GMoney | Layer Zero

gmoney holds one of the four knitted cap ape CryptoPunks, and is a prolific investor. From riding the dot com bubble all the way down as a pre-teen to buying apple calls in high school, gmoney has always been deeply fascinated by finance. gmoney has a keen eye for the broad markets and makes informed trading & investment decisions. Since the start of the pandemic and crypto's subsequent rise, gmoney's tone has shifted to one of a 'disruptor' and 'futurist.' Falling down the NFT rabbit-hole in 2020 has demonstrated a character development of sorts, shifting from the harsh, objective financial markets to a more art-based, community-based one. gmoney's approach to making money is fascinating, but perhaps not nearly as interesting or important as his role in the budding metaverse. ------ 📣 OPOLIS | YOUR CRYPTO CAREER https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ Resources: Benjamin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/intocryptoverse?s=20 Benjamin's Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRvqjQPSeaWn-uEx-w0XOIg Into the Cryptoverse: https://intothecryptoverse.com/ ----- 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 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cyberpunk's understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, we are speaking with Gmoney, the famous knitted cap ape on Twitter, and a prolific just market investor. And Gmoney has been sharpening his teeth in markets from a very, very early age. He got into the world of markets at the age of 12. So, the world of the world of finance, the world of markets definitely pulled him in very, very early,

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  and getting those lessons under his belt early in his lifetime really helped him get into the world, eventually into the world of crypto. I think he's a phenomenal person to actually be able to remove bias and personal interests in markets, and really just being able to look at the broad market as a whole and make informed decisions after that. And that's what allowed him to really establish himself before getting into crypto, and then got into crypto in 2017, smartly used the lessons of the dot com bubble to time-ish the top of the market, and then not have to go through the grueling bear market, and then also fantastically timed

• 1:36David Hoffman?

  getting back into crypto. And so, really just used, kind of in the same way when we were talking to DC, use his experiences in legacy markets to really inform his guidance into crypto markets. And then we go into his transition into the worlds of NFTs, and I really liked the juxtaposition between Gmoney's time in NFTs versus Gmoney's time in TradFi markets, where one is very transactional, one is very just like performance-based. NFTs are much more community-based, and what are NFTs other than art, so art-based as well. And I think it really tells a fantastic story of character development, of going from cold, traditional markets into warm, fuzzy, NFT community markets. So, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Gmoney. Before we get to

• 2:21David Hoffman?

  that conversation, however, we have to talk for a moment about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Matcha, everyone's favorite DEX aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common ETH and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Matcha are free. And that's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha routes your orders across all the various DeFi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and gives you the best possible price without any trading fees or unnecessary slippage. Matcha has smart order routing that splits your orders across multiple liquidity sources if Matcha sees that it gives you better pricing. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pooled the liquidity for me into a single and easy-to-use platform

• 3:05David Hoffman?

  and has even saved me multiple times from accidentally picking the wrong DEX to trade on and getting a bad price. Matcha also allows you to make limit orders on-chain so you can set and forget your DeFi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. So, when you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist, connect your wallet, and start getting some of the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Alchemix is one of the coolest new DeFi apps on the scene. It introduces self-paying loans, allowing you to spend and save at the same time. Deposit the DAI stablecoin into the Alchemix Vault in order to get an advance on the interest it generates. Borrow up to 50% of the total amount of your deposited DAI in the form of AlUSD stablecoin.

• 3:50David Hoffman?

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• 4:35David Hoffman?

  Hey Gmoney, how's it going?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Hey, how are you? How you doing? Thanks for having me on.

• 4:39David Hoffman?

  Fantastic.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  I'm a huge fan, so glad to finally make it on the podcast.

• 4:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you are going to be the first pseudo anonymous person on Layer Zero. And for those that are actually watching the video, there is an animated CryptoPunk monkey with a knitted cap, which of course is Gmoney's famous ape CryptoPunk. How did you get this animation? How does the animation work?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  This was actually made by CryptoNovo and a couple of people that he works with. That when, it was like in January or February, when I bought the ape and, you know, I was, I was talking about punks a lot at the beginning of the year. He is a fellow punk holder. He owns a tassel. And he was like, hey, like, let me get you a Snapchat filter that you can use on Zoom calls. And I was like, that sounds amazing. And I've been using it ever since. I love it.

• 5:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so again, for the people listening to this, the mouth, Gmoney's mouth actually moves. And it looks like the eyes actually blink too, which is pretty crazy. And also, if you turn your head, it looks like it's very 3D. So yeah, it's a 3D, 3D rendering of the ape. That's fantastic. Okay, this is like, this is super cool because I also saw Scooby Trooples from Alchemics do this with like an anime character. And is the, this is a perfect moment in time to really be injecting some of these Snapchat filters because we're all talking about the metaverse. And now we get to like layer on these new like virtual representations of who we are as we are on these Zoom calls, really enabling like the pseudo anonymous people on Crypto Twitter and around to still be on camera, but still also be anonymous. I think this is really fantastic.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's, it's super cool. And I think we're probably going to see more and more of this going forward, right? Like when I got into NFTs, I understood them right away because of Fortnite. And you know, the way people, the way kids will change their skins every 15 to 20 minutes. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, you have multiple lenses where, you know, I want to be an ape on this, on this call. And I want to be a unicorn on the next one, right? Like, I think it's, I think this would be really cool and in opening up a whole new world of personalization.

• 6:49David Hoffman?

  Right, right. I'll put on my ape while I'm gaming. I'll put on my suit and tie while I'm on Zoom. And yeah, it's really like choose your own adventure, choose your own identity as the time comes for it.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 7:01David Hoffman?

  Gee, Gee Money, where did the name Gee Money come from?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  So my name begins with a G and it's a very ethnic name. So a lot of people couldn't pronounce it growing up in the tri-state area of New York City and people called me G as a nickname. And I got Gee Money because I always had a knack for making money. So like that, that's one that stuck throughout high school and college.

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  And I definitely want to pick up on that knack as we go through this story. So let's, let's go all the way back. When did the knack of making money start? When did you realize that you had a knack for this?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Um, well, let's see. I first started following the stock market when I was 12 years old.

• 7:45David Hoffman?

  Okay, so extremely early.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, I, for some reason, when, when I was little, when I was like five or six, like on the Dow Jones, it kind of tells you, or on the nightly news, it tells you, oh, the Dow Jones went up or down today. And I remember asking my, my dad, like, what's the Dow Jones? And he was like, that's gambling. Don't ever do that. And obviously, naturally, I was drawn to it. And so when I was 12, my grandmother bought me the Wall Street Journal Guide to Investing. And that like, kind of taught you how to read stock tables and like, what a bond is and, you know, what a stock is. And it was super, super basic.

• 8:23David Hoffman?

  Is this your grandma going around your dad?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I mean, this was, this was like, one day, we're like at Barnes and Nobles and I'm like, you know, can, can you buy this for me? And obviously, like, it's a book, like, you're gonna buy that for a kid if, if he's asking for it, right? And so I was, you know, like, I hadn't really, I was always, I guess, curious at that point, but I hadn't really done anything with it until I was like 12, around there. And then when I went to high school, I got an academic scholarship to go. I went to a private school and I made a deal with my parents that the money that they would have spent on my tuition, they, they let me invest. And that was in like 96, 97. So I was able to take that money, which obviously at the time was significant to me. And I invested in the stock market.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Uh, I made a bunch of money. I am.

• 9:13David Hoffman?

  Was it, was that a hard thing to convince your parents? It's like, hey, uh, give me money so I can go invest in it?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I, it wasn't because like it was, I think they saw it as like education and they saw that I was already like really into the stock market. Like I would like get the night, I would get the newspaper every day and I would like check stock quotes, right? Like this is like, like as the internet was evolving, right? Like I'm in, I'm in my late thirties. So like the internet wasn't prolific at that point, right? Like my first internet experience was on a 28K modem. Uh, so this was like before you could check stock quotes from, from your phone and, and stuff like that.

• 9:52David Hoffman?

  Okay. So with, with regards to your parents, this was definitely like beyond a phase for you. Now this was very much a part of like what you were really interested in.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was probably one of the things I was the most interested in. Um, at, at that time, like more so than, than sports or, or anything else is like really just being enamored with the market, right? And, uh, and so like I invested, I invested the money. I rode the dot com bubble, you know, made a bunch of money. Didn't sell anything and wrote it all the way back down, right? So that was obviously like a super valuable experience for me. That, uh, became super important later on as I, as I got into crypto. And, uh, you know, I went, I went to college. Uh, one of my best trades, uh, both until literally, uh, this year,

• 10:39Speaker 01

  uh, getting into NFT is, was I remember I was interning in the city, going into my senior year of college. And, uh, I was in New York City interning. I'm on the subway and I look around and I was like, wow, like everybody has these white headphones in their ear, right? And this is back when the MP3 market was massively fragmented. And I just noticed like, you know, uh, businessmen, high schoolers, like everybody on the train consistently had these white headphones in. And that was the original iPod, uh, the original iPod for listening to music.

• 11:12David Hoffman?

  I remember, I remember thinking way back then, or somebody else thought this thought, I was too young to think of myself, but somebody said, Apple did a very, very good job making all of their headphones white.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, cuz it was differentiated, right? Cuz everyone else had your classic black headphones and it didn't stand out. And so I remember sitting in the subway and being like, oh, wow, like, let me buy some Apple calls. And I don't know what it is split adjusted now, but at the time, it was like ten dollars a share. I bought the twenty dollar calls for forty nine cents or or sixty two cents. And then I sold them for forty nine dollars uh within eighteen months. And, you know, I was like, wow, like that, like, this, this is cool. Like, I can make a living out of this, right?

• 11:54David Hoffman?

  Um, were you at the time?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Uh, I was twen- I was either twenty or twenty one. I was going into my senior year of college.

• 12:01David Hoffman?

  Right, right, okay, yeah. So very, very rare for somebody in college to be to have a sort of windfall.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like, to me, it's like, I was like, wow, this is definitely what I wanna be doing um in the future. But uh I'm an only child and my father uh is an immigrant and he had a business that I was set to take over. And so I went and I worked with him for three years in that business. And then he called me into his office one day and said, listen, this is what you're doing. You're you're doing this for me. Um, and because of that, I love you for it, I really appreciate it, but like, you're you're not gonna succeed because you're not doing it for you, you're doing it for me. This is my dream, it's not yours. And so he told me, he's like, go, like, find a job on Wall Street cuz that's what you're passionate about. And so at that point, like, because I had experienced success with like that Apple trade and a couple of other things,

• 12:52Speaker 01

  I was like, all right, I can go. And and at this point, I'm like twenty four, twenty five, and I'm like, all right, I can either, I can go to a bank and like try to work my way up the ladder and get my own book and kind of like have my own pad by the time I'm thirty. Or like I had experienced a ton of success already. I just need to learn how to trade and make money in the shorter timeframe. And, you know, cuz my investments generally would play out. And so I was like, all right, like, let me go put money up. And I put money up up at a prop firm. And I learned how to trade, right? And that was in, um, I started in like July of two thousand seven, so it was right before the financial crisis, like, you know, in, like, I, I was,

• 13:35Speaker 01

  before that, like, I was short Countrywide, I shorted Bear Stearns, like, I, like, saw the writing on the wall, if I knew what CDS was, I probably wouldn't be here at this moment, because I would have, uh, made a ton of money off that, but I had no idea what it was.

• 13:49David Hoffman?

  Wow, you shorted the housing market before it crashed?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would, dude, I had Countrywide puts when it was at like thirty-five bucks.

• 13:56David Hoffman?

  Oh, my god, that's epic. Bought Apple calls and shorted, shorted the market in two thousand seven, that's, that's insane.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  And, and, yeah, and like, you know, a lot of it was just kind of just being, just understanding, like, what trends were doing, right? And like, understanding, like, the macro of things and, and how that affects the micro. And, you know, in, in, in two thousand eight, in September two thousand eight, I, I went long, like, a ton of silver and gold, and like, I, I did great off the bottom. Uh, I admittedly, like, didn't know about Bitcoin, if not, I probably would have bought some, you know. I, I think it was like in two thousand ten, I don't know exactly when, but I remember, uh, finding out about Bitcoin a- around that time, two thousand ten, two thousand twelve timeframe, when Bitcoin was around twenty-seven

• 14:44Speaker 01

  dollars, and I was on, I was on Zero Hedge, and it was posted on Zero Hedge for the first time, and I was like, wow, this is really cool. And I was like, all right, like, I was trying to figure out how to buy some, I couldn't figure out how to buy it, and then, like, I just kind of gave up, and then, like, I saw it started running, and it went to, like, a thousand bucks, and then it pulled all the way back to two hundred, and I was like, okay, that, like, that's, that was the bubble, right? Like, that was it. And then I didn't really look at Bitcoin for, for a couple of years after that.

• 15:13David Hoffman?

  Okay, I definitely want to get into the Bitcoin story, but I also want to back up and go all the way back. So we definitely have like a grasp on like your early interest into markets and definitely having a knack for that. I want to talk a little bit about your education. Were there any like classes in school, high school, or college that really, really resonated with you? Like any kind of subject matter specifically?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I majored in finance, so like I was always, I always liked like valuation stuff. So I'd say probably in high school, there was only really one business class. There was an economic class which I took, which I loved. And then in college, like as I'm sitting here thinking about it, probably a tax class, which I took, which you know, was just like really boring, but like super informative and practical. And then also like a private evaluation of private businesses, which was basically like, you know, how to value companies through cash flows, DCF and all that kind of stuff, which I think is super relevant to like even just publicly traded companies.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  But to me, I was always, I was always very interested in the market side of things, the publicly traded stuff.

• 16:26David Hoffman?

  Right, so I'm going to go ahead and guess that your education really happened hands on, right? In a live environment more than it did actually like in a classroom. Does that sound about right?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I mean, I think those two classes that I mentioned are probably the most relevant classes where I learned stuff. And you know, it's like understanding price action and psychology. It's like, that's like mass psychology, like you learn all that stuff like on the job, right? Like you only learn it by feeling it. Like I can tell you like, like, oh, like when the price moves against you, you should do this, or it goes in your favor, take profits here. But like you really don't know until you live it, right? Like you've been in crypto now for a minute, like you understand that like you're, you're, when you're like, when you're feeling the most ecstatic about your position, you should be selling some. And when you're feeling the most depressed about your position, you should be buying some, right? Because that's just the nature of human psychology, no matter what market you're in.

• 17:22David Hoffman?

  Right, that is the markets, right? Like if you are feeling depressed, so is the market when the market is also depressed, right? And so like you can take your own internal cues and apply them, apply them to the market, absolutely. So when you were, again, in the younger phases of your stock market finance education career, be it in university or being hands-on, you said you looked around and you saw everyone wearing white air buds, and so you got into Apple, then you saw the writing on the wall with housing market and shorted that, and then you got into gold. Was there, for me, like, I didn't really care about anything in finance until I discovered crypto, and so that was my thing. But it sounds like you are more broad. You have actually no,

• 18:06David Hoffman?

  like, personal interest in any one sector, be it like tech, or housing, or gold, or whatever. Was there any, like, part of, before crypto, any part of the financial markets that really resonated with you as a sector, or is it really just playing the game as a whole?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I think, like, as I think about it, I very much understand, and I, like, I like consumer discretionary in general. Like, as a tech, as a stock investor and market participant, I'm generally a generalist, but I understand consumer trends the best, right? So it's like, the Apple made sense to me because, literally, I'm just sitting on a subway and I saw it a couple of years later, I don't know the exact year, but like, maybe 2005, 2006, like, True Religion jeans, I don't know if you remember that fad?

• 18:51David Hoffman?

  I do, I do.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  That was a publicly traded company, and I remember riding it from like, four bucks up to like, 20, because, like, everybody that was fashionable was wearing them, right? And there was this huge boon. And so, like, to me, it's like, I very much just like, was just paying attention to that, and just being cognizant of these things that happened. Again, like, I think, to me, a lot of it, the way I see it is like, that's very, all these things are very consumer-focused, and obviously, at the end of the day, I think the gold trade is, you know, the gold/silver trade is why we all end up in crypto, right? Where it's like, hard money and not like, money printing is, ended up what kind of drawing me into crypto in the first place.

• 19:35David Hoffman?

  Well, while you were going through this like early phase of your finance stock market life, were you doing this alone or did you have friends, like minded friends doing like minded activities?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  So for the most part, like in high school, it was definitely me on my own. In college, it was still like me on my own. When I started trading full time, obviously, I was trading at a prop firm with a lot of people who were also like minded, trading their own money. So, you know, I feel like when you have your own money on the line, it's very, you treat it very differently than if you're running somebody else's money. And so like to me, I very much, I guess I kind of started finding my tribe around like 25, you know, and like my business partner on the equity side, we've been working together since, you know, 2007, which is, I don't know, about 14, 15 years at this point.

• 20:25David Hoffman?

  Before we get into how going with somebody changed your disposition, how did you as an individual, everyone has their own like risk tolerance, everyone has their own like personal interest in risk or not, how did, how did that part of your financial life come, come into play? Like, when did you learn that you were where on the risk spectrum?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  I think I was always pretty far out on the risk curve and I think that's pretty evident with, you know, the, the play I made in NFTs at the beginning of the year. And I very much like manage, like I think as a trader, as anybody that's dealing with like financial assets in public markets, like you're a risk manager, right? Like that's your entire job, right? Like you need to size accordingly. You don't want to be too big, you don't want to be too small, you need to be just right. And so, you know, I think I'm further out on the risk curve than most, but I also understand that because I have so much leverage in, let's say, my trading life, like I will like buy a house with no mortgage, right? Because I understand that like, that's not somewhere where I need leverage, right?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Like if I was working a nine to five job, making an annual salary, of course I want that leverage because I want to appreciate, I want to participate in the appreciation of the asset. But I know that me personally, like I don't need like Something that necessarily is safe, where if everything went to hell, you know, I still have a place to sleep, right? And that's kind of the way I see the world very much is like, okay, what's the risk in this? What am I risking, you know, what, what am I, what do I realistically think my risk is in this? And size supporting me, right? You know, like, cause and I think I, I was doing it a lot on a day to day basis. Obviously, trading where it's like, okay, like, I think like I'm risking 25 cents. But if I'm risking 50 cents, it's like double the risk, right?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And like that messes up the entire risk reward. So to me, I always, always, always focus on position sizing and what I think my initial risk is and, and what I think I could lose in any given moment. And that helps determine like what I want to do with regards to the position.

• 22:32David Hoffman?

  Most people who are into crypto and likely most people coming into crypto don't come from finance like you do. But most people don't actually like cognitively think about risks. They just kind of do their thing and then risk maybe comes for them or maybe it doesn't. When, when did you start like cognitively thinking about risk? Was that like very, very early on in your, your finance career or like did it come around later?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  It, it didn't start really coming around until I started trading professionally. Because I think like in order to be successful, uh, like, I mean, listen, trading markets is probably, I'd say probably the hardest job in the world. It's, you know, you're, it's emotionally taxing. You have to be very, very disciplined, like, you know, I've trained a lot of people throughout the years. And I will say the number one thing that determines whether you're successful in, in publicly traded markets is your discipline. Right? Cause like if let's say you're risking a hundred dollars and, and this was like a lesson I always tried to teach kids when like they were starting is like, you know, let's say you're risking a hundred dollars and you lose a hundred twenty dollars. Okay, cool. That's not that big of a deal, right? It's an extra twenty dollars. You're still going to be able to eat tonight.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  But, you know, let's leverage that up like, you know, a hundred X, right? And like, if you're risking a hundred thousand dollars and you lose a hundred twenty thousand dollars, like, that's a, that's, that's a big drawdown. That's significantly more than you were risking. And that messes up your upside. Side scenarios, right? That messes up all your risk reward on any trade that you might take. So to me, it became very, very evident very early on, especially when the people that taught me is like, you need to be disciplined, you need to have a system and you know, you need to understand that like you're not, you know, gonna always be right and you don't, you know, there's a difference between trading to make money and trading to be right. Right? And you're not going to make money if you're trading to be right.

• 24:20David Hoffman?

  Did you learn this, the whole just risk management behavior from taking a big L at all? Or did you, did you just kind of learn a bit just from, just from time?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I mean, I think I've took, taken big Ls throughout my career, right? Like, I think really young, making a ton of money in the dot com bubble and not selling anything because I didn't want to pay taxes. It's like, you know, I went, you know, I went up from like five or six X down to like, you know, losing 90%, right? So it's like, to me, like, that was like a very valuable lesson early on that, you know, especially as, you know, you make it a professional career, like, I'm never necessarily married to a position, right? It's like, this is a trade and if I'm wrong, like, I have to get out, right? Or, you know, like, I, when I hit my risk limit, like, I have to get out, right? And, and that's, to me, is probably the hardest part about trading, right?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Is, you know, if you, the more conviction you have in something, the harder it is to let go. And it's against human nature to like, take that loss and kind of regroup and rethink about it from a clear head, you know? I, I was actually just chatting with somebody over the weekend where they were telling me that, like, I guess in the March bottom last year of crypto, where they sold the bottom and then bought it back, like, you know, a day or two later, like, at a slightly higher price. And I'm like, that was the right thing to do.

• 25:42David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's, that's, I did that. That was exactly me.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  But that's the right thing to do, right? Like, that's the beauty of like, a very liquid market, right? Like, if you, if you did that with real estate, you wouldn't be able to get back in. But like, the beautiful thing about things that trade 24 hours all the time is that you could literally, you could buy it and then be like, oh, no, that wasn't the right decision. You could sell it and it costs you like, you know, 50 bips. Like, it, it costs you like, nothing. And, and so to me, it's like, there's nothing more important than having a clear head when you're making these really important decisions. And that was something I learned like, on the job, thankfully to the people that taught me and, and my experience.

• 26:21David Hoffman?

  So when in your, in your timeline, did you cross the 1 million mark?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  It was, I, it was at some point in my twenties, um, you know, it was, I did really well, obviously, off the bottom in, in, uh, in March of 2000, in 2000, well, in, in September 2008, March of 2009, I did really well. Um, and then, you know, I experienced like a hard time in my trading career in like 2014, 2015, maybe, uh, where I gave back a lot of what I made, uh, just because the market was just very hard to trade at that time.

• 26:59David Hoffman?

  And then, okay, so I think it's time to go into the Bitcoin crypto story. So where we left this off is you saw Bitcoin around $20, you wanted to buy it, but it was too hard. Watch it go to 1,000, watch it drop to $200. Where does it, where, what happens next?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  And so like I, I just wasn't paying attention to it afterwards, right? Like I was just like, I would pay attention to it whenever like it popped up on Zero Hedge or the news. Like I knew what it was. Cause like, I remember the first time I read about it, I, I was like going down the rabbit hole for like two or three hours. I couldn't figure out how to buy it. And I was like, oh, like that was it, tulips. And then, uh, in mid 2017, early 2017, Bitcoin starts getting back above a thousand bucks. And I'm like, oh, like me as a student, yeah, me as a student of price action, like there's something here, right? Like if, if price gets back above there and it's holding, like this would be something that I'm paying attention to. So I decided to do a deep dive and from that deep dive, I find Ethereum.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And I'm like, wow, this is even better than Bitcoin, right? Because like there's programmers on here and like, I want to go where the devs are because that's where the talent is going. And then I started going down the ICO rabbit hole and you know, I caught, let's say like the mid to late stage cycle of that. And I remember in like Q1 of 2018, being like,

• 28:20Speaker 01

  This tech is really good. It's gonna change the world. But I was, I still remembered my experience back, back in high school, right? Where, uh, obviously the internet was gonna change the world. But every, all valuations got ahead of themselves. So I sold anything that I had that was liquid in Q1. And I was like, I'll be back. And I'm like, it's gonna take like seven to 10 years to build out blockchain tech. Because I was using the dot com, uh, parallel, right? Where the, the nineties came, like, you know, the bub, the bubble popped in 2000. And then the internet that we really use today didn't come about till like 2010. So I was like, alright, tech is gonna move a little faster, so maybe seven years. And, you know, I sold anything that I had that was liquid. And I was still keeping an eye on it from, from afar.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, when, when Jerome Powell said in March of 2020 that he was buying everything. I wired a bunch of money over to Coinbase. Did my first, uh, rebuy of crypto in, in like three years. And I started going back down the rabbit hole. And I was like, holy shit, like, they built some really cool stuff. Like, very fast, right? Like, the first time I used AVE, I was like, this is gonna change the world. And so, you know, I started listening to as many, uh, podcasts as I can. Like, that's where I found you guys and started listening to you guys. As I was starting to get reacquainted with everything that I missed. And, you know, I was yield farming and, you know, kind of like trying to figure it out.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And I found NFTs in like August or September, uh, late August, early September. And immediately they started making sense to me. Because I started playing Fortnite at the beginning of quarantine.

• 29:59David Hoffman?

  So, wh, we are actually, um, uh, uh, in the classes of the same era. We came into, uh, crypto around 2017. I came in, I started really paying attention in like June or August or something. Uh, and then went all in in like September. But, uh, where you had the, uh, the, the dot com bubble in, in your belt, I had nothing. And so your dot com bubble lessons was my crypto 2017 lessons. Where, uh, you know, went all in, uh, on Ether at $300 at, in like, uh, yeah, the, the first half, the middle of 2017. Goes up to fourteen hundred dollars. I'm like, wow, this is insane. Like, I'm a psych student. I had no idea that this would be like, I would have this money.

• 30:42David Hoffman?

  And then it goes down to six hundred dollars and I'm like, all in. And then it goes down to four hundred dollars. I'm like, all in. And then it goes down to two hundred dollars. I'm like, all in. And then it goes down to eighty dollars. I'm like, well, I'm out of money. And so it's funny, and this is why like, everyone talks about like, oh, class of twenty seventeen, class of twenty thirteen. Now we have the class of twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. And like, it's kind of just like this rite of passage for so many people that don't know about money and finance to buy the top, have an insane amount of conviction, not understand that like, it doesn't matter about your conviction. It really matters about like, market dynamics and that a lot of people make their first very big lesson into the space. Thankfully, very early, right? Like, I think one of the best tailwinds that you've had is you had your very big,

• 31:26David Hoffman?

  like, burn at the very beginning of your career. And so you kind of can understand like, the highs and lows of emotions as the charts go through highs and lows. And then you have that under your belt as you are prepared to ride future waves.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. It's very interesting. Like, you know, sitting on a trading desk, like, we always say, like, you know, the worst possible thing that like, you could experience as a trader is a lot of success right out the gate, right? Because then you think, oh, you're the smartest guy in the room, you're invincible. And then you take big risks with big amount of money, right? I'd much rather learn that lesson with a smaller amount of capital so that I'm smarter and I'm wiser when I have more capital to deploy.

• 32:07David Hoffman?

  Do you remember anything in Q1 of twenty eighteen? And for the listeners that aren't familiar, that is literally the top of the twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen bubble. Do you remember any like, signals that you saw? It's like, eh, this is too ridiculous.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I think like, just prices were going parabolic. Everyone had

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Everyone had a a business, a white paper, right? At the time, like, people were writing white papers left and right. And like, they were for like, some of the craziest things that I'm like, that like, that doesn't even make financial sense as like a business, let alone like, a token. And so I just remember, it just, I just felt the froth, you know? And like, I I mean, I remember when I I sold, I didn't sell everything like at around these prices. But I remember that day, like Bitcoin went from like twelve thousand to twenty thousand in like twenty minutes.

• 32:59David Hoffman?

  I remember that day.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  My best sale was at sixteen thousand nine hundred. And I was like, oh, like, I was patting myself on the back. And then twenty seconds later, I'm like, wow, that was a terrible sale. Because it went up to like twenty. And then like, a minute later, I was like, okay, that was a good sale, right? Like, because that's how quickly it was. And so like, to me, it was just, it was just like the panic of of masses. And, you know, I've seen that type of hysteria in stocks, uh, you know, just trading for for so long. You know, obviously on shorter timeframes, but to me, it's like, all right, this is where you sell. And and then you figure out where where you're gonna buy back.

• 33:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, people these days that have been in the markets this last few years, we have not seen anything close to the blow off top. That was Bitcoin from fourteen to twenty K. It happened in like, I think, under thirty six hours. We went up from fourteen to twenty, hung around like twenty K for like four or five hours. And then dropped down to fourteen, like, you know, just ten, twelve, thirteen hours later. It was absolutely insane. And then the worst part about it is that like, the the rest of the market kept on going. And so like Ether topped out like two or three weeks later in slightly a more sustainable fashion. Like, it was over a thousand dollars for like three or four days. And then like, and then the altcoin, like, the altcoin wave just like pumped right after it.

• 34:17David Hoffman?

  The most like vigorous pump I have seen across the board of all time. And that was, it was just like fireworks. It was like Bitcoin was the first firework. Ethereum was the next big firework. Then all of these altcoins started popping off. And then like, after that, over the next like six months, you just saw ashes, just ashes and ashes, just like falling from the sky. It was, it's one of the most surreal moments I've ever seen.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and it's really interesting because I'm like, you know, to me, like, what's different this cycle than was different than me last cycle? Because I, you know, I met a lot of people that stuck in through the bear market that are doing obviously great now because they were grinding it out through the bear market. And like, to me, it's like, I, I always thought blockchain tech was real, but I thought it was like a decade away, right? And I had a business trading equities where I was like, all right, do I want to sit there and struggle for the next 10 years for the tech to get bought? Or, you know, should I go back to my bread and butter and then I'll come back when I think it's mature enough? And, you know, like, obviously to, to everybody's credit, like, you know, stuff got built very quickly. And so like, I sit here and I look at NFTs and I'm like, this is very much the same dynamic.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  The market's definitely going to get it ahead of itself, right? I don't know if it's there yet, or if we're about to get there, or if it happened. But I know just by the nature of markets, that's what happens. So, but to me, it's like, all right, at most, you know, if we, if we were to enter a bear market today, it's like, at most, I would think it lasts two years, right? And so because we're just iterating so fast, things are being built so quickly. And I think I can make a case personally that like, it would happen faster because this is so consumer facing, right? And as adoption increases, it just hits that Lindy effect faster. So to me, I'm like, I'm, I'm much more willing to pivot and go into the space full time.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Because to me, it feels much closer and much more real than like, a lot of what I thought there was like a ton of vaporware at the time.

• 36:11David Hoffman?

  And that's a trade in of itself too, right? And like, not only is it a trade of your money, but it's also a trade of your time and attention. And so like, what, what you're saying is like, oh, I'm re, I'm ready to put two years, two plus years of my life on the table, even if we go through a bear market, because, uh, would you, would you say, I mean, ma, maybe hindsight's 2020, but like, uh, go, going and missing the bear market of 2018 to 2019 and being present during that time. Do you think like, missing that is a mistake? Like, do you wish you had been there or do you think it was like a good move to like, tap out?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  No, I, I think it was a good move for me because I just, I didn't know how long it would be. So I was, I much rather would go to where I, let's say, had a More secure source of of revenue and you know, but like I've seen, I I I have friends that I made last cycle that, you know, are crushing at this cycle because they stuck around. And I'm like, all right, cool. I mean, everybody says, you know, everyone says that, you know, you make your money in the bear market. That's very true, right? Like you sit there, you grind it out, you work with people that are really building in the space. And you know, you align yourselves with them and you guys are building great stuff together. So like to me, I don't regret it, but it's like a lesson that I'm like, okay, like this this next bear cycle, like I'm gonna be around, like I'm gonna stick around because

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I know like the things that need to get built that are important to get built. Because like we're over here fighting for like self sovereignty and like the open metaverse and like we all know what the alternative is and like none of us want that for ourselves or our grandchildren, right?

• 37:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So when you said Jerome Powell started buying everything that triggered your brain to rethink about crypto. Can you just walk us through the calculus that you were making in that moment?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, basically here we are about like two, three weeks into COVID. You know, the market's in freefall. As a trader, I'm, you know, making a ton of money because the volatility is obviously really good. And all of a sudden, you know, the Fed does a press conference. I think it was like March 28th or 29th, it might have been March or April, but I I don't remember exactly, but I remember he basically said he was gonna be buying, they were gonna be buying a ton of corporate bonds. And I was, my first thought was like, buy gold, right? But then it's like, what's a better bet? Like if I'm buying gold, like what has more leverage? Bitcoin. What has more leverage than Bitcoin? Ether. And so like I immediately just went, I'm like, all right, wire money to Coinbase.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Buy as much ether as I can and you know, like hang on for the ride because we're about to put the money printers on. And you know, obviously like that's what's happened over the last year and a half.

• 38:43David Hoffman?

  That's, that's interesting. Yeah. So ether was at this time, I mean, at the low of of March, it was like $80, it was probably around like somewhere like 150 to 200 when you, when you were looking at it right then.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was like high hundreds, maybe low 200s around there.

• 38:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, congrats, congrats on that trade. And I think that's a really emblematic of like what it means to be a good generalized investor. Again, you, you made the call on Apple, you shorted the housing market, bought gold after the fact. And it's just, I think, a really interesting, another interesting story of of you being able to just look at the broad. Current context, the broad zeitgeist of what's going on and like look around and they, they, yeah, that, I think that's a great calculus. Well, gold, gold's the obvious choice. But like, what's, what's, what's the slightly more risky, but also like better gold and like, and then you just recurses down to, to, to Ethereum.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Cause like my, my whole, my, my thought process and like this was the same thought process I had when I got into NFTs was like, what's going to give me the most leverage if I'm right, right? Like if we all have the same trade on like, then like I want to make the most amount of money for the risk that I'm taking. Like me buying the S and P 500, of course I would have done well, but it's a much safer bet, right? Like, but if I'm going to be sitting there risking that we're going to be printing a ton of money, like how far out on the risk curve? And I guess this goes back to like my risk tolerance is like, I'm willing to go far out on the risk curve because I'm like, all right, well, I know I have this app, these assets in this basket in my safe basket. And then these are the assets where I'm like, okay, like let's, you know, let's sit there and, and, and try to make a bunch of money with it.

• 40:22David Hoffman?

  So when you got in back into Ethereum, back into crypto in the, the March, March trough, was that a trade or did you start really like doing some research and, and just getting in cut, catching yourself up to speed? What, what was that like?

• 40:38Speaker 01

  So yeah, so it started me getting caught back up to speed, but I also had like a couple of projects that I invested in, in the 2017 cycle that were starting to unlock. So you know, as they're starting to unlock, they're like, okay, like what wallets do we send, we send your tokens to? And then, you know, I started researching on them and then, you know, like it, it's so funny. I had a wallet that I hadn't opened in a while. And I had SNX in the wallet and I'm like,

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Synthetics?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was like,

• 41:06Speaker 02

  You bought Haven in 2017?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And so I was like, I don't know what this is. I'm like, I don't know what this is. I haven't, I haven't kept up with any of this. So I sold it. And I sold it, I think like three or four days before I got listed on Binance. So like I sold it right before it started mooning. And but like, but I was very grateful because like at the very least I was like, whoa, like here's a bunch of tokens that I thought were worthless that. That are actually worth like a good amount and I I converted to Ethereum because I knew what ETH was. I didn't know what SNX was. And I was just starting to go back down the rabbit hole and like, you know, like as like, you know, when things are going up in price. You know, you you start getting more interested and then, you know, I started talking to my friends that stuck around and they were telling me, oh, listen to this.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  You know, listen to this podcast, you know, talk to this guy, follow this person. And, you know, I was just kind of. Yield farming and just kind of just following people that I thought were smart. Like I got rugged in sushi. You know, like I was yield farming sushi and I got rugged. And so like, but to me, it's like a learning experience, right? Like I was. You know, I was trading in the mornings, I was trading equities and then I'd be done by like 11 a.m. And probably for the next like. 12 to 15 hours, I'd be reading about DeFi and listening to podcasts and like just trying to understand because. I knew I had a lot to catch up on.

• 42:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so you you came into Ethereum right before DeFi summer, which is literally the perfect time to get into Ethereum. So as somebody that's been following just financial markets for all of his life. What what did DeFi summer look like? Because I mean, for somebody in crypto, it's like, oh, we're doing a new weird thing. Okay, that's great. But like from, I think from a more. Uh grounded financial perspective, DeFi summer might be kind of surreal. What was DeFi summer like for you?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Um, so you know, I was playing with like a small amount because I was like, all right, like, you know, if I can like, you know, 3X or 5X like this stack, then like. You know, I can put myself in a position and I like, I very much was like, all right, everything that I had in the in the space. Uh, that I let's say like the synthetics and like a couple of other tokens. I'm like, all right, that's going to be like what I build off of, right? Like. I had like the amount that I bought in March, that was kind of like my safe, my safe stack in in this risky asset. But I wasn't going to be risking all of that. And so I was just like relearning. I think one of, I think one of my. Things that I'm really good at is understanding that I don't know everything and that I'm willing to learn.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  And that there's not just one way to make money, right? So it's like, if I see people, like I'm not, I guess you're your typical finance bro that's like. Oh yeah, like there's only one way to get rich and there's only one way to make money in public markets is I'm like, well, if I see a lot of people making money. Like, like, I'd be an idiot to not try to find out how, right? And just understand the mechanics of that, how that works and, you know, understanding that I can learn from like anybody, whether, even if they're younger than me, like, that doesn't mean that I'm smarter than them, right? Like, it's like, there's a lot of people in the world that are much younger than me, that are much smarter than I am, that I can definitely learn from and that, like, when I was approaching DeFi summer, I was just like,

• 44:11Speaker 01

  again, reading as much content as I could, get into a pool, ask people questions and then kind of learn by doing, because that's, you know, I, like, sometimes I would read these medium posts and I'm like, I, that was Chinese to me, like, I have no idea what this person's saying, but then if I put like $10,000 at risk, like, I start figuring it out real quick, right? Because I, I don't want to lose that money. So it's like, you know, like, how, how do I minimize risk? And it was like, very much a learning process. I knew that I was, I didn't have like the best edge because, you know, people that understood the medium posts, that understood code and how to read the code, like, before something launches, they understood the risks way before the night, way before I would, right?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  And like, you know, if there was the chance of a rug pull, like, you know, all these things. And so like, to me, I, I knew I was fighting an uphill battle, but like, there was money to be made and I, I was, it was very much a learning experience that, like, I'm super grateful for because it, again, it was like, you, I learned by doing. And I think like all of us is like, you know, we cut our teeth on, on these things, like, like, I wear that rug pull with, with pride, like, um, um, you know, I was, I think I was involved in that one and, uh, I think it was called Eminence, that, that, uh, that rug pull. Or it might have gone out like right before the rug pull, like, but like, just, you know, like, I, even if I get caught in these things, I'm not, I'm not like, oh, like, you know, fuck DeFi, like, it's like, no, like, that's part of the learning process, right?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Like, it's, you know, if, if money was free, like, then everybody, everybody getting rich doing it, it's like, it's nothing, nothing in life is free like that.

• 45:46David Hoffman?

  While you were going through DeFi summer, was there any like thoughts in the back of your heads like hmm, this is unsustainable, this is frothy, anything like that?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  No, uh, because I, I think that, uh, to me, it's, I mean, this is like, this technology is so crazy. Like, dude, the first time I used Ave, I posted my Ether's collateral and I got a loan against it in five minutes because I was just using it for the first time and I didn't have to post any KYC. And I'm like, dude, this is gonna change the world like that. Like, and I would tell my friends in Tradby and they were like, I don't get it. What's the point? I'm like, have you ever, have you, have you ever tried getting a mortgage? Like, you like, you know, like, it, it takes weeks and they ask you so much invasive, so many invasive questions and all that is, that's just a collateralized loan. So it's like this, like, to me, this is like such revolutionary technology that I'm like,

• 46:37Speaker 01

  you know, I'm one of the first, you know, let's say a million people that are using it that know it exists, like, and there's billions of people on the planet, like this is gonna be such like, you know, 10, 20 years from now, this is gonna be such proliferating technology that like, even if it is bubbly now, like it long-term, that's like, you know, like investing in Amazon during the dot com bubble, right? Like, it got real frothy and I think it reached the high of like $90 or something like, and this is like, before the, the splits that it's had and here we are 20 years later and you know, it's multiples of that, right? So like, to me, like the tech is real.

• 47:15David Hoffman?

  How have you gone and balanced your crypto portfolio between like Ether and like the DeFi tokens specifically in this phase of, of the timeline? When like, uh, you, you've gone through markets where it's almost impossible to like actually price in fundamentals, like the, the dot com bubble, you can't price fundamentals there. DeFi summer can't really price in fundamentals, not really. Like you can kind of see adoption, but you can kind of see usage, but like, that's about it. So when you're balancing like DeFi tokens and Ether, how, how did you elect to choose the allocations that you've chosen?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think that like to me, it's like because uh I, I, and it runs at different points in each cycle. Uh, I think that like I understand momentum because I've been a trader. So I understand like when momentum's high and you should be in higher beta assets and when momentum is low, you should be in like the safer assets. Uh, I guess one of the ways I've worked on portfolio allocation is I don't use leverage. I use very, very little ever leverage. Like maybe I'll use it for a trade here and there for like a couple of weeks or a month. But I'm quick to pay it off. And like as soon as like a drawdown starts, I just go straight to like no, no loans, right? Cause like to me and like, I don't go to cash, like I don't go to USDC, like I'll just go to ETH.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Or you know, I'm like, all right, well, has the story changed? No. Am I still bullish on it? Yes. All right, cool. Like hold it, right? Like, you know, over the long term, like I think prices will be higher. And that's didn't that like to me, like I slept the best, like being in crypto, even with all this vol, because I don't use leverage. Right? So it's like when these down lows are happening, I'm not worried about getting liquidated. I'm not worrying about having a post collateral and I'm just like, well, has the narrative changed? No. All right. Stay long, right? And like that to me has been like how I've approached the space.

• 49:08David Hoffman?

  Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with G money thus far. In the second half of the show, we get more in depth into the world of NFTs. Because G money, of course, is a prolific NFT person. And then we also get into the legacy that G money wants to leave behind. Now that he is in this world. Now that he is, you know, one of the most successful NFT curators around, what does G money want to do with himself? Uh, so that was a fantastic question and overall had a broader conversation about the culture of crypto and how it's meaningfully different than the culture of TradFi. And so let's go ahead and get right into that second half of the show. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs.

• 49:53David Hoffman?

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• 50:37David Hoffman?

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• 51:21David Hoffman?

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• 52:06David Hoffman?

  Go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your DeFi apps all in one space. And that's probably what kept you in the space even after a DeFi Summer kind of came to a pretty quick end, right? Like it ended as soon as Ether started moving. It's like all the people that were, because during DeFi summer, there was that phase like, oh, it's the DeFi tokens that capture value. Ether doesn't do anything. Then Ether moons finally, and then that was the end of DeFi summer and then and everything died. So what kept you going? What captured your attention after the end of DeFi summer? I think this is when we get into the story of NFTs.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  So, so, you know, I remember all throughout DeFi summer, I'd see on Twitter where people like, NFTs are like the next big thing. And I didn't have time because like I was still like, you know, I'm learning about sushi, learning about Wi-Fi and, you know, I'm like, well, these things are mooning so hard. Like, I don't even have time to figure out what NFTs are. And then when, when DeFi summer calmed down, I'm like, all right, finally, like, I had it written down. I'm like, NFTs. And when it calmed down, I finally started going down the DeFi, the NFT rabbit hole. And it started making sense to me right away because on the first day of quarantine, I started playing, I bought a PlayStation. I hadn't played a video game in 10 years. I download Fortnite. I start playing with my friends and their nephews. And this one kid, first game we play, 12 years old.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  He goes, what, what skins did you buy? And I'm like, skins, like, they don't give me any special powers. I'm not buying, this game is free to play. I'm not spending any money on this game. I'm, I'm like 30 years old, right? Like, you know, and so

• 53:39David Hoffman?

  I'm here to pass time.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm here, I'm here to not go crazy during quarantine. And so I sit there and I realized that, you know, first off, in like one or two weeks, I started buying a bunch of skins. And I see, like, whenever I play with, with these kids, like, they switch their skins every, every game, which is, let's say, like every 10 to 20 minutes. Like, that's like an outfit change. That's literally like you during the course of this conversation, going into your bathroom, changing and coming out three different times. So I'm like, there's going to be this massive super cycle here that that kid's 12 years old right now. 10 years from now, he's going to be, he's going to have his own discretionary income. And he's going to be totally okay with the idea of owning something as a purely digital form. And so I'm like, there's this super cycle here.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  I don't know how to take advantage of it because at the time I don't know what NFTs are. And I'm like thinking, I'm like, all right, maybe Roblox or like Minecraft, like maybe do something with those and like try to figure out a way to monetize. But really I was just like looking for a publicly trade. At the time, Roblox wasn't public. So I was looking for like a publicly traded vehicle to do that. And then finally in September, I find NFTs and I'm like, holy shit. Like this is your skin on Twitter and Discord. And this is how people are gonna wanna portray themselves. And you know, like to me, it just, it made so much sense and I started going down the rabbit hole. And you know, when I, you know, I, I heard about punks really early on. And I think like the floor might have been like seven hundred or a thousand dollars at that point.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  And I was like, no, punks are too expensive. I wanna find the next punks. And I start going down the rabbit hole. And as I'm hanging out in a lot of these discords, you know, I just realized that like punks are the next punks. And, and that's when, you know, I bought a zombie and I was waiting for the ape. And you know, cause like, I noticed that the people uh in the space, especially at that time, that were the most knowledgeable, generally had crypto punks as their avatars. So I was like, oh, like, you know, this, what does this say? Like this says that you're successful. This says that you understand NFTs. This says that you've been around a while. So like to me, I was like, it's very much like an in-world flex, right? Like for the same reason that like, if I meet you, I don't, won't tell you how much money I made last year.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  But if I'm wearing a nice watch, you kind of, that's kind of all you need to know.

• 55:57David Hoffman?

  Kinda know, right, yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  You need to, that tells you everything you need to know without me having to say it. And so my thesis was that humans were gonna be humans, whether they were interacting face to face or behind computer screens. And that's really where like the punk's thesis really made sense to me. Where last cycle, I remember everybody was like, when Lambo, when Lambo? And I was like, I think at the end of this cycle, it's gonna be when punk. And that's really why, um, you know, I wrote that thread. I, I bought, I bought those punks and you know, I, I think I poured a lot of gasoline on that fire.

• 56:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the, what struck me when you were talking about uh playing Fortnite with these kids, like wearing these skins. And like you, you didn't, you didn't get it. I can't, yeah, skins, well, no, excuse me, you did get it. Uh, and like everyone's gonna be wearing a skin in the future. Everyone's wearing it on Twitter, everyone's wearing on Discord. You're, you, I'm talking to you wearing your skin right now on Zoom. Like I'm seeing this skin happen and I'm guessing, and if, maybe it's not this easy right now, but in the future, you could press a button and put on a different. Punk or a different, a different NFT, right?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. You know, and I think like a lot of people are working, but because you already see it on Twitter, right? Where people will change, like depending on the project that they, you know, maybe they just minted or they want to support. It's like, you know, listen, not everybody, unless you're Steve Jobs, not everybody wears the same clothes every day, right? So it's like, you know, you want to express yourself differently.

• 57:17David Hoffman?

  Right. I, I'm drawing a lot of connections to this part of your, your, uh, this part of your career back, all the way back to you noticing everyone wearing, um, Apple headphones on the subway, right? Like, but it's a little bit different where if everyone's wearing Apple headphones on the subway, everyone is already buying Apple products. But what you, you, what you connected is all these kids playing Fortnite and then the NFT mania, or not mania, but like NFT adoption on Ethereum. And so like, one was actually like reactive, like, oh, I'm seeing Apple sell a bunch of products. One's a lot like proactive where like, oh, I'm seeing kids wearing kid, uh, skins in Fortnite.

• 57:56David Hoffman?

  And then there are these like digital skin things. Maybe this is just like a story of you just getting better at noticing patterns. But any, any like insight or comments you want to add to that?

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's probably me just getting better at noticing patterns over time. Uh, I, I'd like to think I have more wisdom at this point than I did 20 years ago. And I just seen like, like the super cycle, right? Like, you know, and I started asking, like last year, like I would start asking all my friends that had kids. I'd be like, well, what, what do they play? What do they ask for? Like, cause I remember when I was a kid, like I'd go to Toys R Us and be like, oh, I want this toy. And these kids are asking for like V bucks. And I just noticed more and more that it's very digital, like digital based assets. So to me, it's like, okay, that kid, you know, can't afford this today, but at some point in the future, he will be okay with the 40 this, right? Like whenever I have these conversations about describing an NFT,

• 58:49Speaker 01

  like the people that have the hardest time understanding it are over the age of 40. The people that get it right away are on like, when I explain it to a teenager, they're like, that is awesome. How, how can I do it? And like, I've seen my friends, my friends' kids that are like 14, 15. Like become like their NFT person, right? Like they're they're the ones that are minting. They're the ones that are buying and trading and and doing all this stuff. And because they just innately understand it because they've grown up with technology their entire lives. So like to me, it's like, yeah, like as these people spend more time in front of a screen, like they're they're gonna be spending more money on that, too.

• 59:29David Hoffman?

  So there there's two other Layer Zero podcasts that I've done that I see a lot of patterns with this story. One is with Eric Connor, who like like you went to university for finance or or business, and then we started working at a bank right after, right during like 2008, actually started working at a bank. And then he got into the world of crypto and Ethereum, like got was generally a pretty good trader or a very good at understanding the psychology of markets. And then he got into NFTs, and that's kind of like where he like prefers to be now. And then same thing with DC Investor, a very similar timeline with you, which is the Layers Zero I did last week, which is watch the early days of the internet, also was very knowledgeable investing, and now kind of only cares about, well, not only, but like really cares about NFTs.

• 1:00:14David Hoffman?

  Like, he's kind of like the NFT guy. Do you have any insights about like why people seem to converge upon like the NFT markets, the NFT game?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Well, I I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with like the thing that really interests me about the NFT market is that I really do think that NFTs are the Trojan horse for crypto to go mainstream. So when I look at that and like, you know, like last summer, I was involved in DeFi, but like, it's difficult, you know what I mean? Like, it's, you know, you have to, not everybody wants to play a money game where, you know, you're gonna get a high APY, but then like you need to worry about like, you know, the coin going down. And like, it's a difficult game to play, but like, everybody inherently understands what collecting something is like, right? Like what artwork is like. So to me, like, when I see consumer adoption, like, it literally is is like, it comes from NFTs.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  So that makes me way more excited about NFTs than crypto in general, because I think I think we you can probably agree is that when the way we get mainstream adoption is when people don't even know that they're using crypto, right? And I think NFTs are are the way that that happens. So that's why I'm super excited about NFTs.

• 1:01:24David Hoffman?

  I think that makes a ton of sense, right? And the NFTs just have that surface area for adoption, right? Like, you're not supposed to like every single NFT. You're supposed to like the NFTs that you like. But as an investment vehicle, there's a difference there where like, NFTs, they're going to be a bajillion NFTs, right? We're going to mint one NFT per interest that there is. And so as like an asset class, I kind of think it makes NFTs really, really hard to invest in. Because like on the other side of things, like there's just Ether. There's this one Ether, right? Like, do you believe in Ethereum? Oh, you buy Ether. Do you believe in NFTs? Ooh, which one do you want? And so like actually getting broad exposure to NFTs, I think is kind of hard.

• 1:02:07David Hoffman?

  And so, I mean, maybe the answer, like, that's why there's like this fat CryptoPunk thesis, right? It's like, well, CryptoPunks might track the NFT market at large just because they are the OG NFT. But do you have any thoughts on like how to actually gain exposure to NFTs? When the whole thing is supposed to be like fragmented?

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, I think that's why I think I always try to red pill people on punks and squiggles and like other like AAA blue chip assets. Because to me, it's like, all right, if you don't want to do that much work and you want to get involved, like, you know, buy the creme de la creme, right? If you want to go down the rabbit hole, you can go down the rabbit hole as much as you want. But like, much like in art, right? Like, there's a billion pieces of art that are made every year, but not all art accrues value. You know, the same thing with like sports cards or anything that's made. There are certain things that accrue value because people covet it and people want it. And that's where the value accrual goes. So like, to me, it's like no different than investing in like the art market

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  or some other like high-end asset. You just need to do more work, right? Like, but I do think that, and you're starting to see it already where... Index funds are being made to track, you know, certain projects so that it just becomes as easy as owning like an ETF, right? Like where it's like, okay, I just want exposure to NFTs. Like I just buy this token and that gives me exposure to these nine or 10 different projects, right? Either through fractionalization or through outright ownership in the treasury. So like, it's definitely not easy. Like, I think the fact that people have made a ton of money in the last year makes it seem like it's easy. But, you know, I firmly believe like, nothing is that easy in life. So it's like, you need to do your

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  homework and, you know, do your own research, as people always say.

• 1:03:56David Hoffman?

  Right. Do you think Chromies have as much like value capture accrual as punks? Or Chromie Squiggles specifically? Or in that ballpark? Or like, or is it really just like punks are the lead and that's kind of it?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think punks are like number one. I think squiggles are up there because, you know, you look at Art Blocks as a platform and what it's been able to do in the space. It probably has one of the best communities in the space. Snowfro himself is like an OG punk holder that claimed CryptoPunks on the day they were released. And so like, to me, it's like, they, they will be historically significant, right? Like, as I start talking to more and more people from the contemporary art world, I, I always find it interesting how a lot of them can resonate with Chromie Squiggles, more so than they can with punks. And so like, you know, to me, it's like, all right, if these people will be coming into the space, especially with like, the price is way less than, than what a punk is, like,

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  they'll probably start allocating more money towards, towards squiggles. And, and so, to me, I put squiggles up there. It's, it's Snowfro's genesis piece. It's an ode to punks. And I think Art Blocks is going to be a historically significant platform, especially in the generative art space. So, um, you know, I, I like squiggles for that reason.

• 1:05:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, for me, the squiggles are fun just because they're like the perfect level of nihilism. It's like pretty nihilist, like, oh, a chromie squiggle that's going for like $50,000. That's kind of weird, but also there is some art there as well, right? Like, you know, it's colorful, it's got a shape. There is some, there is some art there, but then it also has like a kind of a, the sticking power of punks because chromie squiggles are like the first art blocks project, right? And so like first art blocks projects perfectly like balanced nihilism and then also some cool colors that like, you know, you, I could see myself having my chromie squiggle on my wall somewhere, like metal cutout print, like I could, I would do that. And that's kind of like how I think about a lot of like the art blocks art that I, that

• 1:05:57David Hoffman?

  I look at is like, could I see that on my wall? And that's, that's how personally I value these things.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  And I think that's the right way to do it, right? Like, that's what people always say when you buy art, buy art that you like, not like, when, the second you're in it to try to make money, then, you know, like you're, you're gonna lose, right? Like, I missed out on Bored Apes because I was like, ah, I don't really, I don't really like the art, you know? Was that, that was a bad financial decision, but I didn't want to buy something that I wasn't gonna be like, all right, I'm proud to own this.

• 1:06:27David Hoffman?

  The, the cool thing that I think about the NFT market, and I think why people end up grav, not everyone, but a lot of people end up gravitating towards the NFT world is the, there's a much larger sense of community and culture in the NFT market than there is in, in like TradFi, right? Like, sweet, you made the calls on Apple, but like, did you make any friends along the way? Like, with, with NFTs, like, there's a lot of culture along with that. Tell us about the culture side of things that you've been able to experience with NFTs.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just the community, like, you know, the number, I know everyone says and it's so cliche, but like, when I first got into the space, people would be like, oh, like, you know, like, you should look at this, you should look at that. And it wasn't like, I, I feel like sometimes you would get in DeFi where like, somebody's trying to show you something because they want to dump on you. Like, this was more like, no, like, this is like, Snowfro was the guy that redpilled me on punks, right? And he was like, dude, like, you need to buy a zombie, like, you're spending so much money in the space, like. This is like the creme de la creme. And I was like, really? And like, you know, he spent like two days explaining it to me. Why, why I needed a zombie and why, why I needed a punk, but specifically like an elite, an elite tier punk.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  And like, you know, it just like that, that helpful attitude. Like I made, I've made so many friends that like I've met in the last three, four months for the first time that, you know, it like, it's really heartwarming where these people that I've spoken to online every day for like six months prior or a year prior, and we meet for the first time, like one of my buddies picked me up from the airport. I had no idea what he looked like. We're living there, DMing on Twitter and being like, yo, what, what do you look like? What are you wearing? And what are you wearing? Like, what card do you have? Like, and like, but yeah, when we met each other, we gave each other like this biggest hug. Like, you know, like long lost friends that haven't seen each other in 10 years. And it was like, yo, dude, like, you know, we made it, right? Like, we're fucking, we're doing great.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  And I don't know, like I never, I never experienced that, obviously in the stock market, even, you know, running a trading desk, trading side by side with people every day. There's something about the community of all doing it together and building all these things from scratch that I think like really resonates with people.

• 1:08:41David Hoffman?

  And is there any advice that you have for people who want similar experiences? How, how did you find your friends? How did they find you? Was it just like being in Discord or just like, well, what was, what's the process of establishing relationships that you found?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the best is like interacting with people, like interact with people as much as you can. Go to the discords of the projects you like. You're gonna find people that like, just like in real life, right? Like you find your people that you gravitate towards and the same thing is gonna happen online, right? Like a lot of, like I was super active in the punks discord really early on, our blocks. And then like, you know, then you start having conversations with people on the side and you're like, oh, like, then you start doing deals with these people and like, and then those friendships build over time. The same thing with Twitter, just interacting with people and you're gonna find like your, your tribe, right? Like I, I firmly believe that the more you put yourself out there, the more you'll

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Find the people that like are like you that you wanna be associated with and that to me is like It's funny cuz like a lot of projects will be like, oh hey like Yo, can you help with marketing? I'm like, you don't even want that, right? Like, just go out there and interact with people on Twitter And, you know, be active in discords because The people that will like your artwork will find you, right? Like, you don't want to have to sell your stuff because you're trying to sell it, right? Like, you want people to buy it because it resonates with them. And like, you know, Twitter is probably the best Free marketing that you could get, you know, organic, right? That people will see your stuff.

• 1:10:14David Hoffman?

  One of the punk discord Finding, making a name for yourself in the punk discord is like kinda difficult Because that thing is so active and there's so many people there. And, yeah, there are definitely like the people that are reoccurring, they are on a reoccurring basis. What about how like actually trying to like stand out from the crowd in discord is like, Oh, this person has valid, interesting contributions to the discourse Versus, you know, just the bots that are there?

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, anytime you add value, Whether it's in Discord, Telegram, Twitter, like, people will find you. I think that, you know, I think one of the reasons it was Let's say easier for me to build a brand was because when I Did what I did and I wrote my thread about it, nobody was really People were calling me an idiot, right? Like, for spending six figures on a picture And here we are today where people are spending seven, eight figures on JPEGs, right? And so I think that, you know, the more value you add, the more people will see it And you'll find your tribe that way. And, you know, it's very much like the Gary Vee mentality where it's like, you know, You work and you put your stuff out there

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  And people will find you because there will be people that Want to listen to what you have to say. Not everybody will necessarily have to wanna listen to what you have to say, But you'll find the people that wanna be part of your community and that wanna interact with you And add value to you the way you add value to them.

• 1:11:37David Hoffman?

  So what's uh what's next for G money's NFT portfolio? Do you have any like big plans as to like what to do with the damn thing?

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I'm still I'm still holding. I'm not necessarily minting as I'm not an active minter. You know, I'll do stuff every once in a while. Um, I like, I think that like I own some of the best assets in NFTs. So for me to want to sell them, and I know sixty five twenty one nine says this all the time is like, don't sell the institutions your JPGs like I agree, you know, like there's like if you sell something. Yeah, like if you above like the thing is like if you sell a grail of something, right? And like, like if you were to sell your punk, like there's no way it'd be very, it'd be very unlikely that you could buy your punk back at a lower price. Like if you were to try to buy it back, you'd have to buy it at a significantly higher premium.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  If you want that exact punk. Now, if you don't care, then that's fine. You can buy a different punk that's similar, but not exactly. But it's like, these things are all one of a kind. So to me, I I want to hold on to these things because I do think that, you know, if if crypto does what we all here that are here in the movement right now think that it's going to do, then you're talking about some of the most, you know, grail pieces of the next hundred years. So like, why do I want to sell that for what I think will be pennies on the dollar?

• 1:12:56David Hoffman?

  So uh, I was actually that that's a great perspective, but I was actually interested in like how your portfolio or how your NFT like curation uh will manifest in like the metaverse or the physical world? Are you going to like make some sort of digital gallery like? Because if you're going to hold these things for life, like you need to display them somehow. Uh, so what are the displaying plans for for G money's NFT portfolio?

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Um, so I'm I'm figuring out how to get a digital display in in my house. I don't have as much uh wall space as I like, so I'm trying to figure out where to put it. But then also like, you know, there's A couple of digital galleries that I want to be setting up. I've just been taking my time on it because, you know, I know that like we're not fully immersed in the metaverse just yet. So I know it's not like I need to rush out and show it, show them off, right? Like even like my, like my OpenSea wallet, like anybody can check. And people are like, oh, like I love this collection. I love that collection. It's like, all right, like I don't need to, I'm not necessarily focused on curating my collection just yet. Because I'm still in like the accumulation phase. Because I know that the curation and the showing it off part will come soon.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  And I know when that comes, I'll, I'll be right there at the forefront with it. But to me, it's like, I don't, it's not, to me, there's no huge rush to go out and do it. But it's something that like I'm actively thinking about.

• 1:14:15David Hoffman?

  You say that you're still in the, the curation collection phase. What about your NFT portfolio do you think is missing that, that you're really looking for? Like, what do you want to hunt for?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I guess maybe some one on one, I, I love an X copy. Probably like my biggest miss is not buying an X copy when I could have. And now like they're just super priced very high. Um, and then just like, kind of like, you know, I, I love like, I love bringing artists into the space. Like Justin Arasano is a great story where I helped bring him into the space and then just watch.

• 1:14:50David Hoffman?

  That was you.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I was, he, I mean, it's, he hit me up because I, he either heard me in a clubhouse or he saw me posted on Instagram that I bought the ape for a hundred fifty K. And he originally wanted to sell me his entire collection of Twin Flames for a hundred thousand. And I was like, dude, like, keep the physicals, break it up into a hundred pieces and sell them for a thousand bucks each. And I thought I was going to hear from him in like two or three months. And he, he like calls me back in three days, like I sold them all, like, thank you, like you changed my life. And then he started going down the rabbit hole. And, you know, obviously he's done incredible things for the space. He's done incredible things for his own personal career and like, I'm super happy.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Like to me, that's one of my great, like, that's one of my proudest moments in the space of being able to onboard somebody that has had such a huge impact on the space themselves.

• 1:15:41David Hoffman?

  Actually, I had the, the fortune to actually get dinner with Justin in New York, the first day I was in there. Uh, and that man just exudes kindness. He's just, he's just very, very concerned for the world and wants to see the world become a better place. And also has dope photography skills.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's like it's incredible and like everything that he's done for the space and you know, he always wants to connect with people and you know, he's a connector himself and like I I'm just, I'm so happy that he's part of the space and able to do what he's been doing because to me, he's probably the best, the best community builder in crypto with what he's been able to do in in such a short amount of time.

• 1:16:22David Hoffman?

  Totally, absolutely. Um, one one perspective I'd like to get out of you is like, there's, especially in crypto, crypto has this very powerful force of like making people never feel like that, that they have enough. And you also have to play the game, like we're in the world of scarcity technology and scarcity technology puts in scarcity mindsets about people. And you say that you're still into, you know, collecting your NFT portfolio, your portfolio is not done. Do you ever, do you ever have like a vision of the future where you're like, you know, I'm done, I did it. This is, I'm where I've wanted to always be and now I'm here. Like, is that a destination or does that even, or does not that place not even exist?

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  So I kind of feel like I'm already there, right? Like I, I think that it's, it's funny you mentioned the scarcity mindset because I think from, from really early on, humans in general are taught the scarcity mindset, like that's survival, right? And I don't know when it happened exactly for me, but it, it, there's something that switched from being a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset that really was like, okay, like, you know, how can I pay it forward? Not every interaction should be so transactional where like, if you get something, I get something, right? Like there could, there's, there exists a world where I can help you and I don't expect anything in return, you know?

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  And I guess coming from finance, which is very much a zero sum game, I lived, I lived and breathed that scarcity mindset for 20 years professionally. And so, you know, like I always had like a number that I wanted to hit that, you know, I'm like, oh, if I hit this, like, I'm going to take my foot off the gas. And I hit that number and I like, I crushed that number. And like now I'm sitting here, it's like, okay, so now that like, you know, for all intents and purposes, money isn't as big of an issue for me anymore, like, what do I want? And it's like, I want. To increase adoption of NFTs because if I can help increase adoption of NFTs, then that increases adoption of crypto, which gets us to the future that I think we deserve of self-sovereignty, right?

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  And so to me, it's more so about like, what can I do to push the space forward? It's not so much about that scarcity mindset of like, oh, how can I hoard more? How can I make more money? The money is great because it helps you get to the vision and it gives me the means to help achieve that vision. But like, it's no longer necessarily just about the money for me, which, you know, if you told me that 10 years ago, I would have called you crazy. But like, it's amazing being able to see that transformation in myself, but then see it throughout the space with a lot of people that are like, oh yeah, like, I don't need to work, but I'm working my ass off because like, I want a better future for humanity, right? And like, to me, like crypto is probably one of the best,

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  like, the best way to leverage your time to have like an impact on humanity like 10, 20, 30 years from now.

• 1:19:11David Hoffman?

  I think one of the best reasons why I truly resonate with crypto is that, Kevin O'Wakie gives this line like crypto wasn't meant to make you rich. It was meant to make you free. And wealth is a part of freedom, right? Like you need wealth to have freedom, but wealth doesn't necessarily give you freedom. You need all the other thing, properties that that give you freedom as well. And I think one of the best things about crypto is that like, it allows a lot of people to go from the scarcity mindset into this abundance mindset. But then the next step after that, once you are in the abundance mindset, if you still want to pump your bags, the way that that works is you also carry along people who are still in that scarcity mindset, and then also get them into the abundance mindset. And that's just the simple nature of a positive sum game.

• 1:19:55David Hoffman?

  We're like, hey, I have enough, but if I want this to go up, I need other people to have enough as well, right? They also need to come, to come, to come with us. And that culture is something that I don't think that you find in TradFi, right? And that's one of the, one of the big tailwinds of crypto is, one of the most underappreciated properties of crypto is we can export our culture to the world that needs it the most.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I totally agree. That, that was really well said. I agree with everything, right? Like it's, and it's, it's funny because like, I'm sure you, I don't know, can you pinpoint that, that, where that shift happened for you?

• 1:20:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it happened around like the 2000 to 3000 ether price where I stopped caring about the grind. It's like, oh, like, I need to make sure I'm on the next wave. Like, I need to capture all. And at some point, I was like, I was, I wore Che Guevara shirts to middle school. And so like, I have like this very much like, I was like, oh, yeah, capitalism is evil, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very much like, learned the error of my ways and like, now appreciate capitalism for what it is. And now I'm just like, I, this is, this, the grind of the psychological stress of like, the scarcity mindset, I was just turned off from. And so like, I remember going through 2017, like, trading 50 times a day, like, learning about a token, buying that token, learning

• 1:21:18David Hoffman?

  about a new token, selling the old token, buying a new token, like hopping from token to token. And then in this new bull market, I very much learned that, like, not only does not doing that, like, ease off a bunch of stress, but I also make more money by not trading away into impulse, right? And so like, having a much slower mindset and like, just like, having a much longer term thinking has helped me have just a broader perspective. And I think that's that longer term mindset turned into like, hey, this is not about like, me catching every single wave. This is me exporting the values and the culture as much as possible. Because, again, the best way I'm going to be able to pump my own bags is to get as many people into crypto as possible.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, no. And that's like, a great, a great thought, right? Because like, I sit there and like, I, dude, I, I don't check the price of crypto like, that much anymore. You know what I mean? It's like, the times that I, like, I think yesterday, like, we made it, or two days ago, we made an all time high in Bitcoin. I was like, oh, I'm like, cool. Like, I know, but I had no idea, right? Because I'm just so busy on like, all right, what's my mission? How do I export that culture to other people? Because that increases adoption, right? And that's kind of what my main goal is. And, you know, if, like you said, like, if by doing that, the value of my portfolio goes up, great. But like, I do know that ultimately, long term, the value of the portfolio will go up. So that will take care of itself, as long as I'm doing my job, right?

• 1:22:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm a, I'm a big fan of not having any stress these days. And like, you know, not trying, like, being zen about the markets is definitely a key for that. Gee, when we go and fast forward 10, 20, 30 years in the future, what do you want the legacy of G money to look

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Just somebody that pushed the NFT space forward that helped people understand that like everything in the real world is an NFT and as we go more digital, the way to that self sovereignty is to decentralize systems so that you know, we're not slaves to to any overlord or anything down the road, right? Like I'm I'm trying to go as far as far away from that dystopian future that that will always be pictured in sci fi, so that we can be free to do what we want.

• 1:23:37David Hoffman?

  Well said, sir. Gee, we've shook hands a number of times in real life, but we're about to do it again in Metaverso in December. You want to pitch to the listeners why they might be interested in coming to Puerto Rico to go to Metaverso?

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. It's a it's a one day NFT conference on December 7 in Puerto Rico. It's the beginning of Puerto Rico Blockchain Week. And so myself and a couple of people based out of PR were like, why don't we just get together and like, you know, get some of the best minds in NFTs and, you know, talk shop for a day. And and that's kind of where the genesis of it came from. Myself and Amanda Cassett decided to team up and throw this great event. And I'm super excited. We have a lot of great speakers. You're hosting one of the panels. So thank you for that and looking forward to it.

• 1:24:25David Hoffman?

  Do you still still playing Fortnite these days?

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Not as much as I used to, but I literally want to that just because I've been traveling, but I definitely I definitely need to get back on. If you want to play sometime, let me know.

• 1:24:37David Hoffman?

  I don't have an Xbox. Oh, wait, no, it's on PC, though. I can play on PC. Do they? Well, maybe one day when they upload punk skins to Fortnite, I'll get myself in there.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  I'm patiently waiting for that day.

• 1:24:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah. How else do you like tune out and relax from these markets?

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I I'd say probably just going out and like going, I like, I love food. I'm a foodie and just hanging out with friends and I I generally try to be present when I'm with people. So that forces me to obviously put the phone down and and not be on Twitter or any socials. And to me, that's like a great way to tune out, right? Because like, I think a lot of times we get lost in in the grind and to your point where like, you know, you go down the rabbit hole and there's always, there's not enough time for all the work that needs to be done. So there's times like I sit there and I'm in front of my computer. It's like two o'clock in the morning. It's like, dude, you need to one disconnect and to go to sleep. But then also like, you know, sometimes you just need to go out and have

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  some times uh with friends, right? And and appreciate the human element.

• 1:25:42David Hoffman?

  You've you've been doing a decent amount of traveling into all the the crypto conferences. Why? Why do you like doing that so much?

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Um, because I I like the human element. And I think that, you know, at the end of the day, like for the same reason that you have this show, right? Where it's like crypto, as much it is about the tech, it's about the humans that are behind it, right? Like if if you add like bad people with bad intentions, building this tech out, it would show in the tech, right? And so uh, to me, it's very much about like, how do I do my part, right? I'm not a builder. I'm an investor and an advocate. So uh, I need to do my part of like advocating for the space and making sure people hear the message from the right person, because there's going to be a lot of people, like in any mania, that come in and try to get in front of it and try to say that they're the expert when maybe they

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  have their their interests that might not be totally aligned for an open future, right? So that to me is like, I think that that's super important is educating people, uh, educating the mass, the masses at large. Uh, and if that means I I need to travel, like I I enjoy traveling, but like, you know, sometimes you just want to be at home and and relax and be more productive. So but I understand it's part of the job. It's it's what I signed up for.

• 1:26:57David Hoffman?

  Would you ever sell your punk?

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  I don't know how much you want to buy from me. No, not me. I don't, I really, it's, it's, you know, I see it as something that hopefully like I pass down to my grandchildren. And, you know, it's, it's a family heirloom, almost like a crest.

• 1:27:15David Hoffman?

  But how do you know, how do you know they're not just gonna sell it?

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I, I don't know, you know, hopefully I won't be around when that happens.

• 1:27:23David Hoffman?

  Gee, thank you so much for coming on to Layer Zero and giving us your time. This was a fantastic story.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed my time. Cheers.

• 1:27:31David Hoffman?

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• 1:28:14David Hoffman?

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