training and other investments. But a lot of the value is falls into that speculative bucket, right? And I don't fault anybody necessarily for like seeking that. I get it. I mean, the money is out there, but in order, but like, it's hard, it's harder for a lot of people to have an edge in that kind of activity. Because a lot of these traders are very sophisticated. And

• 21:40Speaker 01

  actually, a lot of the traders that you see on crypto Twitter, I'm convinced are not making money. So you also need to like be aware of like the LARPing that goes on, which is quite, there are some traders who are very successful. I mean, there are some traders who are very successful. A lot of them are not like super active, trading daily candles either. They'll trade like shorter timeframes than what I'm trading, but they're still like, you know, focused on more market movements that are based on reflexive price action than anything else. I didn't really get involved in that kind of investing in the stock market, because in the stock market, I feel like it was even harder to have an edge there. And you have to use more exotic instruments. And I wasn't really doing that as a personal investor. There were some speculative sectors that I got into kind of early on that were very exciting.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Like 3D printing, like I got into that when it was like hitting like the hype narrative. And I was up a lot in that and then I watched it all decline a lot. I mean, I still, I still, I still made out more than I put in. But it was kind of one of those things where I look back and it's like, you know what? I probably should have taken some profit off the table because it's like, even though the fundamentals were strong. Uh, or like the ideas, actually, I should say the ideas were good. The fundamentals were not necessarily there. I think we have that challenge in crypto sometimes too. However, over the past like 10 plus years that, that, that crypto has kind of existed. I feel like fundamentals have been increasing and it makes sense now to actually look at crypto from a more fundamental basis, in my opinion.

• 23:07David Hoffman?

  Well, one of the things that I really like about this crypto thing, and I only started getting in into investing maybe like 18 months. Before I went from like investing in the stock market to investing in crypto. So my stock market investing like, um, knowledge base is very, very limited. But the big difference that I noticed eh with crypto is that with crypto assets, there's communities around these things. Uh, and the one asset that I really actually cared about was uh AMD, which also actually had like a community. There was like a subreddit based around it. Uh, and one of the cool phenomenons and you and I, we, we share some Discord channels. We share some Telegrams and a lot of them are ETH based, uh, like communities, right? And that's like a, for me, I'm pretty sure that's a big first in the world.

• 23:51David Hoffman?

  And like this also started with Bitcoin, of course. Where like all of a sudden, it's not just the fundamentals. It's also like the community and so many communities in this, uh, in the crypto world. Like it's weird that so many communities are based around financial assets. How have you, uh, uh, going from the, the world of, you know, lot stock market investing to crypto investing? How, how has the fact that communities are around these things like, you know, change your mental models about how to evaluate these things?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  So I, and I do think communities have existed in like so traditional markets, like even some of the communities that I was like involved with mostly as a lurker, like the Bogle heads that I mentioned earlier. They're based off like, they're like acolytes of Jack Bogle who founded Vanguard and they're just people who are like talking about how to allocate among index funds. And there's a community that sprung up around that. And a lot of people, you know, you can get a lot of value just by reading and following those communities. I think in crypto, it definitely becomes, um, or runs the risk of becoming more cult-like or tribal-like than even with equities. And there are various reasons for that, but I think fundamentally because a lot of the value of crypto assets is socially driven.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I think a lot of, I think a lot of people, especially a lot of developers, might not actually appreciate that. They're like more just focused on the technology and they're like, oh, this does this. But it's like, at the end of the day, the value that we're creating in this space is ultimately about social legitimacy and being able to disintermediate activity trustlessly in a way that is reliable. And I think that different people have different views of what that trust means and different people are going to prioritize different elements of that value proposition. And, you know, I obviously have my own point of view, which I think is right. And, but there's somewhat, there's someone else on the other side of the fence that has an equally strong view that also thinks that they are right.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I mean, the market is going to decide these things in the long term. Um, but I do think that it's important to kind of look at the market through that lens and understand that different people. I mean, just because someone likes some other token that might be different from me, doesn't necessarily make them like a bad person. I think in crypto, a lot of the times people kind of turn that into like a personal argument. And it's honestly not as bad during like nice bullish periods like we're having right now, David, you know, where, where everything's going up. So it's not like the end of the world. But like during more bearish periods, as you will remember from the last bear market, it gets, it can get unpleasant. And I, I think that is unfortunate. I mean, especially like I, I basically created my Twitter account because I got tired of like the misinformation that was being propagated about Ethereum.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  I know that was a big reason why you and Ryan really like pushed Vanquish forward as well, because the amount of disinformation, not, not just misinformation, just pure. Disinformation was staggering and people just didn't understand what was happening in Ethereum from a fundamental basis. So that's where I felt like actually being in that tribe a little bit helped me because I was able to see through all that BS. I was able to see the true fundamentals. I was able to like filter out the random crypto trader who knows absolutely nothing about the technology saying Ethereum is going to zero. And I was able to hone in on what I felt was like a valuable, long-term value proposition. And it turns out I was, I was right or have been right so far.

• 26:58David Hoffman?

  With the community aspect, aside like removing the investment and, and you know, number go upside of, of assets. How has the community side of things changed your life?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  The community has been huge and the Ethereum community has been in particular. And I think the crypto community overall, because even though we have things that separate us, there is a lot that unites us, right? And a lot of us have common views of the type of world we want to see from crypto, not universal, but somewhat common. For me, being involved in the Ethereum community has just been a huge positive. And I started off actually mostly participating on Reddit and back in the days of ETH Trader and then on ETH Finance. I would write up more longer form pieces there and I would just kind of share my investment thesis on why I was interested in Ether. And beyond that, why I thought it was like a world-changing technology. And a lot of this, we can talk about this if you're interested, but like a lot of that goes back to just my experience of growing up during the rise of the consumer internet.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  And I saw just so many parallels of what was happening with Ethereum. And most of it, like 90% of it was organic. It didn't feel forced. It didn't feel like, it, it felt like this open, free collaboration trust layer. And I didn't see anything else that was doing that. And the community, being involved with the community helped me understand that better. It helped me make more connections to learn more about what was actually happening with Ethereum. And it helped me kind of refine those theses and share them with more people. And then I kind of shifted my emphasis more to sharing that information on Twitter, just because the reach is a little bit bigger than just, you know, the, the hundred or so people who might stumble upon one of my comments on Reddit. On Twitter, it's, it's a much bigger impression base.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  And for me, it was really not about like establishing a personality. It was just, I want to get this information out to, for people because I believe in kind of what Ethereum is trying to achieve.

• 28:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, talk about the your transition into the world of crypto. So you spent a number of years, you know, sharpening your teeth by investing in the normal stock market. At some point, you stumble into the world of crypto. Maybe that's where you started to get to comparisons of crypto and, you know, the rise of the consumer internet. Can you talk about just your crypto moment?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So it was back in 2013. And prior to that, by the way, I was aware of Bitcoin. You know, I had heard about it and I was like, okay, this doesn't really, the idea of digital scarcity did not make sense to a lot of us, and it still doesn't make sense to a lot of us. But especially for someone who grew up with like the 90s consumer internet, literally you could copy paste anything. And now we're in this world where you're telling me that you can have like a digitally scarce asset on this decentralized ledger, which supposedly nobody controls. It's a huge mental leap, right? And so I dismissed it for a long time. And then it was around November 2013, Bitcoin hit like a thousand dollars. And that's when I really started paying attention. I was like, wow, I remember when this was trading for like a couple of bucks. And I was like, of course, I wish I had bought then.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  I didn't, but like, but I was just like, well, you know, I let me try to learn a little bit more about this. I didn't go like super deep, but I went deep enough to be like, okay, I'm gonna start putting some money into this. So I bought a bunch like close to the top back then. Okay, happens to all of us.

• 30:11David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  And I kept, and of course, in my mindset and being a W2 wage earner back then, and you know, I, so I was earning my income. I was like, well, I'm just gonna dollar cost average into this. I don't care about the volatility. That was what I told myself, right? And then, so I kept buying from, from that point, and it kept going lower and lower. And I was like, okay, what's going on now? And then eventually, at some point, I decided, a couple of years later, I decided I wanted to buy a house or buy a condo. And I was like, well, I might as well just sell this Bitcoin. It's never going back up. So I sold it for between 400 and 200 and something dollars. Okay, so we'll say average, average sell price was around 300. And I had lost money on that. So I've got the tax write off. I was like, okay, this is cool.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  And then, so fast forward, of course, now Bitcoin's worth over $60,000. And that was a huge like wake up moment for me of like, okay. I like, well, in hindsight from now, looking back, I was like, that was a big wake up moment for me. Because I was like, I realized in 2016, 2017, as I started to dive into Ethereum. And that's the, the way I learned about Ethereum, by the way, is I heard Bitcoin had gone, gone back above a thousand again. And I was like, damn, I sold it. And I was like, well, let me log into Coinbase and see what's going on. I saw this new coin called Ethereum on Coinbase. And I started to explore it and I, I, you know, went on to the forums, I learned about, I was like programmable blockchain, what does that really mean?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And as I started to dive in, just that dynamic energy, the open source mindset, the sharing, the collaboration, the vision. It all reminded me a lot of like this early consumer internet, which like, at the time, those types of things were like incredibly novel on a global scale. Right now, we almost take it for granted that those kinds of communities can form. But back then, when I saw the early consumer internet and I saw, I remember going through that, probably before your time, David. But I remember going through that process of like getting online with like a 2,400 baud modem and like going up. And then eventually getting to like 56K or whatever it was. And it was like, wow, that's so much faster and better.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  And then, you know, just the promise of different technologies that were well before their time, but eventually became viable, like on demand video. Like, I remember this conversation really well in college with a callmate of mine, who was a comp sci major. And he told me, he's like, I'll tell you what, the internet will never be able to support on demand video streaming. And I was like, never is a strong statement, but he was convinced and he gave all these technical arguments for why. And I was like, I think if it's important enough, we'll adapt and we'll learn how to make it happen. And I felt like that dynamic energy has always been part of what's propelled the internet forward. And similarly, I feel that same dynamic energy with Ethereum and what's moving it forward. And, you know, obviously you and I have probably similar views about this.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  But how we're using these technologies today is not necessarily how we're going to use them tomorrow. But what's important and what you can't fake is the quality of that community and how, are they bringing that energy to move things forward? And I did feel like Bitcoin was doing that at first, like back when I bought Bitcoin in 2013. I got that same feeling, right? When I first sent Bitcoin from one address to another, I was like, that was like the same moment that I first got my first email or sent my first chat message to someone. It was like, it was like a, oh shit moment. It was like, wow, that's like insane that I was able to do that. And I, I didn't have as many moments like that with Bitcoin from that point on, just because it became kind of this more ossified creation, whereas with Ethereum, I still have the, you know,

• 33:46Speaker 01

  especially during the bear market, I was having those types of experiences like every few weeks. I was like, wow, this is incredible from using DeFi and all of that. And I still have a lot of those experiences. And so that's, that's kind of how the mindset relates, if that makes sense.

• 33:58David Hoffman?

  As a early consumer of the internet as it was coming into fruition, even before we all knew what the internet was or could be, what were some of the things that you're doing on the internet?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  A while back then, I was just like online chatting with friends. I mean, just learning about stuff like the amount of knowledge and information that was on the internet and it wasn't nicely curated. There wasn't even Google back then. Search engines were very hit or miss, right? It was hard to use. If you got outside the AOL world garden, basically, which a lot of people chose not to do in the earliest days. But that's where you really like found a lot of this information out there. And to me, it was just incredible that people could interact like this and that I could chat with someone that is halfway around the world. And now similarly with like public blockchains, you can interact with them economically halfway around the world. And I mean, so all of those things, but yeah, I was just chatting with people. I was playing a lot of games, like I was playing,

• 34:56Speaker 01

  you know, a lot of those games had started to go online and there were, a lot of them were over IPX, which was like a now defunct like local networking protocol, which is not really used much. And, and so there are emulators that allowed you to do that over TCP IP. So I was playing like Doom online with my friends, Warcraft, Warcraft two, I was playing Quake. You know, I was just a huge nerd, so I was just playing all this stuff and having fun on the internet and it was like. It was, but there was nothing else that was like that at that time. It was truly like this pioneer freely willing spirit. I was on IRC chat forums. So it's actually not that different.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Like Discord, a lot of people like, wow, Discord's like great. It's like, this is literally exactly like IRC, except for you can have emojis and messages now, or like, uh, images in your messages now. But it's like basically IRC like reinvented for like the 21st century.

• 35:48David Hoffman?

  So, uh, you playing World of Warcraft 2 and Doom, that is where our histories over the internet will, uh, will, will begin to overlap. One of the, uh, the first things that I would ever do on a computer was sit on my dad's lap and press the five button, which would be the shoot button. And he would do everything else for Doom. He would figure everything else, but I would just see the alien on the screen and I would just press five. And that was my first entrance into computers and internet.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, but that's, I mean, yeah, a lot of people had, and, and, and by the way, using computers back then was not easy. It was actually like really, like especially from the age that I was, I'm talking about, so like late eighties. When you turn on your computer, you're confronted with a black screen and a command prompt. Okay? And if you're like an eight or nine year old, your average eight or nine year old, you're gonna be like, what the heck do I do now? And I never really got into it much, except for one day my dad was like, oh, our hard drive, which was like, I think it's 40 megabytes at the time, it's a 40 megabyte hard drive. For this 286 computer, he's like, we need to delete some files. Can you figure that out? And I was like, oh man. This seems like it's going to be really hard. He had no idea how to do it. So I'm like reading the instruction manual. And when I figured it out, I was like, oh wow, it's like that sense of accomplishment. I feel like using crypto like that is like very similar today.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  It's like you're confronted with terrible UX. It's really hard to use. You can't expect most people to even want to figure it out. If they do, it's often by necessity or they just have that interest naturally. And so I think that we're moving forward though into a more consumer facing era and I'm excited, I'm excited about the possibility of that.

• 37:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's actually a thread that I definitely want to pull on because a lot of this conversation has been like, oh, DC investor, he was good. Uh, he learned how to invest in the stock market and he took those skills to crypto. But also it's like, oh, you watched computers figure out what the hell computers were and you watched the internet, learn what the hell the internet was. Uh, and so just elaborate a little bit more on developing those early computer skills and, and how it's helped you navigate the world of crypto.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Well, and for me, I was never as like technically adept as a lot of my friends, or some of them, I should say, because there were some people who are like truly like, you know, they went on to become awesome coders and stuff like that. I'm not sure I had that level of discipline or aptitude, but I did learn how to program a little bit and I did some of that. But like, I was kind of like a level below those folks. But as someone who was kind of immersed more in what does this technology mean for us? And how can we use it versus like, how can I manipulate every aspect of it? And for me, I think that has served me well in crypto, because I tend to think more about these adoption arcs and what they're going to look like.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Like, I remember there's a distinct period of the consumer internet, which was focused on dial-up. And what you could do during that period was very limited, but we really pushed it to the absolute limit, where they were like downloading little video clips. By even by the end of that era, there was like RealPlayer, which some people may recall, which allowed you to stream video. And that was like a huge deal. It's like, wow. But like, at that time, it was hard to conceptualize that everyone would have something near like a T1 fiber connection coming into their home, right? It just didn't really occur to us that that might happen one day. But as you saw the use kind of catch up with that, you know, you remember, and everyone's seen that kitsy clip of like Al Roker and the Today Show and Katie Couric. And they're like, what is the internet?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Is it the at symbol? Is that the internet? I mean, and I mean, that mindset was extremely prevalent back then. It was prevalent among my, some of my friends, a lot of my family. They're like, what are you doing on here? Like, my friends are like, what are you doing on the computer? Like, what are you doing? You're just tying up our phone line. But they didn't get it. And I was like, look, I'm like learning about all this stuff. What was really valuable for me in those early days was being able to use the internet to learn more about any topic. Like, I could search about like, how to learn about how to do something on my computer, and I could find an answer on the internet. Like, that was huge. Like, back in the day, you could not like do that. You had to like know someone who could like tell you something like that. So I sound like really boomer here as I reminisce on these things that people

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Take for granted now, but that's so I don't take anything for granted in crypto. I realize that we're on this journey where we're at the hardest to use period right now, or the second hardest to use. I could say the epic of like the hardest to use is probably passed a little bit. Now with like MetaMask and hardware wallets and stuff like that, it's getting better. But the future is really going to look dramatically different from what we're doing today. And it's not going to involve us directly interacting with these protocols, most likely. It's probably going to be we're working through like a layer two. You're probably going to have some kind of multi-signature wallet. So you won't have to manage your keys and it's going to be fast. It's going to be cheap. I mean, we're still like some time away from that.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  But I think like, it's kind of like a lot of people don't, because they haven't had that experience of looking back on that internet period. They only have the skepticism and they're like, well, we'll never get there. There's no point. What problem does this solve? Why am I using this? And the early internet didn't solve a problem. The problem that it solved was actually sharing big files between DARPA facilities. That was what it was designed for. And that was reflecting how the early internet was used. The early internet was mostly going on web one was like viewing static text and images. That was it. And that was still a huge value proposition, but it was more like an evolution of the printing press than of like true collaboration. Fast forward into the web two era, and that's where everything got a lot more interactive,

• 41:20Speaker 01

  where you had apps basically in your web browser. That was like a huge thing that did not exist before. Like these were not at the beginning of the internet. Fast forward to today, where you have the internet basically being used as just like going back almost to that data layer, where we're just streaming data of all kinds across it. And we've kind of gone back more to that infrastructure element, interestingly enough, which is where the internet started. And now it just has become embedded in almost everything we do and everything we use. And I think crypto may take a journey that's somewhat similar to that.

• 41:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I, I think that probably I would assume when you got into the world of crypto and discovered Ethereum, it all, all of those experiences and all of that like experiential knowledge that, that you learned going through the early clunky days of the internet, probably helps you become not skeptical about Ethereum, right? It was like seeing the same patterns, the same writings on the wall. Talk a little bit about that.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  A lot of it just comes down to the fact that I used a lot of those early internet products. And I remember how hard they were to use at the time and just the early personal computing in general and how unpolished it was. A lot of people today who are growing up today, they haven't really used a personal computer in like, and they never had to troubleshoot one. They just have phones, they get the software updates, they're super stable, they have almost no problems. Back in the day, when you're, when you couldn't connect to the internet or something like that, you had like some serious IRQ conflict or whatever. You had to like know a little bit about like what you were doing. And you had to like dive into the innards of it and really understand it. And so I feel like with crypto, you have to do a lot of that today still. The UX is definitely getting better, but it's still like not great.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  I mean, we could use before EIP one, five, five, nine, just the idea of having to like clear a transaction that got stuck. It's like, what the hell is this? And why would I have to do that? It's still, it is still like an annoyance, which, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of UX elements like that in crypto across the board. And I saw a lot of those things in that early internet, early personal computing journey. And so it just gave me that perspective of, okay, this is what the technology looks like now. Here's what it's being used for. It feels frivolous, but when you think about what it could make possible, it's like civilization changing. And that was my view on crypto. And it started with like that Bitcoin is that discrete unit of value.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And it kind of progressed into that programmable world computer, which I'm not a huge fan of that kind of terminology. But like, let's just say Ethereum is that global trust layer, because that's what I really view it as. And when you think about what, what are the things that that could make possible? It's a lot of things and there's going to be some bad things that come from that. But I think like the good will outweigh the bad is kind of my feeling. Similar to, similar to the kinds of challenges we went through as the internet became mainstream.

• 44:10David Hoffman?

  I always think it's pretty funny when, I don't really see these anymore because definitely after EIP one, five, five, nine, a lot of these problems are fixed, but there are other things like it too, where somebody will say like, oh, I've like, I made a transaction, it had the, the gas fees went up, it hasn't cleared. I tried to make another one and now I have seven stuck transactions. Like this technology is never going to work. And like jumping from like, oh, I had stuck transactions to this technology is never going to work. I always think it's so funny. It's like you are missing the forest for the trees, dude. Likes, like you just gotta zoom out a little bit. Like that is a solvable problem. Like calm down.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Well, and I, you know, just from their perspective and their limited, their limited perspective, I see where they're coming from, right? Because they're just like, this technology is hard to use. And how is this going to scale so that we have millions of users? And you see this playing out now in some of the narratives of these alternative layer one blockchains as well. They're saying like Ethereum doesn't have the capacity we do. What they're not necessarily telling you is as soon as they hit their threshold capacity, they're going to have the exact same problem. So we basically have to turn Ethereum more from this app and execution layer into this trust layer. And I think that is, that's what layer two is all about. And it's a very logical progression. Was Ethereum designed for it from the ground up? No, but I mean, neither was the internet.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  The internet wasn't designed for a lot of things that it has now taken on being able to do. And so I do imagine a world where we have multiple layers being built on Ethereum, abstracting away some of the complexity so that the end user is just basically using an app. And they may or may not even be aware that they're using Ethereum. And are there going to be other chains that are part of that? Probably, you know, I don't know which chains they'll be. There's a lot of things that I've seen in my time in the space that seem very strong, but they end up being flashes in the pan. I do feel like Bitcoin and Ethereum both have like some staying power and unique value propositions for other stuff. And this goes back to a lot of my training as a consultant. I'm like crucially focused on like that value proposition.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  So when I talk about fundamentals, that's a lot of the time what I'm talking about. Like, what is the unique value that a given chain, network, or asset provides that no other chain, asset, or network can provide? And I can see that for Ethereum. I can see it for Bitcoin in just the minimally complex asset layer. I don't necessarily see a unique value proposition for a lot of other projects in this space. And that's why I generally will choose like not to invest. Really anything material into them and I don't really hold any of these other layer one tokens right now. Would I ever trade one? I mean, maybe, but it's not really the type of investment that I go for typically.

• 46:56David Hoffman?

  Let's pick up the thread of where we left before we went down the internet rabbit hole where you were dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin until you wanted to buy a house. You sold it, forgot about crypto for a while. Then you saw Bitcoin reach its all time highs. You opened up Coinbase and discovered this Ethereum thing. How did that lesson of buying Bitcoin at its all time highs, getting wrecked by it, which is like the rite of passage for everyone in crypto. It's always the most expensive lesson. How did that, how did learning that lesson impact the way that you thought about the industry moving forward when you opened up Coinbase again and saw Bitcoin and Ether?

• 47:31Speaker 01

  So it changed my mindset because I realized that I was wrong to sell the Bitcoin when I did. And my initial thesis was actually correct and I did not have the fortitude or the positioning to be able to stick with that. And actually, had I not bought that house, I probably would have held it. And so it kind of goes back to, and I tell people this today, it's like, don't put money into crypto that you need in the next few years or might need. Right? And at that time, like buying a place wasn't necessarily on my radar, but I kind of fell into the peer pressure of like, oh, you're at this age. You should be buying something. And I was like, okay, fine. I guess I'll buy a condo or something. And so I ended up selling it at a loss and you know, so, so if you need money in the next few years, don't put it into crypto.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  I think that's probably the lesson that I took away from it. And so the way that I approached it in 2016, 2017 was, okay, I'm going to put money into this that I truly don't need, you know, and I had more assets that accumulated by then from working. And I was like, I'm going to take a risk here because, and especially as I started to learn what Ethereum could do. And a lot of it was more promises of things that we see today versus stuff that had actually been delivered. I just got really excited about the potential future vision of Ethereum and Ethereum has delivered a tremendous amount of that. I don't think it gets enough credit for how much it has delivered. I pretty much like I, at this, at that time, as I got into it though, I also.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Saw the ascent of all of the ICO mania and I mostly stayed out of that because I just kind of like stuck to my like fundamental thesis. I'm like, okay, what's the fundamental value of this? And I did. So I didn't really buy a lot of those tickets. I just bought as much ether as I could. I held most of it like I and I accumulated a lot more during the bear market. Because my view of the fundamentals hadn't changed and having that experience in 2014, 2015. Made me realize that like, I'm not going to make that mistake again. You know, I was just like, I'm buying into this because this, these are like world changing technologies, not because I'm trying to make a two X. Or a three X. And I think I had to kind of shift my mindset out of that.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  That time and space that I had kind of lost out and adapt for what was happening then.

• 49:41David Hoffman?

  It's very clear that you have a long-term mindset with your investments, right? When you tell people it's like, oh, don't put any money into crypto that you'll need in the next few years. I feel like a lot of the younger generation would be like. Years, what, what years? That's too, that's too long. And I definitely got into crypto and started like playing the token game because that was when I got into crypto, right? During 2017. Looking at Blockfolio roughly 2,000 times a day, just like feeling the emotional whiplash of tokens go, go up and down. And one of the biggest things that I've learned in this bull cycle is to just like not feel the impulse, not feel like the FOMO from the tokens.

• 50:19David Hoffman?

  Because that's what lost me a lot of money in 2017 is going hopping from token to token to token on a whim, just because one was pumping. And like, it's not only was it actually financially a better choice for me to not get whiplash by these, by these tokens and just not and be more zen about the FOMO. But yeah, it was, it was also a massive reduction in stress, right? So like, not only does it actually make my, my portfolio overall more healthy. My tax liabilities go down, but it also makes my stress go down. Do you have similar experiences?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and I think a lot of it, a lot of this comes down to like, a lot of people really don't truly understand the power of compound interest. You know what I mean? And they don't realize how much drag, like selling an asset. Um, you know, with, with high capital gains taxes, if you're in the US or similar jurisdiction can hurt your potential earning potential. And yeah, the stress just upholding something that you don't really believe in. Right, yeah. Yeah, you don't know, you're just like kind of taking a guess, you're buying it because of some momentum play. It's like, you know, every day I held something like that, I wake up being like, is this the day that I need to sell this? Because it's just like, is this gonna like collapse tomorrow? And it just wasn't a mindset and, and I didn't find it like mentally stimulating to like be engaging in a lot of that stuff.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  And so for me, and again, I understand that I entered the market probably older than a lot of current participants. But it's all relative and it scales to what your current net worth is, to what your earning potential is, right? I think that I see a lot of young people taking on what I would consider to be unreasonable amounts of risk. Like it's never something that I would recommend to someone. It's like, look, if you can't, if you don't have that much money to invest in crypto, then don't invest that much money in crypto. Like you just can't like, you know, don't take like, don't do stuff like go and borrow a lot of money and try to like buy in right now. I mean, I would never suggest stuff like that to people because I've seen what happens. I mean, we saw in 2017 what happened when a lot of people piled on with credit card debt. And at that time Coinbase allowed you to buy with credit cards.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  And I, I bought, I bought some myself, but I was like, okay, I can pay this off in a month or two. But there are people who took on years worth of debt that, that they probably, you know, that they ended up defaulting on and so on. So like my, my philosophy always been like, I want to succeed, but I don't ever want to put myself in a position where I might face like economic ruin. Have to move in with like relatives or something like that. To me was just like a logical, like, okay, that's the amount of risk I'm willing to take. But it's worked out and being a little bit longer term has actually helped me say, stay in the space sustainably. Instead of just like, okay, I got my pound of flesh and now I'm moving on, which is what you do see with some folks. But more often you don't see are the folks who lost everything. And there's people are out there, there's not vocal or visible.

• 53:04David Hoffman?

  And it's definitely the time of the market, the parts of the market cycle that you're in is easier or harder to have long-term focus, right?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:14David Hoffman?

  A constant theme that I'm talking to with people out here at NFT NYC, specifically the people that I know, like I'm not here for the conference, I'm here to hang out with the friends. And the friends that I have are friends like the around that I met around the same time I met you DC, which was in the bear market, right? And a lot of us, well, the bear market hurt. It was very a demoralizing time. Now, a lot of us are like, oh, the bear market, it was so quiet then. It was just us, it was just the homies. Do you have like similar like bear market nostalgia?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah, I miss those times because it was smaller. A lot of the people who were around back then were really committed to the longer-term vision because you kind of had to be. It was like, okay, these assets are hitting like low after low after low. So it's like, as long as that's happening, you kind of had to be invested in that long-term vision. And so I liked a lot of the people that I met during that time. And I think like we will see coming out of, you know, whatever happens with this current market. If maybe it's a bullish period that continues for a while, maybe it's one that's punctuated by diff. There will be bearish periods of some type, right? And the people who stick around through those are the ones who I'm going to pay attention to. And I think there are a lot of, I've seen a lot of like promising folks, but I kind of want to be like, well, let's see if you're still here in like a few years, like, you know, and it's like,

• 54:29Speaker 01

  and I feel like a lot of them are not necessarily going to be because they never got into the value proposition or the right mindset, right? And I, I think we're going to see that a lot in the NFT space, unfortunately. Because a lot of people have put money into NFT. And NFTs are even like more dangerous. And you know, you know, I talk about this stuff like all the time, despite being a huge proponent of NFTs. A lot of NFT investors are going to get burned because they viewed them as these fungible investments that they could just get the money out of anytime they're like storing their ETH, which is like a terrible meme. And they're going to realize that like they didn't store anything because there may be periods in the market where nobody wants to buy those at basically any price, then what, right? I mean, I think it's like, kind of like, so I hope those people, I hope there aren't a ton of people like that.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  But just in talking with people, there's a lot of people like that. So it's something I'm wary of.

• 55:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there was a point on the weekly roll up that I talked to with Ryan where he said, he had a tweet where he says he thinks over 50% of the people in crypto have never seen a bear market. And that's, and if we're talking about the NFT community, it's got to be like 85% of like the NFT community has never seen like assets meaningfully like go down and really like, you know, get them to feel pain for the first time. And that's also a terrible asset to have that be true about because of the very illiquid nature of NFTs.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a lot of the NFTs are going to be like a lot of what we saw with like ICO tokens of that era, they're just never going to recover. You know, like whatever magic they may have had is long lost, forgotten. Some of them may make a resurgence later. You know, you never know. There are stuff that comes back from the dead, but most of them won't. But you're also going to see people who hold a lot of like, let's just call them like higher end or what people call like blue chip NFTs. So let's say like punks, autoglyphs, ringers, fidenzas, like stuff like that, right? You're going to see people who are forced to sell those, you know, like prices go down when people are forced to sell. And when you have people who might be over leveraged and they're there then at that point, they go into a survival mode.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  And it's like, look, I'll take any price for this. It doesn't matter as long as it's above what I paid, which might have been like a couple of ether. You know, maybe they're getting 10 ether and they're like, okay, I'm happy with that. Right? You're going to see periods like that where people are in rapid sell off mode. And you'll see that happen a few times as people go through the psychology of like, okay, this is going to go up or no, it's not going up. I gotta sell this, you know, but there will be like tremendous buying opportunities for some NFTs. And I'm hoping to like maybe be able to take advantage of this. I mean, I hate to do that, but like, you know, if I can help someone else pay off debt that they have to pay off because they made poor decisions, you know, I'll do it. But like, it's not, again, it's not something that I would suggest that people take on a lot of.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  A lot of people just don't understand what they've bought and the risks associated with it.

• 57:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, I definitely have in my, in the back of my head is like, hey, there's definitely going to be a time where I can finally snag a fidenza and an autoglyph. And if I can get those two paired with my punk, like boom, like I can like check, check my NFT boxes and like go back to DeFi where I feel at home.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Well, those are great NFTs to have. So if you could only, if you have the means and can afford those. But you know, David, the paradox is the more people that think like you, the less likely this is to happen. This is true. I don't know. You know, there will be floors and they will be, they will be caught on the way down. I mean, I don't know. A lot of this is guessing based on previous crypto experience. But there's no doubt, I think, that a lot of NFTs are overhyped beyond what they should be. And a lot of people are going to sell and then they're going to watch them go 100X again. And it's going to be very difficult for those people. I feel for them in advance because it's, I've been there. I sold my, I sold that Bitcoin at like average $300 and it happens.

• 58:16David Hoffman?

  Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with DC thus far. There's so much more to talk about in the second half of the show. We get into the NFT conversation, we get into crypto gaming. And then of course, we also get into some of the lessons and guiding principles that DC has picked up along the way. That makes him keep a level head on his shoulders and ride these turbulent waves of crypto without getting stressed. And overall, learned how to have a good time in crypto. So we're going to get into all of that and more in the second half of the show. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017. And it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells.

• 59:00David Hoffman?

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• 59:45David Hoffman?

  So whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at gemini.com/go-bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after signup, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com/go-bankless.

• 1:00:06David Hoffman?

  The Aave protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. Aave version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the Aave protocol even more powerful. With Aave, you can leverage the full power of DeFi Money Legos, yield, and composability, all in one application. On Aave, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. Here, you can see me borrowing 200 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different DeFi tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate

• 1:00:51David Hoffman?

  option if I wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on Uniswap, and then deposit them back into Aave. With Aave, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of Aave at ave.com. That's A-A-V-E dot com. DC, it's very obvious that you have this like deep history with the internet and with investing, and it just carries right over into crypto. But something that's not so obvious is that you have one of the greatest NFT portfolios around, as far as I can tell. And I don't, I so I'm yet to hear anything about

• 1:01:32David Hoffman?

  your history that was like an art collector or like anything like that. So like, where is this just like something that's brand new for you? Or like, what about your background, like lend it itself towards NFTs?

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  So I've always appreciated art in general. I appreciate like artistic energy. And maybe it's because I'm not like a very artistic person, but I do consider myself to be a creative person. Like, I'm always like, have different kinds of ideas. I just express it in different ways. I mean, like, one of the things I was known for in my 15 years of being a management consultant was creating like, The prettiest PowerPoint slides like you'll ever see. And I was like a PowerPoint ninja. I was really good at it. I really take pride in like doing the graphics on them and stuff like that. Obviously, I'm not going to turn any of those into NFTs. But the point is, like, I had like this creative energy and I was looking for outlets in which to, if not apply it, to stimulate it.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  And so I've always been like interested in art. I've never been like an art history aficionado or anything like that. But I've liked art and I've also enjoyed the idea of collecting stuff. And I didn't really collect a lot of assets, to be honest. Like, I have like some Magic the Gathering cards, some of which are like graded and stuff like that. I used to collect baseball, basketball cards and stuff like that as a kid. You know, I had a lot of like different trading card game cards and stuff like that. And so I always thought this idea of like buy something that's going to become more important later was like something that's kind of like ingrained in me. I think it's actually ingrained in our DNA to like want to do some of that, to be honest. And so as I kind of got into this crypto space, I wasn't initially drawn to NFTs.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  I didn't really get deep into NFTs until like January of this year. Okay. And there are a lot of people, there are actually a lot of people who have way more impressive collections than me. You may or may not know about them, but there are people with tremendous collections out there. But I like to think of mine as like my own like special little collection, which reflects my personal taste. Which is, and when I bought it, like you'll probably recall, they weren't really worth that much at the time, a lot of them. And I was still spending amounts that were a lot. Like I, I paid like 20K for my hoodie CryptoPunk, which was a lot at the time. Now it looks like a bargain of a century.

• 1:03:42David Hoffman?

  People, I remember people like just denying buying a CryptoPunk at a thousand dollars. Like, why would I ever buy a thou- like a CryptoPunk for a thousand dollars? Like a thousand dollars is a thousand dollars. Why would I ever do that? And like, it doesn't matter what the prices are. It's, people are just not convinced by these things for like, almost by default. Uh, and so like giving up 20K is something else, right?

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Well, I kind of, and I, and the way by then, by January, February, I kind of started to more understand how these NFTs were transcending their art and they were becoming like store of value assets, like collectible assets, pieces of that internet history, which I know you've talked about in the past. And when I kind of like connected those dots, it was kind of like, I need to buy some of this because I don't know if there's going to be like another chance. And if I'm wrong, then I out that money and whatever. But if I'm right, these are going to become like priceless artifacts. And right now it looks like we're leaning towards that second outcome is my guess. And so I never started with this. I don't have a lot of art experience. I more just kind of applied my artistic inquisitive

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  nature with that, with that economic side of me and the crypto economic side of me. And I just kind of decided that these were something interesting to me.

• 1:04:59David Hoffman?

  I'm sure you've seen on Twitter, especially around NFT NYC, all these people buying up the billboard space in like Times Square, putting their CryptoPunks, putting their Fidenzas. What do you, what do you think about that?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  I think it's like, the way that I liken this was like, it's almost like you end up, like if you're in New York and you, you're on Good Morning America, you like call all your friends and say, hey, tune into Good Morning America and see me on there. It's almost like this, like, it's like the sign of you haven't like necessarily made it, but it's like this, hey, look at this. This is like, you're seeing me in this unexpected context that, that, that changes perhaps your perception of me. And I think that's how people are viewing a lot of their NFTs being displayed in these public spaces. And I've actually done a little bit of this myself with Save Art Space. I participated in one of their events where they were featuring punks all over New York City. My punk was featured in Times Square as part of that. And so I think it's kind of like this sign

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  of like, even though we're paying to do it, it's like this juxtaposition of saying this, this digital thing that only we've cared about, hey, a lot more people are starting to care about it now. And you're kind of like sharing it with the world. And it does show you that like, we're not in that metaverse layer completely where we want everything to be pure digital. We want to see this juxtaposition of these assets alongside real world stuff. And that somehow makes it more important in some people's minds. I think that's part of the psychology behind it, to be honest. And I think it's, I think it's cool. I think it's great if like, if some of these big collectors want to like splash their collections up in Times. You know, you're going to at least see some people walk by and like, oh, what's that? And then they've got those pictures and can say, hey, this was in Times Square.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  So it helps, it helps increase the cultural provenance of some of these assets by bridging them more into the real world. Same dynamic applies as these items are being auctioned by Sotheby's and Christie's. It's the same kind of thinking and mindset. Even though we don't need those auction houses, even though a lot of times the prices that they fetch are lower due to KYC barriers and stuff like that. It's still considered to be prestigious by some because it's like, hey, it's almost like it's this rationalization or justification. Let's just say it's like an acceptance of the work that has been done by crypto digital artists by these famed houses.

• 1:07:19David Hoffman?

  Do you have any plans through your gallery in the future with like in real life exhibits, metaverse type exhibits? Well, what's the future of DC's gallery going to look like?

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  So right now I do have my collection on gallery.sosdcinvestor and that's where I

• 1:07:34David Hoffman?

  I met, I met one of the founders last night, by the way.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Oh, you did? Okay, awesome. Yeah, I know those guys well and they're, they're doing great work and I think. But, but I, so I've got my gallery on there. That's the one that I curate and I kind of keep my pieces up to date and I'm always rearranging little things. Long term, I would like to be able to do more in terms of 3D. I think the technology is getting there, but it's still not like exactly where I want it to be like on Cyber has some really cool stuff. I haven't created any galleries there, but for me, it's like, I don't really want to do like these 20 piece galleries. I kind of want to do like a, here's like hundreds or thousand, a thousand pieces in my own little museum or part of someone else's museum. And like, you know, I've got like a wing of it or something like, I want to be able to curate like a true experience for somebody.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  And eventually one day, maybe I, I, I'm confident that we're going to get there probably sooner or And later, I'm really interested in projects like Nifty Island for that reason. You know, I want to have, I would love to be able to like host events in my virtual space one day and have people, artists and collectors come and we can just kind of chat. So I'm kind of preparing for that. The VR metaverse world to some extent. But for now, you know, I'm always happy if people want to exhibit some of my pieces as part of some kind of collection or something, happy to at least consider that. But that's kind of how I see it. I've also like, I would love to get, you know, I contacted the Hirshhorn, they haven't gotten back to me, but I'm trying to get like, I'm trying to like work with some artists to get more of our NFT art featured in installations like that.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Because again, that's part of what brings that broader awareness and acceptance around what's being created here.

• 1:09:11David Hoffman?

  One of my buddies from, from college who now also works at me with me at Bankless, he does VR children's books at, at Pika.

• 1:09:20David Hoffman?

  But I'm going to start bugging him about like, because his, his pitch for this is that, it's like Disneyland rides, but in VR, right? So there's a bunch of like Disneyland rides you go into, you hop into the little car and then it takes you through the story of the movie, right? Not talking about like Splash Mountain or like the roller coasters, right? Just like you follow a trail and you go through the story of the book, but you're in VR, right? And so, and so the, maybe I should get a bug in his ears, like, hey, you guys should make like a little journeys, VR journeys to tell a story of the like the genesis of the gallery. Maybe, maybe that's an interesting proposition for them.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah, I love it.

• 1:09:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah. The other aspect and of crypto that I think we're about to go into that I know you are definitely probably paying attention to at least a little bit is, is gaming. And DC, I know, I know that you're a gamer. So before we go into crypto gaming, what games do you like to play?

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Um, I like to play a lot of, um, I play some first person shooters, like non competitively, like my reflexes just start.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  10 year old kid on the internet, sorry, or what they used to be. But I love playing like, you know, games like I, I like Fortnite minus the building, you know, I play games like Call of Duty.

• 1:10:32David Hoffman?

  I hate the building in Fortnite. It's such.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  I hate it. Yeah. Turned me off to the whole game. Like I, once I got to a certain skill level, I was like, okay, every, every end game is a build fight. I'm like, I'm out. But I, but I also like to play like platformers. A lot of what I like to play is actually strategy games and it has like kind of, I think it's actually, back then they're like, video games are bad for you. But in my mind, like, basically they're like little simulations that train your brain to work under different situations and succeed and thrive. So huge fan of games like Civilization, the new Age of Empires just came out. So I like to play a lot of games like that, kind of more on my own, but I'll play some of those other games like socially with friends.

• 1:11:11David Hoffman?

  Do you, uh, when you play these games, you also imagine a world where there's a bunch of crypto assets inside of them? Or have you kind of like separated those two worlds?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I think that, so a lot of the types of games that I play, I'm not necessarily sure that I will see that. But I do think with like trading card games, which I do play like some Magic Arena and stuff like that, like in Hearthstone, I, I played that in the past. Like games like that will benefit from these models. I think a lot of like, I'm, I am not like a big MMO gamer, but I, but I have some friends like Anthony, like, grew up playing like World of Warcraft and he's like huge into that. I never got into that stuff. Cause I was like, my mindset, I was like, if I get into that, I'm just gonna lose my life and I'll just be stuck in there. Although a lot of people that, like, a lot of crypto people did grow up playing that stuff and they got a lot of economic experience doing that. You know, they like learned how to trade and stuff like that. And so I think that over time, like I could see those kinds of,

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  those kind of games benefiting from NFT based assets. And there's going to be entirely new kinds of games that don't really fit any genre that we have today, that are more like economic simulations where people are interacting with each other. I mean, even this idea of like a VR metaverse is going to become like a meta game where people are exchanging NFTs, they're trading crypto assets. Like there's going to be whole economies that are set up around Ether as an asset. Like that is like the meta game of like, the whole thing is a game. We're in the game right now, David.

• 1:12:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Uh, are there any specific crypto games that, that you're looking forward to?

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so God's Unchained is one that I'm continuing to like kind of watch as it evolves. But I think that trading card game piece is really interesting. I also think Guild of Guardians, which is gonna be like an RPG, which is coming out by Fuel Games. That'll be another really interesting one. And then you've got kind of all the stuff from like what Axie Infinity kind of continues to do and so on. So it's not a space that I'm like super immersed in because I I'll be honest, I'm not sure I see myself playing a lot of these games. But I want to understand like the value for the people who do, right? I think I think the biggest mistake that crypto investors make is look at stuff just like from what they would do versus like what others. And that's what others would do. And that's why I think a lot of people like missed NFTs.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Because they never, they don't understand, like, I think as a collector of stuff, you kind of have to accept that the stuff that you value is not the same thing that everyone else is gonna value. But maybe the stuff that other people value is even more valuable than the stuff that you think is interesting. So as a collector, there's always like a fine balance of like focusing on stuff that you're interested in versus what the broader market is interested in. But I think I think we've like scratched like barely the surface of NFT gaming, to be honest, David. And I think we're held back a lot by like various laws, we're held back a little bit by the technology, although that's changing with Layer 2. But you will see in five years, if we have this conversation, it's gonna be like a crazy discussion. Because you're gonna be talking about how like the economy of this game just crashed and it's in a recession and it's gonna come.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like, those are the kinds of economic terms I expect we're gonna use.

• 1:14:13David Hoffman?

  Oh, I I hundred percent agree. And when we were talking to Chris Dixon, he was talking about how SLP tokens from the Axie game are actually just being used as a generalized medium of exchange in the Philippines. Like unrelated to the actual game, people are just like, say, hey, like, pay for this haircut using SLP tokens.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  That's so crazy.

• 1:14:31David Hoffman?

  It is super crazy. And like when we have like so many, like the the promise of crypto gamings, crypto gaming is to, exactly what you said, to create economies, right? And when we have so much of like the third world that's going to be able to be financially compensated via crypto gamings, like I'm kind of worried about like what happens to the local, like, real world economies when half of the workforce are playing video games, like online. Like, it's a little bit dystopic. And I'm like, kind of like, I'm not too worried about it, but like, kind of want to know what happens.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Well, we're kind of in a phase of our evolution as humans where productivity is accelerating at such a rate with like automation and AI and and there is huge amounts of like job displacement. That is a reality, right? We're seeing and it's not and over time, like most dynamic economies can adapt to that. What is different right now is the degree and the pace of change. It's like it's like unabated, right? You can learn a skill today and in like 10 to 20 years, it's like obsolete. Then what, right? And even like the manual labor and stuff like that, that you could always like get a job, like doing doing some of that. All of that stuff is being automated first, right? So you're gonna have a lot of people that might not necessarily have stuff to do,

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  which is why you see stuff like universal basic income taking off and those discussions happening. But that's where I see like a metaverse economy actually growing out of that to actually pick up some of that, uh, some of that economic slack. Now, is it value adding for someone to participate in those activities? From a raw productivity sense, maybe not. But if someone else values a digital good that someone's creating, like an NFT artist, then you could say that that is productive in the sense of it's creating value for someone else, even if you're not creating a distinct output. So I'm not that worried about real world productivity. I think the economic incentives will always keep us there. But I'm very bullish on this idea of these virtual global

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  economies emerging and they may actually evolve in ways that promote more equitable global income distribution. I don't know, because these things can be played potentially from anywhere. Anyone can play them. I mean, I don't necessarily think it's a good life for someone to spend their time like farming items in an in-game, but a lot of real world jobs are also not great. I mean, to be honest, and if someone is doing that, it's because the other alternatives available to them are so bad that this is like a better option for them. And I just think we're gonna have these economies that emerge and a lot of people are gonna dismiss them as fake or not real or not meaningful. But as we start to live more and more of our lives in that digital sphere, what's real

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  and what isn't? Like, you know, at what point, if you're if you're creating value adding services for people in that digital life, then I would argue that that is productive and it can potentially be beneficial.

• 1:17:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the quicker that people can just get over the hump and it's the same hump that people have to get over when they accept that crypto is real, they accept that NFTs are real. Eventually, they're going to also have to accept that in-game economies are real. And like, one of the, one of the things that really allowed my conviction about DeFi and Ethereum to stay rock solid during the, the bear market when Bitcoiners were fighting like DeFi and everyone else was fighting crypto at large was that I may, I took a loan out on Maker Dow and I was able to send that money to my bank account and the number in my bank account went up. And I was like, how can you say this isn't real? Like, the number in the bank account went up, like, of course, this is real. Uh, and so I think it's just like, it's a matter of like experiencing it for yourself and

• 1:18:01David Hoffman?

  hopefully crypto gaming is where actually a lot of people do get to experience a lot of the things that they previously thought were fake because gaming is one of the greatest onboarding tools that, you know, I could really think of for crypto.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  I think so, and I think you're gonna have that people already are ready to participate in these experiences. We've already seen that with the huge success of like different MMO games. As I said, crypto is kind of like a meta game on this. I think there, there is a subset of people that's not trivial that are ready to participate in stuff like this, but beyond that, I think there's also going to be more of these outside of gaming, like truly like digital economies that occur where there are digital services that we can't conceive of right now. Like, for example, one of the things I'm thinking about doing is I would like to create a 3D gallery in like Nifty Island. Am I gonna want to place every wall in that gallery myself and do that? Probably not. I mean, you know, it's not necessarily like a skill that I have, but like, could I pay someone that's like young, motivated and wants to like do something like that? Yeah.

• 1:18:57David Hoffman?

  A virtual construction man?

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it's just like, now I'm paying someone to do something for me in that digital context and it's adding value for me and I can pay them for that service. But you're gonna see more services like that, stuff that I can't really imagine right now that is going to emerge over time.

• 1:19:15David Hoffman?

  Totally. So zooming and getting ourselves out of the metaverse, DC, what do you do when you aren't in the metaverse? Like, do you like to ride your bike, walk around the park? What's up?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  I like to walk around town. I love, I love being in the DC area because there's always like a lot of like fun stuff to do. And certainly pre-COVID, you know, I mean, post-COVID, I think we're all trying to like, find our groove and like, you know, reconnect with people that we haven't seen for a while. So I really enjoy traveling and I haven't gotten a chance to do much of that right now. But like, especially traveling overseas and getting different like, life experiences, seeing how different people live. That's something that I really enjoy doing. So I'm looking forward, hopefully 2022 is going to be a better year for that. Because there's still like, there's still onerous travel restrictions in some jurisdictions. But yeah, that's something I'm really just looking forward to getting back to.

• 1:20:06David Hoffman?

  Will I see you at ETH Denver 2022 in February?

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Fingers crossed. Although I, that one's not on my calendar, actually. So I don't, I, I will make it to some Ethereum events in 2022. So count on that. And hopefully, hopefully Denver, we'll see.

• 1:20:20David Hoffman?

  Do your in-real-life DC friends think that what you're doing is super weird? Or have they like, wrapped their heads around it yet?

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not too like vocal, well, some, some of my friends definitely are pretty much fully aware of what I'm focused on, because they have some similar interests. And I think some of them thought it was crazy at first. But I was like, you know, a lot of them were surprised. At the time when I quit, I had like 20,000 followers on Twitter, which seemed like a lot. People were like, what? You have 20,000 people following you? And now that number's grown further. So I, you know, but for me, it's not like, it's funny, because people are like, so is that like your brand? And I was like, I don't really try to manage as a brand. And I get like, people who are like, doing like with Bankless, you have to manage the brand. You have to like, do that.

• 1:21:03David Hoffman?

  It is a brand, right?

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  It is a brand, right. I mean, like, but for me, I don't consider like DC Investor a brand. It's just me, my persona, engaging with people. And in that way, it's not that different from like, I feel like I'm like 14 again, in the sense of like, I'm spending a lot of time on the internet, talking to strangers, and learning about what's going on. And I'm looking for opportunities to engage. And, but I, but I've gotten a lot of value out of like, engaging with different Project teams, learning what's going on in the space, helping to relay messages. Sometimes I I I deploy angel capital and stuff like that. And it's just, it's just fun for me to be able to help grow the space in the formative period that we're in now. So I'm not ready to go back, go back to being like a W two employee yet. Maybe one day, never say never.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  But for me, you know, I've also been working for 15 years straight in a pretty competitive, grueling industry. And so I'm like, you know, I can take a year off and I can just kind of think about what I want to do next. And that's been kind of my philosophy.

• 1:21:59David Hoffman?

  DC, I think if you went back to being a W two employee, you'd be one of the few people that I knew that went, you know, quit their job, paid way more attention to crypto and then decided to go back. Do you actually think that's a future possibility?

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Probably not, but it might be something, it might, it might take a different form, you know, like, and, you know, I definitely want to, I, for me right now, my focus remains on crypto. Is that what I'm going to be 100% focused on forever? Maybe not in like 10 years, you know, maybe in 10 years crypto just becomes this boring thing that's just like involved in everything. And that's what attracted me to crypto to begin with, right? That interdisciplinary nature. And I'm really, I'm a huge proponent of like interdisciplinary thinking. And I wrote a couple of tweets about this a few days ago as well, where I just talked about the value of like, like even a liberal arts education where like, whether you get it from college or you just learn it yourself, learn about math, learn about history, learn about biology, learn about chemistry.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Like all of these things have fundamental relationships with one another. And I really view crypto as being that interdisciplinary, exciting space. So as long as it remains that, it's hard to imagine that I would like get out of that, to be honest. When it becomes boring and people just accept it, then I might like be ready to move on to something different.

• 1:23:09David Hoffman?

  Sure. DC, are you a optimist or a pessimist?

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  I would say I'm pretty much an optimist. So I think most people would say that about me. Um, I'm pessimistic on certain things at times, but in general, I lean towards the glass is half full.

• 1:23:24David Hoffman?

  What about the world makes you optimistic?

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  I think that I think a lot of it actually comes down to just my experience from investing and how over hundreds of years and millennia, humans continue to become more productive, right? And so when you when you buy things like stocks, like a lot of people are like, oh, you're just buying shares in a corporation, you're kind of betting on the fact you're really what you're really betting on is that humanity is going to continue to be productive and that we're going to continue to be able to take the same amount of capital assets and do more productive things with that. And I I've just I have always been amazed by human ingenuity in general and how we continue to boost the standard of living. And I know we see a lot of doom and gloom headlines, but the reality is like poverty

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  is that especially pre-COVID, to be honest, like was that has been at lower levels than it has been ever historically. We don't necessarily see or realize that. I've traveled to a lot of these countries when I was younger, and I've seen the difference myself where it's just like, you know, like a lot of these countries have transformed themselves. And yeah, they're not at American standards, and they're not even close, to be honest. But it's still a lot better than things were. And so I am optimistic about us as a species being able to continue to improve our condition and hopefully improve the planet along with that in more sustainable ways. But I I am kind of forever an eternal optimist for those reasons, I think.

• 1:24:47David Hoffman?

  If there was one wish or one thing about the crypto world that you could just snap your fingers and change or get everyone to realize, what's what's the thing about crypto that frustrates you that you would want to see changed?

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  I think the one of the things that frustrates me is how much short-termism there is in the space. And I find it annoying as someone who's really excited about like the fundamentals of where we're headed, where you see projects that kind of spring up, they're basically designed to extract value. They're they either don't have a plan to deliver something useful, or they're going to be incapable of it mostly. Likely and a lot of people just kind of legitimized that stuff. And I'm not talking about any one project in particular, but like we've seen this dynamic play out so many times. And so I wish that there were more fundamental, long-term thinkers in crypto. They're out there, but like they don't necessarily control all of the fund flow. And as long as there's a huge amount of money that's available to extract or grow, you're going to kind of continue to see that.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  And it's just kind of up to others to just share a different vision. And that's really what I try to do. I I'm very upfront and like, look, you're not going to agree with every take you read on this account. But I'm always just going to tell you what I, from my own life experience, how I see things playing out. And that's all I'm really interested in sharing, to be honest. I'm not interested in like preserving deal flow with some project or whatever. Like those things like don't matter to me. If you're doing good work and you're advancing the space, then I'm interested in supporting you. If I feel like you're being more value extractive, then I'm not going to be interested, probably.

• 1:26:19David Hoffman?

  Is there a a like rule of thumb or just idiom or phrase that you wake up in the morning and say to yourself? Or maybe not that, maybe not that early in the day, but like something, some just good piece of advice that you always check yourself against that that you think is worthy of being shared?

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  I don't know if I have an idiom. I'm sure I could think of some if I had like more time to think about. But I think the one thing that I always try to focus on is the long term, because I've seen the costs of being a short-term thinker. And I I know that underscores a lot of comments that I've made in this episode. It's very easy to say that you're going to be like long-term. It's a lot harder to say you're going to be long-term after you bought something and it goes down in value a lot, right? And so I I've just kind of made it my mantra to be that longer-term thinker, because there's always a lot of noise around. And I do miss things sometimes, right? There are things that I thought would peter out that end up becoming huge. And it's like, okay, but but then long-term, I'm still proven right because it like disappears, right?

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  And so for me, being a long-term thinker is incredibly valuable in crypto, because there's so much short-term thinking. I would say like seventy-five percent of people in crypto tend to focus more on short-term than long-term. And even of that twenty-five percent, very few are thinking about this as like a multi-decade movement of act. I know you guys at Bankless obviously do, but a lot of people are not there yet. And they may never get there and they're going to miss out on a lot of opportunities because of that.

• 1:27:45David Hoffman?

  DC, this has been a fantastic exploration into how you think and what you're up to. So, thank you for coming on to Layer Zero and sharing that with the Bankless Nation.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, Dave. It's been really great chatting with you.

• 1:27:57David Hoffman?

  Cheers. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where

• 1:28:41David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.