Mariano Conti | Layer Zero

Mariano Conti is a pillar in the crypto space. Known for revolutionizing smart contracts with Maker, he has built a long resume of building and investing in key projects. He's also a fascinating human being with a unique story. Tune in to hear Mariano's takes on how the pandemic shaped crypto's narrative, Bull vs Bear markets, finding passion and community, and his musings on going anonymous. ------ 📣 ZERION | Your Gateway to the Metaverse! https://bankless.cc/Zerion ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ 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/Matcha 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants/dharma ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:30 Mariano Conti’s Travels 8:17 Crypto & COVID 11:58 Financial Concerns 20:42 New Paradigm 28:22 New vs Old 34:32 Attention Maximalist 40:30 Mariano Pre-Crypto 50:14 Early Engineering & Investing 55:48 Work Ethic & Passion 1:01:09 Cult & Society 1:06:55 Churn 1:11:00 Builder-Focused Community 1:15:53 Clout, Ego, and Twitter 1:22:32 Anon & What’s Next 1:32:06 Closing ------ Resources: Mariano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nanexcool?s=20 ----- 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 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 Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, we're talking with Mariano Conti, who is one of my best friends in this space, absolutely, and is one of the most foundational builders, I would say. He worked at the Maker Foundation, working on basically all aspects of the MakerDAO contracts. But he got actually into

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  Ethereum before Ethereum was even a thing. So he was one of the first people to live a bankless life, if you will, and started receiving money for his code in Bitcoin. And that's how he got introduced into the whole Bitcoin space. And a lot of people know Mariano's story. It's his story. So every time he goes onto a podcast and anyone ever asks, like, "Hey, Mariano, how'd you get into crypto?" He tells the story. But as soon as Mariano and I are done having reflections about the current state of crypto in 2021, I start at that point in the story where he got into crypto, but then I start going backwards, not forwards, which is something new that I haven't heard before out of Mariano's background. And then, of course, we finish right

• 1:35David Hoffman?

  where we left off, back around to the current state of crypto in 2021, but this time with a different angle. I hope you guys enjoy the conversation with Mariano Conti. But before we get there, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. 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

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  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. 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.

• 2:53David Hoffman?

  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. 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.

• 3:37David Hoffman?

  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. 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, Morgana. How's it going?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Hey, David. It's been a long time.

• 4:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's been a long time since I've seen you in that particular room.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been missing this one. It's weird. After a year and a half of seeing myself talking to others with this background, then I spent like more than three months away.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, away from home, away from Argentina. So where everywhere in the world did you go before you came back home to Argentina?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I did the US a lot. Um, road trip from Miami to San Francisco. Went to see friends in Seattle, went back to Miami, uh, did a little stop somewhere in the US for something. Then I think I did Paris, Mexico, uh, Punta Mita, which is like a nice place in Mexico. It's a, a beach resort. Then what else? Uh, then Miami again, then Denver, then New York, then a fourth time Miami and then back to Buenos Aires.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, you know, it was, uh, it was weird. I, we were just traveling with my girlfriend and Miami was the original destination. And we had the return tickets there. So, uh, it was like our, our hub in the US and, uh,

• 5:46David Hoffman?

  Home away from home?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I left at a different time that my girlfriend, so Miami became our, our, yeah, like our center in the US. Even though it's the place probably that I, uh, you know, traveled the least inside, I just stayed in the hotel the whole time.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  But yeah, it was interesting, interesting months.

• 6:07David Hoffman?

  Out of all of these travels that you've done recently, how much of it was crypto specific or crypto travels? And how much of it was just like Mariano exploring the world?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it was almost half was crypto or a little bit less than half. So the original idea was just to do the, the road trip, right? To rent a car and drive it from Miami to, to San Francisco. And we did that and on the, on the road, I met a few crypto friends, but that wasn't, you know, uh, the, the main idea for the road trip. So in a couple of places, I don't know, in Vegas, I went to see Amin at his, uh, You know, Lair.

• 6:50David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  I saw, I think I saw Hudson and Johnny from Element in Dallas. But they were like sporadic, you know, the main idea was was traveling. And but then after, yeah, you know, HCC in Paris, that was entirely crypto. MCon in Denver and then, you know, Mainnet and the Doge Party in New York. That was a hundred percent crypto. Mexico, I was supposed to see the some somebody from the crypto community there. But in the end, I, you know, I spent most of the time with family and I couldn't

• 7:34Speaker 01

  see anybody and then I felt bad because I got a lot of messages when I said that I was going to be in Mexico from the, you know, the crypto community there, which was very impressive. And I lived there for a long time, so it's like it's my second home. And it was like, oh, I don't know, I felt weird. People were saying, oh, Mariano is coming to to Mexico City. It's like they wanted to organize things and and take me out for coffee or beer or tacos or whatever. And they were like, oh, you don't have a car, you're staying for a month, I'll loan you a car. Like, do you need an apartment?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was felt like really good. Mexicans are incredible.

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I I want to circle back to that, but over overall, I want to ask you. You've been in crypto since like 2013 or 2014, when you first started playing around with with Bitcoin. Before there was really a big community, right?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Uh, late 2014.

• 8:33David Hoffman?

  Late 2014? So like.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:36David Hoffman?

  Now, now that we are on the other side of COVID. How has like crypto in real life changed? Or how is it different or new now that like the crypto community is hanging out with each other post 2020? Right? Like we had, everyone, the whole entire society, all of the world got locked down, right? We all had to go into hiding. And now not only is society like coming out of hiding and like redefining itself, like crypto especially is coming out of COVID, but also in extremely different contexts, right? Like post DeFi summer, post Bitcoin and Ether breaking all time highs, post NFTs becoming a global phenomenon. So like for somebody that's been in the crypto, in crypto society for a very long time,

• 9:21David Hoffman?

  what's it been like to do in real life crypto stuff all over the world for the past like year or so?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  First off, it was incredible. You know, going to Paris and seeing people there after, that was my first crypto conference after a year and a half. I know a lot of people went to Bitcoin Miami. And which, you know, it wasn't an Ethereum conference, but I hear there were a lot of Ethereum people and DeFi people there that, you know, kind of co-opted the city and some of the parties. For me, it was, it was Paris and it was incredible first, you know, seeing friends after so long.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  We're, we're growing the community, but you know, there's a core that is still like, it feels like a tiny one, you know? Just like a group of friends who we were defining and creating DeFi together a few years ago and feels like either we did our thing and now we're doing something else or continuing to do it. And seeing everybody in Paris felt a little bit like that. And then on the other hand, noticing that actually the community had grown a lot. And there were, there were plenty of people who I had never met in person before because they had joined the.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  You know, in in DeFi summer, maybe a bit later, there was uh the entire NFT community, some of them people who we know from before that got into it, but then also so many new players. And then maybe, of course, but but I don't know why I even mentioned this, but it always exists, what we call tourists, right? People who got into this uh during the bull market and uh you know, when we're back to a period of uh peace and quiet, meaning that if it does happen, right, that prices end up uh dropping again and stay down for a large uh amount of time.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  These are the people who will say, hey, I'm out of here, like.

• 11:37David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Uh I was only in it for the tech, but they weren't. Uh the but all in all, I I felt that it was still very much the the community that I know I love, the the friends we've made along the way and uh.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Okay, I I've got to be completely honest. From last time,

• 12:04Speaker 01

  can I say this? Almost everybody also that's OG like got rich. I mean, let's not bid around the bush.

• 12:13David Hoffman?

  No.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:16David Hoffman?

  The transparent ledgers are transparent. We know this.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. Uh so many people do not have financial concerns anymore and this is this is a an entirely real thing and and it did change a lot of us, but I think like for the better. It's um and and it's interesting because you talk to these people like we're all friends. We've been through a lot together. We've been through maybe one or two bear markets. And we spent a lot of time building and we spent most of uh COVID uh building. I remember when the pandemic was starting.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  I was in, um, I was in Warsaw and Black Monday was, uh, Black Thursday was happening. You know, uh, and even though we knew that at that point, DeFi was pretty much gonna survive. Instead of, you know, the drops in, in, in twenty eighteen and everything. Uh, I know a lot of people that had a, had a really tough time. And then I would say ninety-nine percent of the OGs who, who stood by and continued, they're, yeah, they're very well off now and either if they're still continuing to build or not, or they're doing other things.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, I, I don't know how to describe it. It's, yeah, community of friends that we now have yet another thing in common and we can talk with each other about this kind of thing that, you know, essentially changes you in a way and but also frees you. It's incredibly liberating. You have all this space in your brain and you know, this brain power that doesn't have to worry,

• 14:13Speaker 01

  you know, about survival anymore.

• 14:14David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Maybe it's like, oh.

• 14:18David Hoffman?

  Food, food and rent are taken care of. So now we can move on to bigger and better things.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like, I'm done with this. This part is, I never have to worry again. I mean, hopefully, right?

• 14:29David Hoffman?

  Hopefully, right. Not gonna worry.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it, it is great talking to, to friends that are in that situation. And also I see a lot of people becoming more creative, uh, more daring, being able to take more risks. So I think this was just incredible for everybody, you know, a, a generation of builders, of investors, of believers, that it paid off for them.

• 15:00David Hoffman?

  It is decently surreal when we go to these Ethereum conferences, Bitcoin, Bitcoin conferences too, but the ones I'm used to are the Ethereum conferences. And I look around and everyone kind of just assumes that like everyone else is doing like pretty well for themselves, right? Like, there's just this air of just like, what's the word, abundance around. And like, I'm a little bit, I feel like I should be a little bit concerned because that feels very toppy, right? Feels like a top signal, right? It's like, okay, everyone around me is wealthy, like, damn, that's gotta be the top. But also, at the same time, the

• 15:39David Hoffman?

  whole point about crypto is that we supposedly have found ways to fund this whole thing that's sustainable, right? Kevin O'Wakie calls this like regenerative finance, right? And so, like, I feel like we're in that, like Schroninger's phase, where like, is this a top or is this a new paradigm? Like, we don't actually know. But, kind of like, to your point, like what you said, like, there are so many builders who suffered through the 2018, 2019 bear market and built all the way through it, that like, well, I mean, of course, they made a bunch of money when they came out the other side. Like, they, they're the ones, when you suffer the pain of 18 and 19, like, you get to suffer the euphoria of 2020 and 2021.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Right. And, but when you look around, I mean, I agree that, on the one hand, you see people in, I don't know, dressed in Prada, things like that. I still dress like shit.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Don't you also feel like, like, you know, it is well deserved?

• 16:44David Hoffman?

  Sure. I mean, of course, we think this, yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  We think this.

• 16:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah. But, yeah, yeah, at the same time, like, we keep on talking about, hey, like, new paradigm, crypto is a new, new fundamental asset class, it's a new economic foundation. At the end of the day, it kind of makes sense that, like, everyone who would go to, like, the Ethereum community conference, which has been an ongoing conference ever since 2015 or 16, I think, like, well, I mean, it's the only way that this would ultimately happen, right? Like, the people bootstrapping the economy, obviously get financially compensated for that, those actions.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm really happy that it happened. And like I said, this changes the, the dynamics a lot. And in my opinion, it, it's gonna let a lot of people and a lot of teams, you know, build differently, uh, built with more conviction, last bull market.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Most of us still didn't know a lot of things and Right. I, I tend to put almost everybody in the same bag. Uh, I feel comfortable doing that because I've spoken and I'm friends with so many, you know, projects inside Ethereum that, uh, you know, I can generalize, of course, there's outliers. But when I say something in the general, uh, I feel confident that it mostly was that way. Uh, a lot of projects, they now know, like, I'm an extreme Ethereum boltard, but even I know that, yeah, we know where it is going.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  But, uh, this is an asset class that, uh, in the end is still affected by macro, by whatever you wanna call it, and it's not gonna always behave the way we know that it should, right? So, and a lot of projects didn't know this back then or didn't prepare for it. So, you know, even the Ethereum Foundation was Right. Uh, selling Ether at the bottom and consensus to, you know, pay their engineers and pay people. And a lot of projects did that, and a lot of them were on the verge of, of closing. A lot of them did, a lot of them did close. A lot of them did. Right.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  And, but also with that, with that scarcity, we got things like, uh, you know, Molok Dow in February 2019, in like depth of the, of the bear market. Why? Because, uh, you know, I mean, Cassandra and a few others, they decided, hey, we, the community, we're gonna take matters into our own hands. And if we can, we're gonna bootstrap. A grand style and just like hand out money to projects to continue building. And this was.

• 19:44David Hoffman?

  What little, little remaining money that we had. Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And they have said, yes, I'm in and consensus, yes, I'm in. And a few of us in the community that, that I'm in ping were like, yes, we're in. And out of that, you know, exploded a whole bunch of DAOs and the ecosystem as we know it now. So I don't know. I'm, I think everything, we need to make sure that whatever is happening, that we make the best of it. So I think we did so in the, the bear market and I hope we do that in the bull market.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, projects are now a little bit more diversified when they can, but also extremely bullish when they can. And yeah, I mean, I've, I've never been more excited to be part of this community, really.

• 20:41David Hoffman?

  And, and one, one thing that I think is significantly different from 2017 and, and why like, when I juxtapose like, is this the top or is this the new paradigm?

• 20:52David Hoffman?

  Point, points for the new paradigm side of things are the fact that like, everything being built here seems to be much more sustainable than in 2017. Right? In 2017, it was like spin up a website, spin up a, a white paper, receive like a hundred million dollars in funding. We still have that sort of like ape tendency and things get overfunded very, very quickly. But it's on the backs of a much more real and sustainable like set of projects that are being funded. Right? They, these aren't, these are no longer ideas with the white paper anymore. Like maybe people are still aping in like a hundred million dollars into some brand new thing that just got spun up. But that thing that just got spun up is something real. Right?

• 21:34David Hoffman?

  And so like the speculative energy is still there, but like these projects that are coming out in 2021 are seemingly much more sustainable than anything we've ever seen in, in previous bull markets. And so like, and it's also really important, like when we have. While I think you and I look back upon like the 2018, 2019, and we aren't the only ones, and look back on it with nostalgia, right? Like, there's a lot of people who's like, we all wanted the bear market to end back then, but now with like this absolute mania back then, we also are all kind of wishing for simpler times to have this like bear market comeback, so we could all be quiet and like have a quiet come by our community. But also, at the same time, having these builders like you and Amin and like these leaders

• 22:18David Hoffman?

  like Eric Connor, who made it through the bear market, can, and then provably like did well for themselves after the fact. I think that gives a lot of conviction and a lot of, like, a lot of people willing to take risks on to build these new things, right? To enable and inspiring new generation of builders, so that like, we went through the bear market, so you don't have to, right?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:46David Hoffman?

  Like, you didn't come in when it was like the weirdest time ever to build something on Ethereum, which was 2018 and 2019, but you are here now and like, look what building did for the people that came before you, right? And so like, hopefully that was like the bear market to end all bear markets. And as a community of sustainable builders, we can build things where that indicate to future peoples like, hey, even if you do build through a bear market, you come out on the other side okay. And like, we've kind of, now that we're building more sustainable things, like you should be okay regardless.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  I hope so. I hope so. And, and yeah, you know, one of the things I do now, you know, as an angel investor and advisor is just, I talk to projects. And I did this as well with the, you know, some young founders in, right now during my travels, you know, in Paris, Denver, New York, couple of other places. They ask for my advice. And in the end, we start talking about the old days, you know, 2018, 2019, because that's what they end up enjoying the most. It's like talking about how we built certain things. And

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Just so they make sure that they don't make the same mistakes we did. And this is something I I I mention all the time. It's when we were, I I look now and it's gonna, it's gonna get better. There's proposals and everything, but like make your governance right now.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  There's delegation and and so things, but it is just not very easy to use. Uh, it is complicated. But why is it right? When we were building it, I would, I looked behind my shoulder and there was nothing. There was nobody I could, hey, uh, can we talk about that? Like we were inventing everything. We didn't know who the to base or or what to base ourselves on. So we just built something. And yeah, it wasn't the greatest thing, but it was the first. And then Compound came and they uh, they benefited from what we built. And they built something so much better that now it's it's basically, you know, governor.

• 25:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Alpha, Bravo, or the com token. They're the uh, the standard, I would say, of of governance uh, on Ethereum projects and others. And now I like to think Element, uh, they looked at what Compound did and now are coming up with maybe governance 3.0 or whatever. And so that is what I like to just talking to projects and saying, and that's what they get the most out of. Just like doing that, talking about the things we built and the mistakes uh, we made. So, yeah.

• 25:45David Hoffman?

  I think, and also I think when you, if listeners tune into like me and Anthony, Sazana, we we do a semi-regular live streams every Friday now and then. We ultimately end up just talking about the way things were, right? It's like we all, we, everyone who was went through 2018, 2019, ultimately always ends up talking about it. And I think it's actually important, right? Cause it it offers like history lessons for so many of the newcomers that have come in 2020 and 2021. Just so we, it's important, I think, broadcast and advertise like, hey, what what it was like to be in crypto in 2018 and 2019? Literally, the world just forgot about crypto. And what they do remember was like the ICO scams and not, well, and because that's basically the only thing there was to remember, right?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, also, uh.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, back then, and this is also why I think that now is a great time to build.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  And there is still like, back then, there was ICO scams, just a white paper and nothing more and get a ton of funding, right? Right now, there are equivalents.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  I've been working on a script, probably never gonna release it, but it I get an idea and the script uses the Namecheap API to purchase a domain name, change the DNS to like a server that I have, create a template for a smart contract for a 10,000 PFP NFT drop,

• 27:18Speaker 01

  set up like a standard website, and then all I need to do is change the CSS a little bit. And I mean, what else can I automate? Create a Discord, create a Twitter handle. And, you know, in a day, you can have a 10K NFT drop. And you probably earn a nice bit of change with that. If you set it to 0.05,

• 27:48Speaker 01

  you can maybe make, I don't know, 500 ETH. I know, it's crazy. And out of mostly automated things. But that is, that is the cynic in me. Then, on the other hand, yeah, the ICO projects, they were building, they were creating these scams, but there was also nothing there. There was Maker, we were building, but we hadn't released yet. There were only like five protocols out there, and none of them on maintenance. You know, there was Augur, there was DJX, there was...

• 28:20David Hoffman?

  Right. I remember when talking to new people, I always look back on like when I got into Ethereum in 2017 and early 2018. I was like, why, why was I excited about Ethereum? I can't remember anything like Ethereum itself was cool, but there was nothing on Ethereum to actually be excited about. Like if you wanted to go trade tokens, you had to go to Binance.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I suggest you go, you grab your oldest account and just go to EtherScan and go to the transactions and like go through them like from oldest to newest and see.

• 28:58David Hoffman?

  See what I was up to?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, you'd be surprised. There's more, there's probably more than you remember. I went through this because of the YDX.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  And I had an account where I don't remember, probably 2018, something, I don't know, interacting with the YDX. I need to double check, but you know, CryptoKitties 2017 Ether Delta, what was?

• 29:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ether Delta.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Maybe 2016 even. But like you said, there was not a lot. And now whatever you're building or whatever anybody's building that's new, there's at least a foundation, right? You already have, you know, protocols for liquidity, for swapping, you have stable coins. Stable coins have been one of the biggest factors to keep the money inside the blockchain, right? Inside Ethereum. Back then it was, oh, I need to exit. It's like you had to exit to a centralized exchange, trade it for what?

• 30:08David Hoffman?

  Best you could do is owning Tether on Binance.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Or Tether.

• 30:12David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:13David Hoffman?

  And it wasn't even on the Ethereum blockchain. It was on Omni, Omni Tether.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Oh, Omni Tether.

• 30:19David Hoffman?

  Remember Omni?

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yes. Remember it was a, it was a big deal. And then suddenly.

• 30:26David Hoffman?

  And suddenly it was all on Ethereum.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  ER C20 Tether. Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Uh, and now you can just, if you trust the system, right? And if you like, believe that USDC is not gonna uh.

• 30:40David Hoffman?

  Ragia.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Blacklist, you rather is. And if you believe that DAI is gonna maintain the peg or LUSD, or uh, you wanna be in RAI, or you wanna be in FRAX.

• 30:51David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Or in ARM, or in any of the, I don't know, dozens of projects that now exist. There's absolutely no reason to leave, and I mostly don't, uh, you know, leave Ethereum.

• 31:05David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Um, the only bridge, you know, the only sidechain I played with a little bit is Polygon.

• 31:13David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Uh, and now, you know, L2's Arbitrum, uh, bridged, uh, you know, a few ETH to play with that. But I know I've never, I don't know, maybe I should, cuz I've been telling people I'm becoming more of a, an Ethereum maxi as.

• 31:35David Hoffman?

  As time goes on.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  As time goes on. And I have a different definition of of maxi, which I'll say it in a minute. But I always used to be very open minded.

• 31:47David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And it's like, no, no, but I'll give everything a chance, I'll try everything. But now, I mean, I've never used Solana, I've never used Avalanche, I never used Phantom. I don't think I ever used uh, Binance. And I like staying there. I, I realized that I'm one of the lucky few that wasn't priced out.

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  I was not priced out. And this is a funny anecdote. Uh, a lot of Argentinians, you know, I've been advocating the usage of DAI ever since I got into this. And this is the reason I got into this, uh, originally. And it's still in my mind to, you know, serve and people in an undeserving economy and help them free themselves from inflation and capital controls. That, that is still. That was still, I don't know if it's still front and center. I, I think that I, I fought my fight and now it's in the hands of.

• 32:50David Hoffman?

  Now your watch has ended.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  But that was the original goal, right? And so many Argentinians, they got on board to die and they had to use Uniswap and they had to use Pull Together and then they, they got a lot of money from Airdrops and it was incredible. But then during DeFi summer, they were priced out. But because there were, they were some of the first people who got priced out. There were some of the first who got into Binance and into whatever projects are there, you know, the, the cakes and the beefs. I don't know what else is there. And they ended up making a lot of money because they were the first priced out of Ethereum. And, you know, there were some of the first to get into Polygon and I'm not gonna

• 33:36Speaker 01

  begrudge anybody from making money. That's, that's not why I'm here. It did break my heart a little bit that they got priced out. So hopefully, you know, now that we have Arbitrum and now that we're getting optimism and that, you know, we have the, the CK rollups and hopefully we're gonna get them back into default because I still believe that this is not just about playing with DeFi. It's also the ethos of decentralization that

• 34:06Speaker 01

  I'm believer that Ethereum is the only, the most credibly neutral blockchain out there. And, you know, we saw what happened with

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Solana being down for a while and, yeah. But, but it was interesting, you know, seeing this and watching people ending up making a lot of money in these other chains. But me, I don't, I don't use them. I, I stay on Ethereum and when I say I'm an Ethereum maxi, I'm an attention maximalist.

• 34:36David Hoffman?

  Ah, okay. That's what I was gonna ask for the definition, yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. My attention is on Ethereum. Like, right now, I'm not full time, right? I angel invest, I help out some projects, but mostly I've been enjoying my life and I think that, you know, I deserve a little bit of rest, been traveling, everything. So the limited time that I have and also I'm already forty years old, so declining mental cognitive abilities or whatever.

• 35:08David Hoffman?

  Forty.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's been a been a journey, man.

• 35:13David Hoffman?

  Sure, right, yeah. Crypto goes faster, yeah, right.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm like fucking Harold here.

• 35:20David Hoffman?

  The weight of the maker oracles on your shoulders.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  With the limited time that I have, it's I don't have enough bandwidth even for what's happening in Ethereum. It used to be that you knew everything that happened in Ethereum. Then it was just what happened in DeFi in Ethereum and then just maybe in the lending protocols inside DeFi, inside Ethereum. And now you have DAOs, now you have NFTs, you have so much. And it's a my definition of maxi is attention maximalist. I don't think everything out there is a scam. There are other probably interesting projects that no, maybe they sacrifice some decentralization for speed. Maybe they, but I don't call them scams, not in like the Bitcoin maximalist sense that.

• 36:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's certainly a Bitcoin of flavors to call everything a scam, yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  If it is not my coin, it is a scam. And everything that is not Bitcoin is just something that will wants to take your Bitcoin. Like, I don't think that with everything, but I am an attention maximalist. It's I want to stay in Ethereum because that's and also it's all I know. I'm not going to learn a new programming language, not going to make new friends. I got my friends and we're on Ethereum and we like it there. So, and the moment I made peace with that, so much happier. I'm a little bit trollier on more shitposting on Twitter and people have mentioned that.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  But I don't know, I think it's a better way to to enjoy life.

• 36:55David Hoffman?

  No, I totally agree and definitely I have my own like a group of non crypto people. I'm trying to get into crypto and like have definitely turned towards like a shitpost maxi in that group at some point in time. Like, I feel like this is just part of the natural progression that people go through is like you build, you build really hard. Finally, the market turns in your favor and then you just like coast, you just like relax and like, oh, thank gosh. And also at the same at the same point of like, kind of what you said, just like all your friends are in Ethereum. And like that's, that's like, that's the society that you find yourself in, right? Like, it's so hard when you have both the economy and the society around that economy, like that bootstrapped each other, like.

• 37:39David Hoffman?

  It's to what you said, it's like not that you are shutting yourself off towards other things. It's just that like it's hard to get yourself to uproot yourself when so much of your your life and energy has been dedicated to this one ecosystem, right?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:54David Hoffman?

  And the Ethereum culture has always been one of acceptance. Like we are like, oh, new thing. Let's like, let's try it out. Give it the time of day. But that's also worked against Ethereum culture in its face at the same time, right? Where like a lot of nefarious projects came and it's like, hey, give us a time of day. And Ethereum is like, okay, that's our culture to do that. And then we learn those lessons the hard the hard way. And so like, I think there is amount some amount of like, healthy, I don't care isms about some some people in the deep Ethereum community culture, right? Because like, you it's not, you don't get to be called a maximalist, just because like, you've run out of time

• 38:36David Hoffman?

  and you and because you don't owe anyone your time. Like, your time is your time.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like, yeah. So why haven't you checked out this project? And because

• 38:46David Hoffman?

  I don't care.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  And I don't care. It's like, I'm not calling it a scam. I'm just saying that I don't care. And but yeah, that's true. I I think maybe we as the Ethereum community, we skewed towards the too nice at some point. Well, you know, the Bitcoiners, they skewed the other way.

• 39:07David Hoffman?

  Right, definitely.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  The being assholes about everything, not their coin. Maybe it worked in their favor. I I default to being nice. It's like, I will tell you no, but with a smile. It's like, no, thank you. But I don't know, I I think that's that's the difference between between the communities as well. And

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, then we get into the whole, you know, Ethereum killers presenting on main stage at their con.

• 39:41David Hoffman?

  I think there's a first and last time for that. All right, guys, in the second half of the show, this is where we go into Mariano's background pre-crypto without actually going into the crypto section. So stay tuned for that. But before we get there, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this 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. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide. And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid die markets.

• 40:24David Hoffman?

  Gemini just launched their Earn program, where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in DeFi, or you don't want to worry about DeFi exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. 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

• 41:09David Hoffman?

  a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com/go-bankless. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. AVE version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the AVE protocol even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of DeFi money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On AVE, 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.

• 41:48David Hoffman?

  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 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. Mariana, I want to actually, so so many people tell you or ask you when you come on the podcast like, all right,

• 42:30David Hoffman?

  tell me how you got into crypto and then they go through the story of just like, oh, I was working in Argentina, blah, blah, blah. I want to start at that point in the story, but go the other direction. And so right before you got into crypto, what were you doing and what were you doing before that?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, damn, there's gonna be a lot of honesty in this podcast. The truth is that I made a couple of good investments early on in life. So I discovered crypto at 34, maybe 35. Before that, probably didn't work all that much, maybe like three, four full years out of my life.

• 43:19David Hoffman?

  What do you mean you didn't work for three years? Or what were you doing?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  No, no, I worked for three or four years.

• 43:27David Hoffman?

  Oh, you worked for three to four years total?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Out of, you know, when I left college.

• 43:32David Hoffman?

  Oh shit.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Up to like 34. Yeah.

• 43:37David Hoffman?

  So it goes without saying that the 34 onwards, when you started working for the Maker Foundation, it's probably the hardest you've ever worked in your life?

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 43:47David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Before that, I was working for a couple of years for a digital agency and I started working there.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Think around, yeah, maybe start of twenty fourteen.

• 44:02David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Uh, during the World Cup. And the reason was, I think my girlfriend, she got a job and I was like at home doing nothing and I got bored and I'm like, okay, maybe I'll find a job for a while.

• 44:16David Hoffman?

  Just because you didn't, you didn't have anything to fill your time?

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I discovered, and I, yeah, um, I had moved back to Buenos Aires in twenty eleven. So I spent most of twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. Just like not doing much, just enjoying.

• 44:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  With family and.

• 44:40David Hoffman?

  So during, during those years, what were like the centerpieces of your life? Because if it wasn't, it wasn't crypto, right? Because crypto hasn't happened yet. So like.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:48David Hoffman?

  You got up, when you got up in the morning, what would you think about?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Good question. Um, I mostly lived a kind of hedonistic life. I, uh,

• 45:02Speaker 01

  watched movies and went to parties and read books and used my computer and, you know, kept learning about programming because if you're a engineer, you need to more or less stay current with things. Uh, I had a game developer phase where I built a whole bunch of different, um, prototypes for video games, uh, that are still out there somewhere. Uh, spent a lot of time with family, spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, the Argentinian situation and how different it was, uh, from, you know, growing up in Mexico,

• 45:41Speaker 01

  which it is a, a third world country, but compared to Argentina, it's so much more stable and. Um,

• 45:51Speaker 01

  and yeah, basically doing that, it was.

• 45:55David Hoffman?

  When did you move from Mexico to Argentina?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  In, when was it, like, April twenty eleven? Yeah. So the year before, in twenty ten, I got like, I think I turned thirty, or I was about to turn thirty, and I got like my, I called my first midlife crisis. I wanted to go.

• 46:17David Hoffman?

  Your first? Oh, no. Should I be expecting multiple?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think there's another one coming at some point.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Maybe, uh, maybe this was the one, and I just had it earlier.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  You know, I, I was born in Buenos Aires. We moved to Mexico when I was six, so in, in eighty six. I stayed there for twenty five years, and even though we came back to Buenos Aires almost every year, maybe two months out of the year. When I was here, I was the Mexican. When I was in Argentina, in Mexico, I was the Argentinian. It was weird growing up like that, but not bad at all, right? It was just, that thing stayed in my brain. And, uh, in twenty ten, I was like, okay, I wanna go to Argentina. I wanna live there. I don't just wanna go there as a tourist for two months in the winter or two months in the summer.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I wanna be there and wanna live there for six months and figure out what it's like. Uh, and I told my girlfriend.

• 47:23David Hoffman?

  What was your identifier when you were in Mexico? Was it like your, was it your accent? Like, in Mexico, do you have an Argentine accent? And when you're in Argentina, do you have a Mexican accent? Like, how would they figure that out?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I used to, no, uh, it was easier in Mexico, cuz I had, you know, Mexican accent.

• 47:39David Hoffman?

  Grew up there.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  And, yeah, but, uh, yeah, sometimes, like, a couple of words. But when I turned to my brother, I would talk to him in, like, Argentinian, but it would be like a weird Argentinian accent. When I came to Buenos Aires, then it was, it was always, they would look at me funny with my accent. And say, yeah, but where are you from? Still, still to this day.

• 48:02David Hoffman?

  No way.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  And now, I used to be able to switch between accents. And now I don't, I, like, my brain created a mix between Argentinian and Mexican and.

• 48:14David Hoffman?

  Mariano dialect.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Talk now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's weird that when I'm here now, people, yeah, they look at me and it's like, yeah, this guy is not from Buenos Aires, maybe from weird part of Argentina.

• 48:27David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  They say, where are you from? Spain, from Mexico, from, um, yeah, that was, that was the mix. And I just wanted to be here and live here for a while. So I told my girlfriend at the time in Mexico, it's like, let's move to Argentina for six months. Just let me like do this. I wanna, you know, commune with my roots, with my motherland, that I will go back to Mexico, get married, have kids or whatever. And she didn't want to, so I broke up with her. All my shit. Yeah. That was bad. It was, yeah, I had been with her for like four years. We're maybe gonna get married.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  I said, I'm sorry, there's something that I wanna do. So yeah, we broke up and I gave away.

• 49:16David Hoffman?

  When you, when you broke up, was it like, this is over? Or is it like, hey, we can reconvene in a few months from now? Or what, what was that like?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it was mostly over.

• 49:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. Maybe I thought if I only stay in Argentina for a while and then go back, maybe we'll.

• 49:33David Hoffman?

  Sure. See what's happening. Yeah. It never happened.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  It never happened. I, I came to Argentina with two suitcases. One had my clothes and one had my computer and my monitors. And I stayed here forever. So I left my dad and my brother, they still live in Mexico. Now luckily, you know, the first four years, I don't think we saw each other because I was here and I didn't travel.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  But now it's like, yeah, I see them all the time. It's like easier. Well, with COVID became a little bit harder last year, but now it's, that's, that's over. That's also one of the cool things, you know, distances, they don't mean much anymore, right? It's a, if it wasn't for this freaking pandemic, uh, I don't know.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  It's like, maybe we needed it to, don't you feel, and sorry to change subjects again, but don't you feel like this pandemic, I don't know, advanced the crypto adoption by two to three years, maybe?

• 50:41David Hoffman?

  Oh, absolutely. Right? It's like, well, there was the, that whole idea that like,

• 50:48David Hoffman?

  people started speculating in the stock market because like televised sports weren't a thing. So they were just bored and they needed, they needed a horse to bet on. And so they started gambling in the stock market. And then like, you know, DeFi summer happened, NFT winter happened, the first, the NFT like winter, as in like, the first bull market of NFTs that happened during the winter after DeFi summer. Just because we were all bored at home, like speculating on our computers, right? Like we needed an itch to scratch. And so, why not, let's just have a bull market. Everyone's home.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  That's crazy. Yeah.

• 51:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So when you were, you, you said you had only worked for like three or four years before you found crypto. What years were those again?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  So let's see, I had a job out of college. I was

• 51:38David Hoffman?

  Doing what?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Just like junior developer. I think I was programming in C sharp. I was also part of a, like a small shop and I don't even remember what I did. I, I, I programmed for like two or three months. Oh yeah. It was like, uh, one of this, I don't know, I was doing just software for like accounting.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Before that, I had already like, I did early on, you know, the first website for my dad's business and, you know, I did, I did software for

• 52:17Speaker 01

  You know, his salesman and you know, for managing budgets and shit like that. And that thing is still running to this day.

• 52:25David Hoffman?

  It's like No shit.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, once a year, like my dad or my brother, they call me and it's like, hey, can you? And they already know that I open up Zoom or hang out. So it's like, hey, that, you know, I'm all smiling and I can already see it in their eyes when they're gonna ask me about something like that. Cause my face changes and it's like, you're gonna ask me to look at old code that I don't even remember how it works. Like 20 year old code, but it still works and it's out there and it's, you know, helping a real company do shit.

• 52:58David Hoffman?

  That's awesome. That's amazing. Mariano has code that hasn't gone down longer than Ethereum and it's not on Ethereum. That's hilarious. Okay, so, so

• 53:07Speaker 01

  It's not that complicated, but, but yeah.

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  When these awesome non crypto investments that, what time did they have them? Were they post college?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, around that maybe, yeah, so probably before. When was the, when was the first, no, not the first bubble?

• 53:33David Hoffman?

  The dot com bubble?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Bubble was around 2000.

• 53:35David Hoffman?

  Ninety nine to 2000, yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2000, no, the other one.

• 53:41David Hoffman?

  Oh, there's another one?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but not, not the internet. The other financial crisis, maybe 2008.

• 53:49David Hoffman?

  Oh, the housing crisis? Yeah. So the bubble between 2006 to 2008?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. So maybe a few years before that, so maybe 2005 and six.

• 53:58David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  My dad, bless him, he said, you know, you, you're young, you have a bit of money. Cause I had worked for a few months doing this, you know, just building software. He said, how about you buy some dollars and you put them in the stock market? And I buy the stock market and he taught me a little bit about the US stock market. And he said, yeah, and he said, you're young, you can take risks. And now is the time and he's an accountant. Oh, uh, he's also an engineer like he started uh engineering for like four years. So that is where I got that side of of me.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And he's the one that got me into it. So we figured out a way to do a, uh, you know, a wire to the US and then open up like a zero commission account. Uh, online and yeah, I started, you know, buying and selling mostly tech stock, you know? Uh, I don't even remember like, you know, AMD, Intel, Nvidia. Activision, maybe I have no idea. The things that I that I knew about, right?

• 55:13David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Zero diversification, it was all.

• 55:16David Hoffman?

  Tech only.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, tech only because it's it's what I knew.

• 55:20David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  And I kept that for, I mean, even to this day, I I probably still have a couple of those that I that I never touched. And yeah, that was my my first foray in that. And I was lucky with that because yeah, we had the the twenty eighteen, if you look at the the chart. But then I had another couple of odd jobs here and there, and those pretty much sustained me for a while.

• 55:48David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the the question I want to get to is like you worked for a few years before crypto came into your life. You had this, uh, you were lucky enough to put money into the stock market at the before the housing crisis. Um, and you were just like, uh, like riding off of that to to fund what you call a hedonistic lifestyle. So I want to I want to get to know like, when did the work ethic come and why did it come and and what made it come?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I don't think I've ever thought about that, but like on the spot right now, I would say when I discovered crypto and I started working, you know, at Maker, I found my freaking calling. I that I have no other way of explaining it. It was um, it was finding a group of people who were building something together and not just what we were building, the way we were building it. You know, decentralized all over the world, uh, on a chat room, but never met each other. Uh.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  And I don't know, I felt such a kinship to that. And I was always, you know, I built my first website, uh, ninety-five, ninety-six. So I I've been involved in this kind of thing, but always on the fringe, right? Uh, like, I feel I could have been like, I don't know, on the on the internet revolution of the late nineties. But I never did, because I was on the fringe. Uh, I could have done shit with web two point O. And I never did, because I was in the sidelines building, but never felt like, yeah, I'll dive into this.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  But then when I found web three and when I found maker, found Ethereum, that's what, I don't know, my brain finally said, okay, you've been involved and around, you know, computers all your life. But you've never been, you know, done more than that. And when I discovered this, that's when I knew, yeah, this is, this is what I want to do. And it never felt like work. It just felt like, yes, I'm gonna do this. And I, you know, stayed up for hours and hours, uh, building and talking to people. And I would go to bed and I I wouldn't be able to sleep, right? I would move around and then I would have to wake up in the middle of the night and just go back to coding. Because it was such an incredible energy.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, I never, I never felt that with with anything else. And it went even beyond that. Uh, I'm like, okay, I'm a developer in this now. And then I discovered, you know, crypto Twitter, whatever, and conferences. And it's like, I need, we need to go deeper, right? I just, I don't want to be a coder. I want to be, I want to be famous inside fucking Ethereum. Like, uh, that I told a friend of mine, I think I was drunk, either in East Buenos Aires or in the first East Berlin. It's like, I saw people, uh, giving out talks, you know, uh, talking about their projects.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  And then they would, uh, come down, uh, from the stage and people would go to them and ask them questions. And I I looked and it's like, I want to be that. It's like. At every step of the way, it's like, what can I do to be even more involved? You know? And I don't know, I don't know why it happened, but it happened and it happened with Ethereum. That's why I'm so, you know, adamant about community, about purpose. And why I always get, you know, I do those sappy tweets about, yeah, the community, our people, my people. It's like something, something clicked, you know? I have no other way to explain it.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  And at every step of the way was, okay, now you are doing this, what more can you do? And you know, that gave way to whatever angel investing or it's a, for me, that was the next step. It's a, okay, now that you're financially well off, maybe you can put some of that into other projects. I mean, to friends' projects, I mean, to, you know, young people's projects. And so that's, you know, that led to, to where we are.

• 1:00:22David Hoffman?

  I can just imagine Mariano trying to fall asleep and he just sees code just like running through his eye, and through his eyelids, like, oh, wait, the maker contracts, they could be like this. And then he get up and starts writing them.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's how the, the second version of the Oracles happened. Like when we released Oracles V1, like three days before actually releasing single collateral die, I went back and, and checked. I have the, the first commit for the second version of the Oracles. So as soon as the first were done and not even Psy was released, I was like, okay, we need to make them better for next version. And yeah, I was like, oh, epiphany. And it's like writing things there.

• 1:01:09David Hoffman?

  It is, it is pretty interesting to see, like, there was a lot of, there's a lot of people that have similar stories. And, and I resonate with that story myself as well. I was like, Working pre crypto is just not working the same post crypto. And there's, I'm reminded of the layer zero I did with Eric Connor, where we talked about like, well, crypto is not just like your career. It's also your like entertainment and it's not just your entertainment. It's also like your social group and it's not just like your social group. It's, you know, all of these things all put together, right? And so many people have a similar story of just like, I was working my nine to five job. I was like looking at the clock, waiting for the clock to run out so I could go home and do other things.

• 1:01:54David Hoffman?

  And then I found crypto and now it's completely reversed. It's like, I can't, like, I can't put it down. Like, I can't wait to start. I don't like to finish. When I'm, when I'm done working, I just turn on crypto Twitter. When I'm done with crypto Twitter, I just DM my other crypto friends. And it allowed, I've seen so many people go from like, yeah, I went to my eight hour a day job, working two hours a day to going from like, now I go to my eight hour day job and I work 18 hours a day. Right? And there's so many of these stories and there's, and each person has their own story to tell us like why it resonated with them. But like, I think the ultimate through line is like, well, something really magical happens when we have financial assets that align with our human values.

• 1:02:39David Hoffman?

  And as you, as somebody coming from Argentina, which has seen a chaotic government with a chaotic financial system, perhaps you look towards Ethereum and you see like stability and not just stability for yourself, but if you can build it, stability for the people around you.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, everything that you said, I hope, it all sounds sane to me. It all sounds like it clicks. I have no idea. I hope that somebody, you know, that maybe is just getting started in crypto is listening to this and, you know, DM me or like contact me if this sounds like you or if this sounds like we're talking about a cult.

• 1:03:26David Hoffman?

  It's definitely both. It's definitely.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  It is a little bit of both, right? It is.

• 1:03:31David Hoffman?

  A cult, the only difference between a cult and society is how big the cult is. If the cult, if the cult is 2 billion people, well, then you just call that part of society.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Where the, yeah, that is true. In that is, we need to, uh, we need to grow this.

• 1:03:50David Hoffman?

  Grow this cult. When we were in Denver with the M-Con, for M-Con, I was with the Meta Factory guys in the, uh, in the hills of Colorado. And we were just joking about how like, we were just doing the classic cult joke. Like, we have, uh, are a group of, a collective group of people that all rally around the same totems. Like, who do we pray to? The god of Moloch, right? Like, we have our own currency. Like, I actually think we should have just actually just commit to this thing and just actually just instantiate a religion. If not for the very release, at least for the tax benefits.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  That's not a bad idea.

• 1:04:30David Hoffman?

  Right?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  We have our own language.

• 1:04:33David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. Uh huh. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. We have our own rituals. We have our own, just like values. We could absolutely make a Church of Moloch.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  I would like that. That would be, yeah. No, no, we totally, we totally could. And yeah, now that you mentioned Denver again, it was, it's so good being out there that, I mean, I saw you in Paris, I saw you in Denver, I saw you in New York. Uh, you know, the difference, after M-Con in Denver, I thought I wasn't gonna have a great time in New York, you know, because Maynet, it was gonna be something completely different.

• 1:05:12David Hoffman?

  Suits.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. But then I enjoyed myself so much there as well. A different vibe, certainly, but equally enjoyable. And, yeah, you know, just Ethereum people all around, like you say, talking about similar things. Um, just, you can instantly, you know, talk to somebody new and just like talk to them for a long time and find common interests and also talk about meaningful things at times, right? Um, I know, I like to say, a lot of people ask me, hey, are you building on DeFi? Are you doing something still?

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  I like advising DeFi projects. I like investing in them. I'm glad I'm also on the sidelines now in DeFi. Like, I'm glad I'm not building DeFi. But I'm not against it. It's like, I still love DeFi. I still think it's extremely important, but I say that I paid my pound of flesh. And now I'm enjoying it from the sidelines and have to worry about oracles and liquidations and res parameters and governance. And sometimes I talk some shit about that, but it's always from a place of love, right?

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  It's only because I've lived through it. And yeah, but that doesn't mean I don't like it. I it's like, it's because I love it that I feel that I can, you know, in a position to criticize it a little bit.

• 1:06:50David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  But then through that, hopefully make it a little bit better.

• 1:06:54David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. Well, there's something to say about just like, we all joke in this industry is like, oh, one year in crypto is just like one month in the legacy world, right?

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05David Hoffman?

  Or is it the other way around? I don't know. The one that makes crypto go really, really fast.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11David Hoffman?

  And like, to some degree, like, this is expected, right? Like, you were introduced in crypto in 2014. You started building vigorously 2016 through 2020, maybe 2019. I can't remember when you left the foundation. And then now, then you turned to

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  2020.

• 1:07:28David Hoffman?

  2020? Jesus.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's only been 13 months.

• 1:07:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, my gosh. Hey, at least it's been a year, right? Anyways, so like you go, you go through the cycles and then, and then you hit the sidelines, right? And like, everyone's doing, even to some degree, like, I'm doing this a little bit in the sense that like, a new DeFi protocol comes out and like, sometimes I don't even read the announcement post anymore. Whereas like in, in 2018, a new DeFi protocol would come out. I'd break out my ledger, put some money in, see what happens. Gas was zero dollars.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59David Hoffman?

  I play around with it. It's like, oh, cool. Now I know what this is. I could tell all my friends about it. And then now my friends are coming to me with like, oh, this new DeFi protocol. Heard of it? I'm like, no, can you please tell me about it? But I think that's important, right? Because there there needs to be this churn of active participants that are doing the things in the crypto world, right? And if Mariano was still there, like hammering out smart contracts left and right, you'd take up a lot of space for a lot of other people to build their own stuff, right? Like, there is ultimately only so much things that could be done. It's seemingly endless, right? But like, we do want some healthy churn of new builders to come in, the old builders to step out and take more passive roles.

• 1:08:41David Hoffman?

  You know, the the village elders who are guiding the the crypto novices. And, you know, we can only guide those people so much. They need to just learn by doing. And even even we also don't want the the veterans of 2017, 18, 19 to actually dictate what the crypto novices of 2021 need to do, because they need to do their own thing, right? And so like, to sometimes the best you can do is just sit on the sidelines, watch, and angel invest.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, exactly. And it's also, yeah, after, you know, a career of playing, you retire and whatever, become a coach or

• 1:09:22David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, it does feel like a professional sports where you you just like, you can't last that long. It's too hard. It's too hard to keep up. The things move too fast. It's too taxing.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot of people that, you know, are still going, right?

• 1:09:36David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  That's that's incredible. I don't know how they do it. And, you know, I mean, off the top of my head, maybe I'll just mention, but but, you know, Martin Koppelmann and Stefan George from, you know, Nosis, they're still building. Of course, everybody, you know, the core devs,

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Vitalik and Peter and Chris with Solidity and Martin Svende. And there's so many people who are still around. And

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  you look at that, the DevCon Zero picture, and it's like, wow, how do they still?

• 1:10:19David Hoffman?

  Beating the same drum.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then that's also what what keeps me going. It's like shit. They they built this. They're still around. They're still doing. They're still researching. Maybe some of them from different positions, uh, but they are around. And that's also why I think I don't ever wanna, you know, not be around this ecosystem. Um, it's given me a lot that I

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  it's not that, yeah, I owe it everything and I have to be here. It's no, it's that I I want to be here. And I hope that I will still want to be here for, you know, years to come.

• 1:11:00David Hoffman?

  And I think that this lends itself back to that, like maximalism conversation that we were be having before, right? Like, there's zero other builder focused communities that have this sort of track record. And so like the it's when somebody says like, oh, why don't you pay attention to Tara? It's like, well, none of my friends are. So why should I? Right? Like, we're all we're all kind of focusing on the same thing, right? It's like, there's the there's that metaphor of like, the hunters of a hunter gatherer society. They're they're looking at the deer. And all the hunters are shoulder to shoulder, like, looking at the deer. They're all pointing in the same direction. And so like, for me, like, when all my friends are pointed at the same direction, like, I'm looking with with them. I'm not looking like, oh, look, there's a squirrel over there. Like, no, we're all looking at the deer.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Oh, um, and I, for example, in New York, I saw a friend of mine, Will Barnes. We worked together at Maker, um, a smart contracts. And now he actually, he was at Consensus before. And now he left and is building on Solana. He's building a DeFi uh, protocol on Solana. And um, and I think he was a Rust developer before. And I don't know, we either we talked a little bit in New York or just somebody on a tweet was like, they they wanted to know, because there are

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  There are very few examples, but they exist, right? It's like when, when people say on Twitter, oh, every developer I know, you know, the, the VCs,

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  what is it, the multi-whatever?

• 1:12:44David Hoffman?

  Multicoin?

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but oh, every developer I know is leaving Ethereum for Solana.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Those tweets, that's a hundred percent bullshit, but, but also I know of one case.

• 1:12:57David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Right? So, I mean, it does happen. And yeah, I think he was mentioning, uh, why he moved. And it's like, oh, in my case, he said, you know, new challenges, new technology.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  You know, the things he thinks like Solana might be good for, uh, you know, he wanted those like fast block times, even if they, uh, you know, sacrifice decentralization. It's like for my project, I feel okay with that. And it's like, yeah, we talk, it's like, interesting, but that's totally fair.

• 1:13:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  And then I went like, damn, could I look at, you know, something different at least? You know, for the, for the intellectual exercise of seeing how something works and, uh, you know, not for me, I cannot learn, I cannot learn a new programming language, man.

• 1:13:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  It's like, I already have enough of them in my brain.

• 1:13:59David Hoffman?

  Plus there's the, the switching, yeah, the, your, the switching cost is like not something that, that you're interested in, right? And it's like, it's kind of like the same problem is like, um, trying to spin up a whole new social network, right? Like, sweet, we have this brand new awesome social network. Let's all go and no one goes, right? It's like, well, I'll go if you go, I'll go if you go, I'll go if you go. And then no one actually goes, right?

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  And then it's what, yeah, making a whole new group of friends and talking about whole new things. Nah, I'm too old for that shit. Happy where I am. Uh, this goes back to the, to the party analogy. And I think this came from also, uh, you know, I mean, he said somewhere like, Ethereum is a party and all my friends are here. So why should I go to another one? And then that got expanded a little bit. It's with analogies of gas and shit. It's like, oh, yeah, we have, we have beer at this party. And then somebody says, oh, but there's like champagne at this other one, but it's like far away and there's nobody there. And that's like, yeah.

• 1:15:04David Hoffman?

  I'll take the beer that I have with it versus the champagne I don't.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then the friends that are that are already there. I remember I talked to Camille Russo about this and she put in the book, like Infinite Machine, the the last chapter is called the party.

• 1:15:22David Hoffman?

  Funny. I know. Yeah. I'll have to go reread that chapter because I actually don't remember that.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, last chapter. And I think it actually starts with with me.

• 1:15:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  That's why, oh, I'm such a big ego that I I have like,

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  I have like the book, the parts where I mentioned, I was like,

• 1:15:48David Hoffman?

  No, that's awesome, dude. That's great. If there's one thing that having a having an ego in crypto is definitely beneficial because like there's so much like clout to be claimed that you got to claim it, right?

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta you gotta play the game. I also said that, you know, the best thing I did on Twitter was like going from read only to read, write.

• 1:16:11David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  You know, when I started producing instead of just consuming. That also opened up, you know, it opened up a lot of opportunities. It opened up new friendships. It opened up investment opportunities. It like really improved my, you know, Ethereum lifestyle. It was so good. And that's also, that's incredible. I freaking love Twitter and I'm on Twitter all day. As I think I was with my girlfriend yesterday, we're watching TV and she's like, hey, what are you gonna do? And I was on Twitter. It's like, what do you mean? Like job wise? It's like, I'm on Twitter. This is my job now. It's like, I'm like drafting a tweet.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  It's gonna take me this the whole afternoon.

• 1:17:00David Hoffman?

  It's gonna take me 20 minutes to write this tweet. Yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And but what other, you know, growing industry as you know, Ethereum, crypto, web three, it's also so accessible. It's like you can, you can go on Twitter, you can at whoever, I don't know, Leschner now with the compound thing and he will answer, right? He's the founder of a multi-billion dollar protocol. You can, you can at Kane.

• 1:17:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  And he will, you can add, I'm thinking the ones that are there a lot, like Joe DeLonge from Sushi, a lot of the Anons, and they will answer, right? They will have.

• 1:17:46David Hoffman?

  If you ask a good question.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  If you ask it, yeah.

• 1:17:49David Hoffman?

  Ask a good question, yeah.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  No, and of course, I used to be, I responded to every single DM. It was like my pride that I said, yes, I will answer every single DM and my DMs will always be open. And I don't have a lot of followers compared to, you know, like you guys, but still it's now it became unsustainable.

• 1:18:13David Hoffman?

  It's extremely overwhelming, yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  I cannot do it anymore. I still try.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  But you know, when, when it's like a good question, you know, either like where, what should I do with, with my career? Or should I get into solidity? I at least try to, you know, write a couple of lines because I did that, you know, I, well, at the point that I was starting Twitter, I was also, you know, now in the, you know, the Ethereum, the conference circle. So most of the friends, the community I made, you know, through conferences and not so much through Twitter. But you know, where else? I don't know. The beginning of the space age, imagine if you could like fucking tweet at the scientists.

• 1:19:05David Hoffman?

  Well, when we have these like digital, we have this like digital society, right? And so like, where does the society congregate? Well, it's going to congregate on goddamn Twitter, right? Like web three be like be damned. Like we're going to feed, we're going to use these web two platforms until, until we can't, until we have something better. And there's nothing wrong with like to congregate on Twitter to. Be of our place of just mutual conversations and the whole cool, the whole cool thing about Twitter is just like one massive, massive asynchronous conversations. And so like, you don't actually have to tune in, you can tune in as you so choose.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40David Hoffman?

  Conversation is going on with or without you and you can choose to add to the conversation to the global, the, the global conversation of this like crypto society. You can tap it into now whenever and it's like literally the industry having a conversation with itself.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and when there is an alternative, we'll find it and we'll use it. I don't wanna, I don't wanna force it. It's like so many projects in Ethereum, they were like ahead of their time and they failed because you know, the landscape wasn't ready. We weren't ready for certain things. P P, you know, existed for a long time, but didn't pan out. I know, uh, Ava is building something now, I hear. Maybe that'll be it, maybe it'll be something else. I'm not in a huge hurry. We're changing so much.

• 1:20:32David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  It's like when somebody says, yeah, but you're communicating on Twitter and on Discord. It's like, we're already changing so much, so fast. It's like, we don't have to change everything at once, right? It's like, this is like gradual. It's not like, okay, we're out of the city and now we're gonna live in the mountains and it's like, you know, do or die, hundred percent or nothing. It's like, no, we're doing what we can and let's not force everything.

• 1:21:05David Hoffman?

  And we're, we're doing it in the correct like order of operations, right? Like where the, the high value stuff goes first and now we've just unlocked L twos. And so we've gone from like hundred dollar main chain transactions to like five dollar L two transactions. But you also have to think of like, what's the value of a tweet? And maybe, maybe the value of a tweet goes all the way up to 10 cents, but it's never gonna exceed like a dollar, right? And so, uh, and most tweets are gonna be worth point zero zero zero one pennies. And so we just need, and once we have an economic platform that's like that, then we can talk. But right now we're doing all this stuff that's worth at least a 15 dollar transaction, right? So there's just an order of operations.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Exactly, let's do the, the foundation first. Internet money, you know, metaverse money, whatever you wanna call it.

• 1:21:51David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I just remembered. Who said it the other day? And and you replied, shit, I'm on Twitter way too much. Oh, Selkis.

• 1:22:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it was Selkis. Right. Yeah.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Selkis finally says ETH is metaverse money. And I'm like, dude, ETH is just money, man. It's okay. Selkis, you can say it. It's all right.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  I still like the guy.

• 1:22:15David Hoffman?

  Oh, no, he's absolutely great.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Good conference.

• 1:22:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, everything he says about crypto is absolutely spot on. Until he starts talking about Ethereum and then is only so so.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Ah, oh, well.

• 1:22:30David Hoffman?

  Well, can't win them all.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:32David Hoffman?

  So Mariano, what's next for you, man?

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Um. What's next? I've I've been itching to just like go anon and put something out there.

• 1:22:47David Hoffman?

  Put your put your builder hat back on, but not let let anyone know?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Yes, and I was talking to a prominent founder in New York about the benefits of of going fully anon. And, you know, there were several things that they told me that I hadn't thought of. And and and it's not, you know, the the responsibility or or or the legal liability, even though, you know, that that's there. It's something else. It's like the being liberated.

• 1:23:25David Hoffman?

  From from judgment?

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and just being able to to build and release something without, you know, pre judgments and and people thinking ahead of your intentions.

• 1:23:38David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, you can't build anything these days without people coming and judging you.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:44David Hoffman?

  Like even when we released the the bankless Dow with the bank token, like. People judged for better or for worse. I mean, everyone that received the bank token was like, yay. And then there's a lot of people that were unrelated were like boo.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, um, totally. And everyone I talked to, and this person as well, it's like this, this shroud of anonymity feels good to them. And like I said, it's liberating, but not just, you know, as a builder. Uh, crypto Twitter as well, you know, that nobody has their actual face anymore. It's just like profile pictures. It's crypto punks and bored apes and whatever penguins and et cetera. Uh, wasis, I don't know. And there is something weird.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  I think people have become a bit more honest in what they say. And I don't know if you've seen this movie Hollow Man, you know, it's like the invisible man, whatever. And there's a line, I think he says something like, you wouldn't believe what you're capable of when you cannot look at yourself in the mirror. And I found myself saying shit that I might not have said, or just like written things that I might not have said if, you know, I'm seeing my picture there, like looking back at me, you know, my headshot. It's a, you know, with the glasses and hey, going to DevCon.

• 1:25:20David Hoffman?

  Do you know that some bars will put a mirror behind the bar so that customers have to see their own faces when they yell at the bartender?

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Right. And when they're like bitching about something, I was like, oh dude, like I'm doing that.

• 1:25:37David Hoffman?

  I look really ugly when I yell. Yeah.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's the exact same thing here. It's like you're looking at a, and.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  At some point, that picture is you, right? I mean, you have your punk back there. And now, when I see that, I see you. Like, I already, like, that punk, if I see, um, I'm scrolling and I see it, I know that it's you. And then if I, you know, sometimes I double check, it's like, okay, is this like a right click save?

• 1:26:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Whatever. But, you know, that is you, but it's also like a, you know, mask in front of you. And so is my punk. And I find myself typing and saying things that I might have been a little bit more restrained. And I think that the whole of crypto Twitter has done that. So hopefully, that's, that's making ourselves, you know, more honest through anonymity, if that's even possible. But yeah.

• 1:26:39David Hoffman?

  No, that, that definitely makes sense, for sure. Um, I was, my mental model is like, that's our metaverse self. And it's very appropriate that like, well, we're on this internet platform, web two or not, like, and now we have, instead of our faces, our digital representations, we want to be. And like, one of the, it's also worth noting that like, the face that you have, like, you didn't ask for that. You didn't choose that. You didn't sculpt that yourself. And so like, the soul that you have behind your face, it's actually a completely anomaly that of the relationship between the soul and the face, right? Those are two separate things.

• 1:27:14David Hoffman?

  So like, in the metaverse world, we're gonna slap on a brand new face and it's as much as real because we, at least we've chosen the digital representation. We chose that. I chose that CryptoPunk. I didn't choose my own face, though. So like, there is some sort of like, uh, natural resonance with like, when you put on a profile picture avatar. I will, I will say that like, a lot of my friends in my, my, uh, normie chat, they all got into penguins all at the same time and they all swapped out their profile pictures with penguins. And we all lost track of who was who. We could not recognize any of them.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember when when we were all penguins. It was like, who the fuck is this? I have no idea. And then you have to keep track. I don't know. For example, Alex Vanovic. Now he got, he really likes his penguin. I have to remember, okay, you know, the Viking Penguin. That's Alex. Okay. But there are people whose identity and yeah, I mean, I did choose my punk, but then I also kind of didn't. It's like I crap whatever floor punk was there at the time. But if I could have chosen one, I would have chosen one with maybe a couple more features, right? They're so expensive.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 1:28:38David Hoffman?

  So the answer of what's happening next for Mariano is spinning up an anon account and putting out some contracts somewhere?

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Yes, but then how the hell do you do it? It's like, do you tweet? Do I tweet from my account? It's like, oh, I just found out about this project.

• 1:28:56David Hoffman?

  I just aged into this contract. Come join me.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  From this completely anonymous person that is totally not me. I have no idea how to do it, but.

• 1:29:05David Hoffman?

  Right. You're gonna have to start from square one without the clout of Mariano Conti. You're gonna have to spin up a brand new identity that has no help from the actual human.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  I, you know, I met so many annons during the last three months.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  A few like big accounts and you meet them and they're people, right? They're people like us and it's like, they're anonymous and on Twitter and everything. But it's like, once you start meeting them, it's like, yeah, hey, I'm this person. Hey, I'm this person. But I never asked them how they got started.

• 1:29:44David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. How they got started as an anon? Yeah, I met I met G money in real life in New York. And I was like, I don't even know what the hell I was expecting, but I was like, oh, you're not a punk. I forgot. Like, that's crazy.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  You're not an ape.

• 1:30:01David Hoffman?

  With a mended cap. Yeah.

• 1:30:05David Hoffman?

  That'll be a great story to tell is the story of how Mariano's anon account became more followed than his actual human account. That'll be funny.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  No, if that starts happening, like I'll.

• 1:30:20David Hoffman?

  Docs yourself?

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Wait, this is me. This is me.

• 1:30:24David Hoffman?

  I swear to God, it's me.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Follow, follow my vein.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  No, but for sure. That is, that is what I want to do next. I, I seriously just want to come up with like a tiny, tiny, tiny project. Cause I actually produce a fair amount of code and I tweet about it and I tweet like stupid, like salutator snippets to do.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  You know, fun things like saying GM to a smart contract and. Not, if you don't say GM once a day, then transactions fail. And it's like, hey, grab this code and add it to your smart contract. So you need to say good morning or yeah, and stupid stuff like that. But I never end up, and I was talking to somebody else. Like a builder in the space and they were like, yeah, same thing. It's like, I produce a lot of code, but I'm not, you know, like the, the Andres or the Doms of the world. That they treat mainnet as a playground.

• 1:31:27David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  They build really quickly and they deploy. Like I build fairly quickly, but I don't deploy. It's like, when I get to that part, I become so middle of the curve, you know? That it's like, oh no, but maybe I should test it. And no, I don't like this. And yeah, the UI and, and then somebody else is like contract in 20 minutes. And it's like, here, use EtherScan, motherfucker.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  And I'm like, no, I cannot do that. That is, yeah.

• 1:32:00David Hoffman?

  That's gotta be the maker DNA in you.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:32:04David Hoffman?

  The conservative side, yeah. Well, Mariana, shall we wrap it up here?

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

• 1:32:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, I appreciate you.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Ninety minutes.

• 1:32:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not, not bad. Thank you for coming on while you are coming out of a cough from mainnet.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:18David Hoffman?

  Sorry if that was me that gave it to you.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  I, you know, have my, my mat as always and I'm glad that. You know, my, my throat was cooperative and thank you. Cause yeah, we've been trying to uh, record this for a few days now and uh, yeah.

• 1:32:35David Hoffman?

  Pulling it out for the last minute for listeners that are listening to this on Tuesday, we're recording this on Monday night. So not that we discuss anything timely, but uh, it is still extremely, extremely fresh.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, it is. And it's like, yeah, we're just, that's what I like about this. We're just carrying on a conversation that we started a couple of months ago.

• 1:32:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah. In Paris, literally in Paris. Yeah. I was like, oh, you told, you told me the story of uh, when you were wrapped up in the blankets under this fantastic new air conditioner that you had. And then your girlfriend came home and after a long day at work and saw you all cozy under the blankets. You've been like super hot all day and got super mad at you. It was like, hmm, we're going to talk about that on the roll up or not on layer zero.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Oh man. Yeah. And then we continued it over in like different continents, different cities and now here it's.

• 1:33:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I will say that that is, that is definitely something that I've noticed with you. But now that you actually named the thing is like, the conversations that you and I have all kind of seem like one, one seamless conversation. We just pick up the thread at random opportunities.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, no, that is exactly right. Are you going to Lisbon by the way?

• 1:33:47David Hoffman?

  No, I'm not. After all the traveling I've been doing, I specifically scheduled a podcast recording during Lisbon, so I couldn't go. So I will be home in, in San Diego during that time.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Ah, smart man. I might end up homing, but yeah, right now I'm leaning towards no.

• 1:34:04David Hoffman?

  Lucas, the editor at Bankless hit me up today. It's like, I just phoned him out into a one-way ticket to Lisbon. I'm like, well, bye.

• 1:34:13David Hoffman?

  And then eventually I'll see you in uh, go to Colombia, not, not uh, not Argentina for DevCon, but close enough. Maybe afterwards I'll come to Argentina.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  I, I know. I, I remember when I tweeted that, you know, gonna meme DevCon BA 2022 thinking like the people at the Ethereum Foundation. It's like, God damn it.

• 1:34:36David Hoffman?

  Mariano is doing it again.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  They responded from the official DevCon account is like, no, no, no.

• 1:34:46David Hoffman?

  No, we're squashing that meme right now.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52David Hoffman?

  It'll happen at some point in time. And when it does, it'll be glorious.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, I, I believe it. We're, we're gonna do something in Buenos Aires at some point.

• 1:35:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I will be absolutely there for the week before, the week during, and the week after, because it'll be fantastic.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Amazing. Yeah.

• 1:35:12David Hoffman?

  All right, Mariana, thank you, sir, for coming on Layer Zero and telling me your story.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, David. Take care.

• 1:35:18David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:35:19David Hoffman?

  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

• 1:36:02David 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.