124 - Is Mark Cuban Buying the Bear?

Mark Cuban of ABC’s Shark Tank, owner of the Mavs, and seasoned entrepreneur and investor joins us for Round Two of Bankless. Hear what Mark’s been up to since his first Bankless appearance, how he explains crypto to noobs (hint: he doesn’t), what he envisions next for crypto, how long he believes the bear will last and so much more! ------ 📣 NOTIONAL | Real DeFi Yield https://bankless.cc/Notional ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🏦 ROCKET POOL | STAKE YOUR ETH https://bankless.cc/RocketPool 👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave ⚡️ LIDO | LIQUID ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/lido 🔐 LEDGER | NANO S PLUS WALLET https://bankless.cc/Ledger ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:50 What Mark’s Been Up To? 6:20 2017 vs. 2022 Cycle Differences 7:10 Mark’s Crypto Interest Development 16:56 How to Explain Crypto to Noobs 20:21 Macro Components to the Bear 26:10 ETH vs. BTC 30:37 Payments 32:51 What’s Next For Crypto? 34:20 How Long Will the Bear Last? 38:50 Where Mark’s the Most Optimistic 45:50 ReFi, Positivity, & Advice ------ Resources: Mark Cuban https://twitter.com/mcuban 1st Appearance on Bankless https://youtu.be/l3ptz8qvZcg ----- 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams and I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, we've got a special episode for you. We just pinged Mark Cuban and said, "Hey, Mark, do you want to come on the podcast sometime? I know the playoff season is over for the Mavs and you want to talk some crypto? We're in a bear market." And he said, "Yeah, sure."

• 0:28David Hoffman?

  Right now.

• 0:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Give me 30 minutes.

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  Right now, let's do this.

• 0:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so, we jumped on and we did it. And David and I just recorded an episode with Mark Cuban, picked his brain about a number of things, how he feels about the crypto bear market, how he thinks we're going to recover, if we will recover, and where do we end up on the other side, in particular, what he's looking for from an application perspective from crypto. So, it was all of Mark Cuban's thoughts on where we are in this market. And of course, he's been deep down the rabbit hole in some of these protocols, messing around with DeFi protocols, you guys heard in our original episode with him. He's into Axie Infinity in the gameFi market. He's also doing things with carbon credits and Klima Dow. So like, he is deep in a number of these things. David, what were some of

• 1:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  your thoughts going into this episode?

• 1:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's interesting to hear how Mark Cuban thinks about these things. And you can definitely like try and put yourself in Mark Cuban's shoes as like a Shark Tank investor, right? The external investor. He's coming from this with like a business mind, right? He's got this experience coming from the world of traditional finance. And when he talks about the bear market, you can hear him put it into these terms and ideas that he's familiar with. But then it kind of clicked to me to what he was saying. It's like, "Oh, you're waiting for like Layer Ones to like band together and merge?" Because in times of bear markets and times of struggles, things like have mergers and acquisitions. And so, like putting myself in the shoes of Mark Cuban and trying to understand how he thinks

• 2:02David Hoffman?

  about the crypto industry via more traditional routes, I thought was pretty interesting. And again, from the external investor who's always in the mindset- Of utility for the customer, utility for the user. What product am I actually going to go out of my way? And even though crypto is hard, I'm still going to go out of my way to use it. And so it's always a refresher talking to Mark Cuban about the external reference point for how the how people like Mark Cuban look at crypto and what they see when they take a peek inside of our industry.

• 2:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, we're going to get right to this episode with Mark. But before we do, we want to tell you about these awesome tools to help you go more bankless.

• 2:41David Hoffman?

  Rocketpool is your friendly decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH with Rocketpool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in DeFi at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by staking it with Rocketpool, but you can get even more by running a node. Rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating nodes. Running a Rocketpool node is easier to set up than running a solo node, and you only need 16 ETH to get started. Why would you do this? You get an extra 15% staking commission on the pooled ETH, so your APY is boosted. So if you're bullish ETH staking, you can increase your APY and get some extra tokens by adding your node to the decentralized Rocketpool network, which currently has over 1,000 independent validators. It's yield farming, but with Ethereum nodes. You can get started at rocketpool.net and also join the Rocketpool community in their Discord.

• 3:26David Hoffman?

  You can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there. The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day, and we need bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. Across is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge. With Across, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets to the chain of your choice. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across bridges are powered by Uma's Optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens from Layer 2 back to Ethereum. A token proposal is being deliberated as we speak in the Across forum, where community members will decide on the token distribution. You can have your part of Across's story by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair, fair launch of Across.

• 4:08David Hoffman?

  If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to across.to to bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba networks.

• 4:18David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Over 300 projects have already deployed to Arbitrum and the DeFi and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Some of the coolest and newest NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, all the while DeFi protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity. Using Arbitrum has never been easier, especially with the ability to deposit directly into Arbitrum through all the exchanges, including Binance, FTX, Huobi, and Crypto.com. Once inside, you'll notice Arbitrum increases Ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee. If you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, visit arbitrum.io/developer to start building your DApp on Arbitrum. If you're a Dgen, many of your favorite DApps on Ethereum are already on Arbitrum, with

• 5:02David Hoffman?

  many moving over every day. Go to bridge.arbitrum.io now to start bridging over your ETH and other tokens in order to experience DeFi NFTs in the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, secure, and friction-free.

• 5:16David Hoffman?

  Mark Cuban, we had you on the Bankers Podcast a little over a year ago, and so much has happened since then. How's it going, my man?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Well, like everybody else, I'm getting torched.

• 5:28David Hoffman?

  Is one big club, absolutely. And so, yeah, we had you on a livestream. As you were going down the DeFi rabbit hole, you're into NFTs, you saw the potential. We even learned that you were writing your own, learning about solidity and doing your own contracts. And so, I kind of want to just get a speedrun of what you have done since then. So can you, like, speedrun us through the last year of Mark Cuban in crypto?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  I mean, just a lot of investments, a lot of research, a lot of learning, a lot of losing, a lot of optimism still. But just like everybody else, you know, you learn from all your experiences. You learn or you get burned, and so that's what I've tried to do. I don't have any one thing or two things that really stand out. I mean, I'm still doing well overall, but like everybody else, you know, my Ethereum and my Bitcoin have gone down a little bit.

• 6:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I believe that makes this your first cycle, so congratulations, you get your first cycle badge.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  I was around in 2017, but actually, I think this is a lot, there's some similarities, but there's a lot of differences.

• 6:34David Hoffman?

  Sure, yeah, let's go into that. What do you think are the differences that stand out to you the most?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  You know, in the ICO craze and the first real push of Bitcoin, that's where you started to get the early interest, but there weren't a lot of mainstream applications. There were, there were companies trying to do some things with smart contracts, CryptoKitties among them, and there were a lot of different ICO type approaches, but nothing really was already mainstream. And that, that was the big difference. You, you know, it was just about people getting into crypto, not crypto getting into people's lives.

• 7:09David Hoffman?

  Amazing. And I, I'm wondering, how have you, like, how has your interest developed? Like, like I kind of alluded to, I remember talking about Euler Beats when you, when you came on, and just you were generally super interested in the way that artists can receive automatic dividends. How has your interest in crypto developed since then?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it's just continued, right? I mean, I think, you know, where I caught a lot of flack early on was, you know, the focus on the utility of, of whatever it is I was looking at. You know, what, what, how was it going to be used? What was the value proposition? And like you just mentioned, what was exciting to me back then with NFTs was the fact that artists could receive royalties, you could create a textbook NFT. You know, we did a lot of things with NFTs with the Mavericks, with MavsCollectibles.com. There's just a ton of applications, but there's got to be utility for them. They can't just be about speculation. And I think when, you know, there's an old saying, everybody's a genius in a bull market. And so when everything was going up, everybody was smart, right? And when everybody's smart, everybody thinks they can do anything and not lose money.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  And then that obviously changed multiple times, you know, over the past 15, 16 months. And so now, you know, you, I continue to look for applications, but you know, it's, it's interesting that, you know, my focus now. So what's really changed over the past 15 months is, you know, we were looking at DeFi, there was the DeFi summer, then there's DeFi and, you know, but there was really DeFi on just a couple of blockchains, right? Mostly Ethereum is where all the action was. And there was a lot of subsidies. It's, again, it's like the, you know, people were approaching crypto and DeFi in particular, like they did software applications, where there were, you know, back in the day, VCs

• 8:52Speaker 02

  would subsidize apps or applications and offer them for free, and knowing that they were losing a boatload of money just to get users to try it. And we saw that with DeFi as well, where, you know, Every, you know, on Aave, wherever you went, there were all kinds of rewards that were just handouts that somebody had to subsidize. And that subsidy was coming from investors, they were coming from, you know, misperceived tokenomics, or they were coming from, you know, just buyers who were just wanted to play the game, think, you know, trying to earn as much, just trying to go as DJN as they can. And, you know, what we've learned since then, you go to Aave now, and you see what the real rate should be. And it's all

• 9:33Speaker 02

  algorithmically driven without the reward. And once you took out the rewards, the whole perception of DeFi changed. And I think that's also one of the reasons why DeFi has kind of survived a little better than C-Fi has survived. Because C-Fi is a centralized business, has tried to run with rewards more and subsidies more. And that catches up to you real quick.

• 9:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure, of course. And as the NFT, the steam in the NFT market has really dried out. And like, like you've alluded to, the, the yields have gone down to their very base primitives. Mark, is your conviction on crypto shaken? Or are you going to hang out with us during the bear market?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  No, it's not at all. It's not shaken at all. I mean, I think this is a good thing. It's painful to lose the money, right? But, but it's really, really good. Because, you know, one of my favorite sayings is first, there's the innovators, then there's the imitators, then there's the idiots. And what, what's been happening in crypto over the past 18 months, or actually, past six months, I should say, is when something worked on Ethereum, then it went to an L2 of Ethereum. So you saw DeFi go from Ethereum, oh, it's too slow, it's too expensive. So then you go to an L2 of Ethereum. Well, it's cheaper now. That's a good thing, right? Then it went to another chain, and the same, you know, and then another chain, and another chain, and another chain. Sounds like a song. It sounds like something DJ Khaled would do. And another chain, and another chain,

• 10:52Speaker 02

  you know. But what would happen is, because blockchain, for the most part, is a zero-sum game, there's not a whole lot of differences. We can argue the tri, the trilemma, right? And the nuanced differences among all of them. And Bitcoin maxies will argue a whole different story. But the reality is, if those chains don't get enough volume,

• 11:15Speaker 02

  They're gone. And because a lot of the competitive aspects of, you know, Ethereum competitive chains are cheaper and faster, you've got to get a whole lot of transactions in order to, in order to survive. And so what they all did, and they all did the same thing, let's go get DeFi. So they all put together grants and funding and subsidies to go out and get LPs and others that would support, you know, DeFi on their platform, DeFi on Blockchain X, you know, fill in the blank. And then they did the same thing with NFTs. We're going to go get this celebrity and we're going to go subsidize it and we're going to put it on our, our chain. And that's how we're going to get enough traffic and, and we're going to show off why our chain is

• 11:59Speaker 02

  better. And then they go through the long list of, you know, Blockchain X maxi, you know, and things they would say. And what they found out very quickly is that doesn't work. When you're a copycat, even if you have, your checklist looks a little bit better, it's really, really hard to get somewhere. And so all that said, we've gotten to the point now where all those chains realize they're in deep shit. You know, there's just no there, there. You can't just, you know, and these are multi-billion dollar cap companies. Now, obviously, the market caps of the companies are, are convoluted and, and kind of configured the way you want them based off of your float versus

• 12:37Speaker 02

  your total allocation or your total mint. But now, what are they going to do? And so you're starting to see some of the, the fissures in these chains that really don't have any traffic and really don't have anywhere to go. And to me, that's just part of the cleansing that's natural. I, you know, I've said before that this is a lot like the early days of the internet and when we went, you know, 95, 94, 95, you know, my company, we started streaming, we were the first company to do, you know, commercial streaming and this and that. And it was a race because the next thing you know, there are 20 companies, 30 companies, 40 companies trying to do streaming and, you know, 39 of them died or 35 of them died. And you saw the same thing.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  And then when the 2000 and 2001 hit and the bubble burst. Ninety-five percent of companies were gone, but the ones that were able to survive are still crushing it today. The Amazons, et cetera, Google, et cetera, because they had good, valid business models. And that's what we're going to see right now with crypto. Crypto, you know, has got a lot of things that it can do really, really, really well. But we, we've seen all the money and brain power really geared towards DeFi and NFTs. And for 99% of those apps, it's a waste of brain power.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  You know, it's not, you know, what's the difference between, you know, DeFi on blockchain, on Ethereum and Polygon and all the others? Not a lot. And maybe just the subsidies and like we saw with Anchor, you know, those subsidies just, you know, if you don't earn the money like we saw with Axie. And I'm an investor in Axie, you know, and I told him, unless you're able to create enough of an economy that you're able to create productivity, meaning you have enough users that you can sell ads and sponsorships and NFTs and earn income from all those things in order to buy the, um, the, um, SLPs and, and the, the tokens, the Axie tokens from users.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Meaning, you know, it, it's earned to buy them, then you're going to run into problems. And so we went from play to earn being this great thing and, you know, and helping people in the Philippines to, okay, it's barely hanging on. And no new play to earn at, um, platforms have succeeded that I know of. Do you guys know of any that have worked? Not yet. Axie's been it, man. Yeah. And Axie's got that, if Axie would have gone in and they still can do it, and I hope they do. And even though I'm an investor, I, I don't really have that kind of connection with them just to tell them what to do. But, you know, if they're out there selling ads and sponsors, sponsorships, and then taking that money and buying tokens from, you know,

• 15:20Speaker 02

  the people who are playing to earn so that there's some, you know, there's a replenished economy, that works, you know? You know, if I buy one of those NFTs, you take my money, you buy some SLP, et cetera. You know, like Anchor, they wanted to be able to do loans to pay for the 20%, but they just kept on going subsidy, subsidy, subsidy, instead of just saying, okay, at some point, hey, guys, we ain't doing shit for loans. You know, we generated a hundred fifty dollars. It's like what you pay LPs, you know, um, on, on different platforms, right? With their native token, you can pay them in it, but if you've got no one to buy them.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  You know, and that's what this is all about. And that's where a lot of this has failed. There's got to be second order and third order and fourth order demand, particularly for NFTs. That's like with the Mavs. We used NFTs as a reward for going to a game. You have to actually attend a game, and you're only allowed to get one. It's free. You go to the game, your reward is this NFT. And if, and when you have these NFTs, we'll give you discounts, we'll do these, these other things. And if you miss a game, you can buy one from somebody else and collect them. But because we gave away for, for, for free, there was no expectation that A, B, or C, you know, we, we didn't, I didn't have to worry about whether there was a second order, a third order, a fourth order purchaser in order to make people feel good about what they got when they went to a game.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And now, when you put out an NFT, unless you're really lucky and you're the Board Ape, you're Crypto Punks, or whatever, and there's, you know, hopefully sustainable demand, what are you gonna do? You know, you get people excited in your community to buy the NFTs, and then what?

• 16:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. So, so, okay, so we had a investor on recently who talked about like, you know, 2020 being sort of a high conviction crypto rally, and then saying similar to what you said, 2021 was a lot of copycats, low conviction rally, it just kind of wasn't there, and it just, the whole thing ran out of steam. And I think we understand that because we're in the crypto space. We see it the way you do, Mark. And by the way, I love that you're doing stuff with the Mavs with NFTs and Smooth Love potions. You know what that is in Axie? Like, the level of detail you go to just always blows me away. But how do you explain this to someone who is not in the crypto industry, who doesn't see this potential?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  You don't. Like, back in the day, I'm old enough, like, um, I remember, so we started streaming in early 1995, and we would have, we had a local radio station in Dallas. And I would tell people, "Look, if you've got your computer and you want to listen to this local radio station and get Dallas sports anywhere in the world, then this is what you have to do." And back then, you had to have a dial-up modem, you had to download a TCP IP client, you had to download a client from an ISP service provider, you had to pay your monthly fee to that ISP service provider, then you had to download the streaming media client, then you had to go to audionet.com and find your Cubs game or your Dallas station or whatever. High hassle factor.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  And I would say that to people, and they would go, "You're out of your mind. I'll buy a radio." You know, or I'll buy a TV. What do I need this shit for? And so it wasn't that I would, that didn't work trying to explain how what worked was I want to listen to the Cubs game. And I'm in Dallas and the only way I can listen to the Cubs game was to go through all this hassle. Or I'm at work in Dallas and I want to listen to KLIF was the first station that streamed full time. And I want to listen to Norm Hitzkis, who was a big sports broadcaster, still is a big sports talk radio guy. And so I don't have a radio or I'm not allowed to have a radio on my desk. I can't have a TV on my desk. I got my PCs and these cheap little $9 speakers. So I can or headphones and I can listen while I work.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  That was a reason for them to go through the hassle. Crypto is the same thing. Right? There's gotta be a reason for regular people to want to use an application. It's like, why would you, why did you go to the app store for the first time to download your first app? Whether it was on an Android or it was on an iPhone. There had to be a reason. You know, you could have just used the default applications, but there was something else you wanted to do, whether it was Snapchat or whatever, you know, why are 90% of the apps on your phone unused? But you downloaded them, right? Why do you just use the 10%? Crypto is the exact same way. There is no difference.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Why do you use DeFi? Well, if I wanted, you know, get a quick loan and be able to lend money and earn some money, you know, some money on my, um, my deposits, even though it's over collateralized. If I need quick money and I have a credit card against it, I can just transfer it. And it's easy, right? There's a lot of simplification versus dealing with the bank. Or if you're unbanked, if I need to do even with Lightning, if I want, if I'm with Bitcoin and I want to do something with Lightning or tip somebody on Twitter, it's easier that way. Maybe not easier compared to Cash App or Venmo, but that versus a lot, a lot of traditional business approaches. And so there was, there's a reason that you use it. There's, it's compelling. It's a path to least resistance. That's what we need now for crypto.

• 20:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't have enough of that. And so, yeah, at some level, maybe the, you know, the bear market was, was coming no matter what. We got a little ahead of our skis. But, but also, Mark, there's like this backdrop, man. We're looking at, so we've been through spare markets in crypto. You've been through a bear market in crypto, right? People like crypto natives have been through many of these, and they're always painful. But this one is a little bit different from like a macroeconomic landscape, right? Like, we got inflation that's 8.6%, man. We're headed towards a recession. Like, what does all of this mean?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  I don't think it really means much in terms of crypto unless there's an application. So we can go both ways. So first of all, look at the stock market. It's gotten, tech stocks in particular, high growth tech stocks have gotten torched even worse than crypto, right? I got tech stocks worth down a whole lot more than my Ethereum or my Bitcoin, or my Polygon, right? They've just gotten torched. Why is that? Because it went too high. You know, when interest rates are basically negative, and you can get as much capital as you need, or some people can get as much capital as they need to go out and buy stocks thinking they're going to go up. Why wouldn't they? You know, you're borrowing at, let's say, 1%, and do you believe stocks will go up 1%? Sure. So, yeah, you know, it was $50 a year

• 21:39Speaker 02

  ago, but it's $300 today. So what? You know, everybody's doing it. It keeps on going up. Why would it go down? Well, you get to the point where it's just too damn high. Just because it's down 80 or 90% doesn't mean it's mispriced today. It may mean that it was mispriced last year. And with a lot of this, that's what it was. The money was so easy, it was so available, that prices went too high. And it may well be that even though we're down, you know, enormously, that we're in the right place in terms of pricing, and we're finding the right place. And the problem isn't now. The problem was last year and the easy money. And so, to your point, in terms of inflation, you know, I don't necessarily

• 22:22Speaker 02

  think, well, first, there's two, when you talk about inflation with crypto, I always have to remember, there's two worlds of inflation with crypto. There's the real world, and there's the Bitcoin maxi world, right?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  People just deal with it, you know, as best you can. And even though it's painful. And, you know, I'm old. When I came out of college, the inflation rate was not quite as bad now, but the unemployment rate was more than 10% and this and that. And so it was a struggle, just like people are struggling now. Um, and when I say you're old, you're supposed to say, no, you're not. But

• 22:56Speaker 02

  but the point being that

• 23:00Speaker 02

  crypto isn't impacted any more or less than anything else. And it's not going to change what people do any more or less, right? Now, I'll say that by if interest rates go, keep on going up, and that's translated into savings accounts that, you know, and all of a sudden you can get a CD, a six month CD for four, five, six percent, or something tax free for four, five, six percent. That's going to impact people's decisions because you go from, okay, I might be able to make some money in crypto last year, and I can make my 10% on my USDC last year, right? And that seemed to be relatively safe, where I'm willing to take more risk to, hey, I don't have to fuck around,

• 23:42Speaker 02

  and I can make 5% on this CD. That will impact the money that comes into crypto and stocks for that matter. Then there's the Bitcoin maxi side of it. With the Bitcoin, oh, you know, Bitcoin, that's a hedge against inflation. Yeah, I don't see that working. You know, I always analogize Bitcoin as it's a better version of gold. It's a digital version of gold, and I truly believe that. And all the gold maxis think it's a hedge to inflation. Yeah, not so much. If that were the case, gold would be where of 17,000, 18,000, wherever it's at, it would be 30,000, you know? And so there was a lot of hope that Bitcoin would do this or that. Now, where Bitcoin and gold do offer a hedge is in countries that are not reserve currencies.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Because the world uses the dollar, you know, if you're in, pick a country, right? Zumundu, what was the, Zumunda, right? What was the one with Eddie Murphy coming to America?

• 24:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Picking on a fake country.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, picking a fake country, right?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  And they have hyperinflation. Owning Bitcoin or gold is much better. Because it's going to, it's going to fluctuate relative to the dollar, or let's say the Euro. And it's going to be stable and it's going to look like a really good hedge against that Zumundu currency. But then so would the dollar, you know? So, you know, I think the Bitcoin max has got it dead wrong. And I think part of the challenge for Bitcoin is, you know, even with the Lightning Network improving and becoming more popular, there's not enough utility. But that's the same problem gold has, you know? Nobody needs gold jewelry. People like gold jewelry and want it, but they don't need it. And so there's a utility issue with Bitcoin, but that said, like gold, it's a good store of value.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  It's a better store of value as in when you're trying to be diverse in your portfolio. And that's why I own it, you know, because I think even, I have no idea where it'll go. I have no idea how low it'll go. But I do know that, um, once there are applications with smart contracts, not on Bitcoin, but across crypto, that regular people use and figure out, just like streaming was a better version of getting audio and video than traditional media was. When there's better reason to use crypto applications, that's when it takes off.

• 26:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you like better, Mark? Ether Bitcoin? Which one, if you had to pick?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  If I had to buy one today for a month, I'd probably buy Bitcoin. Because there's not, um, there's not that push of applications right now. I mean, I'm trying to invest, but if you got one that, you know, is a business application that replaces not just fintech, but let's just say something you do in the office. You know, here's the way we've been doing it. I use this app all the time and, you know, it has nothing to do with fintech. It has nothing to do with collectibles. This is just, I've replaced, I'm using smart contracts on Ethereum or whatever blockchain. And it's made my life a lot more efficient and a lot better. When those start to happen, whichever blockchain they're on, bam, right?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Then people start saying, oh, I gotta use, it's just like, you know, my 13 year old wants Snapchat. Bam, we gotta have Snapchat, gotta have, when I turn 13, I gotta have Snapchat, you know, or gotta have Instagram, or whatever it is, TikTok, you know? What made people download TikTok? Why does every kid use TikTok? We, it doesn't have to be social media, and I think it'll come from business first, but we need that business application, the decentralized version of QuickBooks, you know, decentralized version of whatever that is a crypto app that is just better. And when that happens, boom, because then people will start saying, well, if it worked for, I replaced DocuSign as an example, you know, or I've got QuickBooks,

• 27:39Speaker 02

  decentralized QuickBooks, which allows me to buy or sell, or e-commerce even. Like, I did this talk at the University of Chicago, and I only, you know, and these are MBA students, and I was like, how many of you have used crypto? And about half had, I'm like, how many of you have used a wallet, a crypto wallet, to buy something? And about half the half did, or core of the people. And I'm like, of those of you who did, wouldn't it be a lot easier if you could just go to an e-commerce site, connect your wallet, buy what you want, click it, sign it, and have a lower transaction fee, and it's just paid like that? And if you were a vendor, wouldn't it be easier to just sell, knowing, because you get that cash immediately? And so you could probably sell for less with less friction? Yeah, of course, but nobody's done that yet.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  You know, we've looked at it with the Mavs, and you know, but there's so many, everybody tries to go through traditional means that, to connect your, your e-commerce through Bitpay or whatever, through a bank, and that just gets convoluted.

• 28:36David Hoffman?

  Aave is the leading decentralized liquidity protocol. And now, Aave V3 is here. Aave V3 has powerful new features to enable you to get the most out of DeFi, including isolation mode, which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types, and also efficiency mode, which allows for a higher loan to value ratios, and of course, portals, allowing users to port their Aave position across all. All of the networks that Aave operates on like Polygon, Phantom, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Harmony. The beautiful thing about Aave is that it's completely open source, decentralized, and governed by its community, enabling a truly bankless future for us all. To get your first crypto-collateralized loan, get started at Aave.com. That's A-A-B-E dot com.

• 29:17David Hoffman?

  And also check out the Aave Protocol Governance Forums to see what more than 100,000 DAO members are all robbing about at governance.aave.com. There is a brand-new staking feature in the Ledger Live app today. We all like staking the assets that we're bullish on, and now you can stake seven different coins inside the Ledger Live app. Cosmos, Polkadot, Tron, Algorian, Tezos, Solana, and of course Ethereum. With Ledger Live, you can take money from your bank account, buy your most bullish crypto asset, and stake that asset to its network, all inside the Ledger Live app. Through a partnership with Figma, Ledger also lets you choose which validator you want to stake your assets with. And Ledger is running its own validating nodes, offering a convenient way to participate in network

• 29:59David Hoffman?

  validation, and it even comes with slashing insurance. Ledger Live is truly becoming the battle station for the bankless world, so go download Ledger Live. If you have a Ledger already, you probably already have it, and get started securely staking your crypto assets. The era of proof-of-stake is upon us, and Lido is bringing proof-of-stake to everyone. Lido is a decentralized staking protocol that allows users to stake their proof-of-stake assets using Lido's distributed network of nodes. Don't choose between staking your assets or using them as collateral in DeFi. With Lido, you can have both. Using Lido, you can stake any amount of your ETH to the Lido validating network and receive ST ETH in return. ST ETH can be traded, used as collateral for lending and borrowing, or leveraged on your favorite DeFi protocols, all this without giving up your ETH to centralized staking services or exchanges.

• 30:42David Hoffman?

  Lido now supports Solana, Kusama, and Polygon staking. Whatever your preferred proof-of-stake asset is, Lido is here to take away the complexities of staking while enabling you to get liquidity on your stake. If you want to stake your ETH, Sol, or Matic and get liquidity on your stake, go to Lido.FI to get started. That's L-I-D-O dot F-I to get started.

• 31:03David Hoffman?

  And Mark, you saw the products that we had as a crypto industry in 2017 and how they basically weren't any products. And then went through a bear market and came out and had the conversations that the industry have had in 2021, where in 2017, it was almost basically just Bitcoin that was a household name. In 2021, a lot more things became household names. Ethereum broke into the mindshare, NFTs and DeFi broke in because we had some semblance of realness. Yield and DeFi, people like the NFTs were starting to break into commerce. And some of the components that you just talked about just now, we did just hear stuff like that announced out of things like Stripe, for example. Stripe is getting into the world

• 31:46David Hoffman?

  of Web3 crypto payments. It's still so early.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  But remember, everybody's into crypto payments at some level.

• 31:54David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Stripe, PayPal, etc. None of that is first market. They're all, we're big, we gotta be there. And none of that is original. And none of that is something that if you didn't already, you know, know, you couldn't find. You could already use Lightning Network. You know, there's a dozen different apps you can use to do transfers. You know, it's those things that we go, shit, that's, you know, I could really use that. I got, explain, Mark, you know, someone calls me, explain to me how I make this work. Because, again, I'll analogize when we started streaming business, I would get the calls all the time. I want to listen to the Cubs game. I had somebody from Microsoft call me and say, how much will it cost us for you to start

• 32:36Speaker 02

  broadcasting the Nebraska football and basketball games on AudioNet? I'll pay for it all, just so me and my friends can listen to the games online in the state of Washington.

• 32:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  You know, that's how compelling it was.

• 32:51David Hoffman?

  And so what do you, what do you think is going to compel us in the future, in the next cycle, when we get through this bear market? What's the next thing that becomes a household name out of crypto? What are you really looking at right now in this bear market?

• 33:01Speaker 02

  I don't know yet. I really, really don't. If I did, I would start it. You know, that's what I'm scrambling to find out. There's just too much focus, like you said, on payments, or DeFi, or NFTs. You know, I'm talking to a company to do NFTs for, and I've talked about this before, for textbooks, for college textbooks.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Because if you think about it, you take an NFT, you can incorporate a Kindle reader into it. You take the digital text of the book and you know, you check for the NFT and that unlocks the digital reader. If you own the NFT for the textbook and buying and selling them is going to be a whole lot cheaper than creating, selling, shipping, reselling textbooks where the publisher only get and the author only gets paid once. And so, you know, now it's hard, it's hard for those publisher industries to disrupt themselves. That's not something they're good at, but it's conversations I'm having. That's not going to get everybody to change over, but you know, it certainly could get, it could be a start with college kids are all using it. And that's a better way to get textbooks.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  You know, people are trying to do social networks, ICP is trying to do it their way, but it's hard because it's, it can't just, it doesn't benefit you just because it's decentralized or it's crypto. It's gotta be better because it's better.

• 34:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  One of the differences we've seen in this bear market at least so far is like, even though prices are down, the builders are still here. And I, I'm wondering if you saw that, yeah, for now, do you think that'll last? Or do you think, do you think that, yeah, how long do you think this bear market will last then? And like, is this going to be a long, dark winter?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  No, it lasts until there's a catalyst and that catalyst is going to be an application or we get so low, people go, fuck it, I'll buy some.

• 34:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm almost there. Are you there?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  It's like stocks, right? I look at stocks and I'll look at the market cap. I'm like, is, you know, is Amazon, I own a bunch of Amazon, but should I buy more Amazon? It's a trillion dollar market cap. That's not a fuck it price, right? There, there's some other companies where you look at it and they're like, it's a $250 market cap plus some debt now because they borrow cheap. I'm like, if this were coming public, I mean, I'm sorry, if this were being pitched to me as a private company at this valuation on Shark Tank, would I invest in it? And if the answer is yes, I'll buy it, right? And so, and if you think back, whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Matic, ICP, any of them, or even the new ones like Ape.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  And you look at the market caps and you see it's a billion dollar plus market cap or six billion or eight billion or 40 billion. You don't look at that and go, that's cheap. Because if you remember back to, you know, DeFi summer, these things were selling for less than a penny and their market caps were in the hundreds of millions. And then you look at some things like ALCX and you look at.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  What are some of the others that are defi Uniswap or Sushi Swap rather? And even Uniswap, particularly Sushi Swap has got like a $250 million market cap. And then you look to say, why is that relatively cheap? Right? Compared to everything else? Well, because there's no, there's no utility there. You know, you, you get, you get paid it if you're an LP. But then what? Who's going to buy it from you? What's the reason to buy it from you? And so what happens is it's, it's not so much about the builders yet. But what happens is you'll see a consolidation. You'll see somebody whose market cap of Cardano, you know, everybody likes to pick on them, including me. Um, but like they could use what market cap they have or what cash they have and start making acquisitions.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  And then you take the builders and you start consolidating them around what's, what's the name of their smart contract? Like Pluto or Pluto or Bluto or whatever.

• 36:48David Hoffman?

  Plutus, is it Plutus?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Plutus, yeah, yeah, something like that. Um, see, I was close.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  But now of a sudden you start consolidating those developer communities and user communities. And they become a little stronger by doing that type of roll up. And who knows what's going to happen with near chain? Who knows what's going to happen with Polkadot? You know, but they all have, you know, high expectations. But

• 37:12David Hoffman?

  So it's not cheap yet. You're saying crypto is not cheap yet. You want to see a cheaper before Mark's piling back in.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it, it's not, it's not cheap yet. And I think, you know, I'd rather get with somebody who says, okay, let's do a roll up. You know, let's combine a bunch of these who really don't have, you take Zilquah, you take this, you take that. And you match them all up together and you do a token exchange with to a new token. You close four out of the five blockchains and you pick whichever one you think is best or has the best applications. You allow people to bridge over one time and you know, now all of a sudden your user base is 10x. Now you still have a problem of better applications, right? You still have to have some, some reason that people want to use that blockchain. But at least you may be able to have a better community to come up with ID. Because otherwise you're gone.

• 38:02David Hoffman?

  Are you saying that you're looking perhaps towards a world of like mergers between protocols? So protocols can stay alive. Like, hey, like we're all down bad, but if we band together, we're going to be able to stick it out. Is that kind of what you see on the horizon in the bear market?

• 38:15Speaker 02

  That's what happens in every industry.

• 38:18David Hoffman?

  And so, okay, so if we're looking across the sectors, there's so many sectors in crypto. There's DeFi, there's NFTs, and you've named a lot of layer ones, and you're also seemingly hot on layer twos.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Let me change that, David. There aren't a lot of sectors. There are different blockchains with apps that have been written on them using smart contracts.

• 38:35David Hoffman?

  Right. Yes.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  And there's typically just two verticals, DeFi and NFTs.

• 38:43David Hoffman?

  Well, okay, but there's DeFi application tokens like Alchemix, right? You named it the ALCX token. There's DeFi apps that exist on chains, but then they're actually the chains itself, and those can be like divided into two sectors. Then we also got NFTs. Well, like of all the sectors in crypto, like, like layer twos versus layer ones versus DeFi tokens versus NFTs, what are you really like optimistic for the most? Do you have an opinion there?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, all of them have potential. That's why they got all this money. All of them have it. If you put together a checklist like they did, all of them have a reason why they think they're better and will succeed. You know, zero proofs, you know, can encapsulate and it's 250K or 256 characters and you just pop it on Ethereum and you get the benefits there, you know, optimistic rollups. They've got their way of doing it, right? Where you check for fraud and done it, you know, seven days, speed, whatever, right? I can see value for both, like an optimistic rollup. If I were going to start in a health insurance company that was decentralized so that rather

• 39:44Speaker 02

  than having somebody approve each application for reimbursement or approve each claim, I would have a thousand validators, right? And I forget what they call the people who check for fraud, right? The checkers, right? And all of them would have to put up some money to get their training, but they would get a piece of each claim, right? And so they would earn it. And then the fraud checkers would get rewarded where if, you know, they find fraud, they get the stake from that validator, you know, and you guys know how that works, right? So that's an application that could work, but that's an application that's going to take five years to develop and $200 million or more to put together

• 40:26Speaker 02

  and someone, and then on top of that, the money for the insurance claims and the capital that's required there. But that's the type of thing, if you have an application that is specific to the features and capabilities of each of the enhancements, right? Whether it's ZK or whether it's optimistic or whatever, yeah. I'm very bullish, but it's the applications that will make it work. Every so much of this, the first pass was we're going to be faster and cheaper than Ethereum. Well, guess what? When there's not a lot of transactions, Ethereum gets relatively cheap. It's not cheap, but it is relatively cheap. And you've got Polygon and others who have just added ZKs and added

• 41:09Speaker 02

  optimistics on on top of what they're doing. And so it's just, there's just a lot of people competing for those builders. And those builders are just coming up with the derivatives of things that are already being done. And when it's only about the checklist, that's the hardest thing to to be successful with. You know, it's hard to compete when, you know, that's 7-Eleven, I'm 7-12.

• 41:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, not not Web 3, Web Web 5. I saw this recently.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  That's a whole nother thing, right? Web 3 is confusing. Web 3 should never have been called Web 3.

• 41:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really? You don't like the narratives? What narratives do you like? What do you not like?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  That hurts. Ow, my heart. Yeah, I mean, look, it's not Web 2 and Web 1, right? Web 3 makes it think like it's a new internet. It's not a new internet. It's a platform on top of the internet, right? It's a better way to do a lot of different things. And that's what it is. That's why I just call it crypto as opposed to Web 3. And what the fuck's a metaverse?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, they've been around forever. You know, Second Life and all these other ones that are around in the early days of the internet. You know, and anybody can create one. There's no standards for interoperability. People, look, and there's companies that I invested in that that sold real estate against my, you know, feedback on in metaverses. The worst investment ever.

• 42:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think, do you think that's the problem? Like? Did crypto get too buzzwordy?

• 42:43Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 42:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did crypto get like too buzzwordy and just like silly? Is that what happened with?

• 42:48Speaker 02

  No, it's the internet was the early days of the internet was the same thing, right? You know, and even before the internet, right? On Prodigy and Copy, so chat rooms on AOL, right? Chat rooms in AOL were the best thing and the worst thing. You know, all these kids were had all went through all these bad things because of chat rooms. Chat rooms just that's the multiverse circa 1990, you know? And it's just a bunch of people coming together. You give them an avatar. They don't have to be themselves, but like any community, some people try to dominate. Right? And other people tried to manipulate and other people try to monetize. And when people feel left out and don't benefit from them, they go somewhere else or stop participating altogether. And that's a challenge.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Like I haven't gone on to Central Land a lot. Maybe I'm getting it wrong. But when you go around to Central Land, you see people playing poker and gambling and that's it. Did I miss something?

• 43:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it there's not a lot going on in the metaverse. There's a lot of future potential and hope in kind of property rights in the in the metaverse. But there's not.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Most ridiculous thing ever, because everything is just a click away.

• 43:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  You know, you're next door to the Empire State Building. Hey, I got my little piece of land next to the Empire State, whatever, right?

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mark, okay, so there are a lot of crypto people in crypto who are down bad right now. And I don't know if you've ever been down bad in your career, but like, okay, well, well, tell us about this. Cause it doesn't feel really great. And there's a lot of people sad, depressed, like in just the, you know, one of the five stages of grief. Uh, do you have any thoughts for them?

• 44:26Speaker 02

  I mean, look, I've been broke and sleeping on the floor. You know, I've been, I've lost, I remember having $30,000 and a lot of that was bam, gone. Um, in my company, I had literally $84,000 in the bank and my receptionist stole 82,000 of it.

• 44:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 44:44Speaker 02

  So I get a call from the bank. This is my company, Microsolutions, $84,000 in the bank. We only have four employees. One of them was a receptionist and one of her jobs was just to take the accounts, um, our, our, um, payables, right? Put them in an envelope. Take them to the post office and mail them and then answer the phone, yada, yada, right? That was her job. I get a call from the bank. Mr. Cuban? Yes. We have this young lady who just drove through the drive-in and she, these checks that she was cashing, she had taken the, the check and whited out the payee and wrote in her name. And I'm like, you didn't cash them, did you? Yes, sir. We're a bank. That's what we do. Eighty-two of the eighty-four thousand dollars I had.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Gone. DOA gone. And we had to work with all those vendors and it took us well over a year to pay them back, just to get back to ground zero with them and break even. And so, look, I, I've been there and that, that fear and agony of what you're going to do next is awful.

• 45:50David Hoffman?

  Marcus, we, as a, a lot of people are questioning their conviction in crypto here. So leave us on a high note. Uh, what's something that you're paying attention to? What's a project that you're bullish on? What's something in the crypto space that still keeps, keeps you excited in these dark times?

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Believe it or not, I still like refi, right? I, I still like all the stuff with, um, tokens for, um, carbon, carbon offsets. And I still buy them, I use them. I've gotten crushed with Klima. Um, and that's okay. I actually, I, I bought a ton of B, uh, BCT and this whole thing with Vera blew up and I got a whole bunch and it went down from eight dollars to a dollar ninety now. And I just burn it, which is my carbon offset for my own personal footprint use. And then I also converted to Klima because of their treasury. And I'm betting, you know, with Klima, to me, it's like it's an index of different carbon opportunities. And that's not a standard DeFi application. Maybe it'll fail miserably. I don't, I hope not.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  But to me, I used to buy carbon offsets from a broker and it was a pain in the ass. It was hard, right? Now I go on Polygon and when I want to burn more, I can buy more BCT and I can just burn it. That's my carbon offset. It's the easiest way to do it. Not everybody cares about, you know, offsetting their carbon footprint. I do, you know? To me, that's just the perfect app for it. Doesn't mean it's going to go up. No. But my worst case is I've done a tiny part for humanity. Now, people will argue that it's not great carbon offsets. You can do better. All right. Fair enough, but it works, you know? And it does what I'm looking for it to do. And as it gets better. It'll get better over time. So that that's one application. Um, other than that, I mean,

• 47:31Speaker 02

  literally scouring for business applications. There's, there's another one um where we're looking at taking tokens and integrating them into Apple Wallet that I just invested in so that I can take a Mavs NFT, it can be put into an Apple Wallet, you just scan it and now it's a ticket for a Mavs game or an event like PoP is trying to do, but hopefully a little bit simpler and with um what I'm already, you know, things we're already doing. So you know, there's, there are things to get excited about. The challenge is and why I'm not just diving in and buying more Ethereum or, or in particular, is I don't see that one big breakthrough macro application that like streaming was in the

• 48:12Speaker 02

  90s. I think there'll be one, you know, like I said, you know, using optimistic rollups, if somebody puts together an insurance company, great, you know, somebody, whether it's medical insurance, health insurance, or whatever it may be, there will be applications like that because there are better ways to do it. And I also think, and here's, here's the positive thing, right? Let's look at decentralization, DAOs and decentralization, right? We haven't started to see the thrust for companies that are organized around crypto yet. We've seen companies that use crypto to create applications, but you know, a lot of people downplay decentralization, DAOs, because they're like, what's the point? But

• 48:52Speaker 02

  the reality is, companies can't just start becoming, using decentralization because they're centralized. You're not going to have a health insurance company all of a sudden offer decentralized insurance in the example I gave, because they can't adapt their company to that. We're starting to see, and I'm starting to see slowly but surely, companies that are initiated and start off decentralized and integrate their employees, whether it's using DAOs or just tokenomics, but you make it so that the decisions are decentralized, so that the utilization is decentralized, you know, using um nodes to reduce costs, because anybody who's done anything um centralized using AWS for applications,

• 49:35Speaker 02

  it's expensive as shit, right? And if you're able to create an application that uses the node where somebody can use their PC as a storage facility, kind of like Filecoin or, you know, some of the others, but integrated into apps in, in less expensive ways, right? I'm just riffing on this, but you get my point, right? There are ways that better things can be done using crypto. We're just dipping our toes in. And again, it's not unusual. It's not unusual. You know, companies went public with nothing, nothing. And crapped out like that, but the good ones stayed. Same with crypto. All these apps, all, you know, these tokens. Stop thinking about, you know, how, you know, what?

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm trying to think, you know, all, all the terminology and all the ridiculous terminology in the crypto world. Sir and friend and this.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  But, you know, stop thinking about the community and how much community, value the community creates. Because you think that means there's a lot of buyers there? Stop thinking in terms of the number of buyers. Start thinking in terms of the utility. Would you use this on a daily basis? Yes or no?

• 50:51Speaker 02

  I can find reasons to use DeFi on a daily basis in some of my businesses. I'm just waiting. If someone had an, had an interface between QuickBooks and, you know, pick an Ave.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  And that's what I told them to do. I, I told those guys, I'm like, you know, you, you need to create an interface with QuickBooks. So people can push in their cash and withdraw their cash. Where now you're starting to see applications that will stream USDC to pay workers. So they're paid in real time. That stuff is cool. Right? I can see applications there, but when you're making a decision to buy, don't invest in a token or NFT because you think there's a community that's going to buy it from you. Invest in it because either you like it as a collectible or because you like the utility and you would use it. If you would, if there's an app on crypto that you'll use.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  And not just because you bought the token, right? But because you have a real reason to use, that's what's going to bring crypto back and that's what's going to accelerate it. And that's what's going to crush the hell out of, you know, web two.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  When there are applications that are better used with crypto. And I'm, I'm, I've got a lot of money that says that's going to happen.

• 52:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's it, guys. That's the message from Mark Cuban is the thing that's going to get us out of the crypto bear market is utility. So Mark, are you going to be spending the, the bear market just trying things and looking for that utility?

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yes, continuously. You've got, look, if there's something you do at work and you think to yourself, if I wrote a smart contract, I can do it better using crypto. That's what I want to know. If you can go into a company and say, look at all this time and money and process you're wasting. Here's how you do it using crypto built on smart contracts. Yes. Yes, that's what I want to know. Because those are the game changers. You know, trying to come up with the next Instagram because it's decentralized and you're pissed about or Twitter. And it's decentralized because you're pissed who they let on or don't let on. You're not going to get a network effect based off of that. It's got to be something that is so compelling that people go, this is great. Kind of like TikTok.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  You know, but even TikTok, people think it came out of nowhere. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising just to get it rolling. They bought Musically for half a billion dollars. So that wasn't cheap. So it's got to be so, like I started this company, costplustrugs.com. We went out, we bought generics and we sell them at cost plus 15%. We're already past our two-year projections and we've been doing it for five and a half months. You know how much money we spent on advertising?

• 53:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Because we don't need to. If you need a particular drug, right? And we sell it and we're saving you 80%. You know what the first thing you do is? You tell everybody you know who also takes that drug. And you tell everybody you know that, you know, needs cheaper medications, which is everybody to try our site. And when then you realize that we're cheaper, costplustrugs.com is cheaper than your insurance copay for the drugs you have to take, you're telling everybody, you're going on every Facebook group, Twitter, you know? And that's, that's who promotes it. Crypto needs the same thing where it's again like streaming when we started AudioNet didn't spend ever a nickel in advertising ever because if you wanted that Cubs game

• 54:12Speaker 02

  or that Cowboys game or that Mavericks game, you know, if you were a fan and you weren't in the local hometown, we were the only way you could get it. So you told everybody. That's what crypto needs. DeFi was like that for a while, right? And it has this place, but it's kind of stabilized. NFTs are like that in terms of they provide creators royalties for the creator economy, but we need the business version of that. That's what we need.

• 54:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  There we go, guys. That's what we got to look for is utility. By the way, Mark, I want to thank you for, for cost plus. It's, it's helping a lot of families and you're right about that, man. I've seen so much goodwill, like a Reddit post everywhere in the communities, just like this site saved me tons of money and it helped my family get through a tough time. So yeah, I think we need that in crypto too. But man, it's always a pleasure to talk with you and I'm always so impressed at how deep you go in, you know, in some of these, these projects. So look forward to touching base with you sometime during the bear market and come back soon if you will.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Hopefully it'll be the start of the bull market and we'll be talking about how everything's going straight up. So appreciate it, guys. Always enjoy the show.

• 55:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Take care. Bye, Mark.

• 55:19David Hoffman?

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

• 56:02David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content.

• 58:15David Hoffman?

  The.

• 1:00:25David Hoffman?

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• 1:02:35David Hoffman?

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