From Web1 to Web3: Why Are We Here? | Matt Cutler

Matt Cutler is the founder of Blocknative and the combination of a fantastic storyteller and a fantastic data analyst. Blocknative is not his first company, It’s his fifth. Matt’s first company was an internet company that he started in the 90s well before the dot com boom and he founded a company in every major internet era since. In today’s Bankless Summit talk, we hear from Matt’s experience and wisdom so we can learn how the rise of blockchain technology contrasts with the rise of the Internet and why we are here in the first place. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/100?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:01 Internet Early Days 11:47 The Rise of Blockchains 19:21 Why Are We Here? 23:43 Gas Network 27:16 Fix the World 29:08 Questions ------ RESOURCES Matt Cutler https://x.com/mcutler Presentation Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YvfS-akFgE_tOPr-lAalyeztMtP94L4r/edit#slide=id.p1 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

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

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Welcome to the Bankless Summit, a series of talks from speakers all around the Ethereum ecosystem, which were all presented at a one-day event hosted the day after DevCon, called the Bankless Summit. We are releasing some of these talks on the podcast throughout all the week, and the rest will be available on the Bankless Premium feed. Matt Cutler is a combination of a fantastic storyteller and a fantastic data analyst. He is the founder of BlockNative, which dives deep into the Ethereum mempool and MEV layer. But this talk is a little bit more zoomed out from what people might be used to when hearing from Matt. BlockNative is not Matt's first company, or second, or third. It's his fifth. Matt's first company was an internet company that he started in the 90s, well before the dot-com boom, and he's founded a company in every major internet era since, including

• 0:48David Hoffman?

  the desktop and mobile eras, and now in crypto. So it's the least to say that Matt knows a thing or two about internet businesses. And so let's go hear from Matt's wisdom right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most-secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere, to trade crypto. Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your hundredth trade in just a few clicks. And there's an award-winning client support team available 24/7 to help you along the way. Along with a whole range of educational guides, articles, and videos. With products

• 1:33David Hoffman?

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• 2:16David Hoffman?

  gas swaps through Uniswap X. And when it comes to security, you can rest easy knowing it's backed by Uniswap Labs, one of the most trusted teams in DeFi. Their code is open source and independently reviewed, so you know it's protected. So why wait? Download the Uniswap Wallet today on Chrome, iOS, and Android. And don't forget to claim your free uni.eth username directly in the mobile wallet. Start swapping smarter with Uniswap. Tired of juggling multiple wallets and websites just to navigate Web 3? Meet Magic Eden, the home of Web 3. It is becoming a super DApp where you can do everything cross-chain all in one place. They're solving UX issues by building products across every chain ecosystem, swaps, borrowing and lending, NFTs, perps, and more, all seamlessly cross-chain. Instead of hopping between countless sites and handling multiple wallets,

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  just use Magic Eden. Save time and get to the meme coining faster. Plus, the ME token is coming out this quarter from the ME Foundation. If you've used any of their protocols, like the NFT platform, you can claim some. So check out Magic Eden today and watch them become a super DApp and the home of Web 3 in real time. You can get there at magiceden.io to get started.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Good afternoon, everyone. It's super fun to be here. And by Saturday of DevCon Week is your brain totally full? Like, this is going to be, DevCon is many things, but it's mostly right curve. And I tend to do right curve stuff. And I've been in a whole bunch of right curve things. And this is gonna be definitively left curve talk. Okay? So everyone can take a deep breath and relax and just sort of chill out and let it go. And I'm just gonna tell some stories about something that I have more than probably all of you in the room, maybe in the top two or three, which is years on this planet. Okay, so I am Matt. I'm founder and CEO of Block Nerd. We've been building largely

• 3:59Speaker 01

  in the Ethereum ecosystem for six and a half years now. But I started my journey, my entrepreneurial journey, when I was still an undergrad at school, long before it was fashionable to do internet companies, long before it was fashionable to do them as an undergrad. And one of the things that I've learned throughout my entrepreneurial journey is to You basically have this question of why are we here? Like, why are you doing it? Now, when I started to build this talk and talk to David about being here, basically, we were still kind of in a crab market. It was like, sort of going sideways. And I get this question all the time from my normie friends, which are most of my friends. Why are you building in crypto? Like, isn't that kind of scammy? And now that everything seems to be turning around,

• 4:43Speaker 01

  which is pretty exciting, you're gonna get the same question again. And so, I can't really answer this question for you, but I can answer this question for me, and I can share that with you. And hopefully, this will give you some tools, so that as you inevitably get this question, why are you in this ecosystem? Why are you here? You'll have some answers to that. So, this shows how old I am. This is me on my first day of college with my mom. This is 1991. Please don't raise your hand if you weren't born yet, okay? I'm standing in front of what's known as Lobby 10, which is the great dome at MIT where I was a freshman. And when I went to MIT, this is where we did our work. It's called an Athena cluster. It looked just like this. There were Unix workstations.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  They were CRT monitors. When I first got there, there were only black and white ones. The color of this, that you saw here, was sort of a newer thing. And, I don't know, you went to MIT. There were computers. Your classwork was on them. You could do all sorts of cool stuff. You could message your friends. You had email. You could talk to people at other schools. There were games. And like, we literally did not know any better. Oh, they also all had high-speed ethernet connections, okay? Had no idea. It turned out, this is the internet. We're like, huh. And this is this new networking thing that basically allows these computers to talk to each other. And we didn't really think much about it, even though, this is true, MIT has a Class A subnet.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  What that means is, in the IP address range, 18 dots, that's entirely MIT, okay? Stanford has a Class A subnet. Xerox PARC has a Class A subnet. And so, this is this whole thing about, hey, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And I happened to be at MIT at the moment where I had among the best internet access in the entire world, and of course, we all kind of took it for granted. Now, this is what it looked like, the interesting part of the internet. Not the interesting part, the accessible part of the internet when I first got to school, and this is known as Gopher. I would doubt that anyone here has ever used Gopher, but it was a text-based protocol. I think I just saw a hand raised.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're a Gopher user, awesome. And Gopher was like relatively usable, but entirely text-based. This is the best image I could find of Gopher. My version wasn't on, this is a DOS font, mine wasn't on a Unix font, but you could kind of like navigate through it and you're like, mm, okay, right? But while I was at school, I went to school in 1991, in 1994, this thing dropped, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. This is the Mosaic browser, and I was on the Mosaic browser really early in its life cycle, and it kind of changed everything. Now, a little side note, the Mosaic browser was done by Mark Andreessen's team at the

• 7:35Speaker 01

  University of Illinois, and it was based on this brand-new protocol called the Worldwide Web, which was Tim Berners-Lee, who, I was gonna say, do you even guys know who Tim Berners-Lee is? He's like the father of the web, and I happened to get lost coming up here, so instead of coming up the escalator off the BTS, I wandered around downstairs, and there's a freaking shrine to Tim Berners-Lee down there, which I highly recommend checking out. And Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN, the European Particle Accelerator, and he was building this protocol to enable new forms of communication and collaboration among the researchers. Because he realized CERN was generating so much data that using traditional tools,

• 8:19Speaker 01

  like email, like research papers, would be insufficient for them to convey the information with significant speed and fidelity, and they actually needed whole new communications protocols, right? Is this starting to sound familiar to you? Because it is. This is, this history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And when I was at MIT, this website called Yahoo came out. By the way, at this point, me and a few friends started to build. And this is when I actually started my first company, was way back in 1994. And we were doing all sorts of this sort of stuff, but this was the original Yahoo. And by the way, this, I was able to dig this one out of the Web Design Museum, 1994. It's what it looked like. And you'll notice there's new websites popping up every single day.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  It was super exciting, but look at the website counts. They're still pretty small. I remember when they're even smaller than that. I remember when I was at MIT, I could read all of Usenet over lunch. Some days, it was like 15 minutes, right? And it kept growing and growing and growing. And this was this really fascinating phenomena that was like, if you were in the internet in 1994, this little teeny tiny speck, it was pretty obvious how the future was going to be. Because it was like way better than AOL or CompuServe or anything else. It was programmable, it was flexible, it was visual, it was point and click, and you could do weird stuff on it, right?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  But if you were outside the internet, which was everybody else, it wasn't at all obvious. It was not at all obvious that this funny little research network that connects these universities would be the future. And, you know, starting a company in 1994 on the internet, it sounds really romantic. But let me tell you, it sucked. And the reason why is because nobody really cared for a long time. The online world was growing, but it grew slowly, until it kind of popped on the scene in 1999. Which 1994 to 1999 doesn't seem like that big of a deal from our point of view right now, but it was five years.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Five years of building, and five years of building when I was 21 years old to 26 years old. It's a long time, okay? And so, hey, and then what happened? 2000, everything exploded, and we actually took that company public. At the time we went public, which by the way, February 29th, 2000, which was a funny day, leap year day 2000, we were one of the top 35 IPOs in history, which is crazy. And then it all fell apart shortly thereafter with the dot com boom. And now we live in this world where online used to be this place you could go. When it started, I could hold it in my hands. And today, it's someplace we escape. We have to go somewhere to get offline, right?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  To the edge, to the wilderness, to the wild where there's danger. And you go, you know why I like being way out here? Because there's no cell service. Because my toaster can't connect to the internet from out here, right? And so, this trend, this phenomenon, it seems somewhat inexorable, but it takes a long time to roll out. And what seems so sort of obvious and common sense today was not at all obvious and common sense in the beginning, okay? Now, you can probably see where this is going. Oh, I've done a whole bunch of startups. I've done a lot of tech startups, I've done a bunch of other startups, but I tend to be early in each one of these major revolutions,

• 11:57Speaker 01

  and they have different outcomes. Two of them, one I took public, two did not have great outcomes. The last one I sold, and now I'm going for the trifecta. I don't know if anyone's ever done this before, but take a company public, sell one to a public company, and exit the community with a token. So I'm going for that. We'll see if I can get all three together. And one of these things I want to say, by the way, is Matt still here? Matt, okay? I was you 30 years ago. When I started at Genesis, I was the youngest guy in the room, always. And it was really, really interesting. And now, as I said at the beginning, I'm one of the oldest guys in the room, right? Which is sort of an interesting thing to think about. And so, Matt, I really, really, really, really, really hope for you in 30 years,

• 12:41Speaker 01

  you can give this talk to a different audience, okay? And so, here we are, in the middle of this new rebirth of Web 3. And this is what it looked like when I started. Now, I got into Web 3 in 2017. And this is, believe it or not, the MetaMask interface from 2017. And it looks shockingly familiar to the one today, which is saying something. But it was really pretty lousy. MetaMask has come a long way. It was full of, at that time, all these phantom clicks. Like, you could click something, you'd get no feedback from the wallet. And it was actually doing something in the background. And there was all these sort of really gnarly UX issues. And at the time, what drew me in was this, CryptoKitties,

• 13:24Speaker 01

  which sort of seems old and funny right now, but it was one of the first sort of human, relatable things happening on Web 3. Now, what are some of the parallels that I observed? Now, when I first got on the Internet, it was hard. It was slow. It was complicated. And it was weird. But it was cool, right? And when I did this in 2007, it had all that same stuff. Now, I'll often tell this story. How did you get on? How do you imagine someone got online in 1995? Like, literally, one of your friends would have read an article in Wired Magazine or something else, he didn't really hear about it anywhere else. And they said, "I've heard about the Internet.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Can you help me get online?" And you'd say, "Why?" And they go, "I don't know, it sounds interesting." Say, "Great, we'll do it over the weekend." Because it basically takes a full day to do. Now, before I'm gonna come over to your house, you gotta go to the computer store in your car and get a piece of hardware called the modem, okay? "Oh, and by the way, you gotta figure that out because it's gonna plug into the wall, but it's also gonna plug into your phone line, and you might need to go to Radio Shack and get a long cable, okay?" Now, really fun fact about getting online in 1995 is Windows, which was the predominant operating system of the time, did not ship with a TCP/IP stack.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  So how the hell do you download a TCP IP stack if you don't have one in the first place? This was what we had to deal with then. So you had to even know what a TCP IP stack was, which I would argue there's people in this room who may not know what it is. And then you had to, so get online, get the thing, plug it in, configure it, find a TCP stack, download it, install it, know what a browser is, know where you could find one, download the browser and install that. And then, and only then, could you type in a URL to go to someplace interesting. And you know what people wanted to do? They wanted to go to the New York Times. No, they didn't want to do that at all.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And the reason is, the New York Times is readily accessible. You could get it on the newsstand, you could get it from AOL. They went on the internet to do weird shit, okay? They wanted all the stuff that you couldn't do anywhere else. And they're like, "I've heard some interesting weird stuff is there that I can't see." And you're like, "Oh, it might be dangerous." And you're like, "That's kind of the point."

• 15:44Speaker 01

  "I go to the frontier, I go to the wilderness because it's dangerous." "I don't want to go out on some trip way in the wilds of Thailand and go, 'Look, a squirrel.'" "I can see squirrels at home." "I want to see things I can't see anywhere else." And so, the same is true here in Web 3. "I have done this." "Hey, I want to get on, I want to get on chain, I want to get into crypto." "I'll come over for the weekend, I'll set you up, right?" "Do the whole thing, go back and forth, install a wallet, connect an account, set up an exchange, move some funds over, now what can I do?" "Hey, this is weird, that's why I'm here, it's the weird stuff, okay?" You don't go on chain to get access to your bank account.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Because you can only get access to your bank account. It's to do weird and different things that you can't do in other domains, with some thrill of danger. So by the way, I'll talk about this a little bit, but that's why meme coins are a big deal. It's like, "This is cool, I can't do it anywhere else," and it's kind of dangerous. I like it, right? So, I'm not here for the meme coins, but I kind of get the appeal of meme coins, because you can't get it anywhere else. So, by the way, we had this whole conversation in crypto about what's the mainstream application? I'm like, "Do the weird stuff first," right? Which we're kind of doing already, we're doing a lot of that, and we're mainstreaming as well. So, in 2017, the on-chain world was this tiny little thing, teeny tiny, could fit in my head. And I was like, "This is gonna be a great time to start a company."

• 17:10Speaker 01

  So, in 2018, we started BlockDoinb. And then, in 2019 and 2020, it kind of went a whole lot slower than the internet. And this is super frustrating. Why isn't it bigger? Why isn't it going further? Why isn't it going faster? And this tells us that, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. But one of the things I didn't really appreciate in the 90s was that the Clinton administration in the US took an aggressive anti-regulatory approach to the internet. All of us who are building never thought about the government, not at all. We thought about standards, and we thought about commerce, we thought about big, and all these sort of problems, but we didn't really talk about the government one bit.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Think about how much in Web3 we talk about the government. And it's because, particularly in the US, there's been this really aggressive regulatory policy that's incredibly suppressed the evolution of the industry there. And what does the US have? It has more capital than anyone else, it also has more software developers than anyone else. And so, right now, we're going through this interesting transition in the US, where we may be going from a very aggressively anti-crypto regulatory regime to a much more supportive regime. And I think that the whiplash that that's gonna create might be pretty interesting. So, the question is, when do we do that? And it's perfectly possible, and I would say probable, that this moment is right now.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  That we are at the very precipice of this, which will eventually lead to that. It's crazy to think about. But hey, just think about how much of the world today is off-chain that should be on-chain. And to me, as a technologist, as someone who's seen this stuff before, the trends are inevitable, it's just a matter of time. And the timeline that we're on has been artificially suppressed by the regulatory environment, and that timeline's about to get accelerated. And that's super fun. Not financial advice, do your own research, but we're in a really interesting spot, okay? So, why am I here? And this is what I tell my normie friends. That the global GDP, the amount of economic output in the whole world,

• 19:22Speaker 01

  is just under 110 trillion, and it's growing at 3.2% a year. This is the one that always knocks people out of their chair. The financial services sector is 33.5 trillion. Or 31% of the global economy and growing twice as fast. Everyone I've ever told that stat to is like, wow, that's way bigger than I thought. I go, isn't it fascinating that 30% of the money goes to the money? That seems like a big opportunity for like, I don't know, a new class of technology to make it a lot more efficient? And to free up existing GDP to solve new problems?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  And so, my proposal, oh, this is, this is, don't take my word for it. This is the CEO of Robinhood shortly after their earnings. "It costs us roughly an order of magnitude less to operate a cryptocurrency business and offer the exchange of assets than it does on the TradFi side. That advantage is undeniable." How is it possible to do it an order of magnitude cheaper? It's because we're using next-gen technology, right? Just like the exchange of information over TCP/IP and world wide web protocols was massively more efficient, like, this is happening. And so, like, let's make financial services efficient again. By the way, not a great acronym.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And if, let's just, for the sake of argument, say we can make it 50% more efficient, we can free up 16 trillion of existing GDP. That's 16 trillion of existing economic output per year.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  It's an unfathomably large sum of money. We don't need to grow our way into it, it's right here in front of us. And using the sorts of things that we're talking about all week at DevCon, I think we can get there. And what could we use that for? I don't know. Scale up carbon sequestration, of which there's been a whole lot of innovation around that, but it's gonna need a ton of capital to get it to be big. We can really accelerate fusion, which by the way, free energy, no emissions, changes the world. We can ensure line AGI, so don't get destroyed by artificial intelligence. We can even build sustainable off-planet habitats. And we can build meme coins too. And so when I look at this and I think about, "Why am I here?" My answer is really simple. It's to fix the world.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  So when people ask me, "Why are you in crypto?" I say, "To fix the world." Okay? To free up the economic resources so that the next generation can scale up these technologies so we can solve our challenges. Now, I have three kids. Two of my kids are in college. And they have grown up in an environment which tells them, "They're screwed." "The world is ending." "Climate change is awful, their income is..." Like, it's so frustrating for me as a parent, how they're told that they have no hope. And they deal with depression as a result. And I go, "Look, look, I'll be honest with you. The challenges facing our society are real."

• 22:32Speaker 01

  But when I was growing up, you know what I was worried about? Global thermal nuclear war. How often do you think about that, kids? Like, "Hmm, not at all." And you know when I was in college, you know what I thought about? The HIV/AIDS epidemic. I was terrified of dying by having sex. Because if you got it, it was a death sentence. How much do you think about HIV, kids? Not at all. You go, "Huh, these are massive, massive global societal problems that prior generations faced and solved through technology." So guess what? These challenges facing you, your opportunity, your challenge, your obligation is to face them with optimism

• 23:17Speaker 01

  and to innovate your way out of these challenges. I'm not saying they're not easy. I mean, I'm not saying they're not real. But guess what? Every generation deals with its own existential crisis. These happen to be yours. My participation in this ecosystem is to help free up the economic resources so that those challenges can actually be tackled. And you know what? I'm pretty optimistic about it. And I hope you are too. And I hope you pass that around. Okay, so that's why I'm here. Now, I'm gonna shift gears a little bit. And the title of this talk is "Next Gen Architectures: Next End Challenges." And there's sexy problems out there and less sexy problems. And as you're thinking about building, I want to encourage you to not just think about the big headline sexy ones,

• 24:00Speaker 01

  but there's a universe of less sexy ones. Little interesting things that require attention if we're in fact going to build the foundation of the next economy. And there's been one that's been mentioned a bunch of times on stage here, which I'm always excited about when I hear, which is one that everybody kind of glances over. And in fact, Osgar, who's a buddy of mine, said it's not that big of a deal. And that's gas. Gas. Doesn't even sound sexy. But you know, there's sort of

• 24:29Speaker 01

  a shocking amount of money that's spent on gas. So we looked up online how much is spent on Web 3 fees in the past year, and we found nothing. Which was kind of surprising to me. We did our own on-chain research. And we're pretty confident the actual number spent on Web 3 fees in the past 12 months is 5.2 billion. Another number that everybody is surprised by when I share. And the easy way to think about it is every 100,000 ETH that gets burned at $3,000 ETH is about 1.2 billion of fees. Okay? So ETH is more than half of all the Web 3 fees, but obviously, there's a lot more out there. And you know, there's sort of three guarantees in life now. Death, taxes, and Web 3 fees. You can't get, you can't escape them.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  And so, when we're thinking about what to build... Build, what to make a utility of, as Arjun said. We think that there's a whole bunch of opportunity around this. And by the way, at Block Natives, I've been building for six and a half years. I am oftentimes challenged to build the right way, the new way, the modern way. And Arjun said it really, really well, which is build protocols, not products. And so we see this really interesting set of opportunities around gas as growing in complexity. Matt talked about this. Gas was one dimensional and then it became two dimensional in 1559 and now it's three dimensional in 4844. And right now it's about to get four dimensional with preconfirmations. And as we look ahead to Pectra, it's going to get multi-dimensional and that's just Ethereum alone.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And all this stuff is going to need to get navigated in an increasingly interoperable world. And so we're trying to do something about it. This is the first time it's ever been talked about publicly. We're introducing the gas network, okay? And the whole idea of the gas network is take the gas markets and put them on chain. And so it's basically an oracle platform. That you can basically get the real-time market conditions from any chain to any chain. And by the way, if you want to check this out, gas.network is the URL. We're really proud of that one. And I talk about this in the context of this whole big picture. Because while there are these big opportunities going on out there, there's also a lot of small work that needs to get done. And so as you're building, as you're looking for opportunities, as you're looking for investment ideas.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  A lot of this sort of under the covers, unsexy stuff is going to need to get addressed. And there's a ton to do. There's a ton to do. And so we think this is necessary stuff for on-chain interoperability. And we're at dev net now, we're at test set soon, and we really want feedback on this. And so as we think about the big picture and why we're here. I also encourage everyone to think about the problems to solve. Down the line, we'll do things like a foundation, we'll be labs and a shared governance model. I'll go through that. So that was my. Extended journey from Web 1.0 to Web 3.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  And I think the opportunity in front of us is to fix the world in ways large and small. By the way, when I say fix the world, I don't just mean fix the world technically. I also think we have the opportunity to fix the world emotionally. Give everybody hope. I think we have the opportunity to fix the world philosophically. Get rid of some of the challenges that I think we're seeing around the world that have a better, more constructive way to talk to each other and have disagreements and coordinate and collaborate. So there's so much opportunity inside this ecosystem. And I think the best of this ecosystem is present here at DevCon and present here in this room at Bankless Summit. I think the fact that all of you are here in this room with me would suggest you're

• 28:09Speaker 01

  on the leading edge of this, which, congratulations, welcome, we're happy to have you here. And I would encourage you, if this sort of resonates with you, if this is left curve enough for you, to try to share this some of ideas and these sorts of vibes with people outside. Because we do have a massive PR problem. We do have a lot of people who've been indoctrinated by mainstream media that this group is just a bunch of grifters, just a bunch of scammers, just a bunch of way to rob you and be greedy and not want regulation. And what's so frustrating for me is it couldn't be further from the truth that that's what's going on here, but we got to get the word out about that. And I want to thank David and Ryan for being among the leading edge of that.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  It's really true, Bankless does make a huge difference. And that's why I'm here. So, thanks so much. Really a pleasure to be here.

• 29:08David Hoffman?

  All right, questions? Anyone got a question? For Matt. Question for Matt.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Hey Matt, thank you for the talk and the history.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Quick question, how do you know the fact that the 2000 explosion of the internet after five years and while we're here since a bit more than five years, not that yet. My intuition is that money scares people, right? Because when I remember when I connected to the internet, it was to steal MP3s and movies and I couldn't, I could only win and scammers and blah blah blah, I can also lose. So how do you imagine that making a break or making it not accelerating? Because the newcomers can understand that they get something to lose connecting to this new network.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  If I had the answer to that, I probably wouldn't be here speaking to you guys, first off. But I will say something, so what changed in 1999? Like, it's a really worthwhile question. Like, what was the thing? Like, was there some new piece of tech, some new piece of innovation, some fundamental change? And the honest answer is, I'm not entirely sure, but from my experience as a builder, one bit flipped. And that was the corporations in the US went from not knowing about, not caring or fearing about the internet to saying, if we don't have a strategy here, if we're not on this, we're screwed. And it was literally, you could feel the ground shift.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  It started in 1998, but it really catalyzed the 1999 where just all the businesses decided all at once, they had to go online. It was a crazy time of just how many people got involved, how much money got involved, how much sort of crazy ideas got tested out as people tried to pursue things. And I believe we're on the cusp of that right now in the US with the financial services industry because they're super competitive about taking profits, right? So there's about this massive unimaginable flood of capital, which is in the US right now that's been on the sidelines, which they all see, oh, there's this new frontier opening up and they're going to race in. And when they race in, the developers are going to follow. Follow them and that's going to catalyze a whole bunch of positive activity.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  And so as much as we have, I would argue, a little bit of a complex relationship with the corporate world in Web 3, they have tremendous power. By the way, the way that you'll know this is happening is all the mainstream media will suddenly flip bits. They'll start talking about it the right way. Hey, the crypto industry has been, uh, has always been asking for clear regulations. And now they're finally getting it. And now that the government is providing clear regulations, look at the innovations that that's unfolding. And so, uh, I believe that we're near this tipping point for our industry. I'll be back here next year if they're going to have me back. Um, and we can talk about that. But that, the, the corporations tend to think in somewhat group think.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  And the worst thing as a leading public company is to get left behind. And to be told your CEO is not innovative enough and your stock is tanking when your competitor is taking off. And so to me, that's what changed in 1999. That's where we're not yet, but we may be on the cusp of. That is your question? Great.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Any other questions?

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Cool. Let's give Matt a round of applause, everyone. Thanks, everybody.

• 32:35David Hoffman?

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