What Happens Next in Crypto? with Fiskantes & Matti

Fiskantes and Matti of Zee Prime Capital join us to share a glimpse of their collective crystal ball into the future of crypto. How does our industry go from bear to bull market again and what does the future of the space look like? Fiskantes and Matti have the answers. ------ Galxe | Explore Crypto’s #1 Credential Network https://bankless.cc/Galxe ------ SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ ️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger ️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:30 Are We Lost Right Now? 10:36 What Era Does This Feel Like? 17:25 Product Market Fit 23:25 Narrativeless For Now 28:02 Macro 38:00 Are Tokens Dead? 46:50 Bitcoin 54:31 Bear to Bull Market Theories 59:17 Actual DeFi 2.0 1:02:49 Web3 E-Commerce 1:07:48 Tokenizing IP 1:11:16 Web3 Social 1:16:00 Best Advice 1:22:12 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Fiskantes https://twitter.com/Fiskantes Matti https://twitter.com/mattigags Matti's Article https://wrongalot.substack.com/p/the-next-big-crypto-narrative ----- 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.

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

• 0:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation, exciting topic for you today. The next big crypto narrative. Where is it? What is it? Have we lost the plot? Where's crypto going next? That's what we're going to talk about today. This is a fireside conversation format with Matty and Fisk. These are two of my favorite investors in the DeFi space, working at an organization called Z Prime Capital. And we're all going to have a round table conversation on what is next. David, what are you excited about getting into in this episode?

• 0:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, crypto runs on narratives, right? As we know, and even when those narratives are very real and very based on fundamentals, sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. We still have narratives no matter what. And I think post-merge, everyone feels a little bit lost. Like we've run out of roadway. Like what is the next narrative? Because all we can really see right now is just a bunch of macro, bad weather. And that's not a narrative. That's scary. And so while we are like going through this bear market together, we're looking, we're searching for what is the next big narrative? And I actually did a Layer Zero with Fiskanties forever ago that was on like the rotating narratives of the crypto space.

• 1:15David Hoffman?

  And so Matty and Fisk are just two of the best people to talk to about this kind of conversation as to where is? Where is the narrative? Because we need one. Without one, we feel lost. And so I'm excited for all of this. And you're muted, right?

• 1:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, before we get into the episode, I want to tell you about our friends and sponsors at Galaxy, because they're inviting you during this crypto bear market to take an adventure with them into crypto and also get rewarded. This is almost like gamified crypto learning, which I really love, David. I know both you and I are like big gamers back in the day. I don't have as much time for it because crypto has become my real life video game.

• 1:55David Hoffman?

  It's the game, yeah.

• 1:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because I can win like real coins rather than just like. You know, gold in a world of Warcraft. But anyway, what Galaxy is, is an epic way. They call it learn to earn to level up on crypto. There are these things called campaigns, which are like task-based things that you do in crypto that different protocols and organizations sponsor, and you could do these things and get rewarded. I'm going to show a few screenshots of this, David. Maybe you could say a few more things about Galaxy.

• 2:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Galaxy, it's basically a passport for you to collect a bunch of digital credentials that show that you did something in the metaverse. And so there's a bunch of, we use the frontier terminology here at Bankless. There's a bunch of things for you to do, campaigns to go on the frontier and explore the metaverse. And Galaxy gives you little credentials for having proven that you have done such things. Optimism quests, of course, is also one of these things that you could go do. So you go and you sign up for Galaxy, you get your little Web3 passport, you go on some campaigns, you get some credentials, and you prove to the world and yourself that you are a pioneer. And you can do that all with Galaxy. There's a link in the show notes to get started.

• 3:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  What I love about this is it takes you through all sorts of different chains, too. There's like 10 different chains supported, David. So definitely a lot to explore. And once again, click the link in the show notes and you can start the Odyssey. You could start diving into what Galaxy has to offer. All right, David, one last question before we get into the episode with our guest today is, what should people be looking for out of this episode?

• 3:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we're of course going to talk about the various new possible narratives that could come about. And we should all be dubious as to when we propose narratives, right? Because no one proposes the narrative, a narrative finds you.

• 3:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like a hypothesis.

• 3:48David Hoffman?

  It's a hypothesis, right. And some narratives are going to resonate with you, the individual, the listener, more than others. Some might be your narratives, the things that you really care about, and others might not be so interesting to you. Like, are you a frontier, ZK rollup, low transaction fee DeFi person? That might be, that might be an interesting narrative to you that's different from like the tokenization of IP from the NFT side of things. So what narratives are possible narratives around the horizon seem likely and also resonate with you, I think is something to consider.

• 4:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, for me, it's not just what resonates with me. I want to know actually what resonates with the market because I want to plan my like investment decisions. And so at some level, like if it resonates with me, that's okay, but that's not necessarily the signal, right? And sometimes I can get diluted by that. So I want to find out what the Z prime folks think about this bear market, how we're going to tap into the next market validated narrative and what the fundamentals are behind that. So let's look for that as well. Guys, we'll be right back talking about the next big crypto narrative. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 4:58David Hoffman?

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• 5:39David Hoffman?

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• 6:23David Hoffman?

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• 7:05David Hoffman?

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• 7:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back talking about the next big crypto narrative. Are we lost? Is the big question for today answered hopefully by the four of us. Matty and Fiskantes are partners at Z Prime Capital. This is a hedge fund VC firm in crypto. I respect a lot of the ideas that these two put forth. They have kind of independent ways of looking at things. I can't really pin them down into a specific crypto tribe, but I do know they are crypto bulls to the max and they've got great head on their shoulders when thinking about this space. Matty recently wrote a post called the next big crypto narrative. I think we're going to draw a lot of inspiration from that post as we talk about what the next big crypto narrative might be.

• 8:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Matty, Fiskantes, welcome to Bankless.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Hello, happy to be here.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  How's it going guys?

• 8:25David Hoffman?

  And for the YouTube viewers out there, we have two Anons here, so we have their profile pictures instead of their actual video cameras. And so Matty is the ghost from Pac-Man and Fiskanties is the... What character is that, Fiskanties?

• 8:42Speaker 02

  It's Hisoka from Hunter x Hunter, this psychopathic Joker magician character, but I added, I mean, not me, but some artist on Twitter added a beard to it. So I'm kind of making it my own and stealing this character.

• 8:59David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. Well, Fiskanties is in the top right, Matty is in the bottom left. And so now you know.

• 9:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that was Fiskanties' voice just now. But let's kick this off with the first question. Maybe I'll throw it to you, Matty, because you wrote the post. Are we lost right now?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say that we're necessarily lost. I think that we're just hitting like a, you know, peak reset.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  As opposing to the, you know, opposing to the peak ape or peak imitation that we had. And I think it could feel like that, but I think it's time to, you know, we're now dismissing the old ideas and we're sort of acknowledging that imitation took place. And we do our little witch hunt, you know, Doe and the whole Theratings, Sue and Kyle and whatnot. And now we're heading into, you know, this peak idea, this version, or at least we should head there. So some novel concepts should be tried. And because of that, you know, it may feel like we're lost, but you know, being lost because forking Olympus Dow and dumping on retail don't work, it's, you know, it's not really being lost.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  I think that old concepts, you know, have been banished now. People don't think those will work. And now the ideas will not come from the masses, from the chatter, but from within the founders. And I think that only those really meaning will stick around and build solutions to the real problem. So we we're looking for ideas, I would say, right now. So we're not lost.

• 10:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that, you know, I probably felt the the bear market creep in, obviously, after the, you know, Terra Luna crash and fiasco. And I was like, OK, we're entering. This is something new, right? You know, something's been burstier. And then we had three hours capital, etc., right into the summer. But I think the maybe the longevity of this potential bear market probably hit me post Ethereum merge because it did feel like throughout the summer, at least, we had this one catalyst, which was Ethereum's going to merge. And maybe something could even even though the the macro clouds in the sky are very, very stormy, like there is this bright spot of the Ethereum merge. And now that we've had that, right? I mean, we have other things. We have like the ZK

• 11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  EVM coming out. There are other developments and such. But like the theory merge didn't really move the market at all. And that after merge, where I saw prices still down, like ETH off $500 from what it was even like pre merge, that's when I feel like I fully capitulated into the length of time of this bear market. And I'm wondering, Matty, to you, because I know you've been in crypto for a while. What does this feel like? Are there any analogs from the past? Is this like 2018 to you? Is this like 2019? Is this a whole different thing that we've never felt before? When have you last felt like this about crypto?

• 12:04Speaker 03

  No, to me, it feels familiar. I would say if I would map it to a year in the past, it would be 2018, for sure. And yeah, I remember back then. I mean, it's funny, I and I wrote about it. It's, you know, the merge narrative and everything like we're trying, we're begging the market to recognize the fundamentals where we were happy to ignore them all the way through through the bull. So to me, to me and to us at Z Prime, we're, we're, yeah, it's very familiar territory. And I think that we need to feel the pain a little. Everyone in the space can remind ourselves, you know, that we need to build

• 12:47Speaker 03

  More things and more useful things. Um, and yeah, I guess it's a, it's a, it's a good reminder. But I don't think this is a new, new, new territory for us. I mean, it's always new, right? Like the more change, the more the world changes, the more it remains the same. So I guess that um, all the cycles are in some way different. In some way, they are the same on the top and at the bottom as well. So no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that, um, you know, that this is, you know, the macro looks scary, but you know, there's always. There are always things that, um, you know, make you go sort of very pessimistic. But um, I, I wouldn't say that this is something that these are uncharted waters.

• 13:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fisk, what's your take on all of this? Uh, what does this feel like to you? It's, have you fully capitulated that this is a, a bear market? Is this like 2018? Have you, or is this different?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I wasn't fully present in crypto at that time, but to me, it feels a bit more like 2013 um, Antigox uh, crash. Because uh, in 2018, I don't really remember anything uh, that was like fundamental to uh, the market structure um, break. Right? We, we had like many ICOs popping up, but nothing really broke, like nothing big and important really broke. And in 2013, Antigox was the pillar that held Bitcoin together as a liquid and tradable asset. And in 2022, like this year, we uh, had three arrows and all decentralized entities borrowing uh, three arrows.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  And uh, maybe Luna partially as well, kind of as this like um, group of centralized entities that in a way held the market structure together in a sense, in a very toxic, unhealthy way, but still. Um, so like. Fundamentally, it feels a bit more like this sort of crisis of confidence in the market structure a bit more. But the good thing about this is that like DeFi held on well when it comes to like infrastructure and how it works, how it provides liquidity to the system. And we kind of, we were able to move on from this like pretty huge volatile couple of events quite fast.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Like, of course, there are still like things unfolding in many of the centralized entities, but like it feels like we are just like building on and moving on much faster than we did in two thousand thirteen or even two thousand eighteen. Like, we have, we speak to many founders who are definitely not lost and have very clear vision. I mean, many of them will probably be wrong about their vision, but they have it. They don't feel like, oh, I don't know what to build now, I just copied the other guy. I don't think this is the case. So a couple of these founders will be right and they will find the new gold vein, I would say. Yeah, I think the biggest differentiator is the level of macro pessimism.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we didn't have that in two thousand thirteen, we didn't have that in two thousand eighteen. We have it now with like Twitter regularly talking about risks of nuclear war and shit like that. So I guess this is, this is the new factor that kind of influences everything. And when it comes to merge, like that's kind of funny that it really worked out in the best possible way it could when it comes to the implementation of the tech site, but it's still dumped and I, I, I don't know, I kind of, I don't feel so jaded about it because it was some sort of very sell the news event. And I remember in bear market, even in two thousand eighteen, even good news were basically bad news.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  The only good news were no news in the bear market because everyone tries to sell the news and dumped and there is onto the other guy because everybody has fear and they want to accumulate cash. So I would say like merge, maybe as a narrative, a narrative sort of catalyst kind of failed, but as a fundamental improvement that we'll have. Huge impact on the price of it and maybe market in general. It will succeed, it will just need a bit more time. The same way as like Bitcoin halvings usually don't really just cause a huge pump right after it happens. But it kind of gradually, gradually accumulates this momentum and the reduced supply will kind of reflect in price over a longer period of time.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  That would be my take.

• 17:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Fisk, I really like you like pulling from past these two different bear market eras. And you know, I think I maybe gleaned something as you were talking from what you're saying. So you're saying this is a bit more like 2013 rather than 2018, right? And so 2013 was really the cause, the catalyst of the bear cycle. The reason was we had a major crypto bank blow up. That was Mt. Gox blew up. And you're kind of likening that, I would suppose, to all of the things that went on with Three Ours Capital and Celsius and Terra Luna, like stuff blew up in crypto in the same way. And so you think it's more like that. Now, 2018 to me was a bit more crisis of use case.

• 18:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we didn't have a central bank blow up, but the whole, we have one app and it's called the ICO. There was really no notion of DeFi at the time. There was this, I think, internal crisis of, does crypto actually have any use cases? Besides Bitcoin, you can hold it, but like this whole smart contract thing. It seems like the only thing smart contracts are doing, Ethereum is doing, is launching these worthless ICOs. And so we had a whole crisis of use case there. You're not seeing that crisis of use case right now, are you? Like, so, I mean, some people that are not as in-depth and not crypto bullish are standing back, looking at crypto from the outside, looking in it and still saying that

• 18:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  you guys aren't really producing any valuable real world apps. This thing you call DeFi is just a tiny sliver of niche. And by the way, regulators are probably going to shut that down. And then NFTs, what was that? Cool. You have JPEGs, like digital pictures of animals. By the way, they're down 99%. Are you sure that we're through the gauntlet of like having identified our actual use cases? Like, do we have product market fit this cycle? Or is this also still, you know, a 2018 style of crisis? Where we actually don't have enough useful real world apps?

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I'm not like 100% sure, but I feel, I don't know, orders of magnitude more confident that crypto has many possible use cases and is here to stay than I felt in 2018. Like in 2018, I was kind of jaded about it. I felt like, okay, there is Bitcoin. Maybe Bitcoin already proved that it makes some sense. It's like this permissionless thing you can send to people and store value in it somehow. And nobody can stop you from transacting with it. And everything else is maybe just like a toy for geeks, if anything. But right now, I don't really feel like it. I mean, it's the depth of crypto market. It's like really, yeah, everyone is jaded on Twitter and on-chain volumes are super low.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  But at the same time, we still see people, I don't know, trading on GMX. And of course, it's just a speculation, but people are trading on GMX instead of centralized exchanges more and more. We see still some people trying to play some games or collect some NFTs. Not because, not only because speculation, although granted, it's 95% of the use case, but also because they actually want to collect them and they want to either play this game or be part of this community of, I don't know, penguins and like, you know, share this sort of ownership tight identity with with others. I kind of feel that the use case is there.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  It just didn't reach the level of adoption that would really validate it in front of bigger skeptics. But yeah, I'm super optimistic about crypto's use case. Of course, prices are a bit different thing like, yeah. Um, vast majority of NFTs are worth zero. So even though they are now down 99%, they are still massively overvalued. And yeah, that's, that will be true for almost anything, but I don't know. I don't have any doubt in my head that crypto now has many possible use cases with potentially validated product market fit. It just needs us adoption on scale.

• 21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I think I agree with you, Fisk. And I want people, so a lot of people listening, they haven't been through those previous cycles, right? This is kind of like their first, you know, bear market. And I, I want people to realize, like, if you weren't here in 2018, 2018 really felt like we didn't have any apps. Like, there was no, we had no product market fit at the time. There was no such thing as DeFi at the time.

• 21:55David Hoffman?

  It was all theory.

• 21:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was all theory, and this is so much different. So in order to get kind of an accurate view of the crypto world, I think probably, at, you know, at least based on this conversation, kind of the most accurate model I can come up with is we've got some 2013, like a crypto banks just blew up. So we've got some of that going on. We've got a little bit of crisis of use case where we have to kind of go back and reset, double down on the things that are working, but like, let's discard kind of the, you know, the strange like Ponzi, former DeFi 2.0 things that weren't really DeFi 2.0 and kind of reset the clock a little bit. And then what's different about 2022 versus other crypto bear markets is we have macro.

• 22:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Macro is punching us in the face repeatedly. It was a little bit of this in 2018, but nowhere near what we see today. That to me is, is what our world looks like right now. David, you were gonna ask something.

• 22:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And Fisk, you said something that I want to like latch on to and hang around for a little bit where throughout 2018 to 2020. Like having a narrative wasn't actually like a good thing because it turned into a sell the news event because people just could not get into their psyche to be bullish. Uh, and so for like a while now, like you, you know, ether would bounce between a hundred and $300 bitcoin would do the same. And as soon as we got to $300, like it would just, people were like, okay, we're out and selling and it would go back down to a hundred dollars. And anytime we found something kind of like new to latch on to, it seemed to, it seemed to do that. And so I'm wondering, and Matty, I want your thoughts on this too. Maybe perhaps for a while it's good that we don't have a narrative, maybe we should be okay.

• 23:35David Hoffman?

  It feels, it kind of feels like mindfulness meditation a little bit for the industry as a whole is like, hey, let's all be okay with not having a narrative. Like let's see what happens in a void and, and spend some time here narrativeless while we do some soul searching. That kind of seems like a healthier way for a bear market to progress for all the market participants. Matty, Matty, what do you think about this?

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that one thing that we have forgotten um is that uh, you know, the dot com bubble burst. Which I mean crypto wasn't around, but um, I think it's, you know, the crisis of use cases and the macro backlash that was definitely there. Also the world, world was on fire in, in 2001 after nine 11. So that could be also a, a nice analogy. And yes, it took a while for um, you know, that too to emerge after, after the compress. So um, I think that um, we have, you know, many instances uh, in the history that are now sort of, we're trying to uh, kind of project it onto the future or onto the current market.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  And, and I agree with the fact that uh, we need some, we need to pause and we need to, as I said earlier, we need people to come up with, you know, better ideas, better applications, better product market fit. And I definitely see a crisis of use case and and you know, we said in 2018, there wasn't the fact, well, there was Maker, right? And it was under pressure at the end of 2018 when when each was crashing. I think that there were some huge liquidation back then. It wasn't that much in terms of absolute numbers, but it was like 10% of the dive volume or something like that, right? So it's, I think that everything is happening at the same time right now, whether

• 25:22Speaker 03

  it's 2013, 2000, or 2001, and also 2018. And we need, we definitely need to, to take a break to sort of consolidate our applications, our use cases. And we shouldn't, yeah, we definitely need some time. We shouldn't rush it. And those expecting a quick turnaround, I think it's just hopium. We need at least, you know, two years or something to go back to the drawing board and improve on what we have already. And then even the old concepts will be power charged by that.

• 25:58David Hoffman?

  Two years?

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:01David Hoffman?

  I mean, is that, is that a number that you just kind of threw out there? Or is that, is that like something that you kind of thought, have thought about?

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how I feel. I mean, it's, I mean,

• 26:10David Hoffman?

  Two years, starting from when?

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Um, I don't know. If this is, if we just do it in a very, you know, like one potato, two potato method, if this is 2018, map it to the day, to the month, then we got, we got two more years to go. And I, you know, I'm okay with three more years. So,

• 26:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, I just want to talk about, just really quick on the years, though, okay? So like, two years. Are you also like, are you sure that's not crypto hopium? I mean, I just, you just went back to like the, the 2000 crash, right? And then we had 9/11 after that, okay? Amazon lost 95% of its value after the dot com crash, 95% down. And it took seven years till 2008 for it to reach all time high.

• 27:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but that's normal markets.

• 27:04David Hoffman?

  Crypto moves faster.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I said at least two years. So that's, um, yeah, it's, it's funny that we're also dependent on the, on the macro. But I also think that we, um, in crypto, we're sort of even, even worse in terms of than, than, than, than traditional finance people in terms of uh, being, being buried and being sort of, um, just apocalyptic thinking and whatnot because we inherently don't trust the markets, as in, you know, the traditional markets, the central banks and whatnot. And when we see this, the things are not going that well.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  We're immediately in overdrive saying, oh, this is going to hell. Like we're done. Um, the system will collapse. And, uh, so maybe, maybe we should, uh, um, we shouldn't be that pessimistic and we should, uh, think about better apps.

• 28:02David Hoffman?

  So the, the one narrative that people have latched on to is the Fed pivot, which is an external narrative. That's something that is outside of the control of the crypto industry. It's not something we're innovating on. It's not some sort of new crypto frontier. It's the macro and we are just hoping for the Fed to pivot. And I think people are, are kind of placing their bets as like, all right, when the Fed does pivot, which, which assets are going to like rocket out of that bear market once the Fed has formally pivoted. But that's really the seemingly like large looming like catalyst or narrative of a catalyst that we, we have.

• 28:42David Hoffman?

  And it is the macro. And so Fisk, I'll throw this one to you and Matty, I want your thoughts on it too. Is like, is it even possible to have a internally native crypto narrative while macro is so overwhelmingly loud? Like, does, is this, is this silence of the crypto narrative here until macro smooths over and we stop being at war?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  I definitely think it's possible and I also think that we even today we have some crypto narratives, but they are not narratives that move the prices, they are, these are the narratives that kind of make us argue or agree on what crypto is about. Like currently, I would say, um, one of the dominant narratives in crypto is this uh OFAC sanction list and censorship connected to it. And it's a narrative that probably won't move the price directly in the next couple of months, but it can have huge impact uh on markets, on how crypto works and potentially on prices too, in general, in like next two years or more, as Matty said.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Um, so I think that we just deal with different types of narratives, narratives that make us care more, but don't make us as rich as fast. Um, that being said, like, it's funny with Fed pivot and all of that, how for the last 10 years, mostly Bitcoin maximalists, but also crypto enthusiasts in general, uh, kind of were betting on Fed not doing any pivot or anything, just like failing. They were betting on Fed failing, they were betting on uh US dollar, let's say, losing its global uh power and crypto kind of replacing that. I mean, it, in retrospect, this idea, ideal feels a bit maybe like childish or naive.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  At the same time, I still kind of feel that there is a slight chance uh that in longer time horizon, maybe like one or two decades, we will see dollar not re, you know, kind of being as strong as it is today uh like in uh in the global scene. So that, that's for me is probably more interesting question. The less interesting question is what Fed will do in next one, two, three months or even a year, because that's kind of predictable, they will keep uh um curbing inflation until the economy is hurting too much and then they will switch. That's like, they will tell you the sky is blue and you look up and the sky is really blue and you still try to figure out if they are not lying. It's uh, it's pretty obvious.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  It's pretty obvious what they try to do, what they will kind of try to influence, but it's not obvious what else will happen that will have probably bigger impact on the market. And one of the questions is like, what will happen with geopolitical situation in Asia and Russia and Ukraine? What will happen with US dollar in this world where many big countries are no longer so happy to to hold its reserves in dollar? You know, these these kinds of questions are probably much more impactful, but their certainty is much lower than what Fed will do. And of course, when Fed decides to stop curbing inflation and start printing more money, we are going up. And that's not really an interesting question to me or like topic of debate.

• 32:05David Hoffman?

  Matty, you have any thoughts on this?

• 32:07Speaker 03

  What was the original question? I got lost when Hiski was speaking.

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  Does crypto, do we even need to be bothered with producing our own narratives while macro is just so overwhelmingly in the driver seat?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Well, I think that one potential narrative, but it's a macro narrative is for the longest time, we have been talking about uncorrelated asset class. And then after 2020, we're like, yeah, this is this is very much correlated. And you know, if you if you decouple, you will decouple in the downside, I think. Like when the markets are going down,

• 32:46Speaker 03

  you know, this is the time for crypto to shine. It's, I mean, this is not materialized, but if we if we're if we're able to

• 32:56Speaker 03

  to not fall further, if you know, the the markets fall down, then we have something that we can grab on to, and it's a it's a macro thing. But I think that

• 33:11Speaker 03

  From within, we need better ideas and we need better products. Even though it's hard to admit right now, because, you know, for us on the inside, it's all, you know, magic. But I think that we need to sort of have a more impact on normies. Like, what sort of good did crypto do to regular people outside of like giving them a four year for two months and then leaving them in debt? You know, we have to be more reflective about, you know, sort of what we bring to the world as an industry. And that's why we shouldn't even care whether macro is doing well or not.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Because on one hand, this should be the time, you know, when the times are rough, you should come up with the greatest idea and then, you know, change it. Right? We should come up with an idea that will not make us care about macro at all. All this macro talk is kind of making me feel a bit worried that we lost our independence, right? There was this meme circling around, you know, this meme where the guy is talking to the monkey? And it's like, you're such a dumb animal?

• 34:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, yes.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  And there was one when the monkey was like, you're waiting for the Fed to tell you how much value your anti-establishment digital currency will lose, right? This is not that good. And, you know, people are saying that they're not worried about crypto that much compared to 2018. Right? Because there's so much money in the space, there's so many developers and whatnot. And actually, that makes me worried more because back then we were under pressure to create. Now we're kind of complacent.

• 35:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  You still think we're complacent?

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I think we're complacent. Maybe I'm just, you know, being too hard on the industry. But yeah, I do think that we need to. Create sort of more than we do.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  And you know, I, I, I feel that it's getting better now than, than, you know, a couple of months ago, because people are suddenly having new ideas because the old ones don't work. But yeah, even though it's funny, because when I, when I speak to people from traditional finance that are now say invested in crypto or had been following crypto, they're like, yeah, crypto is who just like 2018, they were like, crypto is gone, like this is not doing anything. Now they're, they're optimistic about crypto. You even hear guys like, like Druck, right, Stanley Druck and Miller talking about this. Well, I'm more concerned.

• 36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're more concerned than Stanley Druck and Miller is about crypto's longevity?

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Not necessarily longevity, because we have like the high level use cases, but maybe those really functional applications that, that, that tree that we're talking about, like that is something that sort of, I, I need to see more from people. I want to see more creativity on the founder's side. I want to see totally new application because I, I remember 2017, 2018, even 2017, like people were, even though, you know, those ideas were crazy because we didn't even have a tech to kind of support that. But these days it was, you know, kind of, you know, very much sort of, I would say self referential

• 36:51Speaker 03

  token feedback loops that kind of make you feel like, you know, this is value being created. But was it, you know?

• 36:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think you brought to light another thing in my mind, Matty, as you're talking about, that's a differentiator from 2018. And this is interesting because I'd not thought about it in this way before. But in 2018, I think builders, particularly DeFi builders, were hungry.

• 37:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot hungrier maybe than they they are now. Like the depths of of that bear market was just like, you know, Hayden Adams and Uniswap couldn't fund a team. He got a grant for like 80,000, 120,000. It was 10,000 at first from the Ethereum Foundation, right? It was just him hacking away, hungry to prove out an idea. I I still think the the private markets, like the VC money is definitely flowing into early-stage projects. And you're right, I don't actually, I've never thought about this, but I don't actually see quite the quite the hunger. Um, let me ask you one other thing before we uh, we do want to get to the the bright spots here and what the future narratives might be. And I know you've got a lot of thoughts on that, the two of you do.

• 37:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, but but one question I had for you is just a particular asset, which is the token, call it the DeFi token. Um, that has gone from troughs of disillusionment to like peaks of euphoria, hasn't it? Um, I remember in 2018, tokens are dead. They're all futility tokens. Nobody buy a token. Well, it turned out that was probably among the best times in crypto history to ever buy a particular set of tokens. Synthetix, Link came out of that world um with massive highs. Once again, it it feels like people are fading tokens. And I I see the reasons, right? Um, bad governance is killing tokens. There's no value accrual mechanisms.

• 38:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I even think regulatory has a massive effect on this. Uh, SEC regulatory threats. Now we've seen in the US anyway, the CFTC coming after DAO token holders in a particular way. Um, are tokens dead? What do you think about that? First, I'll throw it back to Matty and then maybe Fisk.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, I actually was, after 2018, I was, I called it token minimalist.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  I changed my mind after seeing Synthetix. I think that was a big breakthrough for me personally and for us as an investment firm too. So I don't think tokens are dead. I think that we went through an iteration cycle on tokens. Now we have much more information about, you know, what is, what is a good token or what might a good token look like. And I think that in the next couple of months, years, we'll come with better models because, you know, it has been mostly a user acquisition tool these days. And it's time to change it to Bacon,

• 39:56Speaker 03

  more of the value accrual perhaps and all of that. So I, I think that it's, it's going to get better. The tokens, the token models will only get better. And there's a next iteration cycle ahead of us. So tokens, I think, will, will stay here for, yeah, it's a new asset class.

• 40:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fisk, what's your take on tokens? We can have a round two.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, like bearish current model of governance tokens. That being said, most of the arguments you hear about them is that they are basically just placeholders for future sort of token value capture and kind of deflection of, of responsibility from devs to users to be able to say that the project is decentralized in the face of regulators, which, I mean, I'm not sure, I'm not a legal expert. I would also say that DeFi founders in general are much more jaded, not only because of regulatory backlash against DeFi, but also because the actual best stuff that happened in last couple of years, like

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Before that, when Hayden was building Uniswap, it was just this like cool thing everybody can use to provide liquidity. Now DeFi is like this thing, this like minefield where if you build your thing with some bug or uh something that uh some like vulnerability, someone will exploit it and uh your users can potentially use um millions of dollars and people kind of didn't know about it back then or didn't care because it didn't happen, but now it happens regularly and I would say that that's why DeFi founders are not as bold as they used to, uh or it's one of the reasons. I mean, the the big visions are definitely moving out of DeFi into some different verticals, which we can talk about later.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Um but yeah, tokens are definitely not that. They will just, yeah, they will evolve. It's like an evolution. Um. Insect is not, insects are not that. They just like evolve into different types of uh bugs and flies and stuff that uh is better uh suitable to adapt in a new environments. Um yeah, and they will always be. Um and tokens are a representation of anything, fungible, non-fungible, social, um hardcore, economically backed by any cash flow or whatever. Uh we might uh ascribe them to or some like assets in reserve or I don't know what else. So tokens are here to stay. They will evolve and there will be probably a couple of models that will have

• 42:31Speaker 02

  ninety percent of the use cases and then there will be long tail of weird use cases, but yeah, I'm definitely, I think I'm more bullish on tokens than ever. Um just because we see multiple successful models. Um and yeah, I I'm actually most bullish on those that are not afraid to kind of break some laws in a way. Because these are the ones that kind of carry the space forward. If you need to design your token around some particular regulation, I think you are just like doing your community and your project a huge disservice because then you're optimizing for the wrong things. And yeah, I know it's hard for me to say and know the founders don't want to end up in jail, but at the same time,

• 43:13Speaker 02

  innovation kind of needs to move faster than regulation at all times. Otherwise, we are dead.

• 43:20David Hoffman?

  I really like that metaphor of tokens are insects because that whole part of the animal kingdom does mutate really, really fast. And that's what we saw coming out of 2017 into the bear market of 2020 is that some tokens mutated and then they pumped like 1,000 X, like SNX, Link, Lend turned into Ave. And so, Fiskey, I really like that mental model to latch on to. Maybe I'll ask you about a few of these potential tokens that you see doing some good mutations in the bear market. But also, Matty, in your blog post, you threw out some candidate narratives out there that we might be able to latch on to. DeFi 2.0, Web3 commerce, Web3 social, decentralized science.

• 44:04David Hoffman?

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• 47:03David Hoffman?

  And I want to start this second half of this conversation with Bitcoin narratives, the Bitcoiner narratives out there. So what is Bitcoin in this wartime macro-bearish economy? Because I think everyone realized as soon as, like, it was November, I think, and the Fed kind of signaled that it was going to start getting pretty aggressive with interest rates, and all the crypto markets just went super south. People lost the Bitcoin is an inflation hedge narrative, and it hasn't really picked up anything in its place. So how do you guys think about Bitcoin in this current phase of the world? And what its narratives is and what its role is to play in the world? Has it lost its way like the rest of the crypto industry? Fisk, I'll throw this one to you.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bitcoin as an inflation hedge is a very interesting topic to me because I kind of feel that Bitcoin was a good inflation hedge, but it's front trendy inflation. And I think in this regard, like Bitcoin maximalist, or at least these Bitcoin maximalists that are more like Austrian economics educated, they were talking about like how like this monetary policy of Fed and the world we we live in when it comes to, you know, using debt as main growth vehicle, how like this can blow up and Bitcoin was growing throughout this, the whole period of this

• 48:32Speaker 02

  this criticism going on. And I feel that it was a good inflation hedge, just from trendy inflation. It was better inflation hedge than than stocks that also went up, but if you held Bitcoin, you would be now, like if you bought Bitcoin when this critics started to point out that this sort of monetary behavior is unsustainable, you would now be like hedged for life, right? If you bought like in substantial amount. So it just depends how you look at it, but I would say that it's not exposed hedge against inflation, it's like, you know, front running hedge, or it used to be. I'm not sure what will happen now. Narrativewise, I kind of feel that the big guys are like full on

• 49:15Speaker 02

  full on like full steam on Bitcoin. Druckenmiller, Ray Dalio even, who was a huge crypto skeptic, he's mentioning Bitcoin as an alternative to like fiat currencies in some of the podcasts he does. And these guys have like years of most of traditional finance world. So I would say that narrativewise, these like old, powerful, smart dudes will kind of lead the crowd to discover Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is still the biggest crypto brand, right? Like when you ask Random or me about crypto, they will tell you about Bitcoin, about how much energy it burns. And maybe they know about this other thing called

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Ethereum or something, but yeah, most of them will still like mostly talk about Bitcoin, ask about Bitcoin even to this day. So I don't see Bitcoin going away narrative wise.

• 50:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  What if we still man the argument a little bit though, Fisk? Rather than saying inflation hedge, because I think that distracts people. It's like debasement hedge. Okay, because CPI inflation is kind of different. It's like a lot of factors that drive that. But like debasement, that is, the Bitcoin, you know, bull thesis is if a uh, country and fiat systems are printing money, that is, the supply of their base money is going up. Bitcoin will hedge over the long run, not over the short to medium term, but over the long run against that debasement. Do you still think that that thesis holds?

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Um, I'm not sure because I don't know how much, how big this debasement can be and how much growth Bitcoin has. Um, again, these big guys like Druke and Dalio think about Bitcoin as a sort of a competitor to gold in this regard. And they are saying that maybe the reasonable market cap of Bitcoin is some percentage of market cap of gold, something like ten, twenty, thirty percent. And I would say, I haven't done the numbers, but I would say Bitcoin is kind of close to that already. So I'm not sure how much upside is left from this regard.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  I don't know, like, I, I feel that Bitcoin is saturated in terms of being this investment or like speculation that can give you like hundred or nothing. As it used to be the case a couple of years ago, and now it's more, it behaves more like a mature tech stock. Um, so that's, it's kind of weird, uh, space Bitcoin is in right now, but I, I think like narrative wise, it can have multiple narratives going on for it in this world where maybe some countries even trust, uh, banks or some other governments or the fiat currencies less than they used to. Um, I just don't have enough insight into this world of, uh,

• 51:56Speaker 02

  global geopolitics when it comes to like settlements of currencies to be able to give you any coherent thesis about Bitcoin becoming some sort of um, pseudo settlement layer for some international commodity trade or something like that. But I can see that happening. Um. Narrative wise, I just think that Bitcoin is a great toy for TradFi because you cannot really uh do that much with it in a non-custodial way. So all these custody providers will push Bitcoin. And they are the ones that spin the narratives in front of their clients. And I can see that happening and kind of carrying Bitcoin a bit forward, but I don't think it's as interesting as it used to be uh from like

• 52:37Speaker 02

  this capability of creating new narratives. Maybe I'm wrong and I will be happily wrong, but maybe my imagination is not as great as it used to be, or maybe I'm just focusing on other things, but I just don't see any super new exciting narrative around Bitcoin happening apart from what uh traditional finance pushes and TradFi is generally very unimaginative. So there is that.

• 53:00David Hoffman?

  Matty, do you have any thoughts to add on to what Fisky was saying about Bitcoin narratives?

• 53:05Speaker 03

  I would just say that uh Bitcoin at its core is a sort of defensive ideology and a technology that um I mean, I would say the narrative is about like way back in the seventies, we screwed up and we have to go back and and change all of it. So so it's very revanchist in nature. Uh whereas the rest of crypto or especially, you know, um ETH, DeFi and and and and other ecosystems are much more optimistic and they're they're not as defensive. They're thinking about the future, whereas Bitcoin is kind of thinking about the past and uh what went wrong. So in that respect, like these

• 53:46Speaker 03

  these two are not the same, right? They're very much correlated in price, but they're not the same. And uh Bitcoin, all it can do is is search for a macro narrative. So it's a very macro reactionary. Whereas we should be more independent in the rest of crypto, looking looking to the future. Um and um Bitcoin sort of it feels like it it cannot do that. I mean, probably, you know, liquidity because liquidity, so it will still be a thing. It's potential. Um I think Ryan called it the base can hedge. I think that can still be valid, but uh I don't think there's too much to talk about. We just have to wait what uh what the market will do and uh what they will come up with in terms of their um narrative market fit.

• 54:31David Hoffman?

  So Matty, in your blog post, you put out a bunch of candidate narratives that I think we want to run through. But before we do that, I want to lead into that part of this conversation with a theory that I want to run by you guys. And this is my like, surface area theory for bull markets. And if we go back in time, back to, you know, when Maker Dow was being built, first there was Maker, we had DAI, it was a decentralized stablecoin. That was like something, you know, cool that we could point to. Then later came Compound, later came Uniswap, AVE got really big, DYDX came out. Like, there was a bunch of just like, things that started to happen during 2018 to 2020. And it was like, it's

• 55:13David Hoffman?

  like laying tinder. It's like the forest was growing, there's brush burning up, and just like tinder was being laid all over the place. And even during this time, I remember being in the Ethereum space, trying to shout out to the rest of crypto, not even the outside world, but to the rest of crypto, saying, hey, why aren't you guys paying attention to this DeFi thing more? Like, even the crypto industry itself hadn't really like latched on to it. But we had all of these applications that had like so much surface area. Uniswap was surface area for trading tokens. Maker Dow put out the decentralized stablecoin, which ended up being like a very commonly used asset inside of DeFi summer. Like, there was a surface area, surface area. The application layer of Ethereum, where this bull market

• 55:56David Hoffman?

  hadn't really happened yet, because it was just ICOs, had a bunch of surface area. And so that's kind of like my model for how this next bull market, however it comes out, will look, is that there will be a bunch of tinder being laid over the next one, two, three years. And it's going to look like a bunch of surface area. And this is why I'm particularly bullish on something like ZK EVMs, with like ultra-low transaction fees, opening up brand-new use cases that we haven't seen. But it's gonna, it's gotta be in the app layer, right? Because bull markets always start in the app layer, because that's what we saw at DeFi summer was. DeFi summer was an app layer bull market, then the alt-layer one, like, competition, Avalanche, Solana, tried to, and also after the NFT, also an app layer bull market in Ethereum.

• 56:42David Hoffman?

  Then like all of these alt layer ones, Solana, Avalanche, like a Phantom, had these protocol bull markets. But first, first app layer. And so I'm wondering if you got, if you accept that as like a model, like first we have like all of this Tinder being laid in an app layer. Something happens, some catalyst happens. It was COVID that was the catalyst for the last bull market, a bunch of money printing, sadly, sadly a macro thing. But that lit the match and then like, oh, we had DeFi summer and then that triggered the NFT boom and that was all in the app layer. And so as we go forward, the, and the, the idea to take away from this is, is as we go forward into 2023, 2024, there's a bunch of new app layers out there. There's a bunch of like layer twos that are supporting all these low, cheap, easy transactions.

• 57:25David Hoffman?

  And I'm hoping that the way that this plays out is like a bunch of just surface area gets built all over the place. And then one day there's a catalyst and it ignites a bull market and that's, and then we're off to the races once again. That's kind of my model for how these things forward. And Matty, in your article with all these candidate narratives, I'm seeing a bunch of just like surface area that could potentially ignite into a bull market. But before we get into the specific candidate narratives, I wonder if, how, how you resonate with that kind of idea of this is how this bull bear to bull market is going to go. Matty, what do you think about that?

• 58:00Speaker 03

  So what you're saying is that we're going to build a bunch of stuff, um, which, you know, will be useful, but will not get that much attention. But once that there's a liquidity, a magic, magic touch of liquidity in the markets, then we're going to ignite it and uh, it's going to be on fire. That's what you're saying, right? Yeah, I think that totally makes sense. Uh, even like the fundamentals don't get recognized by the way, they need some reflexive action. And for that, we need um, sort of better, I don't want to say macro environment, but definitely we need, we need people not to be scared to invest in stuff and buy stuff.

• 58:40David Hoffman?

  Fisk, any thoughts on this before we go into the actual specific candidate narratives?

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I would say that the next bull run should be more about app layer, like capturing end users. I mean, infrastructure is always moving forward and it's always being improved. And yeah, we will have many tools and many layers that will enable new use cases. But for me, now it starts to be much more about the apps and the things that people will interact with and it will materially improve their lives day to day.

• 59:17David Hoffman?

  So Matty, the first candidate narrative that you put in your blog post was actual DeFi 2.0. Why is this a candidate narrative and what is what is actual DeFi 2.0?

• 59:30Speaker 03

  Well, it's actually something new, right? Meaning that it's it's the next level because I think DeFi DeFi 1.0 is is mostly this self referential token feedback loop, right? Yield and whatnot. And I think that what what 2.0 could be, it could take it closer to potentially production economy. It could, we could find a way how to create more sustainable yields. We can, we can think about it. Although this is a bit tricky and maybe not a good time to think about this, but uncollateralized lending or, you know, under collateralized lending. I think that we're ready for for

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  something that Olympus Dow has been trying to do and that's a fiat independent reserve currency. I don't think they're that they're yet, but there might be other people and other projects building this. So yeah, I guess that we need, we need more than just tokens to pump to say that this is, this is a new era. So much more, much more utility for for regular people, not only crypto heads. And DeFi has been rather, you know, just inward looking and we can think about how to make it.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  More accessible to the real con.

• 1:00:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  The way I go back to kind of DeFi is like, if we're really going to eat finance, then we have to eat finance, right? And the way we've long, for a long time, captured this on Bankless is kind of through different money verbs, like things people want to do with their money. And so right now, I feel like DeFi has, we have the ability to send it. Now you can send it in stablecoin format. Okay, cool. So we've got send as a money verb and pay. And there's lots of progress we can make on pay. And then we've also done some borrowing and lending. But that's only been like collateralized borrowing and lending. And most of the real world borrowing and lending that you do, say on a credit card, like if you're a consumer, it's all credit based.

• 1:01:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what you're talking about is uncollateralized lending is like bringing credit systems to DeFi. We haven't even tapped into that. And then the other thing I guess we do in DeFi fairly well is like trading. And we scratched the surface and maybe some, you know, derivatives and that sort of thing. But like, I think what you're saying with DeFi 2.0 is it's not going to be a different, like more gamified Ponzi'd sort of scheme to make token number go up. It's not going to be liquidity farming. The new DeFi 2.0 is actually going to be building things that eat traditional finance, that real world people want to go do. Is that what you're saying? Am I on to something there?

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that is, that is spot on. I would maybe add that we have built tools for finance, but we need also tools for commerce. And, and that could be a powerful link where if you can, if you have actual commerce going on on chain, that gives you much more space to create new financial products that are not just, you know, that could be related to some cash flows and those type of things.

• 1:02:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's talk about Web3 commerce, because that was another possible future narrative you mentioned. Getting people to spend money inside of the blockchain seems to be maybe a crucial element. I know we've long talked about the use case of being able to buy Starbucks with your Bitcoin, right? It's probably not going to come in that form. But I think you've mentioned a couple of other forms it might take. GameFi being one, commerce in GameFi, maybe tokenized IP as well. Can you talk a bit more about this commerce use case?

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  It sounds very vague, I would say at this point. I do believe that Gamify offers a low-hanging fruit in that respect. So purchasing end-game items. I actually, we were discussing this maybe 2019 with the team, that we can imagine that you have games built for actual items that you purchased. So you can take it, you can take an item that you bought in-game throughout different games. So that it's given more powers and I think that it's something that people would spend money on. And obviously, it's just entertainment and the question is, do we want to just entertain ourselves to death?

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  But I would definitely want to see some, potentially, a link to World of Atoms and commerce that, you know, sort of, I don't know how that free commerce could facilitate commerce better than the existing one. But maybe I'll leave this to Fiski, because he is bullish on the metaverse thing. And that is commerce, for sure, involved in that one. So maybe, maybe he has an idea.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  So I mean, we tapped into multiple things at the same time. I would, I would kind of separate them into like payments. It's funny to me that payments was probably the first use case everyone thought will be massive in crypto. And it never really happened. I mean, we can pay for stuff and we can send money to our friends or even to some vendors. But it's, it's not something that's like big at this point, even 10 years in. And we have stable coins, we have blockchains with low fees, we have all that. And we still are not regularly paying with crypto or with, using blockchain as an underlying infrastructure, at least. We are not really doing that. And I really wonder why, like...

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  It feels that traditional fintech and banking rails have a huge mold in people's heads, in like about how we pay and how we use like cards and payments, which are maybe reversible, maybe, maybe thinking about crypto payments should be thinking in which cases we benefit from having irreversible payments. And if we don't benefit from having irreversible payments within commerce, commercial context, um, can we build layers, application-specific chains or tools to make payments under some, some conditions reversible? That's maybe one question. Maybe other question just is the last mile adoption, like,

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  are payments today really something that needs improvement? When we have cards, we have Apple Pay, we have all this. Um, what does crypto bring to make, make them 10 times better for people to adopt it? I think there are ways that crypto makes payments better, but I'm not sure how much better. And when it comes to um, metaverse, I just need, I just think that we need like a regular economy, which is based around digital assets and which is largely non-speculative, meaning that there are many people who want to build, not, not build, who want to buy and hold these like metaverse assets, NFTs, digital items, not for speculation purposes, but because they really want to hold them, they want to collect them,

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  they want to use them, they want to flex with them. And when this economy is created, uh, I think many of generation Z and younger generations will kind of be naturally inclined to start using crypto more and more as a financial tool rather than just purely speculative tool. And then it can spill out into other areas connected to physical world, which will gather mostly to these young generations, but already kids, you know, young generations are becoming older generations or they enter productive age. And I think this is how we get the adoption, not necessarily pushing um, this mainstream real-world crypto use can see on uh, on boomers, but kind of building the world for the future generations and kind of

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  making peace with the fact that my dad will probably never need crypto to pay for anything. Maybe we need.

• 1:07:48David Hoffman?

  One thing that we definitely are know that is happening is that brands, big brands, are leaning into NFTs and tokenizing IP very strongly. We saw a job report, job listing for Disney, for Disney, to basically more or less pivot the whole entire company into being like token NFT-enabled, whatever that means. But they have this job listing out there that's asking like, hey, for this is relevant to like Disney parks, Disney like media, Disney movies, Disney IP. We need an NFT person to guide the company into like

• 1:08:29David Hoffman?

  this world. And that's Disney. And like Adidas is already doing this. And so I'm wondering, one of the candidate narratives that you put in there, Matty, was tokenized IP. And also, Fiski, I think you were talking about how like so much of crypto has been like internally facing, like, hey, let's build crypto products for the crypto D gens, which is like fun for us on the inside, but it doesn't reach out to the outside. I'm wondering if you guys think that it's possible that we actually like the next phase of crypto development doesn't actually come from the inside? And that's actually how we actually onboard a bunch of people is that we actually don't have crypto natives building crypto native

• 1:09:09David Hoffman?

  products. We actually have normal companies, normal brands doing stuff in crypto, but building it for their users, their fans, their foundations. And that seems to be a much more reasonable way to onboard much more people rather than like, hey, like, go put ether into Maker Dow and borrow DAI. Instead, it's just like, oh, buy this like SpongeBob NFT. And the onramps there seem to be much stronger. So I'm wondering how strong you think that this potential narrative, if you will, but also just like fundamental driver of crypto use cases might actually play out into the future. Matty, what do you think about this?

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  So I think it's a powerful way to onboard new users, but they will not come up with new stuff. They will only adopt the ways and the models that we will lay out for them. So it's very important.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  And we have, you know, sort of, we came up with a bunch of good ideas that mostly lifestyle brands are using these days. But I think this cycle will bring, will potentially bring new ones that, you know, more brands, more companies will be able to adopt and, and onboard new users into crypto without them necessarily coming into crypto. Right? There will never be crypto heads or crypto bros. There will just be users of applications that are of value to them. And that is, uh, that is one way of putting it. And I think that it's, it's good that we have this wave of adoption. That's for sure.

• 1:10:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's such a good point, Matty, that

• 1:10:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  the established brands aren't really going to innovate though here. They're just going to sort of copy the things that the builders on the frontier in crypto are actually doing. And so they're going to notice, oh, that CryptoPunks thing is successful. Board Apes? Really interesting. Now, how can we emulate that for our brand? So they're, they're actually not going to be like building kind of the new things. They're going to look to us, the crypto industry, to really lead the way. One last use case maybe to touch on is Web3 social. What do you think about this, Matty? Like, what's happening here? We see like things like Lens, for example, that are forging new directions.

• 1:11:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  We also see Meta, Facebook, integrating NFTs into their platform. What is Web3 social? Do you think that this is a powerful narrative that could rise in the 2022 bear market?

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  I think it's a very interesting idea or narrative. Because everyone agrees, or everyone, well, there's a consensus out there that that we need a next generation of social media, or we need to improve on the existing ones. And I think that it's when A, C, X, and Z, when they talk about the pre, they talk about like read, write, and oh. And I think that in social media, it's more like separation of read and write. Because we've created this powerful platforms that probably will be, will be either broken down by regulators or by innovation.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Innovation, and usually it's innovation that kind of gets them. And even though, you know, Meta is doing something, I don't really care, or Twitter's doing something, I don't necessarily care that much.

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  So I think that, you know, today, you come to Twitter or Substack and you publish there, right? They own your graph, your distribution. And users can read on the platform and you can only write and publish on that very platform. And what I think could happen is that you will be able to write your ideas or produce your content on various platforms that will be competing to provide the best production experience. And then there will be other platforms that will compete to provide the best distribution. So you write an essay, you want to make it an NFT, so be it. You make this essay into an NFT and then, you know, this tool would enable you to write it.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  Is, is, you know, it's a tool, but you're able to sort of make it this, this NFT thing. And perhaps there will be other that will have, you know, better, better experience, better graphics, additional things. And once you export it on this writing platform, you will be able to attach different identifiers to it. You create an on-chain identity for that, for this piece. And it can have, you know, various attestations and so the identity of the, of the piece and the author can be defined by these attestations. And this could be anything like from I'm followed by Vitaly on Twitter to, it could even say I am Matty on Twitter. But there might be other sort of playful ones and more sophisticated, like I'm a first hundred user on Lens

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  or something like that, right? And then you have these read platforms that will compete to distribute this this NFT essay with these attestations and these read platforms are basically different relevance algorithms that readers that that readers readers use to sort of search for the most relevant content to them. And you know, read platforms are right platforms that will get a cut from whatever, you know, the monetization you choose or, you know, from the traffic that you get. And and this way, you as a content producer are a client of these various platforms and you're not a, you know, sort of a slave to to one or you're you're not at the mercy of one. And of course, there will be different platforms focusing on different readers,

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  left, right, Bitcoin, ETH, Maxi, whatever. The point is that no one owns an exclusivity to distribute and and, you know, no one is banning speech or anything like that. So I guess that is something that that I envisioned. The question is how how economic it'll get? What what are the incentives? What are the monetization methods? But to me, it's definitely a separation of of of read and write and indexing this this contact through new novel protocols.

• 1:15:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's fascinating. The the separation of read and write. You didn't even mention the the own verb there, which is kind of the token verb there. And that's a reemphasis because I think, you know, others that have approached Web3 social have bled with kind of token first. Maybe that's not the way to do it. I I mean, we've talked about a few interesting possible narratives of the future. And when we say narratives, we don't want people to get distracted by that term because I think what we're talking about is fundamentals that become

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  A story.

• 1:15:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  price driving narratives into the futures. But first, you have to look at the fundamentals. I know that's what you guys do at Zpi Zphi Prime. Maybe maybe I should kind of leave this as we start to close out with some of the, you know, the final words in your post there, Matty, which is, I think, maybe the most exciting part. You write this, "There may be other narratives that will carry us into the future. As many founders are working on that many founders are think" Working on that I can't think of does not mean that if things failed in the past, they can't work in the future. It's best when we actually get surprised by the imagination of builders. In the meantime, let's not get overly pessimistic.

• 1:16:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love that line. It's best when we actually get surprised by the imagination of builders. We are probably not anticipating the future use cases that will spur on the 2024, 2025, a crypto bull market, are we? I think we will get surprised as we have these crypto investors, crypto journeys in this space again and again. Parting advice, Fiskantes, could you give us your best advice for someone who's listening to this episode? And they're, they want to stick around. They're a settler in crypto. They're not leaving. What's your best advice for someone looking for the next new thing to bet on?

• 1:17:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  How can they find the right bets in this sort of environment? Fiskantes, what would you say?

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  I would say first of all, walk off from Twitter.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  Because it becomes a huge echo chamber, especially during bear market when there are less people. And the ones there, they are very jaded and salty most of the time. But it's like, I don't remember the last time I read really new and like, let's say, non-mainstream idea on Twitter. So yeah, logging off Twitter definitely helps.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  And yeah, then just, I don't know, like for builders, I guess it's just like trying to solve interesting problems that may, that people may have around them even.

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  And for people who just want to like, Like bet or invest, I guess that's much harder right now because when you just go scroll through coincode, all the ideas you see there, there are already projects that are either successful or not. But you don't really see any inspiration for something groundbreaking with you. So. I just guess, I don't know, like read stuff, read weird stuff that's maybe not even directly about crypto, but about technology in general. Um, for example, and I'm not saying this is something that will bring us any new groundbreaking narrative, but uh, one way to look at crypto gaming or investments into crypto native gaming,

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  which is like one of possible narratives that can carry us is to not go to crypto conferences, but go to gaming conferences and talk to game designers and um gamers there. Um, so maybe doing something like that, stepping out of the crypto bubble and looking around what's happening in the world. Not, I'm not now saying anything about like Berish Macro, but looking around in different trends, in different uh other tech uh tech or innovation verticals. Um, yeah, if there is any, I mean, everyone should have some sort of passion that is not directly connected to crypto or trading. And I don't know if that passion is uh health and biotechnologies or something like that.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  And definitely that's one way to start looking or this, this can be the lenses for you to start looking at crypto with like. How could I use this weird set of tools that crypto is right now to improve something from these other areas? What could be interesting in that regard? Um, and then I would say like DAOs are interesting in general, not in a way that, you know, you can invest in them easily or in the infrastructure, but starting a DAO should be super easy. I think the most innovation, innovative uh way for non-crypto people to get into crypto is to just like form some sort of DAO around anything interesting, essentially making a Discord group with some money

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  under its management that can like finance stuff or or play with it. Um, so like joining any sort of interesting DAO and be collaborative there, I think is advice I give all the time because I feel it's timeless. And I'm not saying that this is something that will make you a lot of money easily, or maybe you will be even uh, you will become a bit jaded because the DAO will not be as functional as you imagine because it's decentralized, there is no leadership, but at least you know how the sausage is made and then you can have better idea of. About, you know, what will be the next thing because you see what failed and how it felt. So I guess this, but it's hard. I would say that anything that influencers like us even talk about

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  uh may not necessarily be the big thing and the big things are almost always something that people don't really expect that easily, but let's see.

• 1:20:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Log off Twitter, start a DAO, stop listening to all the bears, cross pollinate, get out of the crypto bubble. That's Fiskanty's advice. Matty, same question to you. How do people survive the bear market and come out stronger? And how do they find the next big thing during these times?

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  I think the most natural thing is don't try. Uh, just don't push it. Um, I would say follow your curiosity, not, not the money trail. Do not let the money trail determine your opinion on things. Um, sometimes it's, you know, it's actually those things that are not under the light, the spotlight that are the most interesting ones or the breakthrough. And I think that it's important to, to, to, to realize that, um, I think Chris Dixon, he, he wrote this a long time ago. He said that the, what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years. And because you're not a builder, doesn't mean that you cannot become a builder.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  Everyone can become a builder and um, I think that if you see something that should be built, just build it. And um, don't focus on resources, but focus on the creativity. And um, yeah, I guess that's my advice.

• 1:22:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, and there fantastic advice. And I will say everyone who I know who's been early on anything, certainly been early on crypto, got there as a result of following their curiosity, this innate interest uh for the subject matter. And I think that's the best way to find the next big thing as it has always been. Matty Fiskanty's, thank you so much for joining us. I think we have some more clarity on the next big crypto narrative, what that might look like uh into the future. We appreciate you guys.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  Thank you for having us. Thank you, guys.

• 1:22:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Action items for your Bankless Nation. We will include a link to the next big crypto narrative. That is Fiskantes's post, excuse me, Matty's post. And it's an excellent on his Substack. It's called Wrong A Lot. So it's okay to be wrong a lot as well. But I don't think he's wrong on this one. A lot to be optimistic about for the future of crypto. Of course, risks and disclaimers, guys. My time to tell you, ETH is risky, so is Bitcoin, so is DeFi. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Stay curious.