106 - How to Become a Whale | Tetranode

From gaming guppy to Orca whale, this week we’re talking to Tetranode. Who is this whale man? Well, he’s an anonymous DeFi billionaire who has been a part of and has shaped the crypto world since the early days of the space. Not everyone is a whale, but everyone is definitely trying to become one. If you dream of becoming a whale one day, this episode is your blueprint. We uncover all of Tetranode’s whale secrets, such as why farmers are the best alpha, why he’s team Ethereum vs. team Alt Layer 1s, and of course—Tetranode’s advice on becoming a whale yourself. ------ ✨ DEBRIEF ✨ | Ryan & David's Unfiltered Thoughts on the Episode https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-how-to-become-a-whale-tetranode ------ 📣 NOTIONAL FINANCE | DeFi's Leading Fixed Rate Yield https://bankless.cc/Notional ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 7:35 Gaming as Crypto Training 13:40 Who is Tentranode 18:35 Becoming a Whale 25:20 The Purpose of Wealth 30:55 Why ETH Bullishness? 38:55 Why Decentralization Matters 41:25 Tetranode’s Infinity Gauntlet 46:30 Farmers Have the Best Alpha 48:45 How to Move & Play Markets 1:03:08 Tetranode’s Infinity Gauntlet 1:25:32 Layer 2 Life 1:30:20 Dani Sesta Frog Nation Lessons 1:32:50 How to Trust Anons 1:36:06 Advice to be a Whale 1:38:20 Tetranode in the Future 1:45:20 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Tetranode’s Twitter https://twitter.com/Tetranode Tetranode’s Infinity Gauntlet https://twitter.com/tetranode/status/1481687955223638016 Sismo https://www.sismo.io/ Degen Spartan’s Twitter https://twitter.com/DegenSpartan DOPEX https://www.dopex.io/ Olympus DAO https://twitter.com/OlympusDAO FeiRari https://app.rari.capital/fuse/pool/8 Rocket Pool https://rocketpool.net/ Curve https://curve.fi/ Arbitrum https://twitter.com/arbitrum zkSync https://zksync.io/ zkStark https://starkware.co/stark/ Dani Sesta’s Twitter https://twitter.com/danielesesta ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, exciting episode today. This is how to become a whale with a whale, Tetranode, a DeFi whale on crypto Twitter. We're talking to him, unpacking the alpha today. There's a few takeaways for him. I'm gonna list them here real quick. Number one, why farmers like Tetranode are the best alpha. Number two, why Tetranode loves Ethereum, not alt-layer ones. It's an interesting discussion. Number three, alpha from Tetranode's Infinity Gauntlet. These are the projects he thinks are going to be the next big thing.

• 0:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Number four, how to survive the whale games that are played in crypto. Number five is actually parting advice, how to become a whale, and that is the theme of this episode. David, this is pretty cool with Tetranode. What'd you think?

• 1:03David Hoffman?

  The Tetranode story is such a story that you can only find in crypto. My gut take on Tetranode is that he's a guy that really resonates with the crypto industry itself. And maybe perhaps in the rest of the world, without crypto, might have been just a guy. But in crypto, he's Tetranode. And so he really found his calling because of crypto, because of what crypto brings to the table.

• 1:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Somewhat true of all of us, I think, of a lot of people in crypto.

• 1:29David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. Yeah, I definitely find resonance with that as well. And I think we start this podcast on common ground with you, me, Tetranode, and most every one of the listeners, at least the ones that played internet games back in the late 90s, early 2000s, talking about StarCraft and the meta, and how to think about game theory, and how to move quickly and press buttons. And the conversation kind of rolls from there. And so using that as a foundation to consider crypto games and DeFi games, and how to corner markets is a really interesting parallel. And ultimately, we come full circle back to a very similar conversation at the very end.

• 2:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And just to set some context, I mean... Tetranode is a pretty big whale, right?

• 2:11David Hoffman?

  It's a pretty big whale.

• 2:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, I don't, I don't know how you measure that in terms of like amount of eth or like, but it's a lot. I mean, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 2:20David Hoffman?

  The brand is that he's a big whale.

• 2:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, big whale. We're talking a lot of money and he's got some really interesting takes and some really interesting projects. I do get a feeling like unlike other whales, maybe we've talked to on bankless or we've interacted with in the past. He is not purely a trader, like he's not like dumping on people, right?

• 2:42David Hoffman?

  He's a positive sum whale.

• 2:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's a positive sum whale. It's almost like an early stage investor with a massive pool of capital. I almost say like it's sort of a VC type model, but it's not a VC. It's done in a very DeFi native crypto native way. And it's so cool that he can do this as an independent individual without like an office in Silicon Valley. Like without a, you know, a massive team. It's just kind of him. He's putting in the time, working a hundred hour weeks, he said, but he's also like living life, you know? He's also has a family and he's also like, you know, spending time with his kids and it's a really cool juxtaposition.

• 3:22David Hoffman?

  And this is something that crypto uniquely enables, right? He's a one man VC and I bet you he's probably outperformed the average VC. Probably significantly, I'm gonna go ahead and guess. And this is exactly the power that crypto enables people where like, no, you don't need a family office. You don't need lawyers. You don't need infrastructure. You can do this from home. Like you could hear his kids in the background and the guy is outperforming everyone. And he's also anonymous. Like you don't even actually need to know his name. So these are the powers that private keys and crypto can really imbue upon everyone. And so we kind of start this and end this conversation as like, hey, we want everyone to be a whale too. And so Tetranode has his way of becoming a whale and carving out his niche.

• 4:07David Hoffman?

  And he has those lessons that he can impart upon us and we can take those lessons into consideration. But at the end of the day, everyone needs to take their own path. I hope every listener here becomes their own whale in their own specific niche inside of this greater. DeFi ecosystem and maybe Tetrano is just carving the path for the rest of us.

• 4:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think we'll leave our other thoughts for the debrief, David, but one last thing I'll say is like, one lesson I learned is anybody can be a whale because it actually depends on the size of the pool that you're in, right? And so even Tetrano, he's not an ETH whale, he's not a Bitcoin whale, but in markets that he's closer to where he's got a kind of a larger vested interest, he's working directly with the teams, he is a whale. I think that's a lesson for us all. I hope you enjoy this episode with Tetrano. We're going to get right to it. 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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• 5:48David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 6:32David Hoffman?

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• 7:16David Hoffman?

  go to across.to to bridge your assets between ETH, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Bova Networks.

• 7:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest. You know him as Tetranode. At least, I hope you do. You should if you don't. He is a famous DeFi Anon. He's known for his Oracle Whale Twitter profile, and I think that's a tip of the hat to how he's kind of a whale on Ethereum. Very active on Twitter, generated a cult following of his own. People pay attention to what Tetranode says. They pay attention to what he does, what assets he buys. And now, we're going to hear from the man whale himself. Because I think all of us have one thing in common, David. We all want to be whales. Tetranode, it's great to have you on Bankless. Welcome.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Hello. I just kind of dropped myself into here unprepared, but you know, there's no rustling of paper design is noted with the last interview, so it's totally off the record here.

• 8:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. I think it's better that way.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:13David Hoffman?

  I think that's why people enjoy you the most is because the off-the-cuff nature and the very casual identity that you have portrayed yourself is very real to a lot of people.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:24David Hoffman?

  And so that's what we're going to do on this podcast is we're going to get real, real.

• 8:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  In addition to that, Tetranode, we want you to teach us how to become a whale, like you. Because I think a lot of people listening to Bankless want to be Tetranode when they grow up.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'll give it my best shot. You know, part of it is the sort of the endless digging that we all go through. We live and breathe. This stuff that sometimes like you can expose like two people to the same situation and they would like act differently, you know, like I treat it as as like a video game like like an RTS, you know, like Starcraft. So you have like a fog of war and you have very limited, you know, intelligence. So you go out there and you scout and and you dig and the more info you find, the better situated you are. So that's like the the general high level overview. So I can go detail by detail, you know, like what I did.

• 9:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool. And you sound like you're maybe a gamer by background, too.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Hardcore gamer.

• 9:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a little RTS, like, you know, Warcraft III or something with fog of war.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, all of them.

• 9:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Like I first started Age of Empires, you know, and and then it was like, uh, the next one was Starcraft and then Warcraft III.

• 9:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am with it. Yes. This is what I did. And how do you think these games like taught you to be like good in crypto?

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Um, it kind of taught me about like resource management, you know, and how to deal with decision making with information, you know, with limited information. So I used to play a lot of chess as well, you know, like, like I first started chess when I was 16. And then I actually made it to like state level. And then I got silver, metal, just like one year right afterward. So that was like totally unexpected. And then afterwards I went out to college. So I just cut it off right there. But I just kept thinking, had I done it like when I was six, I would have been like the national champion, but would have could have should have, you know, had I been like in Bitcoin in 2009, you know, I would have been.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Don't we all? Don't we all? Anyways, I digress.

• 10:20David Hoffman?

  It's interesting. We've seen so many people show up in crypto and be extremely successful via poker.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:26David Hoffman?

  Hazu is a famous poker player.

• 10:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hasib.

• 10:29David Hoffman?

  Hasib is a famous poker player.

• 10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ari Paul as well, I think.

• 10:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, poker and crypto go hand in hand.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:35David Hoffman?

  But I'm also not surprised that RTS like Starcraft games also do well in crypto. But also, you're the only person that I've actually like articulate the fact that Starcraft in these RTS games are kind of like the original backgrounds

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:47David Hoffman?

  of your skill set.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:49David Hoffman?

  And the differentiator, I think, between poker and Starcraft is There's so much speed in StarCraft. You gotta press buttons real fast in StarCraft to be able to keep up with the meta. Can you comment on that and how perhaps that influenced your style with how you engage with these crypto systems?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  So just as a disclaimer, I know poker, but I'm a really bad poker player. But when it comes to StarCraft, you know, there is a sort of chance, you know, there's a chance in this scenario. But a large part of it is the decision making and you can become very methodical in the way that you press forward, you know, on your strategy and how you manage things. There's just a lot more decision making in StarCraft, like as you would with crypto. I think that lends a better background than poker, you know, like poker, you have multiple outcomes, multiple probabilities. But in StarCraft, you actually resolve it to one using hundreds of decisions.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  So there's a lot more granularity and I think overall it's just like a very, very difficult game to master. So that applies generally to RTS too, you know, I've played from Age of Empires to like StarCraft 2, which is like the last one that I played. I think just having that decision making drilled into you, split second decision making, and also playing in team games as well and just like managing the whole thing. So that also applies to like WoW guilds as well. But a concrete example of how like StarCraft strategy applies to like, say, crypto, is that, okay, when I'm playing like a four on four, you know, and there's this one guy talking shit over on the other side, you know, he says like, like suck it down or something.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  And so the four of us, you know, are conspiring and we're like, hey, let's go fuck that dude over in particular. And so we did. And so he's screaming and taunting you, but eventually we removed them from the map, you know, and we eventually overtook everyone. But those things, you know, in crypto, kind of exemplifies teamwork and there's a lot to be said about market making, you know, and psychology. So I think the same thing can be applied to crypto too. So there was a couple of times when someone was like talking shit about me and was like, yeah, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? You know, so I pissed him off with like a Tetra Node candle.

• 13:05David Hoffman?

  Tetra Node candle.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 13:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. So now you're you're lighting them up with like liquidity and crypto trading and like, you know, Tetra Node candles rather than like

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Starcraft, Zerg swarm.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  No lower entries, just leave them in the dust, you know, and be like, this is how, you know, I can fill the market. So stop talking.

• 13:25David Hoffman?

  Okay. So you play Starcraft, you play RTS games, you're an OG gamer, the classic Blizzard games. But also in addition to that, without telling us who you are, who are you?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I'm just trying to, I guess like crypto has become a hobby for me. Like before I was like a gamer and I was looking for like, you know, graphics card to build PCs with. And in 2010, the graphic cards prices got jacked up and I'm like, I can't find like these Radeon 5870s anymore. You know, what's going on? So I looked into forums and there's this thing called Bitcoin mining and, you know, struck my curiosity. So the first question is like, okay, this Bitcoin, you know, can I just like copy it? You know, copy and paste it and double spend, you know, that's a double spending problem. So I find out that I can't, you know, because it's through hashing algorithm and, you know, it just drove into the math.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  And after I figured out it was good, I intended to send a hundred dollars, you know, to Mt. Gox. But the process was too difficult and, you know, I was riding my bike in college and I was just like, forget it. Too hard. You know, this was in 2010. So of course we all have our moments of regret in crypto, you know, in the past, especially like in the early like 2010. So that was one of my biggest regrets. That was a a figure mistake, I think.

• 14:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then what happened next?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Right. So I saw the thing going up, you know, and I saw it go up to thirty and I was like, oh, God, I should have, I should have, I should have. Then it crashed down to two dollars and I was like, woof, dodged that bullet. Didn't hear about it until like two years later, you know, Bitcoin is like two hundred and sixty six dollars, you know, in April two thousand thirteen. What? You gotta be kidding me. Yeah. And then, you know, every day from then on, I thought like, what I would do with just like, you know, if I had like a thousand Bitcoin back then. And then two thousand thirteen, I was, you know, working and a friend reminded me that Mount Gox, you know, it just crashed.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  So that was my opportunity and I had money at that time. And so I just dollar cost average over the course of like three years into Bitcoin. Actually, I assumed that because I just continued on to Ethereum. But yeah, it was filled with, you know, like most of the stories of the early adopter, it was filled with FOMO regrets and a lot of money thrown at and waiting.

• 15:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Tetra, note, at what point did you feel like you became a whale?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  You know what? When I got like, when I became like a billionaire, I didn't like feel anything. I just kind of sat there and just looked at it. It's like that. Did that really happen? You know? And so I don't think like I felt like I was worth anything until two thousand eighteen, when I started moving to markets in ways that I couldn't even imagine. You know, that that was like before the crash. Like after the crash, I was like, um, I still held, but it was, uh, let's just say that that as we held Ethereum through fourteen twenty and it crashed down to eighty, we lost like ninety four percent of our net worth. I don't know like where you guys were, you know, at the moment.

• 16:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Oh, it was painful.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dollar cost averaging. You're holding. Yeah. Yeah.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crying, sad.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Back in the days, like you had two options, you know, you had like, um, I think Maker Dow and you had like Coinbase, right? So you can either buy it or hold it. And I held it, you know, we didn't have farming, we didn't have like options, we didn't have puts or calls. Yeah. So I pretty much just like held through the crash. So for the first like four years of crypto, I just like held, you know? So that I built a lot of disciplines. So, um, it's a discipline that most of these newcomers, I feel like they don't have, cause you know, they have like a wide variety of options to jump from this to that. So you have like the rise of the rotators in this current gen.

• 17:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Tetradon, you kind of started back in the early days, but you know, maybe didn't stick with it until you had some money. You know, after Mt. Gox, you had 2013 dollar cost averaging in. You started first feeling like a whale in that big Ethereum bull run. It sounds like you probably got in on Ethereum relatively early, you know, 2017 was just crazy.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely insane. And then early 2018, you're feeling like a whale, you're moving markets. And then boom, crash, like 2018 just knocked the wind out of most of our sails. And then 2019, you know, continued, it was a cold, dark bear market winter. So what were you doing at that time? It sounds like you stayed around, you were still holding, but like, what were you doing? And then what was it like, uh, coming out of that? Maybe coming into 2020?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  You know, I was just like holding and traveling the world, you know, and just having a good time and just raising my family. In 2019, 2018 was just like, oh God, my network is just like melting right before my eyes. And then I kind of, you know, got on Twitter, cause I was on Reddit before. So a lot of crypto personalities like anti-pro synthesis and Mr. Yukon Sea, you know, they moved off Reddit because they, it wasn't the place to be for crypto anymore. So we moved on to Twitter. So on Twitter, I saw like a bunch of, you know, Bitcoin Matthews, like A. Pompeiano, just like spouting out complete bullshit, you know? So I was like PMing anti-pro synthesis and I was this person and that person and I was sparring with you on Reddit.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  So, um, you know, let's go and fight these, uh, maxi together. So that started out with just sort of dispelling untruths, you know, on Twitter. Because I was retired and I didn't have anything better to do, you know, aside from traveling the world and raising my family, but I also wanted to keep up with the news and crypto.

• 19:26David Hoffman?

  Tetra, I have so much I want to unpack with so many questions about like why you were bullish Ethereum back in 2017. I often joke with Ryan about like before DeFi came around, before Maker Dow came around, like, why the hell were we excited about Ethereum? Because there wasn't that much there like to be excited about. ICOs, man. ICOs, like, but I want to return to that conversation, but I'm also just intrinsically fascinated about, from what I've gathered from you, from other podcasts and other just history lessons that I've heard you teach to, you know, other mediums is that you were a person that I don't think expected wealth in his life, and then a bunch of wealth happened. How did you just deal with that? The crazy world of crypto, especially when it was so crazy back in the 2014 to 2016 era,

• 20:11David Hoffman?

  like, put a lot of wealth in people's hands that never expected it. Was that you? And like, how did you just like deal with that psychologically?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  That is a good question, you know, I just deal with it and just kind of stared at the screen blankly and just autistically about it. And this is just a number in front.

• 20:25David Hoffman?

  Sounds like not dealing with it.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just a number, you know, and what we have in crypto is even better than what a lot of like famous people and executives don't have is privacy. So, you know, like, I didn't want to make a big deal about it, you know, and be like this big shot guy buying diamonds off the store, you know, and showing off their blings and Casios and Lamborghinis. I just kind of kept quiet and didn't do anything until I was able to buy like a house, you know, with like one third of my net worth. It was a very nice house and, you know, still is. But yeah, like the ways that I think about it, it's like the money obtained in crypto is not to spend money. The whole point of retirement is to take a nap anytime I want, you know?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Like, you know, I still drive like a Toyota. I don't care. Yeah. So when it comes to material wealth, that's not what I was looking for. I'm just looking for like to live and breathe in crypto and finding opportunities, you know? And to use that capital to kind of anchor myself further into the crypto space and further push it and become the market maker.

• 21:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  One thing that I feel like I've learned about wealth is like, you know, the purpose of wealth is to make you free.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if you're not achieving freedom with that wealth, then like, what is the point? Do you agree with that? Or what do you think the purpose of wealth actually is? What is it for you?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  The purpose of wealth? Well, I think it comes with several levels of needs fulfilled, you know? Like, first of all, when I was like piss poor, like, I'm just looking for money, period. So that's like, you know, you're gasping for air. So that's like the the level one. And then after you've done relatively well, you know, you're looking for like a million dollar or AK retirement or whatever. So once you achieve that, then what's next? You know, like my next goal is to make like other people that level too. And inadvertently, in the process, you know, of keep digging and digging. And through like several failed ventures, I was able to find like the flow state, which I am currently in right now. So I wasn't always successful.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  I invested into several ventures that didn't turn out so well, including like the Augur ICO. You know, even though I made profit off of it, it did not become like the market wide oracle that it could have been. No. So the other one was was just like Funfair, you know? You've heard like the legendary Jazz, you know, which is known to be the creator of some Star Fox technology, I think. Anyways, so he was brilliant and, you know, he had experience behind him and he had reputation too. So I invested in Funfair. I looked at everything and it was good. However, I guess like it wasn't very well understood at the time that execution matters too, you know? So everybody was just like plowing their houses into ICOs.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  So Funfair went up a lot and I was not trying to take profits. So I kind of wrote it up and all the way down to like, you know, lower than it was during the ICO. Because I was waiting for him to execute and bring like a product market fit to their project. You know, so product market fit is what I was looking for for the entire time. I wasn't looking for wealth. I was looking to become like the biggest customer on there. So I can gamble, you know, and make money off of the platform. So my policy for most of the projects I'm involved in is that, am I going to be their biggest customer? If the answer is no, then it doesn't fit my use case. And therefore I have no like sort of pull over the project, you know? I must be their customer.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  I must be their biggest critic as well. So that brings it to skin in the game.

• 24:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  You want to be the big fish in the small pool sort of thing, or the whale, maybe I should say, not fish.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  So when it comes to like a product, you know, like, uh, what kind of problem does it solve? You know, like, I must be able to use it. So as you can see with like projects like DopeX, right? I'm like going in there and I'm playing with the options game too. I'm the market maker, you know? And I'm giving them all kinds of inputs and they're making great use of it.

• 24:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Want to talk about some of the projects you're excited about in a minute? Tetra Node and it's like, just hear what you think, you know, where you think some of the alpha is in the space. But before we do, I'd say you were talking about Funfair and Augur and some of these early ICO examples. And what's really interesting, you know, to me is you said like, look, I made money on Augur, but you didn't blow it out of the park. And a lot of those early ICOs, they made returns denominated in USD and dollars, but they did not do very well denominated in ETH, right? Like the ETH you put in these ICOs.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Far underperformed rather than just holding the ETH. I'm curious what you do now, like, how do you denominate your portfolio today? You denominate it in ETH? Do you denominate it in dollars? How do you sort of, what's your measure of wealth and liquidity?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Um, it's all in ETH. Before like we were able to farm and put capital off of like our decentralized platform. Then it would have been more in US dollar, but right now, you know, like everything's denominated in Ethereum. Like, like, okay, you know, if you want a market make, then you must have Ethereum as well. It goes with like the automated market making process. It's like, okay, so if you have like this many tokens, then what are you going to be nominated in USD or the pair that is bought and sold into? So everywhere that we go, even if we cross bridges, you know, Ethereum is ubiquitous and there's no way around that. You know, this is speaking from an operational point of view. It's not even just like, you know, very crafting. It's the hardest money on earth.

• 25:57David Hoffman?

  I want to lean into that a little bit because Tushernote, you've been maybe loyal is the right word to Ethereum for a very long time, even before DeFi even came around. And so why were you bullish on Ethereum before DeFi was even a thing? Because like I said earlier, like sometimes I joke with my early Ethereum friends before we even invented the word DeFi, like, why were we excited about Ethereum? Like, there were no examples. There was nothing in the app layer that got us excited. What did you see in Ethereum that made you optimistic about its future back then? And do you still see that today?

• 26:30Speaker 02

  So in order to get excited about Ethereum back in the days, you know, you have to compare it to what Bitcoin offers. So back in the days, you know, you had like Bitcoin having like their sort of output script, having primitive things like colored coins, you know, and even the counterparty FCP. And while that is, you know, a very sort of innovative step about Bitcoin, it did not go very far because of like the block time and sort of the limited language expressiveness that Bitcoin is limited to, right? So I've read the Ethereum white paper, which is like, I believe 58 pages long, you know, by Vitalik.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  And while I didn't understand everything that he had written, you know, I got the big picture about like smart contract, you know, and where crypto is heading. So when it first launched in 2015, I bought the first Ethereum on Kraken. And I told, you know, my colleague and my coworker, and he's the shadow Tushernote that is around to this day. I said, not a very well-known fact that there is someone, you know, like on my order of magnitude that's going around and quietly conspiring with me. But anyways, so I told them that, you know, we're looking at like Bitcoin's biggest rival right now, you know,

• 27:50Speaker 02

  right at the time of the July launch of 2015, you know, right there. So we bought a bunch and we kept DCA. And of course, like at the time, there was also the block war going on as well, you know, like with Gavin Andreessen and MyKern. And they were battling the rest of the Blockstream mafia on, you know, what, what the future of the Bitcoin scalability solution should be. So I was very, very angry that Bitcoin couldn't scale past one megabyte, you know, and, and they're kind of gimping it. So lots of things were said back and forth, you know, but ultimately I left Ethereum because they offered a more flexible outlook

• 28:33Speaker 02

  and they were more embracing of new ideas. Whereas like you look at Blockstream and they look like the Taliban. So goodbye to that.

• 28:41David Hoffman?

  And I think a lot of people would ask that same question today, being similarly frustrated with Ethereum's scaling strategy and looking at new horizons with new technologies in 2021.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:53David Hoffman?

  And so with all in 2021, it's been just the rise of the alt layer ones with new scaling solutions, kind of a fractal off of the same like frustration about if Bitcoin's scaling solutions or scaling debates, scaling wars back in 2016, 2017.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:08David Hoffman?

  But why, I mean, you're a farmer, you look at all the frontier projects that are across the ecosystem. But from what I've gathered, you've stuck generally to the Ethereum ecosystem. Why stay bullish in 2021? Why stay bullish on Ethereum?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:23David Hoffman?

  And why kind of just like disregard the rise of the alt layer ones?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Well, it all comes from the understanding of the scalability trilemma, you know, you can either have decentralization, security, and scalability, you know. So solving that trilemma is a very hard and long problem. And so far, the solutions that I've seen, you know, popping up like the quote unquote Ethereum killers, they don't quite solve the scalability trilemma, you know, to the satisfaction that that we want to see. They're mostly engineering trade offs, like Solana is just like. You know, like they implement like so many shitty like engineering trade offs that it's starting to show itself, you know, like the shortcuts that they take to scalability is unacceptable

• 30:09Speaker 02

  from a decentralization point of view. Not only that, but how am I going to trust like, you know, the amount of money that I have on Ethereum chain for Solana, you know, to outage just like that. And one day, what happens if they have complete outage? Not to mention their large node and their larger requirement would cause the node to become part of data center and that fragility, you know, will have a fat tail consequence, kind of like the 1001 days of a turkey, right?

• 30:35David Hoffman?

  Do people call you an ETH maxi for that opinion?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  I'm an ETH maxi. You know, I take it as it is. But, you know, like, the first principle approach, you know, kind of rationalizes why I'm that way. Because like Ethereum, you know, we accept like scalability issues, like even Vidalik said himself that the scalability right now on the blockchain sucks, and that was years ago. And so solving that, that is a hard problem, you know, there are trade offs to be made. And we're still researching it because even if Ethereum has like data sharding, now we come into the limitation of how much can a single threaded beacon chain handle? And now, how many executable

• 31:18Speaker 02

  shards do we need? And how would that affect composability? So it's not an easy problem. And a lot of blockchains are making like different trade offs. But ultimately, Ethereum is the first and most decentralized. And the other ones, they often have a lot of VC money into it. So anything that you throw in there in terms of decentralization is probably owned by, well, a number of entities.

• 31:43David Hoffman?

  So have you kept your activities to just Ethereum and its related L2s and side chains? Or have you actually gone on to other layer ones to quote unquote, you know, farm the alpha there? Have you stuck to the Ethereum ecosystem? Or have you kind of, you know, take perhaps a short term profit maximalist approach and try to, you know, squeeze out some alpha in some other ecosystems?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  I experimented with like a few other changes, you know, like Phantom and BSC. I found the bridging UX not very good, so I didn't want to put my full amount and thankfully I didn't. Because like there was this one hack in the BSC bridge that costed them like $80 million. That could have been like my money, you know, unbacked. And recently, I think that's a lot of wormhole hack, even though it wasn't like a bridge related issue. It was a smart contract hack. Who would put like their life savings in there anyways? So bridges are dangerous. They don't have the security guarantees that that L2D is inheriting their L1 parents. So I try to stay away from that on principle.

• 32:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Tetra Node, sometimes when David and I talk about Ethereum, the way you just talked about it, you know, we call ourselves not necessarily ETH maxi, but a decentralization maximalist. And then people are quite ready to point out, but Ryan, David, people don't care about decentralization. Okay, that's like, you know, some of you do, like the early crypto zealots do, the cypher punks do. Crypto boomers. We get it. But mainstream isn't going to care, right? They just like, they can't pay these very high transaction fees. So they're just going to go where there's apps they want to use and transaction fees are low. You just made the case for decentralization. Why do you think decentralization actually matters to the rest of the world beyond us like decentralization maximalists?

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Decentralization, the consequences that require decentralization is a fatality event. Let's just say that you have like a bunch of nodes shutting down because they've grown too large. Then it's clear why we keep the Ethereum nodes, you know, very widely distributed rather than just like a handful in a data center. So we need decentralization also because we want it to be censorship resistant too. Now, let's say certain three letter agencies, you know, want to press on, say, a highly centralized system and shut down their server. Then you don't have the option of withdrawing your money or doing anything about it.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  So I think the world needs decentralization because of the accessibility. So if you centralize it, there's going to be some fragile point that that will bust sooner or later. Like we've seen it in all sorts of examples, like let's just say.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Binance, right? They're playing a dangerous shell game and eventually that's going to blow up in their face. So that's the most extreme example of a permissionless blockchain that is still centralized, a lot of people use. And there's going to be trails of tears, you know, falling out in case anything happens to CZ or the entity that controls finance. So I would not touch that with a 10 foot pole.

• 34:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Tetra, we've just talked about kind of the layer one and your background, how you got into crypto and how you became a whale. Now you want to maybe talk about some of the, the projects that you're really interested in because the theme of this episode is how we could become whales. Okay. So the person that's listening to Bankless, following a similar track, right? It's still, I think all of us believe it's still very early in crypto. There's a lot of opportunity out there and you are in the midst of harvesting a lot of opportunity in some of these early DeFi applications. I want to talk about your infinity gauntlet.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 35:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is the gauntlet that Thanos uses and this is a meme that we've seen on Twitter. It's a meme of an orca whale with an infinity gauntlet and each infinity stone is a project that you have a stake in. Can you tell us about this? Like, where did this meme originate? And tell us about the projects. Like, what does it take to become an infinity stone project for Tetra node?

• 35:43Speaker 02

  I think Ratwedge is out of nowhere, you know, just drew that and I just rolled with it. Yeah, Ratwell just drew it, you know, and then I added like a few projects onto that as like an initial meme. And it kept building on itself and it became so popular that now, you know, it's widely accepted that because it's associated with me. So, um, some of the projects that we want to talk about, I mean, you can pick one and I could just talk about it. Sure. I'm totally unprepared. No page rustling whatsoever.

• 36:15David Hoffman?

  The list of projects that we have are definitely goes down the line of stuff that we've been thinking about recently, which is Curve, Convex, DopeX, and then also Rocketpool. Like, why those capture your interest? But I kind of actually want to throw it back to you, Tetra node. Say I am a strapping young founder of some upstart DeFi application.

• 36:35David Hoffman?

  And I aspire to be an infinity stone on TetraNode's gauntlet. Like, what do I gotta do? Like, what's the criteria? How do I become, as a DeFi app, an infinity stone on your gauntlet? Like, what makes you really, really care about the product that I have?

• 36:48Speaker 02

  I guess like, what I look for is product market fit, you know? So, how it incorporates into my day-to-day operations. Right? Let's just say like, your Sismo DAO, which is right in the eye right there. Right? I talked to the founders, you know? Actually, the founders reached out to me and, you know, briefed me on the project. And immediately, I found a use case for it, right? Which is to anonymously attest that you have what you claim you have. Let's just say that you wanted to prove that you have a punk, you know? An alien punk, without proving, without like, showing which one you do.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Well, Sismo with CKP can do that. So, that immediately sparked my interest.

• 37:40David Hoffman?

  And so, does the conversation of tokenomics come into question? Or is it strictly like, oh, as soon as you saw product market fit, you were on board? And like, we can fix or tinker with the tokenomics later?

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I'm not too worried about the tokenomics, because I usually get the ear of the founders. And, you know, I would give them input on what works and what doesn't. So, eventually, it'll kind of converge on what I envision it to be. Some projects more than others, you know? But I'm always like, happy to lend input, you know, into this tokenomics and make it so that the treasury doesn't leak. Because I know, I know exactly when the treasury leaks, because I'm a farmer. And farmers takes the most advantage of those free giveaways and stuff like that. So, I tell them things like, don't do buybacks, don't do buybacks, you know? Like, that, that would cause the treasury to bleed, and it doesn't do anything. You know, it doesn't do anything for, for your token in the long run.

• 38:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, the thing you look for, then, TetraNode is product market fit, above all else, it sounds like. The token economics, it doesn't really matter, because those can be tweaked and changed on the fly. The hard part about These projects about getting on the Infinity Gauntlet.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is, do you have product market fit? Do you have something novel that will work? And there's a big addressable market size? Is that how you evaluate these things?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Addressable market size, you know, and what I can do with it as the end customer. So that's how I found these project and that's why they're still useful. And, and you know, I don't think there's any that ever fell off the gauntlet, you know?

• 39:09David Hoffman?

  So we've got a very talented analyst behind Bankless. His name's Ben and he recently gave me this take that farmers have the best alpha just because they are the deepest in the protocol and they just understand the strongest dynamics. Do you agree with that statement? And can you, if you do, like, could you elaborate on why farmers just understand things better than generally everyone else?

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we're all trying to make money.

• 39:35David Hoffman?

  It's so simple.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Farmers are operators, you know? They don't just like buy and hold based on what BitBoy recommends. They go in there, you know, and they operate themselves. They know exactly when their treasury bleeds. So the feedback loop, you know, is very close to the metal, as close to the dollar as you can get.

• 39:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want to get back to the Infinity Gauntlet, but this is an interesting side path here. Who are some of the other farmers that you respect in the space?

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Let's see, a shout out to.

• 40:02David Hoffman?

  Addresses that you watch.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. A shout out to one of my earlier partners in crime. His name is Ple Yuh. It's spelled P L E Y U. Let me just make sure on my Twitter that I got his handle right.

• 40:19David Hoffman?

  It's a crypto punk with a headband and purple glasses?

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, the female crypto punk with a headband, yeah.

• 40:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  About to get some followers here.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  So the other one is Dijon Spartan. You know, he's the one who prompted me, that sparked my interest in coming back to the space. You know, rather just retired and hold, you know, to take a more proactive stance in the space. Because I saw the amount of alpha, you know, even though that he's, he's like this obnoxious guy, you know, full of hentai and just like these shit posts, you know? And he's crazy, but he's on to something, you know? So I followed him ever since and I followed in his footsteps. And I actually became the Dijon Spartan in 2021. And I guess I took it one step further in that I can move markets in ways that he couldn't even imagine. But he is my senpai.

• 41:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I still want to go down this path and I also still want to come back to the Infinity Gauntlet. But like, when you say you can move markets, uh, so.

• 41:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  David and I don't do a lot of that, right?

• 41:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're kind of like fundamental investors, sort of buy and hold, right? We're not-

• 41:21David Hoffman?

  We make content.

• 41:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, and so like, what do you mean? What powers do you have? What, how are you moving markets? Like, how does this work behind the scenes?

• 41:31Speaker 02

  I think I can form bottoms, you know, or just cause FOMO by either tweeting or just moving the market to myself with brute force. So, all the tools are available to me. And I also like talk a lot to founders, you know, and in conversation with them on the direction of things. So, once I hear the news, you know, I just like snatch it off. It's, I can move markets up to an extent. And so, let's put it into more realistic perspective here. Now, I am not the market maker in Ethereum. That's why my profile picture is an orca and not a blue whale, right? Yeah, there are like people, you know, with like 30 X my net worth and those are the real market makers, you know, like 3 AC is a market maker, like Alameda is a market maker. I think Jump Capital is a market maker. I'm just like a DeFi DJ, you know,

• 42:16Speaker 02

  who happens to move like coins that are nine figures or less. So, I don't consider myself like that big of a market maker.

• 42:23David Hoffman?

  So, you still ape into things? You're an aper.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Aper, yeah. I mean, the whole market is just so inefficient right now and the information asymmetry is almost vertical, that if you see anything like convex, you know, getting pushed down to $2 by farming dumpsters, then there's your meal ticket right there. So, the information asymmetry still happens here, even with the majors like Ethereum. It hasn't even been priced in. Like, the true valuation, market valuation Ethereum has not been priced in. Otherwise, Ethereum would be like number one by a wide margin just because of the amount of money settled, the fees paid, you know, and with the news of the merging coming up, the tokenomics coming up, I don't see a reason why Ethereum shouldn't be number one, you know, in the future.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  But that's a free market, you know, and I could be wrong, but I'm willing to bet my money for my mouth is.

• 43:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  As are we.

• 43:17David Hoffman?

  Tetra, now that was one of the first things that I really noticed about this space is the significance of information asymmetry all over the place. And it was so compelling. It was so addicting. It was like dopamine rushes. Every time you could find this information asymmetry is dopamine rush after dopamine rush.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:32David Hoffman?

  But also at the same time, for me personally, my personal disposition is that I second guess myself to the point of not pressing the button on my ledger. And so back to like a psychological question is like, it's one thing to be able to identify information asymmetry. But it's another thing to actually have the conviction to actually move the markets and actually place your money where you actually have that conviction.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:54David Hoffman?

  Do you have any thoughts about like how to actually go from identifying information asymmetry to actually acting on it in the best interest of one's portfolio?

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So here's how I rationalize like my decision making. The information asymmetry exists in that you know it, while the most of the other players do not. So this doesn't surface, this doesn't have consequences until like several months down the road. Right? So you either act on it or you wait until, you know, someone else shows it to you. By then, of course, you wish you would have. So it's better to sort of be on my own judgment than to wait to get validated, you know, after the fact. And the reason why I can be confident in that is because like I have many, many years of, you know, like failed ventures behind me.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Not to mention like first principle, understanding of like how the tokenomics and everything works. So it's just a matter of experience. So the way I look at it is that there's a lot of sophisticated trading firms out there, you know, with like dozens of analysts. And yet they have not like outperformed me. I believe it's because they have all the tools in the world at their disposal, but ultimately it's their personal intuition to make a call. So, you know, you could have like this state of the art fighter jet that you're piloting on, but ultimately how well you fly it is up to you to pilot. So no matter how sophisticated some things might be in crypto,

• 45:28Speaker 02

  or hectic it might be in crypto, trust your intuition at the end of the day.

• 45:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tetra node, we were just a minute ago talking about kind of like whales having the power to move markets. And you know, I'm curious a bit more about that. So in what circumstances would you want to move a market? Or like, how are these whale games played? Because I do think sometimes whales, maybe some, deservedly so, get kind of a bad rap for like dumping on people. For example, dumping on retail, dumping on the smaller fish. Is there a place for, I guess, the gentle whale or the benevolent whale? Who doesn't play those sorts of games? What's your take on these things? Are there good whales and bad whales? And how does the smaller trader interact with these forces?

• 46:20Speaker 02

  There are a lot of ways to answer this question, you know, from my perspective. Because like for certain areas, like in Ethereum and Bitcoin, you know, the majors. Like I am just another retail trader, you know, and I'm at the mercy of the market makers, which I do not know. But when it comes to like smaller coins, I am a seed investor in. I have complete market control over it. And pretty much what I move, you know, what I say goes. So I guess for the markets that I control, we're just trying to, you know, liquidate the short sellers. Like we withhold news and we have like timing of news that would cause the market to jump up. But we do it first, you know, before we release the news.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  But if there were any sort of like insider selling, I haven't, you know, experienced it myself. But I can imagine like, okay, you know, if you're part of the founding team. Then, and you have a fight, you know, and you get mad. You suddenly like, like sell about telling anybody that that's sort of front running the outbreak that, you know, this person, the CTO resigns from, say, you know, Project X. So we, I actually have like a couple of well rooms, you know, that I sit in and kind of, you know, just decide, hey, you know, this month, right now, you know, with certain releases, we can actually like burn, you know, any kind of shorters that tries to bring the price down. So, yeah.

• 47:46David Hoffman?

  Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest DeFi apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of DeFi activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their DeFi goals, all while being economically anchored to Ethereum. But Polygon isn't just the proof-of-stake sidechain. The Polygon team is building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon Hermes, Midan, Nightfall, and Zero, all with different design choices in order to be optimized for all possible crypto use cases. If you're a developer who wants to build on the Polygon ecosystem, go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation. And if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap DeFi, you can bridge over

• 48:29David Hoffman?

  your ETH or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon. Alchemix is a DeFi app that offers self-repaying loans that lets you spend money and save money at the same time. Alchemix allows you to deposit the DAI stablecoin into its vaults, which earn some of the highest yields that DeFi has to offer. You can then take a loan from Alchemix of up to 50% of the deposited DAI, and that loan automatically pays itself back from the yield that is generated from your deposit. It's a savings account that the banks don't want you to know about. Alchemix also has ETH vaults available, so you can get a self-repaying loan that's denominated in ETH. Coming up in Alchemix V2 is a bunch of cool new features, such as credit delegation,

• 49:12David Hoffman?

  multi-chain expansion, and DAO revenue sharing and vote boosting. Alchemix lets you get your interest payments on your deposits paid to you upfront. Check out the power of Alchemix at alchemix.fi and make sure to join their extremely vibrant Discord if you want to participate in governance or have any questions about the project. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallet. But the Ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet, the Ledger Live app, and soon, the CL Crypto Life card powered by Ledger. The CL card powered by Ledger is a crypto debit card with powerful features like an instant exchange to fiat, where crypto assets are only sold at the moment that you swipe your card.

• 49:57David Hoffman?

  And also, credit from crypto collateral, where you can collateralize your crypto assets in order to get a higher credit limit. You'll be able to manage your CL card powered by Ledger inside the Ledger Live app, right next to all the DeFi apps and services that you're already used to using, making the Ledger Live app your one-stop shop for all of your financial needs. Go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger, and download Ledger Live to get all of your DeFi applications all in one place.

• 50:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it important to you, Tetranode, to like, I guess, play long-term games? Like, knowing that you're a whale, not in Bitcoin and Ether markets, but knowing you're a whale in some of the projects that are on the Infinity Gauntlet side of things, you know, is the reason you don't dump on retail or play malevolent whale games, is it reputation, really? Is that what matters to you? And you talk about that a little bit, because it feels like every project you enter, a Tetranode, Infinity Gauntlet-type of project, has your brand and your reputation stamped on top of that. How important is that to you? And like, are you playing the long-term game in these markets?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, more or less. I'm lazy, so I like to guard my wealth, you know? So I don't go out and look for like, positive funding or negative fundings in itperps, you know, or try to scalp every movement. You know, that's up to the more sophisticated market maker to earn delta off of it. But yeah, I don't like, try to do that. Like, there's a lot of different ways to make money in crypto. You know, like, you could be like the token on advisor, and you can just get like 1% or 2% of like, the organization that you're working with. Yeah, so the way that I make money nowadays is one, you know, farming and two, becoming involved with a project. So therefore, like, I'm the advisor. So with the amount of projects looking for me, I have the option to turn it down because I'm overwhelmed, you

• 51:46Speaker 02

  know, with the amount of stuff that I have to help with. Like, right now, I need to go and execute some things with Rari, you know, that I need to do, like, after this meeting. So it just seems like another project with exhausting my bandwidth. So there are some things that are not scalable with me.

• 52:02David Hoffman?

  What are they looking for when they're looking for your advice? Are they looking for, uh, I mean, everyone wants capital these days, but they're not just asking for your capital, they're asking for your expertise.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:11David Hoffman?

  Are they looking for your farming expertise or just like branding? Like, what advice do you have that all of these founding teams really want?

• 52:19Speaker 02

  You know, some are market making, some are marketing strategies, some are tokenomics, you know. So I just wear a lot of hats. Like, I've just been in this space so long, you know, and defi so long that everything is valuable. Experience is valuable. So recently, you know, like, Jones Dow, um, they just launched their first donation event. And it went bad the first time because, like, the bots just, like, ate it up because they had, like, an $11 million sales cap. So of course, like, just one or two bots was able to snatch up, like, 90% of the tokens. So they were like, let's cancel it. Let's do it again. You know, so I advise

• 53:01Speaker 02

  the founder to do it again with a secret twist. Let's have a no-limit uncapped ICL. And it did just that. You know, so we were able to raise 20,000 ETH. And then what did we do? We returned 15,000 of that back to the participants. So now, we have a fairly distributed token, and the cap is only 5,000. So those are some of the tactical advice that I can give, you know, like, uh, different things that can be exploitable. But in my experience, I'm the one exploiting it. So I can give advice on the defense of the dark arts.

• 53:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Tetra Node, since we promised listeners we'd get back to the gauntlet and the Infinity Stones, could we just like quickly rattle off the projects that we're talking about here?

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so, I mean, people who are watching YouTube see a bunch of logos, but could you rattle off the main projects that you're involved in that you really like?

• 54:00Speaker 02

  That are currently on the Infinity Stones, on the Infinity Gauntlet.

• 54:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, because I guess they change, don't they? Yeah, but what's here now?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Okay, so the one that I want to point out first is still FEX. That's my highest conviction and it still is. And they're executing and pushing out stuff like there's no tomorrow. We have like 50 different projects, you know, we're trying to integrate with our option vaults, you know, the SSOB, Single Staking Options Vault. So that would allow composability in terms of options and allowing the project to have more capital efficiency. You know, it allows markets to speculate on their prices while they continually accrue fees from the speculation. And then the next product that's coming out is the Atlantic Puts. Now, we're still talking about DOPX here, you know.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  So it will allow, for simpler words, limit orders that you can farm the underlying asset, you know, while you put the limit order up. Let's just say that you wanted to put like a limit order for DPX, you know, DOPX token at $1,000. So while you're waiting, you can use that $1,000 to farm with integrated and you won't get liquidated or anything while the Atlantic Puts is in session. Now, so we'll have a combination of Atlantic Puts and calls and we have like 50 different DAOs, you know, signing up. So the market, the addressable market for DOPX is probably like in the 11 figures, you know, if we're being frank about it.

• 55:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  And we're pushing out with our stable coins too, the DPX USV, which is created from our DPX. Our DPX is created from sort of the tears, you know, and angers of failed calls and puts. So it's an amazing tokenomic system that, you know, have most faithfully followed my advice.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  I just think like the entire DopeX team is amazing and there are a lot of people smarter than me and I'm just doing, you know, one, the backend tokenomic advising and two, the market making and three, the marketing. So the option stuff, I'm still learning on the go as well and there's a lot to cover. But that's my highest conviction.

• 56:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is all on layer two as well, right?

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so yeah.

• 56:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  The layer two decision making was mine and Tika God when the T-Soc chat asked me, you know, do we want DopeX on layer one or layer two? So I say, go layer two because we can attract capital to layer two, you know, and do the Ethereum ecosystem a favor. Not to mention that the money follows us, you know, not the other way around. We make the money follow us. So ultimately, we're one of the largest TBL on Arbitrum currently.

• 56:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. Very cool. What else you got?

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Let's see, Redacted and Olympus, you know, are partners, like they own about 10% of EBITDA. So I think we're sort of tweaking the 3-3 model so that any time that it reaches nearly the risk-free value of the treasury underneath that we're able to redeem, you know, and do some treasury operations just to make sure that the tokens, you know, are redeemable or at least we have a limit floor, you know, at the RFP. Butterfly is using their CVX token, you know, and recently they just like acquired Vultum App to kind of influence their voting on liquidity. So when it comes to Olympus and Redacted, it's all about liquidity control.

• 57:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  So would you group Olympus and Redacted? Are you grouping them as kind of the same project or they just sort of related?

• 57:39Speaker 02

  They're partners. They're partners. Like the reason Redacted existed is because like their treasury would deal with more volatile tokens that Olympus treasury just wants to stay stable, right? So the goal of Olympus is to have

• 57:56Speaker 02

  A stable token, you know, that's backed. And we have this sort of three, three going on, but we're trying to reduce that, that three, three, you know, to a few thousand percent a year instead of like 58,000% at some point in time in the past. So I think we're starting to reach the point where, where the stability, there is a hard floor where the risk-free value is.

• 58:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Olympus recently had like a 80% drop, something like this. A lot of people were saying like, project's dead, it's over, like everyone to go home, that sort of thing. It sounds like you don't see that. What do you see? What happened with this big drop? And then how does Olympus resurrect?

• 58:35Speaker 02

  I think it's because like in the bear market, the monetary premium drops down to zero, if not even negative, you know? So all of a while, they kind of overlook the fact that Olympus has like the second largest treasury in DeFi. So I think we have currently about 500 or 600 million dollars at our disposal. And if the moment the market cap of Olympus is below the treasury, then of course we can do market operations that brings it to the floor. So I'm not too worried about like people freaking out or saying it's over because this is one hell of a back point.

• 59:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is backed at the bottom.

• 59:16David Hoffman?

  This is what we were talking about earlier where you like, there's information available to you to understand that there's a market efficiency somewhere and it's up to you to press the buttons on your ledger or your meta mask to take advantage of that situation. And sometimes it's actually as simple as verifying on chain.

• 59:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's keep going through the gauntlet then. What else you got?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  So now we have like the next one, the Fave Protocol or AKA Fave Rari since Fave and Rari merged. So you have the young, talented Rari team, which I work closely with, you know, merging with the larger and more well-capitalized Fave with Joey Santoro and their brilliant team, you know, coming together. And they're coming out with like some extremely awesome product that will increase capital efficiency even further. So one example is the standard they're making, it's ERC. Four six two six. So that allows for depositing of yielding assets, you know, like let's just say CVX CRV, you can deposit into fuse.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  And then you can borrow money from it while you're staking, or you're staking and earning like the regular income from convex. So there's no reason why you shouldn't put into fuse because then you have more stables to farm with, or you can lever it up, you know, whatever you like. And then Fae is coming out with like a couple of other products as well, like one of their Maker Dow moment is Turbo. They can now mint Fae, you know, off of like certain pools. And you can get interest free Fae from farming, from depositing an asset and then farm with it. Yeah.

• 1:00:54David Hoffman?

  I think the one I'd like to ask about next is something that I think all of us actually share in common, which is really just a lot of optimism about Rocket Pool. But I'd love to hear from you about why you think Rocket Pool is a interesting project.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Rocket Pool is the only decentralized staking option right now. Like all the other ones requires like elements of trust and it's down to like, I don't want to name any of the other staking pool. There's a lot of staking projects out there. But Rocket Pool allows you as a node operator to stake other people's like ether. And then you can earn fees off of that and it's paid out in staking rewards. And RPL, now RPL isn't just like a useless governance token. It's actually used as insurance, you know, that's required to get staked into Rocket Pool. So it does have intrinsic value and now its intrinsic value is tied to the value of the staked ether.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  Right? Because you need at least like 10% RPL as insurance to your staking lot. But there's a lot more that we can do, you know, with the Rocket Pool token. The community right now is just like busy with executing the various bits and pieces right now. We're doing curve integration, you know, and we're figuring out how to make it more liquid for Rocket ETH.

• 1:02:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tetranode as an ETH whale, do you feel Feel comfortable like depositing your ETH into Rocketpool? Or like, you know, significant portion of your ETH into Rocketpool and staking it that way? Or is it still too early in your mind?

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Um, you know, like, that's on a back burner for a while, and I should. Cause what I want to do first is run a Rocketpool node myself. But right now I'm at a situation where I have like a dozen DAOs constantly pinging me. And I just haven't had the bandwidth to go down and sit down myself and do it. Like, what I like to do is have like a firsthand approach to it. Now, rather than say, oh, hey, buy my stuff. Like, I gotta go and investigate myself before I do it.

• 1:02:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally. I think one theme that's coming across this whole conversation is actually using these DeFi protocols is what is really giving you your edge here in this entire space.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03David Hoffman?

  Not buying a token on Uniswap, using the product.

• 1:03:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not buying a token because a YouTuber said you should buy it. Actually.

• 1:03:10David Hoffman?

  Buying a token because Tetra Node said you buy it.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always like the first principle approach, you know? And also, just as importantly, skin in the game. I see too many VCs, you know, like incorrectly evaluating a product because they're theory crafting and they're sitting under armchairs and they're reading their white paper, but they've seen nothing, you know, on the ground below. So that's what makes me different and that's why a lot of protocols seeks me out. Because like I'm out there, I'm executing, I'm in the frontline, you know, I'm the general, but I'm also like, you know, doing the shooting as well, so.

• 1:03:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love that term. Theory crafting is awesome.

• 1:03:52David Hoffman?

  One question I have about the Infinity Gauntlets is why the Chainlink logo is wrapped around the Ethereum Ether logo? Is that strategic or is that just, am I reading into this too much?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Hmm. Chainlink is like an agnostic framework, you know? An agnostic framework used as an oracle right now. And it's anchored mainly on the Ethereum blockchain, even though it could choose like all the different blockchains, you know, to record its oracle data until. Because Ethereum is mostly centralized and it's the most resilient. So I think Chainlink and Ethereum, you know, goes hand in hand. Because Chainlink is kind of agnostic, so it can be anywhere. And yet it chooses to be on Ethereum. So I think it will do well, you know, Ethereum does well.

• 1:04:36David Hoffman?

  What else is left? I feel like we talked about a lot of the infinity stones. I think Curve is left.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40David Hoffman?

  You want to talk about that? And is there anything else?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  I think Curve right now is evolving and it's progressing because we're having like Curve V2, where anybody could put up their stuff like Uniswap, but with a twist that, you know, we pay out in our CRV token. The CRV tokenomics is one of the best that I came across. And it still is to this day, you know, like the way that CRV is issued, it's kind of a bidding war. And that creates a secondary economy across like a DAO who wants to control it, right? So at the very base, CRV is responsible for earning fees, you know, off of like the Curve platform. What happens is when you introduce like a voting system on it to vote who gets the CRV,

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  you're basically bidding for the right to earn a dollar. So how much is that right to earn a dollar worth, you know? So that's the monetary premium incurred by the CRV. Yeah, we can do like an entire episode about this, but to keep it within the scope of our discussion. The CRV token, you know, it provides like a different market from what the normal AMM like Uniswap V3 is doing right now. And it seems to have a lot of capital locked up. I think about 20 billion the last time I checked.

• 1:05:59David Hoffman?

  We actually recently did a full entire episode on Curve convex and that whole ecosystem. And it really just struck me and Ryan as something, exactly what you just said, is very significantly different from almost everything else that we're seeing in DeFi. And it actually kind of made me a little bit scared for everything else that's not Curve in DeFi. Because all of the layers on top of Curve really add on what seems to be like a bunch of armor to Curve. Like Curve really seems to be layering on a bunch of just like peripheral protocols that are also built on Curve that are all fighting, exactly what you said, fighting for the rights to earn $1.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:36David Hoffman?

  And that fight itself is some sort of like decentralizing force around the Curve application itself. And I remember getting into DeFi and Ethereum in the first place, kind of to answer my own question about why I was bullish on Ethereum and DeFi back in 2017, even before we had invented DeFi. It's because I imagined stuff like that. And now in 2022, like It's only Curve. Do you also share that same concern as in like only really Curve has this kind of Curve Wars layer on top of it and the rest of DeFi is doing like these DeFi governance tokens? And what is a governance token anyways? Like, yeah, maybe one day we'll vote in fees. Like, do you share that concern?

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Um, well, the Curve ecosystem, you know, it has the network effect right now that everyone wants their stable to be on Curve because there's already a lot of liquidity on Curve. But more than that, you know, like there's sort of AMM Curve is pretty brilliant in terms of like how capital efficient it can get, you know, and how scalable it is. I feel like with the Uniswap tip, you know, it does a lot of really cool things, but it poses a lot of problems for market makers like myself, you know, liquidity providers like myself. Such as like if I were to provide like, uh, say a million dollars on Uniswap V3, you know, for something like a stable, then I would have to concentrate the liquidity and I would have to fend off against the just-in-time attacks.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  But also like when I'm providing and it creates like some oracle issues, you know, having concentrated liquidity like that, where if you run an oracle off of Curve's liquidity, you don't run into that liquidity cliff, you know, incurred by concentrated liquidity. If you know what I mean? Like some of the stuff, you know, is kind of like rotator territory and I'm stumbling as a word cell.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26David Hoffman?

  Would I go so far to assume that you are bullish CRV and bearish Uni?

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Um, I wouldn't say bearish Uni because I use Uniswap for certain things like limit orders and I can see where, where like if you're a sophisticated market maker, then you're able to earn a lot of fees. Right now, like the thing that I see with Uniswap is that they have their 0.01% stable swap. And it's right now like 50% of the volume of like the table's coin traded. So that's very useful, but as a liquidity provider, I'm not so sure if I'm able to do that, you know, and still be profitable like point 01% is basically doing it for free. So there's opportunity costs where curve pays more.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  So I'm waiting to see in the long run, you know, where the steady state equilibrium is in terms of curve market share versus uniswap market share. And it's a free market, so I'm waiting for it to battle out. But I wouldn't count uniswap V3 or, you know, uniswap team in general out. They're both brilliant.

• 1:09:31David Hoffman?

  Do the concerns about like, oh, governance tokens, it'll just turn on fees one day. Like we've been saying that for, I don't know, as long as governance tokens have been around. Curve is actually spitting out fees to the governance token holders, but like that's, again, that's the only one. Does the whole just trope of, oh yeah, uni comp, you know, insert your governance token here. It'll just one day turn on fees and spit out fees to the token holders. That's a line that we've said. Do you believe that line? And like, do you follow that, you know, governance just has value somehow? Or are you concerned about like the fact that maybe these applications don't actually put out dividends in the way that we might expect them to?

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would advise like the vast majority of my projects that I'm on to have profit sharing at some level. Otherwise people will take profit in one way or another. So they're going to take profit by going the usual route, which is to sell it. Right. But with profit sharing, you can create a system where you can stake it, you know, and take away that liquidity. And give the tokens of intrinsic value, cash flow, you know, of the platform. So let's just say if you're a DAO, building a big treasury, well, all you have to do is just like launch with like, you know, 30 or 40% of the token. So you still earn the platform fees, but also you build a monetary premium, you know, off of your token because it has cash flow.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  Those without cash flow, you know, it's 2022. The governance thing doesn't really work because the voting, you know, is more or less like. A handful of entities just deciding the outcome of the vote anyways, the decision making anyways. And sometimes, you know, like the voting isn't even binding. You know, like back a while ago, your finance had a vote on whether, you know, they should like print more tokens or keep it at thirty thousand the way it is. And of course, like they voted to keep thirty thousand tokens. And of course, that was never honored. So I feel like the governance token vote, you know, is just like a decentralization theater when it comes to it. You know, and it's not very well understood how it should be used effectively.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  So, you know, profit sharing or or just shenanigans.

• 1:11:42David Hoffman?

  Shenanigans. So many things are underpinned by shenanigans in this industry.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46David Hoffman?

  I want to pivot the conversation a little bit to the conversation of layer twos. Because as we all think that we know, we're all about to do this whole L layer two migration. I've started to migrate a portion of my portfolio and other people are doing the same. Some people are already living a layer two life.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00David Hoffman?

  I'm wondering how much of a layer two life you've been able to live. And what do layer twos need to do to convince somebody like Tetranode to completely live a layer two life, a hundred percent on layer two? Have you started dabbling in layer twos? And what would it take for you to move over completely?

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Right, so I have like, you know, one third of my portfolio in layer two. It's going well. There are certain problems, you know, there are certain use cases where I say layer two is just not there yet for me. And that's like the lending market right now. Because Arbitrum has been shown to have some spotty downtime. And I think it's because it lacks redundancy in this infrastructure right now. So if you were like at Aave or Fuse right now, you know, like you have to prepare for the scenario where if Arbitrum went down for an entire day, you know, and the market crashed, you know, you have to have such a margin that you don't run into bad debt. You know, I remember some back and forth with Aave, you know, and they have measures to kind of prevent that.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  But as the entire layer two infrastructure, there needs to be more provision. So that's the challenge that they have.

• 1:13:09David Hoffman?

  Are you privy to kind of the constructions of these different layer twos? And if you are, do you have like a preferred layer two that you feel safest on?

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Um, the ideal layer two would have fast withdrawal time, you know, without having like a third party like synapse, you know, or a cross protocol, you know, arming and charging a fee. So I think ZK Sync is sort of the holy grail of scaling. It's just that it hasn't had like a generalized EVM compatibility just yet, you know, that that's where everybody should be. So I think the end game of Ethereum is to either have like EVM compatible Stark or ZK Sync. Before that, you know, like we do have several ZK Sync app, you know, we have several Starknet app, but the ZK Sync scaling is per app. So it lacks

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  composability, let's just say D Y D X, right? So you can't really build on top of that because you'd have to be like per protocol rollup. So yeah, we need a generalized EVM compatible ZKP scaling solution.

• 1:14:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So it seems like you're really excited about ZK rollups because you have just those extra assurances about fast withdrawals and some of the assurances about its uptime. But what you also kind of just indicated is that you're also really interested in like the composability that you kind of only really get on, at least for right now, on an optimistic rollup, something that is much more EVM compatible.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36David Hoffman?

  Is there a tug of war here? Or how do you square these two things?

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  I think in the very, very long run, we'll see like ZKP as the end game. I mean, I'm sure like Stark, you know, is more effective, but right now it's just like closed source. But ZK Sync, I'm favoring right now because it's open source. But, you know, we don't know what's going to happen over the period of 10 years. And also like Stark is also quantum resistance too. So that that's future proof, whereas ZKP may or may not be. So still waiting for the market to have the final say.

• 1:15:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you have a favorite L2 activity? What app on L2 do you use the most?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Right now, it's still Bex.

• 1:15:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Still Bex.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  So I used to farm on there. I also like buy options on there, market make on there. So that's the extent of it. But I'm still, you know, speculating on how dependable like lending services is, you know, in the face of like day long failures. So I'm kind of avert to using leverage on L2s.

• 1:15:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tetra, I want to ask a question that's been, you know, some of the news recently, but like, I think very much in this conversation, there's kind of the VC, almost institutional side of crypto and of DeFi. And then there's like the more DeFi native side, right? So you have like VCs over here and you have like, DeFi whales, liquidity providers like yourselves. And sometimes you have like VC DeFi style startups. Then you have like more DeFi native startups. And the ecosystem is interesting because on the DeFi native side, you have these DeFi native builders and these liquidity whales like yourselves. One of them that's been notable lately is Danny from the Wonderland Project, Danny Sista. And that project seemed to go off the rails in a, you know, like a pretty big way, right?

• 1:16:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's like controversy in the space. There's like, I mean, bankless listeners know there's a convicted felon, maybe possibly like running this thing. What do you think about that whole situation? Do you have any like learning lessons or thoughts coming out of that?

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  And so many things like I could say, you know, to resolve it to different perspectives. But first and foremost is that Danny personally is a friend of mine. You know, he's always been one to one with me for financial dealings. And he has also saved me several times by tipping me off to various things that I cannot discuss here.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  But his relationship with C4, you know, like I don't want to speculate too much into what it is, but I just don't want to be associated with corruption, you know, with that out of an there. Danny is very Italian and he deals with people personally in a very Italian manner, right? And so sometimes, you know, like it works on a personal connection basis, but business-wise, it might not be working out so well, you know? Like sometimes it's not a scalable operation, you know, to deal with people in such a personal manner like that.

• 1:17:39David Hoffman?

  One challenge, I think that that whole situation really posed on everyone is we want everyone to be able to maintain their privacy for obvious reasons. But also when it comes to developing DeFi applications that, you know, eventually ultimately comes down to users pressing the approve button on their MetaMask, saying, I do approve of this contract, touching my money. There's an interaction there between an Anon developer and approvals and trust. How have you navigated this world? The Danny situation is, you know, one of many situations in the broader, you know, crypto ecosystem. And I expect this to be just an even more significant conversation moving forward,

• 1:18:19David Hoffman?

  especially as US regulations starts to really incentivize anonymity in the developer space. How have you navigated the very murky waters, the fog of war, if you will, as we started this podcast with? How have you navigated the waters of just like Anons as an Anon yourself? How have you dealt with, let's just like figuring out how to play the crypto game? Well, like, you know, about half of the industry is anonymous.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's a different layers of trust, right? Let's just say like in the traditional finance world, you know, you are compelled by the force of law. It's like, okay, if you do something wrong, you know, it's a lawsuit. It can cause like your financial situation to go down or you can get arrested and put in jail. But in here, you know, if you trust the wrong person, then instantly you get rugged and, you know, the punishment is a crime. So the way that I deal with that is through having a lot of eyes, you know, on certain things that requires my scrutiny. Let's just say like I was farming on in a non-project, let's just say. Machi, big brother, Jeffrey Huang, you know, like, like Sisario, pumpkin dumper.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  You know, and I was farming on that project called Myth. It was a long ago, you know, like Myth Finance, it was a fork of Basis. So how do I know this guy is not going to rug me? Well, I go and I looked at the diff checker, you know, between like the synthetic fork rewards and the original staking contract. And so I don't see anything that says like change of ownership of address. Then I think that that's okay, you know? So I also have like several eyes, you know, like in this secret Discord group that we're totally not in, right? David? That just kind of scours the code basis for various anomalies. So we have so many eyes on that. So I think I kind of run like an anon team, you know,

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  of analysts in which I am the analyst myself and everyone contributes. So that's the system of trust, you know, that I built over this past cycle. And it's worked well for me.

• 1:20:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really funny how social crypto actually is, right? And it's like all of these different groups, some anon, some represented by like, you know, just depictions of cats, you know, all sorts of craziness. But yet it's all people at the very bottom of this. And there is some trust exchange on that level. As we start to draw to a close here at Tetranode, I want to ask this question, right? So I feel like hopefully listeners have absorbed what it's like to, like your transition from sort of becoming a noob in this space where we all started to becoming like the Tetranode crypto whale that we know you are today. How would you summarize advice for someone who is trying to take a path like that? They're a small fish, little fish, we all started that way in crypto.

• 1:21:02David Hoffman?

  We all want to be whales.

• 1:21:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  We all want to be whales.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  How does someone become a whale? What are kind of the steps or what advice would you give them?

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so the first one is of course, like the one that I hammer over and over and over again, which is like first principle approach, you know? Like learn the basic building blocks, learn the basic cryptography, and then build from there, you know, the implication and then the economics, you know? And work it all the way to the top to where you see a project that lines up from the bottoms up. Um, the next one that I want to emphasize is sort of the skin in a game approach, which is to operate, operate, operate. So do something, you know, anything. Cause like, in the end, like even if you did it something wrong, you would know what not to do next time. And that's empowering, you know?

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  So, so don't just do it blindly. Do it with the first principle backing, you know, that you have. Even if it doesn't work a hundred percent of the time, you have guidance there. Right. So first of all, do something, but also have like the research and knowledge backing it.

• 1:22:10David Hoffman?

  Tetranode, you have such a presence on Twitter. You have these fantastic illustrations and memes that I think you have just like fantastic designers for like meme artists, crypto meme artists. And kind of like how we started at the beginning of this podcast, like people follow what you say on Twitter. They follow the memes. They follow the internet crypto native culture that I think is something that you're helping create. They also follow you on chain. They see what you're up to. They see what you're doing.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:35David Hoffman?

  In five, 10, 20 years, what do you think the legacy of Tetranode will be?

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know. Maybe I'll just like disappear off the internet like after I get bored or, or something.

• 1:22:46David Hoffman?

  Satoshi style?

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Thirty-five to 40 years, you know, like my kids are my legacy. So that's the end of that. For all the games that we play, you know, in my view, like I can be successful. I can be like 12 figures, but I wouldn't be successful if, if my kids wasn't there to enjoy it. You know, so family is what really matters at the end. Just that they will be all that remains of you, you know, like many, many years from now.

• 1:23:10David Hoffman?

  You plan to teach your kids how to DeFi, Tetranode?

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm already having like test cases with like, you know, kids around my neighborhood and they seem to be, you know, it's like Tetranode, when are we making the Zoom call? We should make a Zoom call weekly. And I've been kind of slacking on that because, you know, like the bandwidth is very thin. Cause I have like a newborn and a toddler, you know, and they're eating up like most of my time nowadays. Yeah.

• 1:23:35David Hoffman?

  And then crypto eats up the rest, as we know.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:37David Hoffman?

  Tetranode, this has been a fantastic conversation and I think we've learned so much. We wanted to ask this question at the very beginning, but like, I think it's actually a better fit at the end.

• 1:23:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Haven't asked it the whole time, but what is a tetranode, actually? Like, what is a tetra? What does that mean?

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  Okay, so a tetranode is like a quake to sort of villain or destination, where the stroggs is the nerve center of the stroggs, like, processing, you know, like, on the planet strogg in quake 2, I believe. Or was it quake 4?

• 1:24:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a quake reference.

• 1:24:13David Hoffman?

  Of course, of course. Why didn't we see that coming?

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Fun fact here is that, you know, like, one of my best crypto buddies,

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  T-Sup Chad, it's a high-level villain from RuneScape as well. So, you know, RuneScape and quake, you know, the old-school stuff.

• 1:24:33David Hoffman?

  So we said we're gonna rug pull you, because we said there was gonna be last question, but I want one more.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  No rush.

• 1:24:37David Hoffman?

  I don't know how old your kids are, but maybe you take them to daycare, maybe you shake hands with other parents.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 1:24:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, well, regardless, let's imagine the scenario.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  I am the babysitter.

• 1:24:48David Hoffman?

  Okay, so in some scenario, you meet someone and they ask you, what do you do for work? What's your answer?

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Um, I say I'm a retired software engineer that sold, like, some startup, you know? Yeah.

• 1:25:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a fantastic answer. What do you tell people you do, David?

• 1:25:05David Hoffman?

  Oh, I tell them I've written a podcast, and then I tell them to subscribe.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. I tell them I'm still working, you know? It depends on the situation, really. Like, I really don't want, like, people, you know, that I meet to still have, like, 9-to-5 jobs. And I say, I'm retired, you know? I'm just saying, like, oh, I work at home, you know? Yeah, and I still do, because even in my retirement, I work, like, 100 hours a week. It's not even a joke. It's because, like, it's not because I'm compelled to do the 9-to-5, you know? It's because I'm compelled to participate in the turf war.

• 1:25:38David Hoffman?

  Does it feel like work?

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  No, it feels like I have a compulsion to go in and dominate and corner the market. It's a different motivation than say, you know, oh, shit, you know, I got to get paid.

• 1:25:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, I kind of feel like we came full circle and we're back at StarCraft again. Like, that's what you do full-time. It's like, this is StarCraft, right?

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00David Hoffman?

  It's funny.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just like the competitive impulse.

• 1:26:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's funny. I think Ryan and I might be resonating with you in a different weird roundabout way where, you know, we don't press the buttons on our ledgers as often as you do, but I feel like we've cornered the podcast market pretty damn well. And that's the thing that doesn't feel like work for us. It feels very, very much like an addiction or a compulsion.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, related to what you said about the compulsion to like, you know, win, win, win. It's like, you know, Anthony Sessano was just commenting to me like, I was like, how do I get like all the seed rounds that you're getting, you know, it's like, didn't you already get like a homerun with Matic?

• 1:26:35David Hoffman?

  Most of them.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Didn't you already get a homerun with Matic? And he was just like, you know, I just want to, you know, to win, that's all. I just want to win more. Yeah, that's the compulsion that we have, you know, win more.

• 1:26:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it can't stop, won't stop. And you know what? It's really another shared thing is like, I feel like so many people in the space, well, you know, some people played poker, some people played chess. Almost everyone in this space has played video games at some point in their life. And that's like a shared heritage. And I feel like somewhat video games has taught me almost everything I need to know about crypto, right? It's at least it's the foundations for a lot of those things. So that sounds like another thing you share. Tetra Node, it's been a real pleasure, man. Thanks for hanging out with us. Looking forward to seeing how the stones on your gauntlet perform in the future and just what you're up to next. It's always exciting.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  Ryan? David? It's been a pleasure speaking to you. So, you know, like in the future, maybe we'll make a return, you know, at some point, maybe after Ethereum is 10,000, you know, and we're in a celebratory mood.

• 1:27:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so it sounds like May. Is that about right?

• 1:27:44David Hoffman?

  Send you a calendar invite.

• 1:27:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I didn't say what year, but yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  So anyways, so we'll stay in touch, you know, through Twitter and room that we're all not in.

• 1:27:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:27:56David Hoffman?

  No clue what you're talking about.

• 1:27:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Secret room.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know, but we're not in that room at all. So we shouldn't even be communicating there.

• 1:28:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this episode with Tetra Node. Tetra Node, thanks a lot for hanging with us.

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  Okay, David, Ryan, I will see you later.

• 1:28:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Action items for you guys. We're gonna put a list to all the projects in the Infinity Gauntlet, all the Infinity Stones for you there, so you have a reference for that. And also, we'll put a list of some of the Twitter accounts that Tetranode said you should follow, some of the other whales in the space. I don't know, David, should we put a link to that secret room that Tetranode was talking about?

• 1:28:37David Hoffman?

  You know, I think we absolutely sure we'll spin up a brand new Discord room.

• 1:28:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I think, look, if Tetranode can do it, all of us can do it. But it takes some time and dedication. You gotta stay involved in these projects. That's what I learned coming out of this episode. Risks and disclaimers. The one thing I also learned, and I know in every Bankless episode, is none of this was financial advice. Eth is risky, Bitcoin is risky, some of these DeFi projects are certainly risky too. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.