Crypto Day | Brian Armstrong, Balaji, Chris Dixon, Katie Haun & More

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (01:07) - Balaji Srinivasan is an American entrepreneur and investor known for his roles as former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded several companies, including Counsyl, Earn.com, and Teleport, and authored The Network State, a book on building decentralized digital communities. Srinivasan holds multiple degrees from Stanford University and is an active angel investor in technology and crypto startups. (27:00) - Alon. @a1lon9 is the co-founder of Pump.fun, a Solana-based platform that enables users to create and trade meme coins instantly. Launched in January 2024, Pump.fun has facilitated the creation of over 6 million tokens and generated significant revenue through transaction fees. They have been a vocal figure in the crypto community, advocating for the democratization of token creation while addressing criticisms regarding the platform's role in speculative trading. (42:07) - Katie Haun is the founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, a $1.5 billion crypto-focused venture capital firm. A former federal prosecutor, she led high-profile investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and Silk Road case, and created the DOJ’s first cryptocurrency task force. Haun previously served as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and was the first independent board member at Coinbase. (59:11) - Chris Dixon. Chris is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and founder of a16z crypto, overseeing over $7 billion in Web3 investments. He previously co-founded SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee) and Hunch (acquired by eBay), and was an early investor in companies like Coinbase and Oculus. Dixon authored Read Write Own (2024), a book advocating for a decentralized internet. (01:29:16) - Kyle Samani. Kyle is the co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, a thesis-driven investment firm specializing in cryptocurrencies, tokens, and blockchain projects. Before Multicoin, he founded Pristine, a health IT startup acquired by Upskill. Samani holds degrees in Finance and Management from NYU Stern and is recognized for his technical analysis and thought leadership in the crypto space. (01:42:52) - Ben Pasternak. Ben is an Australian tech entrepreneur who gained early recognition for creating the viral game Impossible Rush and later co-founding the social apps Flogg and Monkey. At 15, he became one of the youngest tech founders to secure venture capital funding. He used to be the CEO of SIMULATE, a food technology company known for its plant-based chicken nugget alternative, NUGGS, which has raised over $57 million from investors including Alexis Ohanian and Jay-Z. (01:58:03) - Tom Schmidt. Tom is a General Partner at Dragonfly Capital, focusing on early-stage Web3 and crypto investments. He previously led product at 0x and held product management roles at Facebook and Instagram. Schmidt holds B. S. and M. S. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University and has advised companies like Audius and Betty Labs. (02:15:01) - Konstantin Richter. Konstantin is the founder and CEO of Blockdaemon, a leading blockchain infrastructure provider for node management, staking, and wallet services. Before founding Blockdaemon in 2017, he held roles at Deutsche Telekom and Nokia, and built several SaaS platforms with successful exits. Under his leadership, Blockdaemon has raised over $400 million, reaching a $3.25 billion valuation, and serves major financial institutions including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citi Ventures. (02:29:06) - Luca Netz. Luca (born Luca Schnetzler) is the CEO of Pudgy Penguins, an NFT brand he acquired for $2.5 million in April 2022. A former e-commerce entrepreneur, he revitalized the project by expanding into physical toys, selling over 1.5 million units through major retailers like Walmart and Target. Netz also launched the PENGU token on Solana and developed Pudgy World, aiming to establish Pudgy Penguins as a leading Web3-native IP brand. (02:44:27) - Dylan Abruscato. Dylan is the Emmy-nominated founder of Crypto: The Game (CTG), a viral crypto survival game blending elements of Survivor and Squid Game. Launched in 2023, CTG gained traction for its social gameplay and was acquired by Uniswap Labs in 2024. Prior to CTG, Abruscato held marketing roles at HQ Trivia, Uber, and Postmates, and began his career at Saturday Night Live. (02:59:10) - Brian Armstrong. Brian is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the largest U. S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, which he launched in 2012 after working at Airbnb and Deloitte. A Rice University graduate with degrees in computer science and economics, he has also founded GiveCrypto.org and NewLimit, a biotech startup focused on extending human healthspan through epigenetic reprogramming. Under his leadership, Coinbase went public in 2021 and now serves over 100 million users globally. (03:30:22) - Soona Amhaz. Soona is the founder and managing partner of Volt Capital, a venture firm investing in early-stage crypto startups like Nansen, Magic Eden, and LayerZero. Prior to Volt, she co-founded Token Daily and worked at Alation, with a background in engineering from the University of Michigan. Recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30, Amhaz is known for her contrarian investment approach and active participation in the crypto community. (03:45:24) - Mert Mumtaz. Mert is the co-founder and CEO of Helius, a Solana infrastructure company providing developer tools like RPCs and APIs to streamline blockchain app development. Previously a software engineer at Coinbase, he identified inefficiencies in blockchain tooling and launched Helius in 2022 to address them. Known for his outspoken presence on Crypto X, Mumtaz is a prominent advocate for Solana, often engaging in technical debates and challenging misconceptions about the network. (03:59:29) - Dan Romero. Dan is the co-founder and CEO of Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol designed to give users control over their identity and data. Before founding Farcaster in 2020, he was Vice President of Operations at Coinbase, where he joined as employee #20 and helped scale the company through its early growth. Romero is also an active angel investor in startups like Linear, Eight Sleep, and TipTop. (04:16:36) - Shehzan Maredia. Shehzan is the founder, CEO, and CTO of Lava, a Bitcoin-native lending platform that enables users to borrow dollars while retaining full self-custody of their BTC. Previously, he worked as an engineer at Google and earned degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Math from Duke University. Under his leadership, Lava raised a Series A co-led by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, and introduced innovations like seedless self-custody, Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs), and Lava Free Pay for gasless blockchain transactions. (04:27:00) - Brandon Millman. Brandon is the co-founder and CEO of Phantom, a leading self-custodial crypto wallet initially built for Solana and now supporting Ethereum and Polygon. Before founding Phantom in 2021, ...

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Wednesday, May 28th, 2025. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome. But today is the trenches of technology. The domicile of DeFi. The mansion of meme coins. The capital of crypto. It's crypto day on TVP. We started early. We're talking to people from all over the globe. We just talked to Balaji. We talked to Katie. Already been, we've been podcasting for hours. We cut it down for you. We have our first three interviews. They're going to play over the next hour. Then we're going to hop back on and do a whole bunch more live interviews. So stay tuned. But the, but we're kicking it off with Balaji. Let's go. Let's go.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Big news. We have Balaji in the studio. We're going to bring him in, talk to him about for about 45 minutes. Take his temperature on what's going on in crypto. I want the update on what he's up to. And really just take us on the whirlwind tour. We're going to get to the bottom of what happened in 1971. We're going to get the final answer. It's been hotly debated. We're going to figure it out right now. Debate will be over. Let's bring in Balaji. How you doing? Good to see you.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Great to have you on the show. See you guys. Hey.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing having you on the show. Can you give us just the update on what is your day to day like? I'm familiar with some of the prehistory, but what are you working on? What are you most excited about right now?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Sure. So I actually, can I project here?

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Is it possible?

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can show your screen.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  All right. So about in Q4, we just opened something I'm calling network school. Can you guys see the wedding day shot there? Yep. So that was the kind of ribbon cutting.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  And this is something that combines a bunch of things I care about. Here's like, the site is at ns.com.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  And a great domain, by the way. A fantastic domain.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you. I appreciate that. You guys are connoisseurs also.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have a four-letter domain. You're kind of destroying us with the two-letter domain. You mogged us.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  All right, well, I, we will, you know, I, I, still, you know, you're in the, the four Kamas club or something, I guess, the four characters club, right?

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so, so break it down for me. I saw a hundred K fellowship. I also see a school. Typically, I have to pay for school. Are you paying me? How does this all work?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Right. So this is essentially, there's several things that are happening at the same time.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Like, obviously, traditional academia is basically over as we know it.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  It's about 10 different things hitting it at the same time. Um, and it's, you know, lost trust and credibility and so on.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, what we've got here is we're doing global meritocracy. Anybody from anywhere, obviously, Americans are welcome, but anybody who's what I call internet first is welcome, right? So if you're, you know, pro Bitcoin, if you're pro cryptocurrency, smart contracts and so on, you're pro AI, you're pro biotech, pro nuclear and whatnot. And that, those kinds of people exist all over the world.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so we're bringing them here. And so global meritocracy, basically. And, uh, there's, there's Vitalik, there's Brian Johnson. Can you see the video?

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, incredible.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  So, uh, this is it, basically. We're actually doing the startup society. So that's what, that's what Never School is. There's much more I can say about it, but that's, that's the, that's the idea.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, walk me through the actual experience of joining. Is this cohort-based? A lot of these new education initiatives, very few of them have just jumped straight to, we're going to replace the four-year experience? And I don't know if that's because the four-year experience is fundamentally broken. There's a lot of things that are potentially broken about higher ed. But what is your view on just the length of time that it takes to get whatever you need to out of academia or schooling generally?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  That's right. So, uh, well, very good question. It's a long, long topic, but

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  just to, to, to level set, you know, I actually spent You know, ten years at Stanford, I was an undergraduate graduate, got my MS in chemical engineering, BSc in electrical engineering, I taught computer science and stats there. I'm a research scientist, I have 5,000 plus citations, blah blah, did genomics, taught, you know, computer science and so on at Stanford. So I know academia fairly well, and in fact, I thought for the first, you know, I don't know, ten years or so of my adult life, that I was actually going to be a professor. And then I, you know, started a genomics company and, you know, basically became, you know, gone to tech. And my view is, there's many things I could say about the four-year, you know, college education, but one issue is, it's like front-loading all the cost to the beginning,

• 4:31Speaker 01

  and then there's zero budgeted for maintenance over somebody's life. So it's as if you paid $200,000 for a car, and then zero for oil, or gas, or, you know, wheel changes or so on for the rest of your life. And so people get this expensive education, and they forget all of it just a few years later. I'm sure if you gave test retest, you know, stats and looked at what percentage they actually retained, we know all the stuff about spaced repetition, we know forgetting curves and so on. So basically, the education is gone, and what you really want is something that's like continuous education over the course of your life. Sure. Where, you know, then, like, for example, VO comes out, or some new API comes out. What you want is to be able to quickly load that into your brain, be productive,

• 5:16Speaker 01

  and to have some budget every year in a continuous sense, as opposed to, you know, like a upfront, forget everything sense. That doesn't even get into the fact that, you know, unless you've been in the world of work, you don't actually appreciate how amazing it is to have just time to purely study, you have to learn everything on the job. It also is something like front-loading the vacation, and getting all these kids at age 18 into like a lifetime of student loan debt. There's many, many things wrong with it, but that error is ending. And then what's next? Like, my view, you know, why am I doing this? In part because, you know how, well, actually, we'll get right into it. You know how America started? Loosely. It was actually. It was actually, America was started by the tech and the bro. Forming the tech, let me explain, okay? So.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Amazing. Okay, here's why. So Massachusetts, Massachusetts was the tech and Virginia was the bro. Okay.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  There we go, there we go.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so for those of you that don't know, like Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, those are Puritans, they founded Harvard in the 1600s when, you know, it was actually just a one-room schoolhouse, basically a one-room, one-room place, right? It was a very, very small thing, very modest at the beginning. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded about 200-something years later, but basically Massachusetts has always been the center of like higher learning, education, and so on in the US. And Virginia, the Cavaliers, you know, they were the, they were the bro. They were muscular, they were on horseback, and you know, they liked to shoot things and so on. And actually, Virginia was maybe the most important state during the American Revolution. And a lot of the early American leaders came from Virginia. That was like the founder, CEO archetype, right?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  And both of these were actually different factions that at different times won and lost in the English Civil War of like, you know, 100-something years earlier. The Roundheads went to Massachusetts, that was like the left of England, and the Cavaliers were like the right, and they went to Virginia. Anyway, so they basically, when, when the right and left were working together, that was the tech and the bro, right? And that's what made America really great when they were working together. Now, of course, not as much.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's say you have a husband and wife, and they have kids, and they have, and one of, one of the adults, you know, wants to participate in the network state, and the other parent is like, "Well, sorry, the kids are in preschool and ripping them," you know, like, that, that feels like a, a, a large part of the people that you would want to recruit over time. And I, and I can imagine exactly what your kind of answers to that would be, but I'd love to hear it from you.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Sure, so, so first of all. Um, you know, like my vision that we see is definitely family friendly. Um, with that said, you know, who, who moves and who moves at what times, right? So typically people move for education or employment and they usually move in their twenties and so on and so forth. And once they're anchored in territory, they tend to only move if there's like a, you know, a job for both husband and wife, for example, or if they're like refugees, like things get blown up like in Ukraine or, or in, you know, Middle East or what have you. Or if they're like refugees from, for example, blue states where the policy gets so bad that people just uproot and move and there's like muggings or, you know, something like that, syringes, et cetera. Like a lot of people left blue states for the last, you know, five years, as you're

• 8:27Speaker 01

  aware, because, because of that in part. And I know some people say things are getting better or whatever, but like, you know, at least in some places, but I think in general that, that exodus is still there. Um, that's also actually how the US itself was populated at the beginning. There's two different forms, ways of founding startup societies and they're complementary. The first is the wild west frontier kind of thing where you have single men coming out. But the second, actually, the Puritans had quite a few married couples coming up because, because they had an ideological or religious motivation. And then you also had waves of refugees from Europe. There's all kinds of crazy wars in Europe, like the revolutions of 1848 or, you know, famine in, in Europe, like the Irish potato famine. And that also brings, you know, like, like people out, right? But, uh, so, so the answer is like, um, there's only so much you can do at the beginning.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  In a sense, you know how Dropbox started as an individual product and then it became a product for small teams and then for enterprise?

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Right? So in the same way, like you first kind of have to build a product that works for like the individual remote worker, then maybe the couple where it's a two body problem, then like, you know, the early family, then the scaled up family, then like the whole community of people who are moving together or the whole startup that's moving together. And so it's just like, think of it as kind of going from individual to SMB up, up the ladder like that. So you definitely want families and we actually have a lot of people who brought families. Um, but the, the product for families is itself a product, just like Apple has a family plan, for example. There's new permission structures and so on, account structures and stuff you need for families.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  I like how you explain this in product led SaaS terms. That's great. That's great.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  I'm on the Tech Bros podcast, so I'm speaking.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no, no, it's perfect. No, and I, and I totally buy that it's okay for these to be initially be frontiers and sort of kind of establish. Base camp effectively and then bring more people in over time.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, on the Bitcoin thing, I imagine that Bitcoin could be kind of the gold standard for many network states if they opt in. The interesting story that I've been toying with with Bitcoin is that the narratives have shifted. Bitcoin promised a few things. It didn't deliver entirely on all of those. It wasn't entirely anonymous. It wasn't entirely used for transactions, but it's become a fantastic store of value and that's kind of where it landed. Do you think that that's the correct story of Bitcoin? And do you think that crypto projects, is there a pattern of this like shoot for the moon, you'll land amongst the stars. It's okay to kind of build towards like a three-pronged amorphous

• 10:55John Coogan?

  future because if one of them hits, you could still wind up with a fantastic power law outcome?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, like, I think I think it's the only way of doing things in a sense of it's kind of like people who there's some people, there's one guy who remained unnamed, who like critiques like Elon's self-driving scheduling. It's like he promised it an X date and only arrived like, like a year later. He sucks so much. And I'm like, you know, like, I think Elon is saying like Tesla or you know SpaceX, they turn impossible into late.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Right?

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  You'll take that every single day, obviously, in my view, obviously, right? The I want to answer to your point. So the way I think about Bitcoin is maybe the obvious way, but it's digital gold, right? That's to say, it is infrequently moved on-chain, it stores large amounts of value, and it actually serves some of the purpose of gold reserves where like you sort of want to show on-chain that you have it. It's almost like meant to be public in some ways, right? And then the various kinds of features that people have wanted to add over time to Bitcoin, the problem is that Like gold should be as immutable as possible and mutability is in conflict with, I mean programmability is a good value and immutable is a good value,

• 12:14Speaker 01

  but those are like, you know, fire and water, they don't mix, right? There's, you know, you want a drink of water and sometimes you want a hot fire to keep you warm, but you don't want them in the same thing, then you get nothing, right? So immutability, Bitcoin's immutability, its stability and its predictability, think of it as locked, right? And then what happened was privacy went to like Zcash and zero knowledge, you know, tornado cash, which is now legal again and so on. And zero knowledge is booming, zero knowledge is one of the big things that people are underpricing, I think, by tech arguably another and so on.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Then number two is programmability with smart contracts. That went to Ethereum and Solana and whatnot. Number three, transactions, you know, as digital cash, that went to stablecoins, USDC, USDT. And then other kinds of things like storing data on chain and, you know, like, like using it as an oracle, that went to other stuff like chain link and other kinds of things. And then, you know, basically other, other functions like on-chain data is NFT, is just like on-chain code of smart contracts, that went to NFTs. So all of these things that were initially contemplated did happen, just happened on other chains that could tolerate the risk, because, you know, you have success and failures then, and Bitcoin couldn't tolerate that risk, Bitcoin was locked.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, with the zero knowledge stuff, I haven't been tracking it as closely most recently. Are you waiting for engineering challenges to be hurdled? Are you waiting for just more code to be written? I understand that it's incredibly complex code, some of the hardest programming software. Or is it more on the customer adoption side? We're ready for on-ramps of kind of the masses, but it's just going to take time for people to build the, the bridges to actually make these new ZK products just lovable and like, you know.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Well, first, just to explain what zero knowledge is. Zero knowledge arguably is, and Vitalik's also made this analogy, ZK arguably is to crypto what the transformer is to AI. In the sense of it takes a bunch of things that were previously special case stuff and it puts it into kind of a common framework where you can. Like lots of special case subroutines can now be general case to very oversimplify. And what that means is you can develop ZK protocols that, for example, you know, ZKYC, where they just prove what is necessary for a government to be satisfied that this is a real human being and nothing else, right?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  And that's necessary because look at these, you know, these KYC attacks on like, you know, Raj of Solon and other kinds of people, right? Like, the modern form of KYC is where governments force companies to store giant honeypots full of sensitive information. And then the governments themselves are often hacked, like the OPM hack and so on and so forth. So that's one aspect of where ZK can come in and be the solution. Another thing is that ZK is actually used as a compression technology. So for example, ZK or Rollups, not just a privacy technology. And so this stuff is actually already there and it's being deployed and it's working through ZK chains and so on. It's one of those things where, is it consumer visible? Maybe not, but I think, I think it's just a really important technology.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  It might never need to be consumer visible, is what you're saying.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I mean, that's right. But what it does basically mean is there can be sort of magical things where you can prove what you need to prove without giving up anything else.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the way a lot of KYC stuff works right now. I scan my ID. Most people don't know that there is a machine learning algorithm with computer vision in there that's reading the ID and checking it with a database. People just know, hey, I scanned my ID and I got KYC'd. It could be a lot easier and it could be more resistant to hacks and leaks, right?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  What you want, what you want is something like SingPass or Estonia's Digital ID, where it's like an app on your phone and that's your ID card and that can do a zero knowledge handshake with something else, right? As opposed to like a piece of paper, like physical card, you know?

• 16:21John Coogan?

  How are you feeling about stable coins these days? How are you feeling about stable coins these days? I feel like there's an immense amount of energy and excitement, but it's, but they always feel a little bit misaligned with the folks who are like, let's get off the dollar. Let's, you know, you know, we don't, we, we wanted to move away from that system and we're kind of maybe rebuilding it. How, how are you feeling about stable coins? Are you optimistic? Is there, is, do they play an important role in your vision of the future?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, uh, though, uh, I think, well, so let me actually show you guys something. Ready? Here is a fun video.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Can you see the screen there?

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Stablecoin videos dropping right now. Let's see. Uh, oh, Coinbase and Circle announced launch of USDC, digital dollar. Yes.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  October 23rd, 2018. And so guess who's there?

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Were you behind this?

• 17:15John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Lore. This is good.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  I remember this video. Yeah, I remember thinking like, oh, I don't really understand this, but now I do.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  So you were, so you're, yeah, this is a long way of saying you were early and right.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  You were super long stablecoins, but I've heard it's hard to make money.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  That's right. And in fact, let me just show you, just to underline, here is the market cap of USDC, which is now $60 billion.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, wow.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And on October 3rd, let's see if I can get the cursor. Bang. What's it, let's say, October 23rd, 2018. Can you see that? Zero.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Uh, I can't see that, but, um, I can see the broad chart, but, uh, congratulations for being early. You're always early. Uh, where are we going in the future with stablecoins? Uh, how important are they going to be? Because it still feels like there's a little bit of tug of war with like, we're staying on the dollar. We're not really moving to

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  And new, and new, and legacy financial institutions, seeing that we're in a friendlier regulatory environment, seeing the product market fit of stablecoins, now wanting a piece of the action.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Like when people, when the Wall Street Journal reports like the dollar fell in value, like the stablecoins also fell in value, right? And so it solves some problems, but not all of them. So what, what's your take?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Right. So, well, the term stablecoin obviously is historical because it was stable relative to Bitcoin.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Um, I think you could sort of separate that out into two things, like a fiat coin and a flatcoin.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Like a fiat coin is something that's an on-chain mirror of fiat off-chain.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And a flatcoin would be something that actually retained its purchasing power over time.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  And that's much harder to do because you'd have to maintain its stability against bread and PlayStations and whatever. And if there's an actual shortage of those things, then price might increase for no reason than, than, uh, you know, other than actual physical shortage. So, but keeping the historical name. Uh, stablecoins are, so first, why are they useful? Well, at a minimum, they're better international wire transfers. Yeah. That alone justifies their market cap. Totally. Um, that's like tens of billions of dollars in market cap because they just save you from $25. And more importantly, you know, banks are only open like nine to five weekdays, right? So like from 40 hours a week uptime to 168 hours a week, which is 24/7 uptime.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  That's worth a lot. Imagine if websites were only up 40 hours a week, right? Um, so just that alone, the ubiquity, internationalization, then you add programmability and so on. When people say, oh, why just put a dollar on chain? That's why, right? That's why they're valuable, right? And the space is partitioned in an interesting way. And I think many other things will partition this way into like a US and a global, right? Like the USDC coin or the USDC asset is like US regulated. And then USDT is like intentionally non-US regulated, right? Sort of like there's like Coinbase and there's like global exchanges and so and so. I think that'll be a common partitioning of many kinds of markets.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And so, uh, so that's justification for why ambush. But now onto your specific questions. Uh, I think that one of the things, once you've got something on chain, it can just be easily swapped. Right? And so now that USDC is there, you're going to have probably every other fiat currency up there. And what have you, because it's become so mainstream and whatnot. Uh, but when that happens, you get an interesting thing, which is similar to the launch of Google News in the mid 2000s. As you may recall, all these newspapers put their newspapers online in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then when Google News launched, it suddenly showed that the Des Moines Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle

• 20:43Speaker 01

  and NYT, Wapo, you know, Miami, Miami Tribune, whatever, were all basically printing the same stuff. There was some custom stuff that they had in their own markets, but most of it was just reprinting the AP. The news. Right? Yeah. News, right? And you could see this on Google News. It's like 173 other outlets printed the story. It's all the same story every time. Yeah. Yeah. And that's because those newspapers, they had trucks and they had, you know, used to say, never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel. Now never listen to a man who still buys ink by the barrel law, right? Because you know, they're, you know, are you buying any ink? You know, I mean, I actually like pencil and paper to write, but not to print, right? And that's certainly not newspaper. Early days, we went through a lot of. Early days.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Never fight with a podcaster who livestreams for 20 hours a week.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Something like that, exactly. It's beat you on, exactly.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the modern version.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  That's right. So, so point, point being though, that they had these geographical monopolies that suddenly they put their stuff online and there's a delayed reaction and suddenly they realized, wait a second, every newspaper is in competition with every other newspaper. And so of course, all the local ones, not any brand, basically just all died. And only the national ones survived and they became much more ideological. And the new partitioning of information space was on the basis of ideology, not geography. So you've got the, you know, Jimbros and you've got like, people are interested in, I don't know, um, various political causes, you've got crypto causes, you've got things sectioned by vertical rather than geographic horizontal, ideology rather than geography. Okay.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  So the same thing is going to happen with assets. And the reason is first, you've got these fiat currencies that are put on chain. And then we're, we're nearing something which I call the DeFi matrix. The DeFi matrix starts with the observation that fiat fiat can be swapped like Forex, but fiat crypto can also be swapped like USD BTC and crypto crypto can be swapped like BTC ETH. And of course crypto can be swapped for NFTs and all kinds of this crazy maniary of digital assets that are now out there. So you visualize this giant square of every asset that can be traded for every other asset. And there's amazing numbers of crazy financial machinery out there now that will basically do the complexity of finding buy and seller pairs, you know, like Uniswap and market makers and so on behind the scenes for this swap.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  What that means is that whatever asset you have, you have less need to get into a fiat currency. You could just hold that asset. And then when you want to, you just liquidate it for whatever other asset you want at some fee.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Okay. What I mean by that is, what, what do people call it? What's, what's a highbrow way of saying it when you sell your company? You get a?

• 23:12Kyle Samani?

  Liquidity event.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Liquidity event, that's right, that's another term of talking about cash. Cash is liquidity, cash is universal barter. Cash can be traded for anything. But now, anything can be traded for anything. Which means there's less need for cash, right? And so, all these countries will wake up one day and they'll find, wait a second, just like the newspapers, we had a geographical monopoly on our fiat currencies, but now we don't and we're competing in this global marketplace of all these other cryptocurrencies, as well as really big fiat currencies, right? And then they're gonna have to compete, just like, you know, the information environment, you compete on ideology rather than geography. Then in the transaction environment, you have to compete on features, not on places, right?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  So for example, privacy coins, or smart contract coins, and so and so forth. You compete on the vertical, as opposed to the horizontal of France coin, which is a franc, and Japan coin, which is JPY, right? And it's a funny way of putting it, but that's like what they are, right? So, I'm not saying there isn't any utility to geography, but especially given that so many of these things, what have people done? All these countries have gone cashless, right? Cash, physical cash, was actually something that tethered people to geographical area, because you needed to actually hold it, and it was issued there and redeemed there, and so and so forth. Once you go digital, you don't have to use cash anymore. And many people have, for example, crypto cards, where they can hold in one currency and spend in another, and it just, Apple Pay or whatever, just works, you know, that people don't know, right?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  So, stablecoins are an intermediate form that facilitates this transition from the fiat world to the pure crypto world. Kind of like putting newspapers online was an intermediate form. And just like, there was a whole battle in the 2010s, where newspapers at one point felt threatened, oh my god, I mean, not that they went by, they still feel threatened, but they fought this whole Battle of the Bulge counterattack on social media, tried to take away your voice, my voice, everybody's voice, but they lost. You know what I call when Elon took over X, you know what I call it?

• 25:08Kyle Samani?

  What do you call it?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  X Day, it's like D-Day, right? All the good guys. Amassed forty-four billion dollars for like the Normandy landing, boom, right? Like this, you know, because all it was still technically illegal. They were like, if you want your own company, why not build one or whatever to get free speech back? Remember those kinds of lines of argument prior to, right, 2002? And then Elon basically gathered the forces and every tech guy, like some Marvel movie, you know, put in a mill, a bill, five mil, whatever they could afford, pass the hat around. I mean, forty-four billion dollars in cash is like a non, go ahead.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, it's just funny passing the hat around and Morgan Stanley puts in thirteen billion in debt. It's kind of classic.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yes, so every, every center-right, centrist, center-left, in some cases, person who, right? Just, just piled it because Elon obviously was the man, but so many people backed him, right? And this was something where like, you know, Thor landing with a ham or boom like this, right? Poof, all of these communists just fly back against, you know, the walls, all these woke's just defeated like this and X Day, right? Now, what that actually also meant was a Tower of Babel kind of moment because Twitter no longer exists. There's X, there's Truth Social and Gab and whatever, all on the right. And there was, there was Blue Sky and Mastodon and Threads and TikTok on the left.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And there's the crypto networks like Noster and Lens and Farcaster and so on, right? So you have a Tower of Babel moment where Twitter has been shattered.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Anyway, this has been fantastic, Balaji. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome to come on and screen share with us anytime.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Awesome. Great. Maybe I could be your Kramer special guest.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  And thank you for kicking off. We have, we have, I think, ten plus other, you know, exciting crypto entrepreneurs.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Should be a big day once. Welcome. How are you?

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  There he is. What's going on?

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Hey, how's it going, guys? A pleasure to be here.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the Temple of Technology.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  Can you kick us off with a quick introduction on yourself and the company?

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  And then, and your, and your PFP too.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is your PFP?

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Got to get the backstory there.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I think not too many people are pretty familiar with the PFP. But to start with myself, I'm Alan, one of the co-founders of Pump Fun.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Pump Fun is a, is a launchpad where anyone can create their own coin. Um, and it's based on the Solana blockchain. Uh, and my, my PFP is, uh, Romelio. Um, it is a, is a, an NFT based on Ethereum.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. A little crossover. Yeah. Pulling over some Ethereum lore. Not pure Solana math. Uh, why don't we start with, uh, we have a primarily sort of traditional tech audience. Why don't we start with the origin story of Pump? I know you have had a crazy time, even, even fundraising, went through a couple, um, pivots to get to the launchpad that is today. So I, I think it'd be great to, to hear the backstory.

• 28:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so my background, I mean, I've been in crypto for a while. Um, before we built Pump Fun and myself and my two co-founders were building a bunch of different ideas and, um, in crypto, consumer crypto, you know, and NFTs and social phi and a bunch of different random corners of the space. Um, nothing really stuck. I mean, I think we built for around a year or so before we got any semblance of traction. Um, ultimately, we weren't really building for ourselves. And I think once people started trading meme coins on Solana is when we first saw that there is a problem or a few problems that we can solve that would actually be addressing some of our issues. Cause we were, you know, trading on the side. We've always been trading meme coins and NFTs and all that's, uh, different stuff on chain.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  And we noticed that, um, there's a whole bunch of different problems that we, we could solve by, by building a, a, a, a launchpad where anyone can, um, create their own coin, standardizing the way people launch these things in a, in a more secure and safe manner. Um, as well as, uh, in a way that is more user friendly for people. So anyone can get involved and you don't need to be highly technical to launch your own asset. Uh, so Pump Fun, I would say was the first product that really allowed for mass tokenization and it's something that we, um, that we're going to continue doing.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  So I want to give a little bit of backstory. I'm sure you can't talk about numbers, but Pump is one of the fastest growing companies in history. It's why we're, you know, one of the reasons we were interested in having you on the show. I believe, we'll have to make some type of chart at some point, but I believe we'll probably be one of the fastest companies ever to a billion dollars in revenue. How quickly, when you guys started the Launchpad, did you feel like you were, did you kind of realize that you were on to something? Was it kind of immediate PMF, or did you even have to iterate from that initial launch of the Launchpad?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, when we first came up with the idea, we were pretty confident that it was going to work, especially compared to some of the other stuff that we were building. On our launch day, we got quite a bit of buzz around it. I mean, the MVP that we shipped was so incredibly shitty that everyone came and then they had to leave because it just wasn't working. But that initial buzz and the feedback that we got, you know, made us realize that we were on to something for sure. It was only a matter of iteration. It was a matter of finding distribution because ultimately what we offer is a marketplace. It's a Launchpad where you're connecting people that are creating these assets and people that are potentially interested in buying and selling them and trading them. So it was a matter of distribution, it was

• 30:36Speaker 04

  a matter of iteration and polishing the products. It took us around two months after launch to actually get it off the ground. There's a lot of, you know,

• 30:49Speaker 04

  make it work, but eventually it played out. And obviously, you know, we were confident that it was going to work, but we had no idea that it could blow up and then actually generate so much revenue and become this great business.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  How do you actually make money?

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so two different, two main, it's all really the same model. It's a small fee on each trade. So whenever a coin launches, the platform takes a 1% trading fee and each time the coin is traded. Once it graduates, I mean, a graduation is basically when a coin gets to a certain market cap, it grows in size and so on. Once it graduates- There is, it's the same fee basically, but just a smaller one that that the platform charges.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  And is that like by design so you don't get disintermediated or you don't get outcompeted by other platforms? Like, are you thinking about that? And and because I feel like there's this narrative in crypto where like somebody builds something amazing, has a great business, and then there's like an open source fork of it or something like that. Is that is that a risk that you're thinking of and like planning against?

• 31:52Speaker 04

  I mean, of course, you know, when you build something successful, I think in any industry, you're going to expect some copycats. I mean, something that we've been expecting is something that we saw historically. We saw that a year ago, we saw it six months ago, and we're continuing to see it. I mean, obviously, we continue to monitor the markets and and kind of see what user feedback is on on different approaches and models. But ultimately, we have our own solutions. We speak to to our own users and, you know, we we we kind of stay in our own lane in that regard.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the branding. It's extremely chaotic, feels extremely internet native. And but but I'm curious what your kind of like framework to making decisions around everything kind of design, brand.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think when we first started, we pump actually wasn't the the name that we came up for this product specifically. It existed for like a few different products that we launched because we honestly thought it was like all the products we were building were for for people in the trenches, so to speak. So people that were trading on chain and so on. And we felt like that whole ethos, that whole branding just kind of aligned with, I guess, with what with the culture like of of people trading on chain and and really this deeply internet native crowd that we were addressing. I think definitely contributes to how we think about it today. We the way we think about it is we don't necessarily want to,

• 33:17Speaker 04

  I guess, we want to pay respects to to kind of where we came from and we want to grow our community rather than removing and and making our brand.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Like, I mean, there's a big difference between making your brand more accessible or your product more accessible and kind of moving away from the brand that you've built, right? Um, so I think a big part of why Pump has succeeded is that it has really built a community of people that are, you know, that are trading and hopping on every single day and, and so on. And a part of that is being in touch with them and, and continuing to, to, to, to interact. And that also reflects in the design, like if we changed everything all of a sudden and it was extremely, I guess, you know, looked like your average product and AI or something like that, then I think there would be a lot of eyebrows that would be raised by, by our user base.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, can you talk to us about, uh, VC? Uh, I mean, have you raised any? I'm sure people

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  growing fast, they're beating down your door.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  I think the story is, is you raised from, uh, six man, right? Is that correct? Uh, Dudus is fun?

• 34:27Speaker 04

  That's correct. I can't give too many details on the whole, I guess, lifecycle.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but I have a question that, that I, that would be fun to answer. What's the craziest thing a VC has ever done to try to win allocation in Pump? Cause I know you guys, revenue has just rocketed to such an extreme degree. You guys, you know, for every dollar of venture capital, I'm sure you've generated, you know, at this point, um, an obscene amount of, of profit. Uh, but, but do you have any funny stories there?

• 34:57Speaker 04

  I'm not sure if there's anything in particular there, but definitely there are so many stories where, um, not just for VCs, but like, you know, I guess influencers in the space and stuff as well, where we DM them multiple times and got received introductions and didn't get any responses. Um, only for the exact opposite to take place once, once the platform has gained traction. And yeah, this has happened many times.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Can you talk to us about the live streaming product that you guys have? I mean, we're, we're live streamers ourselves and so super interested in what's going on there.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  You recently brought it back and made a number of changes to it. So I'm curious, you know, how, how it's evolving.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So the live streaming feature is pretty simple. When you launch your own coin, you can also launch a live stream alongside it to, you know, engage with your community, talk to them, do a whole bunch of different things. Obviously, I think a lot of your viewers are going to be familiar with the previous live stream product that we had, which kind of, you know, I mean, it gained a lot of mind share late last year and ultimately needed to shut that down for a variety of reasons. But we decided to bring it back with, you know, much, much better moderation as well as a just improved product overall. And the reason why we think that our live streaming product can genuinely change the whole creator landscape and actually compete with some of the biggest live streaming platforms out there is that it completely flips the incentives

• 36:17Speaker 04

  that creators are currently facing. As a creator, I mean, I'm already seeing this with relatively few users compared to the biggest platforms. As a creator, when you're starting out, it's pump fun, live streaming is the easiest place in the world to get your first 50 to 100 viewers. Why is that? The reason is because users are directly incentivized to find people early. Because, you know, if they find your live stream early, they see that you're interesting, you're entertaining, you're funny, et cetera, and they, you know, they buy into your coin. If you get, if your coin gets more attention, then that presumably can, you know, can yield profits. Obviously, not financial advice, et cetera, et cetera. But that's oftentimes what ends up happening. And because of that incentive structure, it makes it so much easier for, for, you know, creators to get traction. And that's

• 37:02Speaker 04

  the biggest problem that creators usually face when they start out. That's the first thing. The second thing is that, you know, with a few recent changes that we've made, creators don't necessarily even have to sell their tokens to make money. They can monetize instantly with no middleman through creator revenue sharing. So whenever someone makes a trade, a small percentage of that goes directly to the creator. So they monetize immediately. There's no approvals that they have to go through. They don't need to reach any milestones. They interact directly with their audience and they don't necessarily need to appeal to any advertisers and so on. As long as they, their content is within, you know, respects the terms of service of the site, they're going to be able to monetize.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Talk about why you chose Solana early on and why you're continuing to double down there and if you're looking at opportunities on other chains at all.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we love Solana. I mean, we, I mentioned Ethereum earlier on with my, with my PFP. So that's, I guess, kind of where we, where our background is. We built on Ethereum for many years in that ecosystem. Eventually, you know, because we were building products and we're getting, I guess, like increasingly desperate to get users. We saw that, especially for this, for, for, for meme coins, people are starting to trade them on other, on other blockchains. Specifically Solana now is gaining a lot of traction back then. So we, we, you know, we wanted to go to where, where, where all the users were, right? Because that would maximize our, our chances of succeeding. So we went to Solana. Obviously, after we, we gained success, we got a ton of inbound from other blockchains and,

• 38:41Speaker 04

  and so on. And people were asking to get their, you know, favorite blockchain added. But, you know, ultimately, our goal is to bring tokenization to the masses. Our goal is to kind of expand this, this universe and, and, and really break into the mainstream. And I, I don't necessarily,

• 38:58Speaker 04

  I don't necessarily believe that going onto any other chain would, you know, would contribute to that. Solana as infrastructure has improved so significantly over the past year, year, year and a half since Pump, Pump Fund has been live, that we're very confident that, you know, once, I guess, that critical mass is reached, the infrastructure will be able to, to support, you know, to support the, the activity on, on the platform. And, and more than just that, there's so many ecosystem applications that utilizes, you know, marketplace infrastructure and so on, that actually contributes to the, you know, not, not just to, to the bottom line, but contributes to the overall, you know, user experience. Like people can use

• 39:38Speaker 04

  whatever interfaces they like to get the, you know, the best experience possible. So all in all, couldn't be happier being on Solana and we're not considering leaving anytime soon.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for jumping on. I know you don't do a lot of interviews, do a lot of media in general. So I appreciate you coming and telling the story. It will, I, I legitimately think there will, there will eventually be a Harvard, you know, business school case study on what you're building, because it's completely unprecedented, the growth.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  I think we're, we'll probably just start to see this year, people realizing how big a business, you know, Pump has become in, in such an incredibly short period of time. So thank you for jumping on and, and sharing and we'll, we'll talk to you soon.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Appreciate it, guys.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  And that Harvard Business case study will be tokenized on chain. I'm sure it will have a meme token.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure it will. I'm sure we'll get 20 meme coins per case study.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  A meme coin for every paragraph.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  HBS class should just be livestreamed on Pumpfund.

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  They could fractionalize the case study. Every, every word, you can just get a word.

• 40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, it's interesting that, that I think meme coins were working on Ethereum, but the, the gas fees on Ethereum were so high.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Hundred bucks or something.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  You know, you couldn't make a trade for a hundred dollars because, you know, somebody would be like, I might, are they going to pay

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  fifty dollars in, in gas to make a new trade like that?

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Speed and price, you drop, you increase the speed, you drop the price, like you always just see more activity. And so, um, yeah, yeah, fascinating. Um, that, that one billion dollar revenue number, is that something that you can just inspect on the blockchain? If you just add up all the Solana transactions, like is that possible?

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's visible. Um, I'd seen a post as of maybe last week that they had passed 750 million dollars in revenue.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, when did they actually launch?

• 41:39John Coogan?

  It seems like it was like a year ago.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  Is it like roughly a year ago?

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Wow, impressive.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  So a year, one year to 750 million dollars and like real, and it's not Marketplace, like that's like their.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not GMV. That's actually their, their take home revenue.

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  Revenue.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, next up, we have Katie Haun from Haun Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the show, Katie. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  We're excited to talk to her.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 42:09Katie Haun?

  Hey, hey, guys. Good morning.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Good morning. How are you?

• 42:12Katie Haun?

  And wherever you may be, I think you're at the conference.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  Uh, no, we are not. We're in Los Angeles. We're in Hollywood, the future of media.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're bringing media back to Hollywood.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  Um, but thanks so much for joining. Would you mind, uh, kicking us off with like just a little bit of an introduction and, uh, how, how are you spending your day to day these days?

• 42:28Katie Haun?

  Oh my gosh, a little bit of an introduction. Well, my name's Katie Haun. I founded Haun Ventures, which is, we're investing in blockchain technology through an early-stage fund and a later-stage fund. And we're about three and a half years old as a company and as a fund.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Do you do liquids?

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many decades has the last three and a half years?

• 42:47Katie Haun?

  Oh my gosh. Well, you know what, guys? I've actually been in this space over a decade.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Katie Haun?

  Over a decade. So how, how many years has that felt like? But the last three years have been wild. But I'm really excited, as about how I'm spending my days, I'm really excited about this particular moment in crypto.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:04Katie Haun?

  Because we have a lot of the fundamentals coming together. And as I said, I've been in the space a long time, and we've had different fundamentals working at different points. But it finally feels like all these fundamentals are working all at once.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  Break down, break down those fundamentals. I imagine it's regulatory, it's community, it's collective belief.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Scale of the actual chains, maturity of the code.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  But how do you think about it?

• 43:26John Coogan?

  What are you thinking about?

• 43:26Katie Haun?

  Well, you guys, here, you guys do it. I can question you.

• 43:30Katie Haun?

  No, so the first thing is institutions, like you said. Institutions, the institutional story has been around before in crypto in different cycles. And we had some early adopters for institutions, right? We had Fidelity. If you think about folks like Abby Johnson, she's been in the space for as long as I have, maybe even longer. We had folks like Meta. I mean, I was on Zuck's original VM project board. He saw stablecoins coming years ago. So we had Meta leaned in as an institution kind of early. And then we had other institutions, folks like BlackRock. I think Larry Fink is actually a great exhibit A for someone who really changed their mind on crypto.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 44:06Katie Haun?

  You know, Larry was against crypto, not against, but he was certainly not a fan of blockchain technology. And a few years ago, he, he said he had really changed his mind. And now you have BlackRock running a tokenized money market fund called Bittl. So that's some of the earlier institutional adopters. But now we have some of the later institutional adopters, folks like JP Morgan, Charles Schwab and others. And you'll see other announcements coming out soon from other institutions. So the institutional story is one fundamental, but I want to talk about three others. You mentioned one regulatory, but before I get to regulatory, because it's not the most exciting, is the technological progress. We've had different kinds of levels of technological progress

• 44:47Katie Haun?

  over the cycles that, that make up the crypto industry, you know, cycles. We always talk about the bear and the bull cycles. And really, kind of the last Beer market, when folks were really declaring the space dead, as they do, by the way, every single cycle.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  It really felt, I remember when Ethereum was touching $800 after the FTX crisis and I was like, I don't know where the bottom is here. This feels like the most toxic asset.

• 45:14Katie Haun?

  Oh, my God.

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  And that was like, I basically-

• 45:17Katie Haun?

  A great time to start a fund, right?

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah.

• 45:19Katie Haun?

  That's what I was, I had just started a fund.

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  No, and in hindsight, and in hindsight, I was like, the moment that I thought this- It was over? It was completely over was like a perfect bottom tick. Perfect bottom.

• 45:30Katie Haun?

  Guys, another time, another story for another day. Remind me to tell you my Solana buying story in New Year's. And when I thought it couldn't go any lower, it even went lower. We got in, we got in when it was pretty, pretty darn low. And a lot of assets, you asked if we do liquids, absolutely we do. We believe hugely in tokens, we believe hugely in equity. But let me get back to the fundamentals first, because this is where we're spending our day. Thinking about stuff like the technological progress. If you think about post FTX, that era you're talking about, ETH is at, or thereabouts, you know, Solana got down to like, what, $9, Bitcoin's hitting like, what, 17, 16, $18,000 levels. People were declaring the space dead. Pundits.

• 46:13Katie Haun?

  Sorry, I know you're not pundits, but everyone was saying, God, what a terrible idea you started a crypto fund. And here we were, 10 of us, like, no, this is a great time in the space. And I think one of the things we saw is there's a market story to crypto and there's a technology story to crypto. And what we saw on the technical progress, and by the way, Fred Wilson and I authored a blog post probably about a week after FTX, saying, hey, the technical story here has not changed, folks. And instead, it's only changing for the better. We had things like the Ethereum merge, the largest software upgrade in history. You know, Toly, the founder of Solana, recently said that we're no longer talking about block space. For one of the first times in this industry. Stuff is scalable, stuff is cheaper.

• 46:55Katie Haun?

  Instead of paying, you know, multiple dollars for a stablecoin transfer or an NFT transaction, it's sub one cent. And that's due in large part to the builders that were building through these bear cycles, including the last painful bear cycle. So that's the second fundamental. And I think the third fundamental, as I think about it, is product market fit. You know, you talk about things like product market fit. Bitcoin, hello, product market fit. Exhibit A, debated Paul Krugman in, was it 2018 or 2017? And he told me Bitcoin has zero use. I debated him and I said it will find product market fit. At that time, I think Bitcoin was trading around three, four, or $5,000.

• 47:37Katie Haun?

  And low and behold, fast forward these years later, I think it's clear. It has found product market fit as a digital store of value. But also, we have things like stablecoins have found clear product market fit. And I hope we can talk about stables. We'll dive deeper later in today's session because stablecoins are the story of the day that folks in the mainstream are now talking about. So we have product market fit and others, other product market fit, kind of I say we're on the precipice of. We can talk about that. But then you mentioned the fourth fundamental, which is regulatory. And I think the thing I heard for the last decade from builders, by the way, from enterprises, from institutions, from LPs, when I was at my prior fund, is regulators aren't going to allow this though. Right? Like this, this is all going to get shut down.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  What was your answer then? Was it like, the obvious rebuttal is regulators are going to make code illegal. Like, it's pretty hard to ban code, right? Anybody can kind of create it and put it out on the internet. I'm sure you were always confident that it wouldn't be made illegal. But at the same time, the sort of US regulatory regime was making it pretty difficult to exist. As a crypto founder in the US, which had the same sort of effect in some ways.

• 48:54Katie Haun?

  Yeah, you know, fun fact, since there's the conference going on today, I don't know if you if you guys are aware of this, I was asked probably around 2012, 2013 to help shut down Bitcoin for the US government when I was a federal prosecutor. So it's just crazy to think about.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Hey, Katie, little project. I don't know if you have time this weekend to look into it. Can you shut down?

• 49:16Katie Haun?

  Open the case, Fanu Lanu, first name unknown, last name unknown. You know, somewhere in the Tenderloin, San Francisco, 450 Golden Gate, said file of Fanu Lanu. But, look, I realized early on that this was a really powerful technology. And regulators, by the way, and we've been saying this for the last decade, regulators should love this technology, I mean, for its kind of permanence, right? All of the things that make blockchain great for a lot of things. Also, by the way, make it, make, look, as I always said when I was a criminal, I hoped that criminals would use this instead of cash or wires, which I don't know how many banks anyone has ever subpoenaed. I've subpoenaed a lot of them. Good luck getting compliance with a subpoena.

• 49:58Katie Haun?

  But at the same time, I really do worry about the erosion of financial privacy. And not just now that I'm in the crypto industry 10 years later. I talked about this when I was a prosecutor and the kind of reach of the Bank Secrecy Act. And we can go really deep on that. I think there are parts now, under the third-party doctrine, that if it went back to Supreme Court today, I think you might have a very different result than the last time the Bank Secrecy Act was challenged, was in the 1970s. And of course, the velocity of payments has just skyrocketed since then. And now, unlike in 1970, where I couldn't glean too much information about you from your maybe couple payments or people writing out checks back in those days, now, if you think about if I have all access to all of your payment information, I could probably

• 50:43Katie Haun?

  like predict where you're going to go every day, just about, right? I mean, it's a really great, almost, in that way, and this is not crypto, this is just all financial data, right? Every time you use your Apple Pay, you're doing a credit card, you're using stable coins. I mean, this is something that we should talk about at another time.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about your kind of early-stage investment framework, philosophy. What are you? I imagine there's investments that you get the opportunity to make that you believe will be successful, but maybe aren't the best use of your capital if you have this sort of broader vision of where the asset class and the technology can go. But I'm curious how you think about opportunities and even kind of your moral framework for investments.

• 51:31Katie Haun?

  I've never heard it described as a moral framework, but that's an interesting framing. I mean, I think, first of all, we start with the founders. Like any other venture investor, it's all about the founders and the market opportunity, right? And if you think about founders that I've previously kind of known in my gut, this is an amazing founder, an exceptional person who's going to build an amazing business. I mean, the first instance of that, as far as I was concerned, coming into crypto was Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, right? And I think one of the things that makes Brian so remarkable is he had a huge business going, just spot trading Bitcoin and then Ethereum and adding all of these other assets. But he was never content to just rest on those laurels as an exchange.

• 52:13Katie Haun?

  It was always about diversifying the business and the Web3 economy. And he was thinking about things like stable coins many, many years ago. Obviously, USDC was a partnership between Coinbase and

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had we had Balaji on earlier and he showed a video of the launch, the web, the web's page for the launch video and he's like in the first five seconds.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  He's seven years younger in that video.

• 52:35Katie Haun?

  I remember that. I remember that. Did he have a bowl of cereal with cream or something?

• 52:39John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 52:40Katie Haun?

  I remember those days with Balaji well, you know, with with the USDC launch happening. And I think, again, he, I remember being in the Coinbase office, by the way, the day, the day that Bitcoin first hit $10,000 for the first time. Imagine, by the way, if we were having this conversation, you know, now we would be like, oh, my God, $10,000 market correction. Well, a few short years ago, that was like cause for celebration. People couldn't believe it was $10,000. I was in the office. The euphoria was kind of everywhere, except Brian had his eyes on what's happening next. We're not going to get comfortable with this. We're building an open global financial system for the world. Where are we taking our revenue lines next?

• 53:23Katie Haun?

  And he's been thinking about that day the S1, you know, day the direct listing happened in April of 2021 at Coinbase. So I was so excited to be a director of that company for almost eight years and see that company through a remarkable series of events. And I still am so excited watching from the sidelines about what they're doing. So I think the first thing we look for is we look for an amazing, exceptional founder. And that, you know, Brian's a great example, right? So we're just trying to find the next, the next Brian's. But also the market opportunities and the space, as I said, the asset class is so broad. So it really, we're talking about, what are we talking about? We're talking about prediction markets.

• 54:03Katie Haun?

  One thing, that's an area we're very excited about, but we kind of think about it as where will this evolve? Not the current state of innovation, but more of the end state of innovation or the midpoint state of innovation. And in the case of prediction markets, I'll tell you, one of the things we think about is think about like Netflix. Netflix did, was very centralized. It curated content. And then all of a sudden YouTube came along and then unleashed even more content globally at scale. I mean, exceptionally so. So for prediction markets, when are we going to get that user generated equivalent or the YouTube moment? I think that's really interesting.

• 54:43Katie Haun?

  And I think what makes crypto special in that story is the programmability that people around the world, 24/7, you know, the internet operates 24/7 and anyone with a smartphone can access that. So we think that's exciting.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Katie Haun?

  So we're looking for, you know, we're looking for exceptional founders.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  Well, it sounds like an easy job. Just find 10 more Brian Armstrongs and you're great.

• 55:07Katie Haun?

  10 more.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Sounds like an easy job.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  I believe, I believe in you.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Katie Haun?

  Thank you guys.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  I think you can do it.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  And thank you for doing the work to surface the Brian's of the world.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're talking to him later today. We're very excited.

• 55:19Katie Haun?

  Oh, great. Well, I'll tune in for that also. I think though, you mentioned moral, I think one of the things we've done.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just, I like the context, the context there is like certain VCs will have a, you know, traditional VCs will have a vice clause, right? Where they say, we don't do defense. We don't do recreational cannabis. We don't do this. And I could imagine crypto funds bifurcating to some degree where some of them say, We're going to do these types of deals and we're not going to do those types of deals.

• 55:47Katie Haun?

  Yeah, that happens already. Right? Like you saw this during the last run up, the last full run in 2021. We had many folks, traditional VCs, many of whom are friends of mine, decided they were going to get into crypto, but they weren't going to touch tokens. They were only going to do equity businesses. And although we love crypto equity businesses, they missed out on a lot of tremendous opportunities. Like, imagine if you had said, we're not touching Solana. I mean, Solana is a huge market opportunity. Ethereum, huge market opportunity. I mean Bitcoin, huge market opportunity, right? These are just some blue chips I'm naming. Of course, there are plenty of others. We said, we are crypto maxis. We're not, you know, we're not going to be religious zealots about any particular token,

• 56:31Katie Haun?

  but nor are we going to write off entire segments. Rather, we're going to focus on the founder, the bona fides of the project, the metrics of the project. And we really want to know here, by the way, do they have a plan for regulatory compliance? Realizing the times were uncertain in those moments. But do they have a plan for it? Or is there a plan to launch a token? And then we say, leave the US.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  That's got to be the most, that's got to be the most nervous meeting a founder has in their round is pitching you on their regulatory plan. Because like, a lot of other VCs are like, yeah, great, he's got a regulatory plan. You're like, well, here's like the 10 reasons why that is not going to work.

• 57:13Katie Haun?

  Yeah, but you know what? I think that actually, we like to think that we can be helpful in that way, even with clarity. I was talking to probably one of the most legendary biotech investors in the world a couple of months ago, and he told a group of our founders, he said, you know, I'm in a regulated space. We've got plenty of regulatory clarity. And believe me, we still need to kind of navigate. Like this doesn't, it doesn't just go away just because we have legislation passed, which we think is really important and clarity. You still got to comply with it. And we always said, I always said, look, you got to have a kind of a plan for it. You don't have to have it all figured out when you're raising a seed round, when you're raising your Series A. Coinbase was great in this regard, but look, they did not. They've obviously made a lot of progress as a company on that front

• 57:55Katie Haun?

  across the different iterations of their company, like one would expect, like is reasonable. So my touchstone is what's reasonable? And you got to build a business too, right? And I think we realize that and we're pragmatic partners and we like to work with founders. Tell me a founder who says, I have no idea what to do here. I don't want to break the law. I don't know what the law is, but like, we'd love your help. We'd love your thought partnership, and we love those kind of founders.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic conversation.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back on again soon.

• 58:24Katie Haun?

  Thank you, guys. Thank you for having me.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  We'd love to go way deeper. I'm sure we're gonna learn a lot today. This is good.

• 58:28Katie Haun?

  Okay.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Thanks for coming on.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz, but first, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  And very excited to talk to Chris. Obviously, extremely storied investor, top of the Midas list, early Coinbase investor, continual Coinbase investor. We got Brian Armstrong coming on later to tell his, the founder journey of Coinbase, but Chris has been all over the place in crypto for a decade, 15 years, 20 years. I think he invested in Bitcoin back in 1994.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  He was early and right.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  A lot of the people that we're having on today were early and right.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  Which is a good thing to be.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Chris, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 59:14Chris Dixon?

  I'm great. John, good to see you.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 59:16Chris Dixon?

  I'm an early Swinburne investor.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 59:20Chris Dixon?

  Good to see you guys. Congratulations on all the success with the show.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Where should we start? Can you give us a temperature on the crypto markets? It's been up and down.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  Come on, let him take a victory lap.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  Take a victory lap.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  Let him take a victory lap.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like you get...

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  I know the job's not finished, but...

• 59:38John Coogan?

  They always twist you, twist your arm into doing podcasts when the market's down and saying, oh, you gotta hold you accountable. And then, and then where is Kara Swisher calling you when the market's up? You know?

• 59:49Chris Dixon?

  That's a good point. That's a good point. By the way, can you guys hear, can you guys hear me okay?

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you sound great.

• 59:53Chris Dixon?

  Okay, great. Yeah, good. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's been, it's been a long journey, as you guys pointed out. I think that, you know, we had a lot of challenges the last four years, regulatory challenges with the last administration, and that looks like it's trending much better now with the new administration, it's sort of more pro-tech, and I think we have a lot of momentum in Congress, and that's a big deal because that created a lot of headwinds. So that's great, and... And then also like the kind of core infrastructure, and we can, I don't know if you guys want to talk more about it, but like, you know, the, like, so for example, one of the things happening right now are stablecoins are really taking off. So like last month, it was something like two trillion in stablecoin volume,

• 1:00:33Chris Dixon?

  which is more than tril- with trillion with a T, which is more than Visa. And so, you know, quite a lot of volume and that, a lot of that's due to the fact that the infrastructure, so Solana, Ethereum and so forth, has gotten really good.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Chris Dixon?

  So you can now send an arbitrary amount of money anywhere in the world for under one penny in one second. But that took years and years of work, investment, you know, founders, technical folks doing a lot of work. So that's great. And so there's a lot of good things. I think that, you know, there's, there's a lot of challenges too, but, but, but overall, it's been, it's been fun.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Do you think that the narrative around stablecoins is still going to morph into micropayments for the internet? Ben Thompson was talking about this with MCP. It's not in the standard, but you can easily imagine that getting worked into the second version of the standard. At the same time, obviously, just global remittances has always been a huge category. It is the one category that I used stablecoins for years ago. And it felt very real in that moment, even while people were, were saying, oh, this is useless. It's, it felt like, okay, this is the value. But I'm interested in like kind of the next application of stablecoins and then the one after that.

• 1:01:38Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, great. So I think just maybe briefly, the way to think about stablecoins is today, we don't really have a global payment system or global financial system. We have, you know, 195 countries. Each one has many different banking systems. When you send money to another country, like I say, you wire money, like actually, we've had this experience at the firm where we wire investment. And it ends up going through like a bunch of humans and paperwork. It's really just a mishmash of systems. And so the way to think about stablecoins is similar to how, for those who are old enough to remember, text messaging was like this at one, like in the 2000s, you would send a text message and you would say, you don't have a plan to send to Canada. You got to sign up. And it was all these different systems. And then WhatsApp and FaceTime came along and they built this sort of what they call over the top global network, right?

• 1:02:20Chris Dixon?

  So think of sort of stablecoins and blockchains as an over the top network. It's, it's from day one, global, low fee, credibly neutral, programmable, payment system. That just sort of works everywhere. That that's kind of the simple way to think of it. And so, as you mentioned, you know, one of the obvious benefits is just cross border. And that's where a lot of the uses are right now. And so, for example, like SpaceX has a program where they move, you know, they'll sell a Starlink. And I think it's like some southern like Brazil or something. And then they'll immediately, you know, use stable coins for so-called treasury management. This is one of the kind of growing use cases that that folks like Stripe will talk about. Remittances, you're sending money back home, you know, from from the US to, you know, whatever, some developing country. Countries where the currency is volatile and they want access to dollars or euros.

• 1:03:05Chris Dixon?

  And then, as you mentioned, John, the the idea that because, and actually, it it I encourage those who are interested to go listen to the Collisons. They were an all in podcast a few weeks ago talking about this. What they're actually say they're really excited about is less the low fees and more the programmability, as you just described. And so you can do, so this is like one obvious thing is, you know, invoice fraud. So people will send, you know, these these faxes type things. It's a really old fashioned where they'll say like, here's my wiring instruction. And now, if you guys, if you've done this, you'll say like, please make sure you call first. But of course, calling doesn't work in an age of AI because it could be a fake voice. And so, you know, what what Stripe was excited about is because blockchains are programmable, they can have a full kind of reputation system on top. So they know like this is a valid place to send money to for your invoicing system, right?

• 1:03:48Chris Dixon?

  So you can program it, as you mentioned, micropayments, right? Now that you can send money for one penny, that unlocks a whole bunch of use cases. So machine to machine payments, every time you're doing an AI API request, as you mentioned, MCP, right? So like why MCP, I would expect would have down the road, a payment standard, right? And AI agents, you imagine a world, which I think we're headed to pretty soon in a couple of years. We have all these different AI agents running around. I'm hey, I'm advertising, I can program, I can, I can write your essay for you. I can, you know, do your homework, whatever. And they're all sort of advertising their services. And then you sort of imagine other agents coming along and negotiating and and, you know, pennies getting transferred back and forth. And this big kind of, you know, economic, you know, kind of mishmash, like kind of collection, you know, on top.

• 1:04:33Chris Dixon?

  So the web moves from like these kind of signup forms to agents sending money automatically. And we think that would be powered by, most naturally powered by a global, you know, low-fee programmable system like blockchains.

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. How has, I'm super curious to understand how your guys' lobbying efforts have evolved over the past six to 12 months. We went from, you know, a sort of coalition, a large coalition of people trying to basically, you know, block crypto from getting real adoption and traction in the US to suddenly ETFs being approved and things like that. And I imagine that's kind of changed your guys' strategy on the Hill. So I'm interested to hear how that's evolved.

• 1:05:18Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, so that's a, so I've been doing, you know, we sort of, I saw Mark, Mark Andreessen on you guys, I think it was a week or two ago, I watched that and he was talking about a little bit. Mark and I have been very involved in this and, and by necessity originally like four or five years ago. And then, and then over time realized just how important it is to engage. They say, in Washington, they like to say, if you are not at the table, you're on the menu. So you don't want to be on the menu. So, so, you know, I've been going sort of like once a month and Mark has too and just, and really just kind of trying to explain our perspective because we feel like the interests of startup, like, so start, most startups don't have the resources to go to DC, right? And of course, big tech companies do and big banks do and all sorts of other big entities

• 1:06:03Chris Dixon?

  do. And so our kind of logic was that we're one of the few entity, you know, kind of organizations that has enough scale to have a government affairs team who represents the interest of startups. And so we go and we say, look, we represent small companies and here's what they're interested in. So for example, they, they want to have clear guardrails and rules around blockchains. They want to have, they want to have open source AI. That's another really important issue to us. Clear rules on like AI and copyright. There's a series of things, you know, having a single federal framework and not a 50 state laws on a lot of these things and so forth, right? And so we go and we kind of advocate for that. We've taken a bipartisan approach from the beginning. We think that's very important. I mean, look, just one is to get, we think that the way you really build industries is legislation.

• 1:06:46Chris Dixon?

  If you think back to the internet, that was built on, really on the 96 Telecom Act. If, you know, and had things like section two thirty, which, you know, you may know is now a contentious issue, had section two, I like to say if section two thirty had been, you know, administrative guidance instead of legislation, it would have been a political football every four years. It was built into legislation. And so you could, section two thirty is what enabled marketplaces, social networks and so forth to build reliably on the internet. So we've always felt that both for AI and for crypto, we want legislation that provides clear rules, paths for innovation, and, and, and really eliminates or mitigates or eliminates, you know, all the kind of bad use cases and bad actors. And so that's always been our approach. It's been bipartisan. That's for legislation, you need bipartisan, first of all. And secondly, you know, like the Democratic Party has, like, most people

• 1:07:29Chris Dixon?

  will sort of think, you know, Republicans are pro crypto, Democrats are anti. That's not really true. Like, we just had a, last week, a senate, sort of, it was a procedural vote on the stablecoin bill, and I believe there were seventeen Democrats who voted for it, you know, which is significant. And I think, you know, our view has been, we want to kind of, you know, shift the Democratic Party back to the values of Obama and Bill Clinton when they were pro tech, and not sort of the kind of blue sky thing, Democrat thing that happened the last

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing about the lobbying is that I looked at the, I looked at the donation dollars that were coming from crypto-aligned people and crypto funds, and it was split almost exactly fifty fifty. Like, the entire crypto community really did go super bipartisan with the spend. And obviously, the Republicans won, so it feels like a Republican issue, like, right now. But I, it doesn't feel like it's going to remain that way. On the issue of government, I'm interested to know, maybe stablecoins are a good example, but just general crypto adoption, how do you bucket, how do you think about the adoption across government, B two B, or just direct to consumer? Because when I think about stablecoins, for example, there's people that want to pay people individually,

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  but there's so many ways that you can just tuck stablecoins under some business, like with the AI thing. If you get Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, using stablecoins in an agentic application, the user might never know that I'm paying a fraction of a cent to access a Wall Street Journal article. It just happens, and I'm not even aware. So what are the key drivers for the different, the different constituencies, and then the different applications, and how do they fit together?

• 1:09:03Chris Dixon?

  No, that's a great question. And like I have a broader kind of framework I like to talk about. Which is sort of, I sort of like to distinguish technologies between what I call inside out and outside in. And so inside out of things that sort of start with established institutions like AI to some extent is like that. You know, the iPhone was like this, it came out of Apple, a very established institution, AI came out of, you know, Stanford and so forth. Whereas crypto very much, you know, Bitcoin started at the fringes, right? And sort of like open source software and there's, you know, other kind of tech movements have started the fringes. And it sort of worked its way in, right? So stablecoin started for the main use case was settling, you know, crypto trades, you know, seven years ago or something. And then over time, you started to see more and more like, you know, payment providers in Argentina, for example. And that, you know, sort of more, more kind of moving to the center.

• 1:09:44Chris Dixon?

  Now Stripe, you know, I think of Stripe is, is very much probably the, I think the smartest, a lot of people think the smartest, one of the, if not the smartest fintech company is all in on it. You know, they did a billion dollar acquisition of Bridge to, you know, to ramp up their efforts. I think the main, the gaining factor, like I speak to a lot of like, like what I would love to see is a world where you have banks and, you know, asset management firms and every payment provider, as you described, John, like behind the scenes, it's just sort of, it's the substrate. It's the infrastructure, right? It's like HDP or SMTP, it's just this thing that exists. A lot, they also, a lot of them say, we just want like that final, you know, regulatory clarity piece, right? Because they want that assurance, because they're, like they're risk averse. We just had four years of kind of lawfare against the industry.

• 1:10:25Chris Dixon?

  So that's why I think that's really like, honestly, like I probably spend more than half my time on that now. Like that, that's just kind of the key. There's two, and just to say, there's two big kind of bills that we're, that we're advocating for. There's stablecoins, there's one called market structure that's just coming forward in the house now, which is also to kind of clarify more broadly on tokens. But I think that's the main thing right now. I think, and I, but to your point, exactly, I don't think most people ultimately will, will think of even the word stablecoin. I think there'll be like digital dollars, you know, that like for the, for the average person.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'll be an industry term like ERP, people interface with that, but they don't know.

• 1:10:56Chris Dixon?

  And like, actually, but we'll see like, like we have a fintech group at the firm that's not crypto. And if you know, folks like, I think you interviewed Aneesh and, and all those folks. And then, you know, they like crypto, but they're not like crypto. And they'll tell me now, like, it's become pretty standard in the stable, in the fintech stack that people will use.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, so let's.

• 1:11:13Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, you're like a three-person startup and like boom, you push a button and you got 190 countries. That's very different than the old days.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to get your point of view on the competitive forces and dynamics right now because we have startups, which there's entire subcategories. You have hyper-decentralized crypto companies. You have sort of hybrid companies like maybe Bridge that are kind of sitting in between fintech and crypto rails. And then you now have big institutional players that are coming in. Maybe they brought ETFs to market to start and then now they're thinking about stablecoin applications as well. How do you look at the market and what kind of advice do you give to portfolio companies that are trying to figure out who they are? Whether that's fully decentralized or some type of hybrid or so on?

• 1:12:03Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that, I mean, the point is not for decentralization and kind of this new architecture of blockchains for its own sake. The point is they have specific benefits. So like, why would one build on a blockchain like Ethereum or Solana as opposed to a traditional, you know, AWS, like a traditional architecture? And the answer is, when you build, the way I like to describe it most simply is blockchains allow you to build digital services that remove the intermediaries. So you remove, so for example, stablecoins, you have no intermediaries that are taking fees. You don't have the banks and the payment providers and the payment networks, right? To take all the different layers of fees. So that's an important benefit is you're building these, you know, you could build social networks without fees. You can build games without fees. You can build AI systems without fees, right?

• 1:12:47Chris Dixon?

  Without fees, it's like very low, like sub, like a couple of basis points. I actually have, for those interested, I wrote a book, Read Right Own, and I have a chapter on take rates where I go through this in detail. But it's essentially you're going from like 30% in the App Store, you know, 100% in Facebook and 50% on YouTube to like five basis points or something, right? So. Or you know, two and a half percent for payments and so forth. So, so, so the first question is, why would you want to build on them? The other one we mentioned before is programmability. You know, you can do all sorts of cool stuff on top. And so I think it, to your question, I think it depends like, like ultimately, I think of startups as you want to work backwards. You want to say, what do you want to do for the world? What kind of service do you want to provide? And then you work backwards and you say, how do you want to build that? Right? In some cases, that means you want to build something on a blockchain, like a pure service, like a protocol, we call it with a token and so forth.

• 1:13:32Chris Dixon?

  In other cases, you want to build more traditional software that may be like, for example, like you mentioned, that, that bridges between a, a bank and an asset manager and a, and a blockchain system. Right? So I think it ultimately, we think of it through that lens is kind of now as an investor, I, I skew towards things. I like things with, for example, network effects, because it's just that they can be very, I've, my career, I've found that network effects can be very powerful. Right? You invest in something, it grows, it kind of has a natural kind of defensibility and kind of gets better as more people use it. So there's just kind of different lenses you can look at it. I would, the last thing I would say is to your, to your listeners, I know you have a broad audience. I think that the crypto space right now, the real shortage we have is startup talent. In that there's a lot of obvious good ideas where there just aren't many people pursuing it.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Chris Dixon?

  So I think it's actually the opposite problem than most, like then you might have an AI right now, where I imagine AI, it's an amazing technology. And, and deservingly, people are excited as they should be excited about it. But you probably for every idea have, I don't know, 50 good startups pursuing it. In crypto, I think we're under competed, like we have under too, too little competition, honestly, like.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Chris Dixon?

  So I would say to your listeners, if you're a smart person thinking about doing a startup, I think there's a lot of white space right now.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  If you're in AI pivot to crypto, we heard it here first.

• 1:14:41Chris Dixon?

  Or do both. We love AI.

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how are you, I'm sure you're perpetually going to be unsatisfied with the technological progress because you understand the full potential. Right? Where, where are you at right now? You know, we had Balaji on earlier. He's, you know, was, was very bullish on ZK proofs and, and what's coming down the pipeline there.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Prediction markets a little bit.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Prediction markets.

• 1:15:06John Coogan?

  It was cool during the election. It was like, wow, this is a completely, no one was talking about this during the Bitcoin white paper. And yet crypto has created something that everyone gets value out of in one way or another.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:17Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. I think, I, like, I think we are still, you know, I think of these, these technology things always go in S curves. We're clearly still at the. Sort of, you know, somewhere in the bottom of the S curve, like, I think there's just a lot more growth and just like user base, there's something on the order, there's tens, most of these applications I'm describing have, you know, up to fifty, at the highest end, probably fifty million users, which is one percent of the internet. So it's it's still very early and, you know, Polly Market is doing incredibly well, but I assume it's still in that kind of sub one percent of the internet. It's not, the internet is, you know, five billion people now, right? So we have a long way to go. I think a lot of the kind of core infrastructure is now, as of a year and a half ago, kind of good enough. You know, a lot, I think a lot of these technologies have that characteristic where you have kind of, you know, whether like neural networks only got good enough, I don't know, whatever,

• 1:16:01Chris Dixon?

  circa, let's call it, you know, something in two thousand teens because of the, you know, the Moore's Law in GPUs, right? And so, you know, iPhones, once you had capacitive screens and semi-whatever processors and so forth. I think blockchains, I think we no longer have, infrastructure is an excuse anymore. Like now, it's about building applications, about getting regulatory clarity. And I think we're pretty far along there. I think we have a long way to go, fully exploring kind of the IDMAs and all the different cool things you can do. And, and, you know, and then bringing it to billions of people is the goal.

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  How have you been advising crypto emerging managers? My, my, one of my favorite, I'm gonna kind of butcher the stat, but apparently like the, the sort of median crypto fund massively outperformed like the median venture fund for most of the last decade. And so I thought that that was this beautiful narrative violation because, you know, people, traditional venture would love to poke fun at crypto VCs, yet they were sort of like systemically outperforming Yep, yep, yep. the other party. But, but what, what kind of general guidance are you giving to somebody that maybe was an active trader and wants to get more into the actual, you know, kind of venture side of the game?

• 1:17:12Chris Dixon?

  I, I, like, I've been, so, you know, I've, I've been, so, I've been investing in, in venture funds and crypto funds for a long time. I've just sort of, after I sold my first company. In fact, Mark, Mark Andreessen and I have done it together for a long time. And have been doing crypto funds since, gosh, probably ten years and just consistently. And I'm still very bullish. And to your point, I think that's probably correct, like on the, on their, you know, the data, like they've just, they've done. And I think it's just, it's just traditional finance in the sense of you have to, you know, non-consensus right, right? Like, As much as we hear about crypto, it's still very non-consensus. A lot of, a lot, a lot of venture funds just simply, maybe they'll have a little bit of Bitcoin, but they'll, otherwise they'll rule it out if there's tokens and things.

• 1:17:50Chris Dixon?

  Um, you talk to fund of funds, um, they, a lot of them will say, we have a no crypto rule, you know, sovereign wealth funds. So all the kind of giant pools of capital that fund the venture world. And so it's still kind of this, considered this kind of weird sideshow. Um, like obviously the past doesn't predict the future and so forth. And we don't know how things will play out, but it's still very non-consensus, I think, from a, from a financial investing point of view, the broader crypto world. So I, I believe, I believe that's where the opportunities are in, in, in venture investing. Um, obviously you have to also be right. And so, and time will tell, but it's, I think it's still much more not, it's surprisingly non-consensus in the investing world, I, I think to, to this day, despite the performance.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  Can you explain a little bit of the dynamic of how venture fits into the life cycle of a new crypto company these days? Because there's liquidity available from retail in some cases. Um, there's some companies that are going to be profitable very early because of their, you know, uh, insane product.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had a lawn from, from pump on earlier and that's classic example of a company that was able to be very efficient. And I think we've seen, uh, on the other side, you have companies like Hyperliquid that got out and, and have a token very early. So I'm curious, yeah, how, how you think of the capital lifecycle.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. So we, I mean, I mean, let's see if I can answer that. So like one reason we started a separate crypto fund originally, like I guess 2018 was so that we could, um, uh, before that I was doing like crypto investing.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Chris Dixon?

  But I would always get these questions from the LPs and like, what is this? Is it equity? Is it tokens? And so create a separate crypto fund with the basic idea where we have maximum flexibility. Um, and, and we went to the LPs and we said, look, this is going to be different. And here's the idea and here's the, and a lot of them opted out, some of them opted in. But we were very clear upfront what it was. And so what we, what we think of it is we can do everything from, we can buy Bitcoin or something just directly, which we do. People see our funds and they assume it's all ventures, not like we do a lot of, you know, just buying like tokens that we think have, have, um, upside. We also do a lot of, we can do equity investments like a Coinbase. It's just a classic equity investment. We have a bunch of those that, you know, the goal would be to someday IPO. They could be cash flow heavy ones that do dividends like the ones you're describing,

• 1:20:05Chris Dixon?

  Jordy, like maybe some of those, or maybe I don't know what their plans are pumped up, or maybe the IPO, maybe they dividend, maybe they buybacks, right? If you have cash flows, you have a lot of options. And then the third one, which is actually, you know, one of our core ones is you'll do an equity, a project will start as an equity investment, but then over time we'll launch a token. And the equity investors get sort of per rata rights to those tokens. And that actually, that's kind of, that was sort of the new thing that we really wanted to lean into back in when we started the crypto fund. That was a new idea that, you know, we helped kind of pioneer that, I think.

• 1:20:37Jordi Hays?

  And that was like the warrant structure?

• 1:20:40Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, it's very simple. It's a term sheet with two extra things that has essentially token rights. Yeah, and it can be a warrant and there's different ways to structure it. And what's nice about that is it, you know, one of the reasons startups works it well is that their max, like when they work is that the investors and the founders are fully aligned. So before that structure existed, I don't know how deep you guys want to go on this, there were these things called SaaS and like these kinds of things where you do token purchases. And the problem is it created all these weird incentives where the founder would try to create a token just to do something what we believe very strongly is alignment between the investors and the founders. And so there's sort of this, this equity structure with token rights or token warrants is one where if they decide to, they can stay in equity company and they can do, you know, just do traditional, kind of go for profits and things, or they can create a token, or

• 1:21:23Chris Dixon?

  they can create two tokens, or whatever is best for that service they're trying to create. And in whatever way that they eventually decide to, you know, whatever business model they pursue, the investor will participate kind of per rata alongside the founders.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  What happens to the C corp in that scenario where they launch a token, the token grows and the community is in like the, like the asset is now controlled by the token and the C corp still exists? Are there rules for foundations and nonprofits and, and different transitions that could happen?

• 1:21:52Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of times they'll become, they'll just become like kind of one software provider in the network.

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:22:00Chris Dixon?

  Like. You know, they're so, so for example, um, you know, think of the Ethereum Foundation. I don't know if you guys know the relationship between Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum. Ethereum is a network. Ethereum Foundation, you know, they help make a little bit of software. They give some research guidance, but they don't control the network. They don't, you know, it's just like kind of in the same way. There's just sort of a foundation that has some kind of a bully pulpit. Sometimes they can have a separate business model. You know, so like Uniswap is a, is a decentralized protocol that we're investors in. It's sort of a, uh, think of it as a decentralized New York Stock Exchange or something. Um, that's doing very well. Multiple trillions and trillions in volume traded and they separately. So they spun off this protocol and then they separately have a website that they operate, which is what the company does.

• 1:22:43Chris Dixon?

  And the website is now, I believe it's a sub five percent of the volume on the protocol, but it's still five percent, right? And so they're just one front end to it. And so that, I think that's probably one of maybe one of the best examples of what you're asking, John.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  That makes a ton of sense. Jordy? Where, what are you expecting to see out of the kind of category, real world asset category over the next couple of years? It feels like it's this year, at least to me, it's felt like we're days or weeks away from some pretty high profile assets coming on chain. Uh, I'm curious how you think about the category broadly.

• 1:23:20Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, um, I mean, I think of stable coins as sort of the initial real world asset, right? It's so you have dollars in the bank account and then the next, and then, and then the great thing about that, the kind of adoption there and hopefully all the regulatory clarity we're getting is that will be a natural stepping stone to, you know, you have Robin Hood talking about stocks. You have BlackRock talking about, you know, treasury bills. Wouldn't, I think it would be nice if anyone in the world, I think it'd be good for the US and I think it'd be good for the world if anyone in the world could buy, you know, four and a half percent treasury, you know, interest treasury bill, right? And have it secure and easy and permissionless and low fee. Uh, I think it's, you know, it's good for our, you know, the US, the popularity of the dollar. And I think it's, you know, it'd be nice for somebody who has a volatile currency to have access to those.

• 1:24:02Chris Dixon?

  Um. So, you know, stocks, stocks, bonds, and then you can imagine, you know, um, all of these sorts of so-called dark pools. So, you know, a still a large part of finance is people using Bloomberg and calling each other. And a lot of that, you know, like trading bonds and muni bonds and corporate bonds and things like that. There's a lot of interest from the banks to think about ways to use blockchains. Uh, to create essentially marketplaces there, you know, maybe permissioned marketplaces where only kind of certain participants can participate. For them, the benefit is, you know, why haven't they created a network like a marketplace before? Because um, they, you know, they, they don't trust each other. They don't want like, who's gonna create it? Is Goldman gonna create it and JP Morgan's gonna use it? They don't trust each other, you know, they don't trust startups to do it. Cause then the startup will start taking big fees. They just sort of kept it informal and, and by phone.

• 1:24:47Chris Dixon?

  Um, and so in a way a blockchain kind of solves a political problem of getting these twenty entities or a hundred entities. Who previously wouldn't kind of coordinate together. I think that's one broader way to think of blockchains is like, it's, it's like if AI, you know, is solving all the problems in the world that, that they need more intelligence, right? Blockchains try to solve the problems in the world that need more coordination, right? Or more, you know, kind of collective, um, uh, collective action, getting a bunch of, you know, the blockchains are fundamentally social technologies. And it's about getting a bunch of, you know, that's what money is ultimately social, right? It's getting a lot of people to agree on a standard and to, and to use the, the same, the same systems and tools. Um, and so similarly with real world assets like that.

• 1:25:26Chris Dixon?

  And there's other interesting ones to your question, like we have one called Story Protocol, a, a project where investors in that's putting intellectual property on blockchains. Um, and letting people, you know, do capital formation and licensing and so forth around, you know, so you create a new, you know, a superhero themed thing. And someone wants to make an AI remix of it and like, how do they?

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  AI, really important.

• 1:25:46Chris Dixon?

  Rights and so we think a lot about like in an AI world, like how will, you know, creators get paid? How will IP work? How will, how, how will money flow on the internet in a world with abundant content, right? Um, and, and I think, we think blockchains have an important role to play in that.

• 1:26:01Jordi Hays?

  How would you like to see the industry and kind of the world collectively try to solve social engineering hacks? It feels like WorldCoin is one

• 1:26:12Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  potential solution there, but I imagine there's a bunch of other sort of businesses that you could fund and then a whole regulatory piece as well, which is we sort of force these large companies now. Bology described it as like, you know, to basically hold these, you know, honeypots of data and there's probably got to be a better, a better way.

• 1:26:33Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, a great question. So you mentioned WorldCoin, I'll just say briefly, so what WorldCoin does is what we call proof of humanity. So it's a way for you to get a cryptographic key that proves you're human and the idea is in a world, you know, as we're moving too quickly with AI bots and deepfakes and so forth, it's useful to be able to say, hey, I'm truly a human and, you know, I can get a, imagine a blue check on Twitter that actually, you know, cryptographically means you're human and not just that you paid $10. We think that would be useful. It's sort of a missing, you know, kind of building blocks, so to speak, for the, you know, for the internet that I think we all want. And so one thing we think about is like, what are those missing building blocks? You mentioned zero knowledge proofs. Zero knowledge proofs are, I think, a really interesting cryptographic breakthrough that I think people underestimate in the broader world how important they are.

• 1:27:16Chris Dixon?

  What they let you do is, is essentially prove things. So I can prove, you know, like a bank needs to know I'm a US citizen, let's say, or I'm, you know, have a certain income or certain profile of, you know, health data or so forth. What zero knowledge proofs let you do is I can prove that to the system without revealing any of that, like my actual, you know, where I can, it can basically send me a cryptographic kind of a game that says, prove that you're a US citizen and I can prove it back without revealing all, you know, my name and all the other kind of stuff that might, that might dox me, right? I mean, I just, you know, we just saw like, you know,

• 1:27:54Chris Dixon?

  Day after day, we see these giant hacks, KYC hacks, so forth. Like, at this point, you should just assume all of your information sadly has been hacked many times. And, you know, having social security as like your unique ID and password is just like a ridiculous system in this era. So, and meanwhile, we have these, you know, we carry around these, these supercomputers with, with, you know, biometrics and advanced cryptography. Like, why aren't we using it? Right? The, the problem is not the, is not the, the, the tech, the core tech. The problem is coordination. Again, like, it's how do you get everyone to agree on what the standards are, right? And that's why I think blockchains can be important, because it's really the, the, all the pieces are there, but how do you kind of put them all together in a, in a broad kind of, you know, standard or coordinated system?

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Amazing. That's great. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  We'd love to continue for another hour.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can go way longer. We need to have you back and talk more.

• 1:28:41Chris Dixon?

  Awesome, guys. Appreciate it. And congratulations. It's great to see somebody, a, a contrarian idea, that a tech show that actually likes tech.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Chris Dixon?

  Very bullish on it. So, thank you.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon, Chris.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on, Chris. Have a good one.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:28:53Chris Dixon?

  Bye bye.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Uh, next up, we have Kyle coming on. Yeah.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Round of applause.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  You know, we're talking to some big people. Just because he's the number one guy on the Midas list doesn't mean you can't hit him with the Ashen Hall.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  You can't hit him with some sound effects.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  I should have.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  But we have Kyle Samani coming on. Let's bring him in the studio. How are you doing, Kyle? Welcome to the stream. Good to meet you.

• 1:29:12Kyle Samani?

  What's up, Joe? What's up, Dordy? Pleasure to be here.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. What's happening?

• 1:29:16Kyle Samani?

  Dude, I'm doing great, guys. Uh, I'm actually in Vegas right now. I'm actually looking at the sphere out my window in my hotel.

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:29:22Kyle Samani?

  Bitcoin Vegas is going on. It's a fun time in crypto.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  Crypto company sponsoring the sphere right now? Or, or maybe we, TVPN should buy the inventory at this very moment?

• 1:29:30Kyle Samani?

  I think, I think y'all's faces would look really good at 400 feet wide and tall. I think that would definitely work.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  We should just be live broadcasting this there. That's the, that's the real alpha. Um, anyway.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you on. Um, what, uh, so, so I don't even have context. What, what event is happening in Vegas? I think Katie Haun is there as well. Is that correct?

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  It's Bitcoin conference, right?

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Bitcoin conference.

• 1:29:51John Coogan?

  Can you break it down?

• 1:29:52Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  What are you expecting?

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  What's happening on the ground?

• 1:29:54Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, it's Bitcoin Vegas is going on largest crypto conference ever, more than 30,000 people at Venetian Plaza. Vance, either just spoke or speaking shortly. David Sacks is here, Bo Hines is here, Ross Olbrich is here, David Bailey, Michael Saylor. Tons of, tons of folks are all here. Senators here, Lummis, Hagerty, a whole bunch of other folks. So, uh, politics is here, Wall Street is here, industry is here.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Kyle Samani?

  Uh, very, very exciting time in crypto.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  And what are the key indications or news items that people are looking for? There's people still hunting for, uh, different companies to establish Bitcoin reserves or news from the government. Like, what are the unanswered questions that people are looking for hints as to which way they'll break?

• 1:30:37Kyle Samani?

  Um, I think probably the biggest questions are how is the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve going to be funded? You know, Senator Lummis has proposed, uh, the Bitcoin bill, which would, which proposes the open market purchases authorized by Congress. That hasn't made it very far in Congress, but it's at least in the public domain. You know, when, uh, the executive order was signed by President Trump a few weeks ago. Um, it said that they can kind of fund the Strategic Reserve using revenue neutral mechanisms. And so there's a lot of discussion today about what, what exactly does that mean? Folks like Bo Hines and David Sacks and the administration are certainly working on figuring all that out. They haven't shared anything publicly yet, but there's a lot of discussion about that. There's a lot of discussion around Bitcoin L2s.

• 1:31:22Kyle Samani?

  These are kind of ways to bring DeFi to Bitcoin. Um, with like two or three or four asterisks after that end of that statement. But like a lot of people are trying to figure that out. Uh, and then obviously the kind of hot subject of the moment is these Bitcoin treasury companies. The most recent of which I believe is DJT, um, which I think it just announced a $2.5 billion offering.

• 1:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is that Truth Social?

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, Truth Social has.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  And GameStop, GameStop announced today as well, a large purchase.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, in, in some ways, all the regulatory stuff happening right now feels like the kid who didn't do his homework until two minutes or two minutes before the exam or something. And is just cramming because crypto has been an important industry for a decade. You know, people have been investing in this category for a long time. But now it's like the government's like, okay, let's figure all this out. Is that just because we've really finally gotten to adoption and breached the technical milestones? Or, or do we, and I guess the question is like, do you expect us to get through this regulatory kind of crunch period and then go back into build mode? And if so, like, what are the technical milestones that we're, that we're trying to build? What, what's coming on the horizon after we get through the political arc that we're in right now?

• 1:32:34Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, so I mean, the reason we're here, we're, the reason we're kind of in this moment is like a lot of stuff building over the last 10 or 15 years and was really extended by the Biden administration.

• 1:32:46Kyle Samani?

  I, I don't think our industry would be as politically relevant and as politically active if it were not for the Biden administration so strongly trying to press on the, the scales against, against industry and industry really mobilized against the Democratic Party in a meaningful way. And my sense is that most political strategists probably will tell you that like on the margin, the thing that moved the election in both Congress and then the presidential in 2024 was the crypto industry in terms of dollars, reach, anger, PR, kind of et cetera. That now is kind of swung from a very frustrating administration to extremely accommodating and welcoming administration that we have today.

• 1:33:30Kyle Samani?

  The work that Bill Hines and David Tax are doing in the executive branch is phenomenal. We're seeing awesome stuff out of DOJ, SEC and CFTC on an almost daily basis now. Uh, and then the other big item is Congress. Uh, there's the stable, you know, uh, the, the genius act in, in the Senate today. And then there's market structure that that's coming pretty shortly. All that stuff is happening. So I think the reason we are where we are is like, uh, like the pendulum is like, kind of swung from one extreme to the other. Uh, I feel pretty good that we're going to kind of basically get, industry is going to get, I think, most of what it wants in the next few months. And that just then provides the foundation for crypto to really permeate all of software. Crypto systems are at their most basic level, just systems for moving money around.

• 1:34:14Kyle Samani?

  And they're much more better and efficient and global systems for doing that. And so my, my hope is that once we get these final things done from Congress and then the executive branch, then you see Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, et cetera.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:28Kyle Samani?

  Embed crypto into all of their respective operating systems. You have AI agents, you know, trading with crypto, whatever. And now crypto financial rails truly permeate global software.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  Do you think there'll be a realignment from the left around crypto? Or do you think like, because it did feel like it was bipartisan for a little bit, or at least it was just ambiguous on both sides. Then it kind of broke right, but it's such a big industry that it feels like maybe the Democrats might want to say, hey, like we're, it's a, it's a big tent. We're, we're also pro crypto.

• 1:35:02Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, I mean, um, there's certainly a handful of prominent Democrats who have been pro crypto, folks like Richie Torres, Senator Gillibrand. There's some others I'm sure I cannot remember their names off the top of my head. Um, and we've been doing, although we're primarily donors to Republicans, we are selectively donors to, to some of those folks that I just mentioned. Um, the party as a whole, I would say, has not really realigned and embraced crypto. And I, I'd say I'm fairly surprised by that. It just seems kind of like a self, like an own goal here. Um, there's a handful of Democrats who like ideologically hated crypto, most notably Senator Warren. Um, but like the vast majority of Democrats, um, in, in, in Congress kind of like don't care or are like pro crypto.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:46Kyle Samani?

  Um, and so I, I've been surprised by the like lack of warm embrace.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Jordy?

• 1:35:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, uh, mutual friend Jared Madfes asked me to ask you, what are you excited about in crypto that no one else is talking about yet, or very few people are talking about?

• 1:36:03Kyle Samani?

  Um, I am really excited for.

• 1:36:09Kyle Samani?

  D-Pen, and this is a category that's been around in crypto for a few years now, and we were very fortunate to help pioneer some of our early investments like helium.

• 1:36:18Kyle Samani?

  But the D-Pen things are starting to really work. Helium, I believe yesterday or the day before was their first day ever. They had a million customers on the helium network in one day. Helium, for those who don't know, is a decentralized wireless network. Anyone can stand up a hotspot in their house and provide wireless coverage, and other people can like use your network and pay you for doing so.

• 1:36:39Kyle Samani?

  We just invested recently in a very high-profile D-Pen project called Double Zero, which basically is bringing private fiber to anyone who wants to pay for private fiber per byte of data. And this is gonna go live over the summer. And it's gonna trade, it's gonna really change low-latency trading on public blockchains. There's a handful of other kind of major D-Pen teams like Hive Map or Pipe Network and a number of others that we're involved in, and I think these are, you know, crypto is fundamentally financial in nature, but like finance is hard for people to grasp. And these, what's cool about these deep in use cases is that they are like fairly easy for people to understand. And the first handful of those things are really starting to achieve escape velocity.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  That's great. How'd you meet the Solana founders?

• 1:37:25Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, I met Anatoly first. I don't actually don't know who introduced me to Anatoly, but I was in San Francisco in April of 2018. And I was at a coworking space and I met Anatoly on a Saturday night.

• 1:37:36Kyle Samani?

  And I was sent, he had sent me the white paper for the proof of history and Solana consented this white paper. I remember I read it and it was absolute trash. And I was like, I have no idea what this does. But someone told me Anatoly was really smart, so I met with him. And after meeting with him, the thing that really stood out to me was of all of the L1, all of the L1 founders were like very academic in background and their pursuit and approach. And Anatoly was the opposite. He was like, I hate academia. I don't ever want to write a fucking paper. I don't ever want to solve an unsolved problem in computer science. He's like, my only job is to like let other people solve problems and then I'm just gonna like apply their solutions to making my software go fast. And his whole career at Qualcomm and Dropbox and other places was just doing that.

• 1:38:20Kyle Samani?

  And I was like, I like this guy. This guy does not sound like all of the other L1 founders. And so we started the kind of back Solana very early on. Obviously got to meet Raj shortly thereafter and the rest is history.

• 1:38:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean, was that investment, did you feel like it was out of your sweet spot? Like, were you stretching in terms of what you're pattern matching against? Or was it like delightfully contrarian in your mind?

• 1:38:46Kyle Samani?

  Um, I mean, look, MultiCoin was very young. We were six months old at the time. We kind of made that first investment and I don't think we had even a sense of like, what is our strike zone or not? We just kind of were like young and running as fast as we could and seeing what happens.

• 1:39:00Kyle Samani?

  In hindsight, I would say like, MultiCoin generally likes to invest in more blue oceans than red oceans. And investing in an L1 was certainly a red ocean investment. And so when we invest in red oceans, we just want to be like,

• 1:39:18Kyle Samani?

  have a pretty pointed view on why the player we're betting on is like the standout player. And as I was just saying, like, just at the founder level, Toly's background was completely different than the other L1 founders. There's a number of other things that kind of stood out, but that being the primary one. I would say now with seven or eight years of history, looking back, I don't think the Solana investment like stood out as being fundamentally like out of strike zone. We knew we hated Ethereum. We knew that like there was problems and we were looking for alternatives. And lots of people were showing up saying like, look, I have an alternative. And so in that sense, it was like very kind of shot on goal.

• 1:39:58Jordi Hays?

  What's been your success rate of identifying new metas? Like, you know, before other people? It feels like in crypto, if people that are trading are trying to trade, you know, specific metas and then identify new ones. But as a VC, you really need to identify things two, three years, sometimes even more than that. Otherwise, you're just going to be too late, right? Once the thing is already big, you don't necessarily want to invest in the fourth or fifth player in a category.

• 1:40:31Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, I feel very fortunate. We've been involved early in a number of metas, for lack of a better word. First, probably being like high-performance blockchains, being Solana. Second, probably being deep in, starting with helium and Hive Mapper. More recently, we've been very focused on on-chain privacy. Most people in crypto have been talking about zero knowledge proofs for, God, five, seven, eight years now. We've scrapped all that and we've made big bets in fully homomorphic encryption, which is a totally different cryptographic approach.

• 1:41:02Kyle Samani?

  So those are probably the three, like, I think, really big ideas where we were, we were pretty early. And there's a number of other areas that are like smaller where I think we've been early. In terms of where, you know, the metas we're like focused on today. I'd say it's like, it's pretty obvious stuff, but like getting stable coins in the hands of people who want stable coins. We've invested in a number of P2P exchanges that make it possible for people in emerging markets in which have capital controls to get stable coins despite their local governments. And so that's a lot of, lot of focus area. And then we've been thinking about what are, as more stable coins come on-chain, what are the secondary and tertiary impacts of that? And then we've been going along a lot of those things in both public and private markets.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  The helping, you know, people with capital controls get on-chain is interesting. It's kind of like crypto's outlaw roots and a little bit, but, but very mission-oriented is saying, we believe in economic freedom, they're, you know, willing to go in and to certain markets and deliver that. So very cool.

• 1:42:05John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is great. Hope the conference is great. Come back on the show anytime. Enjoy.

• 1:42:12Kyle Samani?

  Jordy John, thanks for having me. Awesome to be here.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Ben Pasternak, founder I met years ago because we were both building in consumer packaged goods. He's gone on to crypto. I've gone on to media, but excited to get the update from him.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  This probably has to be the most viral new crypto app.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:35Jordi Hays?

  In at least a year, at least six months.

• 1:42:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to chat with him.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  So Ben, welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Believe in something. Believe in Ben. What's going on? Welcome to the show.

• 1:42:50Speaker 07

  Thank you. Good to see you guys. How you guys doing?

• 1:42:52John Coogan?

  It's good. We haven't talked in a few years. I'd love to just get the update. I had no idea what a terror you've been on.

• 1:42:59Jordi Hays?

  Friend, friend of, friend of ours Dylan is here at the studio. He's going to do a live interview later and he brought up, he brought you up. And John was like, Ben Pasternak?

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Jordi Hays?

  Like the...

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  We talked a bunch.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  And then, and had no idea. He's so, he's so locked in on, on traditional tech that he had no idea what you're up to. And then, and then we explained, of course.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  So yeah, why, why don't you actually just give me a, catch me up to speed on what you're building?

• 1:43:23Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, Believe is a platform for belief and people empowerment. So if you want to contribute something to the world, if you want to build something, if you're going to create art, if you're going to create a song, whatever it is, you can come to Believe and raise the capital you need.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Break the, the, how, how is this different than NFTs? What, what technologies are we leveraging? It's obviously somewhat crypto related, but then comp it to a Patreon for me.

• 1:43:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, so I'll give you some context. Luke Metro, friend of the show, I believe he used Believe.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  This is, okay. Okay. Got it. Cool.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  John's familiar.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Okay. I have, I interact with this.

• 1:43:59Speaker 07

  Cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically, um, we enable people to launch a coin on Solana super easily. Uh, you know, the, the tokenomics itself are pretty straightforward. What we kind of introduced to the space is like a fee that's collected, uh, yeah, basically a trading fee and creators are able to raise money through that trading fee. And yeah, the, the product went like super viral this past month. It's only four weeks old, uh, because you can launch a coin directly from Twitter. So we're kind of tapping into, uh, the existing trend of builders, like building something, uh, screen recording it, posting it on X. And they can just tag Launch Coin to launch a coin.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So you're even removing even more barriers. You don't even have to go to the different website, no wallet or anything. But I assume at some point you can interact with the blockchain at like a lower level through the actual app. But the the the initial kickoff and instantiation happens all on X. Is that correct?

• 1:44:52Speaker 07

  Exactly. Yeah. So you launch an X and, you know, assuming your coin does well, you can download our app, link your X and claim your fees, edit your project details and we're also building kind of like an ecosystem for people to like integrate their coin into that product, you know, engage with different mechanisms and that's all through the app.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  So what, sorry, what what is kind of like the optimistic use case here for someone actually using this to fund kind of a new idea or new concept? Because there are places we can go and get a grant for something, but increasingly it's harder and harder to get a grant for for great art or even raise money for the next movie because of Hollywood and all these other dynamics. So what does a win condition look like for you?

• 1:45:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a different depending on the industry you're in. You know, tech obviously has venture capital, which is a pretty good system. I think it is evolving just because, you know, I guess the big trend is you're seeing a lot of ARR, MRR and people's BIOS. And I think thanks to AI, you know, engineers are way more efficient. There's like less of a need to raise a huge amount of money upfront. So if you can like, again, I guess bootstrapping is kind of in and this is just a great way to get started. So for tech, I think that's the use case. For other, you know, other industries, like there isn't really a great way to fundraise for anything. Like you could start GoFundMe, but those, you know, generally haven't gone too far. I guess, you know, some cases, but pretty, pretty mid outcome. So this can lead to like massive funding, you know, for those types of projects.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that there should, there should be a link between the token and the equity in a company that's eventually created? I imagine at four weeks old, you probably haven't figured out that interaction because that's probably the most complex legal menagerie you can imagine. But talk to me about the long term vision.

• 1:46:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, so when we ship them, we thought they'd be purely like attention coins and speculative. But that quickly changed because, you know, the first launches that did really well started integrating their coins into their product. You know, introducing different like burning mechanisms. So I think that the kind of way I view it right now is, you know, they're essentially like utility coins. And, you know, depending on how I consider ourselves to be like the stripe for coins. So we give developers the tools to like integrate their coin however they want. But at the end of the day, they're really versatile tools and they're going to come up with all different ways that kind of inspire us. Long term, you know, yeah, the regulatory environment is rapidly shifting. So I think that, you know, we're planting a lot of seeds today. And depending on, you know, what happens here and it's looking pretty good so far.

• 1:47:24Speaker 07

  You know, you can do a lot more in terms of equity, et cetera.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  It's very interesting.

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  What's it been like building in crypto transitioning from? It feels like to me, watching what you built with simulate from afar, you know, is always very high profile, always in the news. And more so than I think like a traditional CPG company. So in that sense, like just being good at thinking different and capturing attention. And leveraging that probably set you up pretty well for building in crypto. What would have been some of the challenges? I imagine you're not sleeping a lot because every time you go to sleep, there's something, something's breaking or someone's yelling at you or something like that. But, but what's it been like?

• 1:48:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, you know, it's not my first rodeo to your point. And, you know, prior to simulate, I built a social networking app called Monkey that has tens of millions of users to this day. So I've got, you know, I'm familiar with building consumer software. I think to your point, yeah, the crypto stuff is 24/7. So it's, you know, in most spaces, you have kind of room to iterate and make mistakes in crypto. The market is less forgiving. So it's, you know, it's a tricky balance because you obviously can't be stagnant, but you have to keep evolving and changing things. So yeah, definitely a pressure cooker environment. But, you know, the outcomes are really crazy and. You know, the cool thing about Believe is we have dozens, if not hundreds of creators that have like raised funding. People have like quit their jobs and gone all in on whatever they're building.

• 1:48:47Speaker 07

  And it's rare you get to ship something and for it to immediately have a positive outcome for these people in a like life changing way. So for me, that's like super energizing and I hope we can continue to do that at scale.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  What do you, how do you, how do you think this evolves? Right now, it feels like Believe is a product for individual creators, entrepreneurs, artists, like you're talking about. Is there a world, but, but if you guys become, you know, Stripe for coins? Or however you phrase it, is there a world where traditional companies in the future would, would use Believe to get on chain in some capacity? How do you think about that?

• 1:49:22Speaker 07

  For sure. Yeah, we're already seeing that. So kind of the biggest case study is DUP, which is like a venture backed company. I can't speak to their exact revenue numbers, but very serious company that has, you know, strong PMF. And they launched a coin and their coin has like crushed it. It's brought them like a new revenue stream. It's like really activated like this new community for them. And yeah, Bobby, the founder of DUP has just like really leaned into that. So I think that is going to definitely keep happening. And, you know, I guess like some of these individual builders might like launch a project that later evolves into like an actual company. And the coin is like, yeah, could definitely be tied to that. You know, watching things, watching how things unfold.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  I want to talk about the line between like good and bad projects essentially like there's two narratives. One is, look, it's all a casino, no crying in the casino. The, the, the D gens love to just do whatever and just like, you know, like you know what you're getting into. The, the, the, the, the flip side of that is like, you know, they're, they're, I guess the question is like, there are a lot of people that have launched stuff and it's gone super well and they built really cool things. There's other stuff where it's clearly just been like a rug and a mess and a disaster and it chases them around the internet for a couple of months or even years. Where, where is the line? What would you counsel people to kind of rules of the road today?

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  For getting involved in this and not just frustrating a bunch of people and actually having like a good experience and, and kind of not just obeying the letter of the law, but like the spirit of the law.

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And on that like decision-making around going, you know, doing curation versus just creating a platform and letting people do kind of whatever they want.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:51:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, so you know, I consider, by the way, I had Elon on earlier, love Elon, he's great, you know, friendly with him and you know, so Pump is a huge innovator in the space. I consider Pump to be kind of like the world wide web and what we're doing to be closer to the App Store.

• 1:51:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:23Speaker 07

  You know, you can't completely curate for reasons that I won't go into, like, we can't say, hey, this is good. Because, you know, if we do that, we're going to be wrong some of the time.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:32Speaker 07

  But it is quite easy to say, hey, this is bad. And when we identify bad actors, there's like mechanisms we can integrate to kind of like get basically disincentivize them from launching with us versus like one of these other platforms.

• 1:51:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:44Speaker 07

  The, I think like the biggest thing for us is, you know, founder education. So, you know, I think most Silicon Valley founders, like 99% have like really positive intent with, you know, things they do. And it's our job to kind of like create harmony between the traders and the founders and we can just do like a way better job at that. Similar to like, you know, if you fundraise with like a safe or even if you do like a prize round, your first time doing it, you know, there's usually a pretty big education curve, like a lawyer is explaining to you what these different mechanisms mean. Most people completely make a mess of it, but by their series A, they identify the problems they made. So there is education with like existing fundraising mechanisms. And I think that for this too, there's an education that we need to make like really easy.

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  Yep. I'm interested, we've talked to some founders who have been kind of like curious about dipping their toes in the water and.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, I remember it was, we had some buddies.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  To talk some people off the ledge.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, after the Trump, you know, coin happened.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Why not me?

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  We had some buddies that that were thinking about it and ultimately at the time, I think they made the right decision not to do something, but things are changing week by week.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  And the trick is like, it feels like the the most basic thing would be like, don't rug, don't, don't sell what you own or whatever. But there's this other dynamic that I learned about, and this is probably obvious to everyone who's who's native to crypto, but I could, I could launch a coin, not sell any. Some traders should come in, pump up the coin.

• 1:53:14Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  And then people buy when it's at the high and then it, and then those traders sell and I didn't rug, but like it feels like it rugged and people are like, I lost money on your thing and then they're mad at me. And so I guess in terms of like the messaging and the risk reward, like, how do you think? The rule, what's the rules of the road?

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  What you're describing is there's like a PvP dynamic.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  So I'm curious for you at a platform level, do you think that, do you think that, like, for example, you know, are there things you can do at a product level so that if an artist comes on to believe is like using the mechanism to raise money, you prevent it from turning into this like PvP warfare? Where people are duking it out on chain.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  I feel like we're gonna reinvent accredited investor laws because, because the whole idea is like, is like a venture capital firm can lose a hundred million dollars on some crazy biotech startup or some hard tech startup. And it really is no crying in the casino, you know, it's like, it's like you guys did your due diligence, you signed the documents and you gave it a shot and that particular technology didn't work out. And so as long as there's no fraud, like you move on and you make money on the next thing. But for, you know, like random retail people, sometimes they get caught up and they, and bad outcomes happen. I feel like there's some, there's some vibes in, in the ecosystem that can just be enforced loosely. There's also some rules, there's some platform stuff. So I'm interested in kind of how you're, how you're dealing with that because it's obviously going to evolve a ton over the next few years. I mean, you're going to be running this for a long time.

• 1:54:40Speaker 07

  Totally, yeah. Yeah, to me, it's, so you know, pumping being the world wide web, there's like very small mechanisms that you can integrate that I think just make the whole space a lot safer.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:50Speaker 07

  And yeah, to your point, read the snipers where they like buy a large part of the supply, they kind of dump at the top. There's like a lot of mechanisms like I'm seeing that I think are really interesting, which is basically, you know, having like, you know, extremely high fees for the first, you know, X amount of seconds at trading so that, you know, the snipers will still get some ownership, but they're, the ownership is like greatly reduced.

• 1:55:11John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:55:12Speaker 07

  There's rate limiting. So there's like a max purchase amount, you know, for the first couple of seconds. So yeah, a lot of these anti sniper mechanisms are just like kind of evolving right now. And I think they're going to lead to a much healthier ecosystem. And in addition, like, yeah, I think it's like the kind of fee, it's hard to say what is good, but it's much easier to say what is bad. So if we, if we do detect bad actors, it's pretty easy for us to kind of disincentivize future bad actors.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of the viral growth or the growth of the company right now has been, would you attribute just to the specific kind of like viral growth hack of like being able to launch a coin directly on Twitter or X?

• 1:55:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'd say maybe like 50%. I think that, you know, the other thing is that, you know, within the so-and-so trenches is, you know, they've been trading these kind of like traditional meme coins forever. And this, it's a really fun game that everyone enjoys, but there is hunger for a new game. And I think that the vision here has really like energized the whole space. So that narrative alone, I think, has done a lot of damage in a good way.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  The opportunity, right?

• 1:56:17Speaker 07

  Yep, yep.

• 1:56:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Anyway, anything else?

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  We're good. This was great. Thank you so much for breaking it down.

• 1:56:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you have a bunch of new things to work on in the 15 minutes that you've been on. Good luck, good luck building. Yeah, excited to follow.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for breaking it down. I actually look at time.

• 1:56:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. It's been cool to see everything blow up for you guys in a good way.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we appreciate it. Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:56:38Jordi Hays?

  Great to chat. Cheers.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  A little round of applause.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  I just see him winning. If you're in CPG, private crypto.

• 1:56:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  It works, it works.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Guess that's the play.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Every once in a while. Next up, we have Tom from Dragonfly Capital coming in the studio. We'll break down some more trends, investments.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting to look at companies like Pump, which was only launched something like a year ago.

• 1:57:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  And now is done close to a billion dollars of revenue. Then you have Believe. And both these businesses look pretty obvious in hindsight, right? But just required a specific type of founder to unlock it.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Really quickly, if you're designing a crypto app, you gotta be on Vanta. Go to vanta.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams.

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  You said Vanta instead of Figma.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry, Figma. Figma. Go to figma.com.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  I was like, whoa, whoa. Yeah, go to figma.com.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  It is the backbone of this show.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  And if you work at Vanta, use Figma to design Vanta. We're creating a Kuretsu. And if you're at Figma, use Vanta for SOC 2 compliance. Vanta automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 1:58:02Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Two ads in one go. Let's do it.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  Nice work, John. Let's bring in Tom.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Tom. How are you doing, Tom?

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:58:11John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you.

• 1:58:12Speaker 08

  Technology brothers. Good to see you guys.

• 1:58:14Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? How are you?

• 1:58:16Speaker 08

  Not a lot. Doing well. I'm loving the suits. I mean, you guys always bring it, but you look great.

• 1:58:21Jordi Hays?

  Have you watched the stream at all? Are we asking too normie of questions or are we hitting the right topics?

• 1:58:27Speaker 08

  No, it's the right blend of norminess. There's a lot of stablecoin conversation, but that's to be expected. You know, people, people love the stables. So no, it's been good. It's been great.

• 1:58:35John Coogan?

  I mean, my bare case on stables is I went super long stablecoins and my portfolio is completely flat. And so I'm looking for alpha. Give me some crazy ideas. What are you excited about right now? That's not one year out, but 10 years out, 100 years out. What's the future look like? Break it down.

• 1:58:53Speaker 08

  100 years out, I think we're all going to be dead and replaced by a agent. So it's all good. I'm not, I'm not too concerned about that. You know, on the stablecoin thing, I wouldn't sweat it. I think you're going to get a little, you know, circle equity airdrop during the ICA. They're going to just airdrop some shares to all the USDC holders.

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  We're shilling for the US dollar. We're US dollar shells.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anytime, anytime, anytime a company sells like a traditional crypto asset and buys USDC, they're defending the dollar.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  They're defending the dollar.

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:23Speaker 08

  I, I agree. I actually, you know, I think you're talking about stablecoin. And when people talk about stablecoins, they talk a lot about flow, right? They talk about using stablecoins for payments, B2B payments, P2P payments, whatever. I think the stock thing is actually underrated and there's a few people in DC who talk about this. I think Paul Ryan was actually talking about basically stablecoins being a way to, you know, mitigate a lot of the US debt because now you have all these new treasury holders. Tether is like the seventh largest treasury holder at this point. And I'm like, this feels like a very pro US bipartisan topic of yes, we want people to be buying. We want more marginal treasury buyers. Stablecoins provide that route.

• 2:00:04Speaker 08

  And it's like a little bit of like a, you know, saying the quiet part out loud, but I don't really care. I'm, you know, very pro US and I think like using.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the irony of the digital assets which people saw as alternatives to the dollar are now some of the greatest defenders is kind of beautifully ironic.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, to dig into it though, is Tether's the seventh largest holder, is that because they displaced like fidelity by taking like all of the treasuries and they just moved them over? Or are these, can we really think of these as like net new treasuries that are being bought?

• 2:00:37Speaker 08

  These are incremental, right? Because these are people who are offshore, people who are in Argentina or Turkey.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:00:42Speaker 08

  Certainly maybe some of it is cannibalistic, but for the most part, from what we've seen from, and actually, Rob Haddock, who's one of the GPs with me at Dragonfly, just had a great stablecoin research piece come out yesterday, talking about who's actually using stablecoins. And it's, yes, some people in the US, and yes, maybe some people who previously would have purchased treasuries through the broker, but actually, it's people who are offshore. And that is actually, I think, kind of the killer app.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  What is happening in the Asian crypto markets right now? I know you've spent a ton of time over the years, kind of focused in that area. How is the regulatory environment kind of evolving? What does crypto activity look like?

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  And how do we get them to rotate entirely into USDC?

• 2:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's part two.

• 2:01:29Speaker 08

  Well, they're waiting for the airdrop. No, I mean, Asia and the US have always, sort of, I would say specialized when it comes to crypto. Like, if you look back the past three, four years, Asia has really been running laps around the US when it comes to anything C-Fi. You know, we're early investors in Bybit and BitGet, which are now two of the largest exchanges, incredible businesses. I mean, we're talking billions of dollars in revenue. They, some of the features and some of the products that they offered, US exchanges are just now sort of catching up to. So I would cite as one example, a lot of Asian exchanges offered what we now call CD-Fi,

• 2:02:09Speaker 08

  of offering a totally normal centralized exchange experience in the front end, but wrapping some sort of DeFi protocol on the backend to be able to offer people, you know, trading for new assets, or to be offer lending and financing opportunities, or yield opportunities, or whatever's actually available on-chain, but without all of the complexity and yuckiness of, you know, having to manage your own keys, which is kind of what normies want. Coinbase just launched, you know, Bitcoin-backed loans.

• 2:02:36Speaker 08

  Using Morpho, which is an on-chain lending protocol, maybe a few months ago. So this is something where the US is now just kind of playing catch up to what's been happening in Asia for many, many years. I think there's also been this trend of more, I would say, Chinese, previously like O2O founders, moving into crypto and frankly, also moving offshore because they see, hey, venture in China is like kind of dead. You know, the domestic market is kind of dead, but I'm a really great technologist. I'm a really great builder. Building in crypto is a way to access a global user base and a global capital base. But, you know, with sort of the skills that I already have. And so, you know, we're early investors in Kito, which is sort of this now has been coined Infify,

• 2:03:21Speaker 08

  which I don't quite love, but I think it's a cool concept of.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Sounds cool.

• 2:03:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, basically scraping Twitter data right now, ingesting that and then sort of spitting that back out into this sort of gamified cloud system. They also do some really cool stuff with like transcribing all of these podcasts and just like giving you sort of like an alpha sense for crypto. But again, that's like a lot of Asian talent now, now sort of moving into crypto.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about the intersection of AI and crypto personally? We've talked with a number of people about the potential of stable coins within agents, but there's a bunch of other.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  How often should you pivot from AI to crypto and back? Is that every three months, every six months, every two years? What are you thinking?

• 2:04:02Jordi Hays?

  No, but in all seriousness, how are you? I mean, I imagine you're a consumer crypto investor. You need to get, you need to get this bet right. Otherwise you're going to look like a fool in 10 years. So I imagine.

• 2:04:16Speaker 08

  Jordy, this is what I have nightmares about.

• 2:04:17Jordi Hays?

  I am sure you do.

• 2:04:20Speaker 08

  No, I think we've been maybe a little bit contrarian when it comes to AI crypto in being more bearish on this category. I think. A lot of what AI crypto is broken down into is people trying to do decentralized inference, sort of this GPU marketplace. And this is sort of, again, an old idea in crypto. This was something that Gollum way back in the day was trying to offer for video rendering. Now kind of coming back, there's decentralized training, decentralized data marketplaces. I think for the most part, this is just really tricky to build, right? Like, if you think about how you actually train a state-of-the-art model, you don't use a million consumer-grade GPUs all around the world. It's like, you want one big co-located A100 cluster. Like, that is actually kind of the thing that you want.

• 2:05:05Speaker 08

  And so like a decentralized network, actually, it's just like, it doesn't really have the right characteristics of something you would, like the type of compute that you want. Compute is not a monolith. The areas where, I think we've been investing in AI meets crypto in the area that we get really excited about. You mentioned sort of NPC and agent payments. I agree, this just seems like kind of a no-brainer where you want deterministic finality, you want your micro-payments, something that just like existing SaaS company, existing SaaS payment companies just aren't really set up to provide. If you want to be able to say, hey, I want like one simple API call for a fraction of a penny, and then never going to use the service again. That's something where stablecoin payments are uniquely enabled,

• 2:05:52Speaker 08

  are uniquely positioned to be able to do this. But it's just not something that you're normally going to see out of traditional payment companies. So we're investors in a company called GoldSky, which is building in this category. We're also, I mean, kind of on the compute topic, we're investors in Exo, which is sort of borderline crypto. It's, I don't know if you've seen them around Twitter, but basically, they allow you to run sort of sharded inference locally on your own network. So let's say you have, you know, a couple Mac Studios. They're really sort of specializing Apple silicon right now. It will automatically discover and execute, let's say, something like DeepSeek R1 across those different computers on your local network. So you can run really great models on consumer-grade hardware,

• 2:06:37Speaker 08

  given sort of the existing shortage of GPUs. And so you can imagine that, hey, if you can sort of distribute and shard compute across your local network. Maybe at some point in the future, you can actually do that across a global network. They're building towards that. I don't know if that's exactly the direction that they want to go. But in the interim, you have this really, really useful tool that allows you to actually get access to local edge compute models, which I think ultimately is where that whole industry is going to go. Versus, hey, we're all going to be running our own models on, you know, someone else's cloud.

• 2:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Back to the venture side, how do you see crypto funds evolving? It seems like there's a number of funds with massive AUM and maybe not enough places to bet on the equity side. Do these funds end up having, you know, be end up 80% sort of liquid, 20% equity, you know, sort of early-stage focused? Or how do you see that evolving? Especially, I was talking with Ani on your team offline and he was talking about how with AI being so deflationary, we just have companies now that have massive potential, but just don't really need capital.

• 2:07:52Jordi Hays?

  So you're sitting in the investor seat being like, please take my money versus, you know, maybe 10 years ago would have been reversed.

• 2:07:59Speaker 08

  Totally. I think that is definitely a trend that we see. And I don't think it's even necessarily a crypto venture thing specifically. But, I mean, you were talking earlier about people throwing, you know, ARR in the bio. And it's like, yeah, that is downstream from just operators having so much leverage now that they didn't have before. Crypto amplifies that where now you can sort of go public. You can access a massive user base. You can be way more sort of revenue positive than you were before. And so maybe the history of crypto funds, just to sort of take a step back. If you think of sort of like 2017, 2018, for reference, Dragonfly was started in 2018. Crypto was a monolith. You give some capital to a fund manager and they're going to decide, okay, I'm going to buy some Bitcoin and I'm going to buy some ETH.

• 2:08:44Speaker 08

  Am I going to invest in a, you know, early-stage equity round? Am I going to buy a SaaS? Whatever that sort of blend was, they're going to be managing that for you. And oftentimes that was in a true closed-ended venture structure. But sometimes it would be in a liquid hedge fund structure with some side pocket. And it was like, the whole thing was kind of, no one really knew what this asset class was going to look like. And so you give capital to someone else and they figure it out. There was also obviously a byproduct of the fact that Even but getting access to something like Bitcoin previously was so difficult, right? Like you couldn't buy it through your brokerage, your bank, no ETFs, most like you need some wacky custodian, but the whole process was very convoluted and so great. You've managed to do a fund, that's something you can underwrite and they can actually go

• 2:09:27Speaker 08

  and determine how much of the Bitcoin exposure that you want. You fast forward several years and now, hey, if you're a reasonably sophisticated LP, you can go and choose how much Bitcoin you want to buy yourself. We actually don't buy major liquids in our fund at all. And it's like, I don't need to, I don't need to charge you two and 20 to go buy Bitcoin or ETH or Sol or whatever it actually is. You can go do that for yourself. And so there's been more specialization in the crypto fund area where now you have true dedicated venture funds like Dragonfly that are kind of doing, let's say, seed through B. In addition to, hey, maybe doing some treasury purchases for some liquid assets that we think have sort of venture upside. And then you have sort of true dedicated liquid funds.

• 2:10:12Speaker 08

  Maybe those are Delta neutral funds or credit funds or actually just sort of long only discretionary funds. But there's sort of this true split and I would say it's a bit like the sharks and the jets. I think the liquid funds always talk shit about the venture funds and the venture funds, I don't really talk shit about the liquid funds, I think they're great. But it's, you know, there's sort of the specialization in the strategy. Maybe to what, you know, Ani was mentioning and what you were mentioning earlier. Now the trajectory of fundraising goes, hey, we're going to raise a pre-seed, though maybe we'll raise a seed, maybe we'll do an A, TBD, but generally, hey, you'll launch a token, token will go public and then maybe you'll do a treasury sale after the fact if you need more capital.

• 2:10:53Speaker 08

  And so if you've raised, you know, north of a billion dollars, to your point, where do you actually go and deploy that? Maybe you, there are some equity only companies and certainly we do a number of those where we think, hey, there's, this company is going to IPO, you know, we don't think there's going to be a token, it can be just a pure sort of revenue generating company. And I think that's like, actually kind of underrated area of the space. But it's sort of unclear where the rest of that capital goes, which is why you sometimes see these very wacky rounds where some company raises some insane amount of money and you're like, what is going on here? And I think there's just this lag effect between, you know, capital raised by VCs and then capital actually deployed into startups.

• 2:11:34Jordi Hays?

  What keeps you up at night about the industry right now? Potential risks? It feels like the industry broadly, you know, this year's been up and down, but so has every year in crypto to some degree. But generally, the industry is sort of like riding on a high, getting more regulatory clarity. There hasn't been, you know, a $20 billion hack in a while. But like, what kind of, what kind of risks do you see at a, at a high level that, that actually worry you?

• 2:12:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, a million things, honestly. It's, it's an industry that is always changing and therefore there's always more things to be worried about, but also things to be, you know, excited about at the same time. Maybe to your point around regulatory clarity, I'm more worried that we don't get regulatory clarity and we fail to get a stablecoin bill passed, we fail to get a market structure bill passed. Both of those are, in the short term, not terribly bad. I mean, I would say it's impressive how well stablecoins have grown in spite of being in this sort of regulatory area. In the long term, the question is, can we get a digital version of cash that is, that

• 2:12:48Speaker 08

  can be, that can have privacy for peer-to-peer transactions? Or do we get true Panopticon status centralized control? That's something that is going to be bad on, you know, a 10 to 100 year time horizon, maybe not so short-term bad, but we need to sort of lay the foundation for that now so we don't end up in that bad situation. I'm also frankly, maybe a little bit worried about a lot of these sort of Bitcoin treasury structured companies. I think there's only so much market demand for these actual virtual assets and I'm like, it is great when numbers go up. I'm a little bit worried about what's happening when, when, when numbers goes down.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's just give it up for when the number goes up.

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just stop right there. You don't need to talk about when the number go down.

• 2:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:37John Coogan?

  Just focus.

• 2:13:37Jordi Hays?

  I want to cut you off right there.

• 2:13:38Speaker 08

  That's how everyone happens. So let's not worry about that. But overall, I mean, it is a great time in the industry. It feels like, like you're saying, it just never dies. Every time someone thinks it's over, that's actually the time that we're so back. That is, that is the exact time to be back. And it, you know, it feels like we're back now in a big way. So yeah, we're really excited about where the future of the industry is going.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for hopping on. This is fantastic.

• 2:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on. Come back on again soon. I think you might be a generational yapper. You're one of us.

• 2:14:10Speaker 08

  You know, we lived a post, we died a post. It's all part of the same, the same life cycle. So thanks for having me on.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  All right. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you, Tom. Cheers.

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  In the meantime, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm just going to clap through this, Ron.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  For modern, modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

• 2:14:30Jordi Hays?

  I would bet that every founder that is coming on the show today already uses Linear.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Don't say that. They're all about to convert with our coupon code.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  We don't have a code. We don't have a code. Linear, Linear is going to eventually get to 105% market penetration because certain companies will have two instances running.

• 2:14:48John Coogan?

  That's ideal.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:49John Coogan?

  That's our goal.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Total domination. Yeah, we're trying to capture 110% of the TAM.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll go into that more later. Next up, we have Konstantin from BlockDemon here. How you doing? Welcome to the stream.

• 2:15:03Speaker 09

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking it off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company, just to get us started?

• 2:15:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, no. Listen, it's a, it's a great question. BlockDemon, you know, the word daemon means in computer science and operating system that runs silently in the background. And that's really what BlockDemon is. We connect institutions to blockchain networks and we allow for compliant and secure monetization of the underlying fee and earn structure, right? And so translated, it means we run nodes for institutions. And so we're pure B2B play.

• 2:15:37Speaker 09

  And so we run core infrastructure, we run around 250,000 nodes across 40 different data centers around the world, enabling basically institutions to purchase and hold assets and their respective consumers. That has been the the the large sort of activity over the last five years. Right now, we're sort of pivoting more into the DeFi area of things where the next few years are really all about allowing people to borrow and lend against the assets that they're now, you know, able to hold and buy a little more easily. And so BlockDemon is an enabler. We're really purpose-built to meet enterprise-grade demand for infrastructure.

• 2:16:18Speaker 09

  Couple of things that are special, I guess, is that we are domiciled in the US, for better or worse. And, you know, we've been able to attract very institutional capital. And so on our board governance, we have people like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and Citibank is another large institution with major shareholder status. And so we've got a really unique investor and partner group. I'd say out of the top 500 institutions offering crypto, 70% are customers of our infrastructure. And so, you know, we're we're very foundational to the space. We've been around for seven and a half years.

• 2:16:59Speaker 09

  We, you know, raised a bunch of money from, you know, said institutions in order to really bring institutions to crypto networks and do it in a way that's, as mentioned, secure. I'm from Germany, come from the cell network world and I always write notes of cell networks. He's at Nokia.

• 2:17:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, actually, is my claim to fame. I worked for, back then, a young man called Niko Scharoa, who, you know, for a moment was president at SoftBank and now runs Palo Alto Networks and also was chief business officer at Google. And so there's been a lot of people who started in cell networks and figuring out how. Make that data work.

• 2:17:40Jordi Hays?

  One network, one type of network to another.

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:43Speaker 09

  There you go.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Well, can you give us a temperature check on the enterprise? In the last cycle, a lot of the pitches for the enterprise, there was a lot of exploratory budgets, a lot of, oh, maybe we can put our, our inventory on a blockchain and we'll store the data, you know, and, and but now our institutions coming around and are they more up to speed on what crypto can do for them? How are they thinking about plugging in and what is, what is kind of top of mind for crypto amongst like the Fortune 500 from what you, from what you've assessed?

• 2:18:15Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think there is different categories, right? And so first off, obviously, the core financial institutions, the Robin Huts, the PayPal's, that enable people to purchase crypto and hold it are now all investigating, you know, how do you earn using these assets, right? And so I think you have existing fintech players that have offered basic crypto services that are now feel a lot more empowered in, in, you know, what we call staking or DeFi to offer sort of earn adjacent products to their customer base. I think you'll see a big trend there. In the TradFi world, I think you're going to see a lot more interest in wallets specifically.

• 2:18:58Speaker 09

  And so they're really at that stage of like figuring out, hey, how do we actually, what technology do we use in order to custody crypto assets in our own infrastructure? And so I think, you know, in the past, basically, you didn't really want to touch crypto or if you used a third party that you could point to if anything went wrong. And so now I think in the current iteration, all these institutions are really figuring out what their own proprietary basic solution setup is in order to custody assets and then also offer adjacent earn potential here. And so we see a lot of that. And with the sort of more Sony-esque type of companies in the world, you see a lot of interest in building their own version of a blockchain, L2s.

• 2:19:41Speaker 09

  You know, I don't know if you remember the good old days when everybody had a totally permissioned little hyper ledger thing. Going, I think we've made some progress there.

• 2:19:49Jordi Hays?

  It is a funny thing. It's like, we should, we should pay attention to this crypto, you know, thing and then, oh, we should just make our own blockchain. That's, that's, that's the way to get involved. It's, it's, yeah, it definitely was a, was an era.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Start our own Visa network competitor. Yeah. Yeah. Why not?

• 2:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Why not? What, um, go for it.

• 2:20:07Speaker 09

  Yeah. And then it's changed with like the, you know, the optimism, the ZK zinc arbitrage, like, you know, people being able to easily spin up a sort of permission chain on a public network, right? And so there's been some progress there. And we see quite a bit there. And then obviously all the ETF stuff and, and, and technology that's, that you need in order to basically custody these assets and offer yield over time.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  What, what legacy, you know, the, we've had a bunch of interesting conversations today and different perspectives. And it feels like in many, you know, the, the irony of stable coins is that in many way, they actually sort of expand and support the dollar, right? So this crypto being this sort of disruptive force is at the same time propping up the sort of legacy system. What areas of traditional finance do you feel like are, are most prone to disruption over the next decade?

• 2:21:05Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, well.

• 2:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Because, and the context is like, those legacy institutions are coming to you now, or they already have, and they're saying, help us not get disrupted, right? Like, we don't want to be Nokia, basically.

• 2:21:17Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think interestingly enough, everyone is, and thank you for pointing that out. I feel like I joined Nokia in 2005 on top of the world. I left in 2010 after I ran it into the ground. And so.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Hey, at least you could joke about it now.

• 2:21:33Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, I was obviously a, you know, small little figure there, but it was an interesting learning, right? Because ultimately you had an entity that was very, very good in building really complex technology in thousand different versions, but very, very bad and streamlining single software. Tools across its platform. And so I think you'll find that financial institutions have a similar risk, right? Like the the IT stack of a large TreadFi is insane. You know, I mean, it's probably akin to what Elon Musk, when he talks about Doge, you'd be surprised about how archaic a lot of these systems actually still are. I mean, if you look at the structure of the SWIFT network, that obviously is one, sorry, guys.

• 2:22:15Speaker 09

  And then you also, just the ERP systems underneath it are so complex. And, you know, JP Morgan has a hundred thousand engineers and they keep on building and doing stuff. And so pivoting away from that archaic infrastructure is really, really difficult. And, you know, they're starting to do it. I think frankly, I think we're we're all way behind here, you know, even as institutions, because the beauty of AI and blockchain and the opening up of financial systems via Bitcoin is going to accelerate the moveability of money. And so remittance specifically are sort of areas where I think time's running out for institutions. You know, it's like either you can innovate really, really quickly or people are going to find other ways to do it, you know,

• 2:23:00Speaker 09

  and let it be a Coinbase issued stablecoin or something like that, that can actually take care of a lot of these things. And so it's going to be really, really interesting how financial institutions hold on to also the custody component, right? And crypto has a self-custodial cryptographic sort of component. And if you think about what you pay your bank, first and foremost, you pay them so they hold custody of your assets, right? And so often custody can be fairly archaic, but with that custody, you also obviously lose a lot of control. And, you know, you have technology and solutions today that can replicate basically what an institution offers here for zero cost, right? It's really the The consumer that is nervous in touching them and the infrastructure currently is way,

• 2:23:45Speaker 09

  way too complex for anyone to use, but you're going to see a lot of improvements there on the user experience front. Also with AI, I heard you guys mention AI and obviously, you know, you got to pivot into AI every three months. But I think one use case that I kind of want to point out that we're working on that I think is really interesting on the wallet layer is using AI to issue very simple commands to crypto networks, right? To just say, hey, I just want to send Ethereum to this address, you know, like kind of, and that can be an AI.

• 2:24:14Jordi Hays?

  It'd be nice if you could tell a wallet, you know, an agentic wallet, just make me a 10% return daily, compounded daily, just forever. Please don't make mistakes.

• 2:24:23Speaker 09

  Just get me a 10x. Right. But you know, but basically make the interface that simple, right? Hey, wire securely $100 to France. You know, I don't know if they need it, but you know, we can, those type of things I think are going to be real improvements on how those work.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jordi. How, what's happening with emerging markets? We've talked about with other guests today around the risk that certain governments might not want their citizens to be, you know, selling their native currency for something like stables or other assets. And so how much attention are you paying to the policy decisions in markets outside of the US? Or is that not a focus for you right now?

• 2:25:08Speaker 09

  No, for sure. I mean, the outside of the US is still our largest market because we were in the US and obviously got clobbered by regulators and by basically Operation Choke Point 2.0. And so we expanded massively into Asia. Asia is a really exciting market for us. You'll see, you know, Asia's lots of things, lots of different technologies and standards. And, you know, you have the full spectrum of really, really dogmatic and suppressive systems and very, very open ones technically. And so, yes, we follow this very closely. I think if I may age myself again, you know, it reminds me a little bit back in the day,

• 2:25:49Speaker 09

  we were trying to figure out how to distribute music via digital channels and cell networks, right? And so, once you pixelate stuff in ones and zeros, it's just really difficult to contain it, right? And you're going to see that with currencies on a very basic level as well, right? Like it's this like. You can try and do the China and ban Bitcoin and things like that, but the reality is it's a temporary solution. People are going to find ways around it. And so I think we've.

• 2:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like the piracy, media piracy has not been solved, right? Like at all, not even close, right? It's probably easier than ever to get movies online that, that, that without, you know, paying for them. So the idea that you're going to sort of regulate crypto out of its existence is, is a bit silly.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Last question from me, MCP, people have been talking about potentially integrating stable coins into that standard. Where, how do you see it evolving? What are you excited about? Or do you think it'll just live side by side with crypto rails?

• 2:26:50Speaker 09

  I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I have a preference, right? I think.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  What is your preference?

• 2:26:54Speaker 09

  Well, my preference is that it's all integrated in one, right? Like, I really wanna, ultimately, I'm, I'm a old school crypto guy. I want access and, and inclusion via crypto rails for everyone that no single entity can control, right? And so my job is to bring a substantial amount of volume from hard-coded institutional rails into open source on-chain networks, right? And so that's my preference. I think it's gonna take a minute with regulators, even though we have a much better administration that's a lot more open to thinking about how to regulate this and a market structure bill coming that we're working with and, and trying to ensure

• 2:27:37Speaker 09

  that this gets done correctly. I, I think it's gonna take a few iterations. You know, like, we're gonna get something done, some regulation at first, and some of it is gonna be good, some of it is not gonna be so good. And then we gotta see how, how, how much support the industry can, can continue to garner across also the aisle, basically. It has to be a bipartisan issue on the regulatory front as well, if we want to real, see real, real progress. And so, but, you know, obviously, we're, we're very optimistic here that we can come up with something that is as open as possible and replaces as many of the legacy rails as possible.

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Yeah, really enjoyed the conversation. Would love to get the update from you as, as things progress and we get more clarity on the regulatory side too. But thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

• 2:28:29John Coogan?

  Next up, I gotta tell you about Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance benchmark series. Benchmark series.

• 2:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder how sales tax.

• 2:28:43John Coogan?

  Well, you know who has to pay sales tax? Pudgy Penguins because they sell real things in the real world. Oh yeah, they do. They do. And we have Luca from Pudgy Penguins coming on the stream next, talking to us. We should just make the next 20 minutes us pitching Numeral. Exactly, exactly. How you paying sales tax? Let's get to the really important questions. Yeah. We don't want to know about the NFT market. The people want to know. We want to know about your sales tax stack and how Numeral's fitting in. Luca, welcome to the stream. We are of course joking. How are you doing?

• 2:29:12Speaker 10

  What's going on? Welcome.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. I'd love to start with kind of the, a little bit of the history of Pudgy Penguins because I know that there's been like a series of eras for the company and you're obviously taking it in somewhat of a new direction or expansion now, but what's the story that you tell about the genesis of the project, your involvement over time and like where things are going?

• 2:29:40Speaker 10

  So the, the 62nd version is I was a huge collector of Pudgy Penguins when they launched about three and a half years ago. They were kind of one of the three golden projects of the NFT bull run. It was really Bored Apes, Punks and Penguins. Unfortunately Penguins kind of got mismanaged. They were founded by a bunch of 18 year olds in their college dorm basement with no operational experience. So no fault to them, you know, Bored Apes ended up being a $4 billion business. Punks became a legacy collection with a multi-billion dollar market cap and Penguins kind of withered, withered to the wayside. But at that time, while I was collecting the NFTs, I was a CMO and co-founder of a company called Gelblaster, which was North America's fastest growing toy business.

• 2:30:25Speaker 10

  I was really involved in just IP.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  We gotta get those for the studio. Yeah, I, I see those ads all the time. I didn't realize you were behind this. Ben, Ben, order some Gelblasters right now. Yeah.

• 2:30:35Speaker 10

  I'll get you guys sent, I'll send some to the office, but that, that I was, I was really immersed there. And so when I just closed my eyes and I thought pudgy penguins, I just thought this is a multi-billion dollar business. And so rather than being like a disgruntled holder who was complaining all day, I decided to step up to the plate. And I bought the project for about two and a half million bucks, three years ago, April 4th. So we're about three years and three and a half months into this. I think what we want to be today is I think twofold. I think on one side of the spectrum, we want to be the face of crypto. When you think crypto today, I think crypto is intimidating. It's taboo, but I think there's no better way to invade the hearts and minds of everyday consumers and with cute pudgy penguins. And I think there's no better

• 2:31:16Speaker 10

  representative from a mascot perspective for the industry than the pudgy penguin. You know, the story all encompassing. And on the other side of the spectrum, we want to be the face of penguins around the world. When you think penguins, I want you to think pudgy penguins. And I just believe that the penguin animal is severely underdeveloped.

• 2:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you guys give, do you guys like do any charity things for the actual penguins? You know, kind of like a royalty, a little give back for those down?

• 2:31:41Speaker 10

  We've done a couple activations. I think children's, children's health and penguins, I think are the two places that we donate and we're charitable. Awesome.

• 2:31:49John Coogan?

  You mentioned that the, the early pudgy penguins community was unhappy with the development of the project. It sounds like that's in contrast to the other NFT projects where people were satisfied. But from my perspective, like a lot of these, they, the 10K NFTs go out, they mint, and then I don't really engage with these projects deeply enough to know like, what is the community clamoring for? So what was the community in pudgy penguins clamoring for that they weren't receiving? And then what are you building that actually will satisfy the community? Or what like, what are they asking for? And what, what are you trying to give them?

• 2:32:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think, I think what every community member in crypto wants is productivity and, and pushing the boundaries and forward progress within, you know, both the, the internal IP and maybe just for the category in and of itself. But just to be clear, like, we bought Pudgy Penguins under the guise that the NFT race and the NFT build out was severely underdeveloped. Uh, and there was a bar still yet to be set and we bought this business to win in this category and ultimately to win in the broader crypto category. And so I think from our perspective, it's not just winning for our community members within our small niche and within our, you know, within, within the pudgy penguin universe. It was really winning

• 2:33:07Speaker 10

  for the entirety of NFTs because prior to us, NFTs stayed in this digital universe and this, you know, vision that Ready Player One was going to come 20 years earlier than it actually was going to come. And I thought, you know, if this was the next generation brand and all of these companies were raising billions of dollars under this guise, then as a brand builder for the last eight years, I felt like they just weren't doing all of the obvious things that all these brands have to do to win. Are we going digital? Is everything going to be digital 20 years from now? Sure. But today, people need physical interactions. Uh, and I think that's a huge reason why we've won and we've been so successful the last couple of years is we really blended the two worlds, right? We have, you know,

• 2:33:47Speaker 10

  toys and 10,000 retailers, every toy is tied in with an NFT and crypto experience. Uh, and, and the whole thing really segues, you would build this thing the same way you've, you know, Hasbro or, or Mattel or Disney would build it, but it's crypto native, it's internet native, and I think that's the difference.

• 2:34:04Jordi Hays?

  How do you balance developing the IP in the way that you believe will create the most value long-term and, and kind of the, the desires or, or wishes from the, the community of initial holders, right? Because as a business, you constantly need to be evolving, reinventing yourself. Um, and I imagine there's a bunch of good parts about having this super loyal, dedicated fan base that's, you know, heavily invested in the projects, but then there's also some hard decisions to make at different times.

• 2:34:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think the community's bought in under this guise that we are creating the internet's Mickey Mouse and that everything that we do is to support that thesis and they're aligned in that vision. I think the problem, or not the problem, but I think the hard part about this business, and it's relevant for a lot of crypto founders, but I coined this like three years ago, which is we're basically building a publicly traded startup, where I have all of the cons of being publicly traded with none of the pros and I'm a startup, right? If I shit the bed, right, and price in crypto is the best marketing because it's such a hyper-financialized asset class. And, and, and you know, I do something great, price goes up, you know, holders are in the money. The more in the money they are, the more they champion, the more they recycle those profits back into the product

• 2:35:20Speaker 10

  and the different, the different product lines that we have within the business. But then obviously if you shit the bed, you know, it, the, the, the financialization to me is, is a hyper form of alignment and it can be your greatest superpower, which I think we've been able to harness and galvanize over the last couple of years, or it can be your greatest kryptonite and you've seen situations like this with basically 98% of founders in crypto. Is, that ends up biting them in the ass. They make one wrong step, they don't have that relationship, they don't have their rapport with the community and then the whole thing just kind of backfires.

• 2:35:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you think if you look back at, at the NFT category holistically, is our projects, is part of that kryptonite just being over-capitalized? Is that, how much of a strength have you, you know, I don't know how, how resource constrained you guys have been exactly, but I imagine it's quite a bit more constrained than, than many other, many other projects in the space, especially as, you know, certain projects got marked, you know, really, really high, a bunch of capital flooded in and I don't really have a good lens on, on how that's worked out.

• 2:36:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think that's just entrepreneurship 101. I mean crypto in general makes people more money than they're supposed to make. You know, it's kind of like there's an arbitrage that I talk about a lot where, you know, there's a real opportunity for builders in Web 2 to come here because the premium on users and success here is probably 10 to 15 to 20x what it would be in the real world. Meaning like the EBITDA of pudgy penguins, you know, might be, you know, we might be a 300, 350 million dollar business today. You know, we've created, you know, five plus billion dollars in value over the last couple of years and, you know, our total ecosystem is north of $2 billion. So I think from our

• 2:37:15Speaker 10

  perspective, it's really just a matter of, you know, being resource constraint has been the, one of the biggest things for us and probably the thing, the lens that I'm most proud about. I mean, our, our next 10 competitors that we've outperformed over the last couple of years have, you know, nine figures in funding, whether it's from venture or community. But that's naturally, every entrepreneur gets, gets into that problem at some point. Unless you really, you know, fight tooth and nail over the course of a long period of time to earn that capital. But in crypto, you can make a lot of capital and raise a lot of capital really quickly. And the NFT cohort of 2020, 2021 is exactly that. I

• 2:37:56Speaker 10

  mean, guys made, you know, 50, 100, a billion dollars, you know, within 12 months of being in business. You're not going to be a superstar organization, you know, off of that type of growth, unless you're just a one in a million entrepreneur and group. But that, that wasn't the case here. And so I think, I think us being scrappy has been huge for us. We raised, you know, nine million our seed round and we haven't raised anything else for pudgy since then. And, you know, this year we'll do 40, 50 million dollars in revenue. So, you know, so far, so good.

• 2:38:26Brian Armstrong?

  That's awesome. Can you talk about?

• 2:38:30John Coogan?

  The decision to surface crypto functionality to the user, to the customer. The Instagram has 1.8 million followers, never really mentions crypto. There's a world where you're communicating to a non-crypto native audience. You have a different group of customers that's very crypto native. How do you balance those things out? Is it all just one on-ramp, one direction or the other direction? How do you think about that dichotomy?

• 2:38:56Speaker 10

  Yeah, so I'm a consumer product guy and in consumer products, conversions and action. In crypto, and I think with building IP and character and love and affinity, I think conversion is a process, right? And so I think the idea that you immediately sell people on something that is still taboo and still intimidating, I think is a mistake. And so my objective is how do I create love and affinity around this character? You know, positive impact around this character, positive association around this character over the course of time. And as they become super fans and participate in fandom, they then go and figure out that this is crypto and go down that rabbit hole. And I think that's a really beautiful story. Now, on one side, that's epic, but I think a lot of people always misinterpreted our

• 2:39:41Speaker 10

  strategy, which is like, oh, how do you get the non-crypto user to then go buy our assets, whether it's our token or NFTs? And it's actually a misappropriated way of how I think people look at the strategy. It's more impactful if you're a crypto native. Let's say you're a crypto whale and your mom or your cousin or your niece or your nephew or your son or your daughter is then participating in a pudgy penguin, buys a pudgy penguin product at Walmart or shares you with an Instagram, piece of Instagram content or a game or something like that. That aha moment for that crypto whale is then like, oh, I've been in crypto for how long, you know, nothing has transcended into my family the way that this has. This is clearly doing something for the industry that, that nobody else is doing.

• 2:40:26Speaker 10

  And that's kind of like our edge is like, we believe crypto is for everyone. And but right now it's not positioned for that, right? It's positioned for the finance bro, for the cool guy. But you know, if we really want crypto to succeed, it's got to be for the woman. It's got to be for the child, as silly as it sounds. towns, those kids are becoming crypto native and an anecdotal story that I think your audience will love is, you know, I started to meet some of the top Solana traders over the last couple of months. These kids are 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Guys who made 20, 30 million dollars in cash, right, are 16, 17 years old, couldn't couldn't cook a steak medium rare if they wanted. Those are the crypto native, right? And that next generation will actually be native. Unlike, you know, you or I who maybe saw the world before crypto, you know, we're crypto

• 2:41:09Speaker 10

  adjacent and we're crypto familiar, but we're not native. This next cohort that's coming in the next five to 10 years will be crypto native. And that's the audience that I really want to speak to.

• 2:41:19John Coogan?

  That's pretty awesome. Talk to me about the decision to trade offs between the Ethereum blockchain and Solana. Obviously, the project originally launched on Ethereum, but the pudgy token is on Solana now. What are the trade offs? How do you think about those? Is there one power law winner that's running away with the game? Or is there a world for both?

• 2:41:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think they they're functionally trying to achieve two different things, in my opinion. I think Ethereum's goal and objective and mission is to be a decentralized network state, which I think is really important for the sake of humanity, right? Like, if you if you weigh a bunch of different variables, AI and just everything that might come into the future, like having a decentralized network state is really, really important. And and I think it plays its role really well doing that. I think Solana is the first blockchain that I've really interfaced with from from an outside org in that I think is really trying to be an organization that's built to win, right? And they and they and they want to capture as much,

• 2:42:17Speaker 10

  you know, value in winning and building the biggest and best blockchain in the world. And then all the things that come with that, right? Like low latency, really fast, amazing BD, getting all the top advisors in to come and help, you know, bootstrap and and and help, you know, ecosystem apps is really run like a like a Silicon Valley organization. And its function, I think, is to win, right? But there's two different functions, I think. I think building a decentralized network state and building a blockchain to win, right? And to dominate, you know, tech and to, you know, because blockchains fundamentally are what Are they really, right? A lot of people tell themselves a lot of different stories. To me, they're borderless payments, right? And they're global and they're global, so global liquidity and global composability, right?

• 2:43:01Speaker 10

  Like, those are its two functions. And if you actually understand that as like an entrepreneur building in the web, those solve two really big problems, right? Like, like immense problems, right? Like Stripe used to, you know, Stripe and PayPal would take your money and shut you down and do the whole nine. You know, like blockchain will remove that edge. And so I think they're functionally two different organizations. I think from our perspective, we wanted to launch our token because we wanted everyone to have a piece of our main character. This internet's Mickey Mouse. We wanted our followers on Instagram and on YouTube and on TikTok to be able to participate, uh, you know, in purchasing that token. And today it's hard to argue that Solana doesn't have the best experience for that person coming from Instagram to then go in and, and, and purchase something quickly, right?

• 2:43:46Speaker 10

  Like Ethereum today, even with cheap gas fees, like no one wants to spend a couple bucks, you know, on, on some gas fees, even, even when that's relatively low for the ecosystem. You know, they, they'll want to spend a couple bucks buying the token and that's about it. Uh, so it seemed like a good fit.

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic.

• 2:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I really appreciated your perspective. Would love to have you back on again for, for a longer interview.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:08Jordi Hays?

  This was great.

• 2:44:09John Coogan?

  And I'm excited for our gel blaster nerf battle.

• 2:44:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need, I need to be able to.

• 2:44:14Speaker 10

  Send me an address. It's gonna be pretty obnoxious, the packages I'm gonna send. So stay tuned.

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  Okay, great. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Thanks for coming on. Cheers.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Really quickly before our next guest, Public. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions.

• 2:44:30Jordi Hays?

  And of course crypto.

• 2:44:31John Coogan?

  And next up, we have, we have an in-person guest in the studio.

• 2:44:35Jordi Hays?

  First in-person guest ever.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:44:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys need to swap, uh, headphones? Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool.

• 2:44:45Speaker 12

  I should have worn my suit.

• 2:44:46Jordi Hays?

  I know, you should have worn your suit. I mean, it's, it's, it's.

• 2:44:49Speaker 12

  Also underdressed.

• 2:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, fitting that you're the first guest. You've been a close friend and advisor to the show here informally.

• 2:44:58Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:44:58Jordi Hays?

  For a long time.

• 2:44:59Speaker 12

  Happy Crypto Day.

• 2:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Crypto Day. It's been, it's been very fun. It's such a, it's amazing to get perspectives from so many different parts of the industry, investors, et cetera. And there's a lot to be optimistic right now. A lot more so than when you started Crypto the Game.

• 2:45:17Speaker 12

  Yeah, I feel like we've launched season one kind of in the depths of the bear market. It was, you know, early, early 2024. I was, was trying to think about what to do next. And I know we had spoken.

• 2:45:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, you had had this idea forever.

• 2:45:30Speaker 12

  Years, yeah. I can kind of give you the whole, the whole backstory, which I know you know, but could probably be helpful context for listeners. But when I was first started working on it for real, everyone was like, you're crazy to build in crypto right now. But in hindsight, it was kind of the best time to launch.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:45:45Speaker 12

  But yeah, I mean, I kind of grew up an obsessive Survivor fan. Watched every single season. They just announced the cast for season 50. I was like off camera, reading up on that and apply every year, never got a call back. But kind of played this like CD-ROM version of Survivor called Survivor Ultimate with my friends growing up. And it was like, very, very rudimentary. You picked your tribe mate, you, you know, played tic-tac-toe for immunity and you voted each other off against the computer. It was like very, very early, like early 2000s. And I don't know, just kind of like always envisioned this world where I could play a version of Survivor online with my friends. Fast forward to my professional life.

• 2:46:29Speaker 12

  I worked at HQ Trivia for The Rise and Fall, which if you're listening, you know, you might remember a live, interactive game show and.

• 2:46:40Speaker 12

  Started my career in TV, but joined HQ for kind of the grand vision of a live interactive TV network. So in the same way that HQ took a game show and made it live and mobile and interactive, the same could have and should have been said for a Shark Tank format, or a talent competition, or a dating show, and of course, in my mind, a Survivor show. So actually first pitched the idea for what is now CTG internally at HQ, probably six or seven years ago now, which is crazy. And then yeah, it's just one of those ideas that kept coming up. I think I pitched it as an idea for a party or a drop.

• 2:47:12Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:47:13Speaker 12

  And just kind of like, you know, was starting to think about what was next a couple of years ago.

• 2:47:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting because it was this, one of the most complex products that you can build, right?

• 2:47:25Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  This like social, interactive, multiplayer, constantly evolving game that's happening on-chain. So watching you, watching you build it, I mean, you and Tyler and Brian and the team just did it very quickly and then got to market. And I remember it very quickly took off and you very quickly were just, you probably didn't sleep the first week?

• 2:47:48Speaker 12

  No, not at all. I mean, it is, it kind of ballooned into this 24/7 game show. I mean, I kind of assumed, you know, the way that it's set up, it's a 10-day season. Every day kind of follows the same format of a daily immunity challenge in the morning. Think like classic arcade games, or crypto puzzles, or digital scavenger hunts. If you win that challenge, you have immunity and you're safe from the vote that night.

• 2:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:14Speaker 12

  Everyone else votes people out. Basically, last person standing wins the pot. And I kind of assumed people would log in in the morning, meet their tribe mates, make an alliance, register a score of a game, go back to work and then kind of come back on that night to vote. But it just was so, so, so time-consuming for the players. And as a result, it was just 24/7 for us as well.

• 2:48:39Jordi Hays?

  Now, I remember, were people like basically calling in sick or taking vacation days so that they could just fully walk in?

• 2:48:45Speaker 12

  Yeah, my like, most heavily requested, like, question basically from players between seasons is like, when's the next season so I can request my PTO?

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  What was that early controversy you guys had? I think you navigated it well, obviously, because it turned into a second season and then an acquisition by Uniswap. But I feel like you quickly ran into the nature of crypto is that you're... I forget who we were talking about this, but maybe it was Balaji. But crypto, because it's so financialized, is effectively incentivizing constant penetration testing and incentivizing the world to basically try to hack your system. And I forget the guy's name.

• 2:49:22Speaker 12

  Anish.

• 2:49:23Jordi Hays?

  Anish. I'm sure you guys are buddies now.

• 2:49:26Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, we made up in the DMs, for sure.

• 2:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:29Speaker 12

  Yeah, so the way that it works is basically you buy your entry for 0.1 ETH. That entry goes towards the prize and the entire prize pot goes towards the winner at the end. And I was always kind of concerned that there could be some sort of Sybil attack, someone would try to buy up 51% of the entries and basically guarantee themselves a victory. And there were a couple of things we did to try to prevent that. And we, for season one, we kind of kept entries uncapped so that people couldn't necessarily figure out what the 51% mark would be. But yeah, right before the entries locked and the season began, Anish and his army of

• 2:50:12Speaker 12

  bots basically bought up most of the slots. And kind of wearing my Web2 HQ trivia hat, I was like, oh, bots are bad. Basically like kicked them all out and was like, this was built for real people and real players. And immediately got the wrath of crypto Twitter, which somehow happens every season to the point where like a few friends joke and think that like I'll intentionally like drum up some CT controversy so more people talk about CTG. But I mean, I immediately realized that, you know, bots aren't bad in this world.

• 2:50:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:52Speaker 12

  So, yeah, we ended up refunding Anish and, you know, making things right. And he was so nice and, you know, we ended on good terms.

• 2:51:01Jordi Hays?

  What was it like bringing Web 2 or sort of traditional companies into CTG? Because I remember you had some pretty high-profile partnerships as well.

• 2:51:10Speaker 12

  Yeah, Adidas actually sponsored a challenge during season two, which was our season two controversy.

• 2:51:16Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:51:18Speaker 12

  Now it's all good. But yeah, I mean, it was so incredibly humbling and refreshing to see that basically after the virality of season one, a brand like Adidas kind of saw this little internet experiment and decided to reach out and ask to be a part of it.

• 2:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:34Speaker 12

  Yeah, we had six sponsors for season two, each sponsoring a different challenge, one of which was Adidas. The rest were all kind of like crypto-native brands, one of which being Uniswap.

• 2:51:43Jordi Hays?

  Do you expect legacy brands to get more involved with crypto? Every once in a while, we'll see them dip their toes in, whether it's Adidas and CTG or Nike with its artifact, right?

• 2:51:57Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:51:58Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like that's died off a little bit, but at the same time, traditional institutions are getting more involved with crypto than ever.

• 2:52:05Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think eventually we'll see it. I still think it's kind of a dirty word with like the big Fortune 500, like, non-crypto brands.

• 2:52:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:12Speaker 12

  The artifact example didn't go well for Nike. I would say the CTG example probably didn't go well for Adidas, which is like a whole nother conversation. But I think "we" as in crypto builders and pretty much everyone that's been on the show today and that you will speak with has seen some sort of like the wrath of the trenches and the army, and it's not a great feeling. And if you are a large Fortune 500 brand with like a crisis comms team and you're kind of like seeing all of those replies and, you know, folks feel like, basically when the crypto Twitter army goes after brands, I think it's really hard to deal with. So, having said all of that, as, you know, the experience and the UI and the UX gets

• 2:52:54Speaker 12

  better and, you know, things like Privy like improve the login flow and wallet creation and kind of abstract away all of, basically all of the crypto from these experiences, I think like big brands won't necessarily know that they're doing, quote-unquote, Crypto integrations that all just feel like the internet.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How have you seen crypto? I would put CTG in the category of crypto entertainment or crypto gaming. It's one of the few games that it feels like crypto, Twitter, crypto acts like really played and got hyper engaged with, even though it was at a small scale. Have you seen any other games really capture people's attention? I know there was a bunch of like open world games that raised massive amounts of money, but then haven't seemingly haven't delivered.

• 2:53:45Speaker 12

  Yeah, ironically, for a crypto game founder, I'm not much of like a gamer myself. I think of CTG as much more of a game show than like a video game. But in my mind, the closest example is Yapster, which is also very heavily inspired by HQ Trivia. I don't know if you've played around with Yapster, but it's an interactive game show where you basically can submit memes. The players can vote on the memes and like the winning meme each show is launched as a token. So it kind of has that and it's 100% live and everyone kind of like votes in real time. There's a chat functionality. And because of the speculation of like the token that like basically wins at the end, it has that feeling of a live

• 2:54:28Speaker 12

  show. So I would put Yapster in my mind as like the only other kind of like live interactive game show that's like really, really exciting me right now.

• 2:54:36Jordi Hays?

  And how big can something like that get in your mind?

• 2:54:40Speaker 12

  I think huge. I mean, there's like the secret sauce at HQ was that you could win real money. And like that is the case for like most of these crypto game shows. I think the difference with CTG and Yapster is that there's kind of only one winner each time. Whereas with something like HQ, tons of people could win. But at the same time, because of that, you had folks basically winning like 25 cents or less than that with HQ because it grew so big. So yeah, I think like, I don't necessarily know that like a live interactive meme coin show is going to onboard the masses, but there's like tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people on crypto Twitter right now.

• 2:55:22Jordi Hays?

  What are you seeing right now on, because I know you'll end up advising or investing in other early stage crypto projects. What are you seeing as far kind of trends in the early stage? You clearly made the decision with CTG not to. Raise money.

• 2:55:39Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:55:39Jordi Hays?

  And you had every opportunity to. I remember in the early days, you would ping me and you'd be like, oh, this fun. You know, and I would, you know, we would have, I remember having kind of conversations about why it would probably not be good for CTG if you were to raise and then, but many people, I think, wouldn't have made that same decision.

• 2:55:58Speaker 12

  Yeah, no, I think with regards to raising, I think like not every single idea has to be a venture scale idea. I mean, we've spoken a ton about this, you know, offline, but I, you know, I think CTG was dreamed up as initially a drop, like a personal drop. I think that it's not like HQ in the sense that we really embrace seasonality and try to be very close to a TV show. And so we technically go off air for like months in between. And I think the players need that because it's so intense. And we need that because it's so intense.

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  To actually build it, yeah.

• 2:56:32Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think, you know, if we had raised, we probably would be on that like hamster wheel of like having to build some sort of scalable platform. So communities and people can kind of like spin up their own versions of the game. And it was just like a very manual process. And I felt like it wasn't necessarily the right choice for CTG. But I don't know, I'm excited about Pixie Chess, which I know, you know, our friend Josh has started. And for those listening that aren't familiar, the way that it's been described to me is, is basically like a noun style auction for different on-chain chess pieces that have magical powers. So you can imagine a queen that goes invisible or a bishop that can go backwards, forward, sideways, et cetera.

• 2:57:16Speaker 12

  And every single day, there's a different auction. You essentially acquire these pieces, add them to your deck. And the funds from those auctions go towards different Grand Slam tournaments that you can like take, basically take your deck with you and play against others. Really excited about that. I've been playing around with Vertigo, which is a new like decentralized exchange on Solana that's like anti sniper. So I know we, you know, spoke, you guys spoke to Ben and Alon and, you know, a lot of these. Token launchers and tokens kind of have a sniper problem, basically, where someone will buy up most of the supply and instantly dump it. So I think like building exchanges with like cleaner

• 2:57:57Speaker 12

  token protections and anti-sniping mechanisms is something that's just going to be net beneficial to everyone. So yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind. And then the last is probably TokenWorks, which is like the closest thing we have to crypto mischief. They do different like token drops.

• 2:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think I saw you posting about that.

• 2:58:18Speaker 12

  Yeah, really excited. So it's Brian Armstrong next.

• 2:58:22Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I think we'll see. We'll check the calendar. Well, thank you for coming on. Your first, the first official.

• 2:58:28Speaker 12

  Yeah. Oh, my God. Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:58:31Jordi Hays?

  Not on the set, John, but there you are. Thanks for coming on, Dylan. And thanks for all the help on the show.

• 2:58:39John Coogan?

  We got Brian Armstrong next.

• 2:58:41Jordi Hays?

  The gong is still ringing.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  Coming in the studio this morning. The gong, the gong, the real gong rings much longer than the fake gong.

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:49John Coogan?

  Well, we're waiting for Brian. Let's tell you about AdQuick. AdQuick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe.

• 2:59:03Jordi Hays?

  It's out-of-home, built different, John.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  It is. It is. And we have Brian Armstrong here. Welcome to the stream, Brian. How are you doing today?

• 2:59:11Brian Armstrong?

  I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:59:12John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 2:59:13Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  I don't even know where to start. I mean, we were kind of in the same YC batch. My first company was in YC summer 12. It's been.

• 2:59:22Brian Armstrong?

  That was Soylent or which one?

• 2:59:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, Soylent. It's a weird story because I joined the company shortly after YC and I was in a different YC company. So, but that's a story for another day.

• 2:59:32Jordi Hays?

  I give John problems all the time for not, you know, tapping you on the shoulder and, you know, demanding that you take an angel check in that era. But anyways.

• 2:59:42Brian Armstrong?

  Well, 2020 hindsight, I can assure you, we were not like the hottest startup in that YC batch at the time. I mean, it was hard to actually raise our seed round, etc. But, you know, obviously it worked out. It was not obvious, though.

• 2:59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Was it, was it, what was the incentive for joining Coinbase back during the YCDs? Was it a full Bitcoin as a referral fee?

• 3:00:01Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, I mean, I was kind of stealing a page out of the PayPal book where, you know, everybody would get about, I think, yeah, if you invited your friends and they on-boarded, they got $10 of Bitcoin and you got $10 of Bitcoin. And at the time, that was like about one Bitcoin.

• 3:00:14John Coogan?

  So crazy to think about.

• 3:00:16Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, and there was a lot of people, I went around to like probably 1,000 or more people in the Bay Area at that time, and anybody I could find, I'd be like, hey, do you want some Bitcoin? Like, I'll send it to you on my phone. And I'd try to get them on-boarded to the Coinbase app. And yeah, when we started out, it was like $5 or $6 for a Bitcoin.

• 3:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how do you tell the story of Coinbase now? I mean, it's such a huge story. Do you think about it in particular eras? Is the going-public era a different, distinct era? Or do you even map it to like the bull cycles and the bear cycles? Does that have a tangible feel in the Coinbase story, internal to the company?

• 3:00:56Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, I think of it in different, so Fred Wilson had this great thing, he told me one time, he said like, companies have multiple founding moments on the way to being a public company. And that was definitely true in our case. So the first era was like Fred Ursam and myself in an apartment, just grinding it out, like, you know, 14-hour days, just doing everything ourselves, like answering customer support tickets, like trying to recruit people, trying to get anybody to join, writing code ourselves, right? And so that was like the pre-product-market fit, like, how do we try to get something moving? And then you go through hypergrowth, right? And your problems totally change, which is like, how do we get a real set of leaders into this company? How do we not get hacked?

• 3:01:40Brian Armstrong?

  How do we go raise more money, like, build a real board? And so you go through this period of hypergrowth where we were like, we'd never managed anybody, but we were, suddenly we were managing 25, 50, 100, 500 people, and we were hyperscaling just trying to keep up with all the demand. And then, you know, crypto went through ups and downs. Eventually, Fred decided to go, found his own company, which was super successful, like Paradigm, and he's doing another company now. So I had to bring in an executive team. That was like its own experience with a bunch of infighting and blowups and drama. And I finally got an exec team that worked, and then we went public and... You know, Emily Choi is like our president and COO now. So she's like, you know, it's multiple foundings along the way to get to these eventual outcomes. It takes like 10 years to be an overnight success, quote unquote.

• 3:02:25John Coogan?

  Overnight success. We love overnight. We love 10 year overnight.

• 3:02:28Jordi Hays?

  We lost the overnight success button.

• 3:02:29John Coogan?

  We have a soundboard and it plays overnight.

• 3:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Every time somebody says it took them 10 years to really be successful, we hit that. But what other industries did you look, have you looked to for learnings to kind of like build through these boom and bust cycles? Because it feels like, you know, you guys are acclimated to that now. But I know, I know this is, you know, the case, oil and gas is probably a prominent one. Did you, were you able to pick up anything from outside of crypto to help you steer the ship through cycles?

• 3:03:01Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, a little bit. I mean, every company has different challenges. So I actually don't think ours are that bad. But one of the, one of the challenges we had when we were getting ready to go public was like, our revenue was super unpredictable and volatile, right? Like, we'd have a trading quarter where we would just blow it out of the water and we'd be like, printing money. And then we'd, it'd be down like 70% the next quarter or something. And, you know, in the public markets, investors really love you to have these predictable revenue streams. I don't, I actually don't, I still don't to this day know why they're so fixated on that. It seems like they should be thinking about the growth potential, but they love the predictability of it. And so, yeah, we had to look at oil and gas. There's like some energy brokerage, like, you know, actually, the traditional brokerages like, like NASDAQ and NYSE, like, they have the same issue. They can tell you, one of them told me one time, he's like, if you can tell me what the S and P 500 is going to do next quarter, I'll tell you what our revenue is going to be. But of course, like, if you

• 3:03:46Brian Armstrong?

  can do that, you've, you got, you got, like, you got it made in other ways. So, but, you know, whenever I'm, I feel like we're having a bad time, I always look at like, the hard tech companies, right? Like, the biotech companies in the public markets get beat up way more than we do. They have much less predictable revenue. Their revenue is pushed out way farther. All my friends who are working on hardware companies, I'm like, wow, they're really doing entrepreneurship. You know, I'm like, they're, they're, they're always calling me up and like, I've got four weeks of cash, you know, we're trying, we're trying to raise money. And I'm like,

• 3:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Fail me out.

• 3:04:20Brian Armstrong?

  You've been trying to raise money like every month for the last 18 months, just living like one month to the next month. And like, those guys have true grit. So, in software, our margins are high and it kind of covers up mistakes that we make. And we actually had revenue relatively early in our journey, whereas in, like in biotech, you have to invest in it for 10 years to try to get your first dollar revenue sometimes.

• 3:04:41John Coogan?

  There were a whole bunch of narratives around crypto back in 2012, even before decentralization, resistance to government control, and non-anonymity, just faster payments, all these different things. What's the state of the union from your perspective? How would you grade the different executions across the original goals? Some of them have just kind of fallen by the wayside as we found different solutions to those problems. But what are you, what do you think we've knocked it out of the park on? And what do you think we still have a lot more work to do on?

• 3:05:16Brian Armstrong?

  Well, the ultimate vision for crypto was always economic freedom, in my mind. In fact, that's the mission of Coinbase is to increase economic freedom in the world. So that's like, how do we give people more self-sovereignty, more control of their money? It enables them to not only like live a freer life and have not have things taken away from them, but it also, it's better for society because if we have a society with good property rights and sound money and like rule of law and these things, you can actually try more things. If people are rewarded with the upside of their labor, they're gonna go try more ambitious things in the world. So you see that there's actually economists who measure across different countries, like how high is economic freedom? And you see that in high economic freedom countries, there's like higher GDP per capita,

• 3:05:55Brian Armstrong?

  but there's also like less corruption, there's less war, there's lower infant mortality, like all these kind of downstream effects. So the ultimate potential of crypto is to get more economic freedom in the world. And we've been trying to push on that through a variety of ways. Like one way we've done it is by getting legislation passed in the US or pushing on that. We had a big influence in this last election. The crypto voters showed up in a massive way. We had like 2 million advocates who raised their hand in the US saying they wanted to elect a pro crypto congress and candidates. We had like a couple hundred million dollars in the fair shake super PAC. And so we now have the most pro crypto congress that we've ever seen. And we're on the cusp of getting stablecoin and market structure legislation passed. The other thing is we've been pushing on our products, right?

• 3:06:39Brian Armstrong?

  They have to be easier to use for the average person. Like the early crypto products were just, it felt like some computer scientists came from on high down the mountain and they tried to make this accessible to mere mortals. And like, that was never gonna work. So the products are slowly getting easier and simpler for average people to use. And crypto is growing into these areas like payments and tokenizing securities. And it's not just like trading as a use case, right? So we're getting closer and closer, but ultimately, I think... Crypto is going to update the entire financial system globally and like the majority of all payments will run on these crypto rails. They're just faster, cheaper, more global, and that's how we're going to get more economic freedom in the world.

• 3:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the conversation around economic freedom over the next few years will shift away from the US and more towards emerging markets who are adopting digital assets but may face, you know, pushback from their governments and, you know, potentially even more aggressive way than we have in the United States over the past four or five years?

• 3:07:38Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, it's a great point because I think the unmet need is higher in some of these other countries, emerging markets, right? Where people, like in Turkey, they're getting like 70% inflation a year or something. It's just like, it's devastating to their entire economy. People have very high demand for the dollar and then Bitcoin. Same thing in Nigeria, etc. Now, some of those markets are going to be very resistant to it, like especially if the government is not fully aligned with the people's interests. Like, the government wants to run their fiat currency because then they can kind of print money and abuse it and, you know, it's one of these kind of original sins of like fiat currency, right? So, or like some of these markets have capital controls, right? Like in India. So I think the governments will be somewhat reluctant to embrace crypto in some of these

• 3:08:22Brian Armstrong?

  places, but the average person will love it. Like, the people are demanding it, they're rushing toward it, the governments are a little hesitant, and so in democratic countries, it'll be allowed because more people will vote for it. But in places like China, they're really cramping down on it, you know? I don't think North Korea is going to add it anytime soon, so it's a little bit like the internet, right? China has the Great Firewall of China, North Korea has their own private internet, and so some of these like really corrupt regimes, I think, will have, they'll try to crush crypto, but in most places in the world, it'll happen.

• 3:08:55John Coogan?

  North Korea even has their own Linux distribution, Red Star Linux.

• 3:08:59Brian Armstrong?

  Did they? I didn't know that.

• 3:09:01Jordi Hays?

  They gave it a cool name. I mean, you gotta admit, it's a cool name.

• 3:09:03John Coogan?

  It is a cool name. I want to talk about Base. Obviously, it's powering a lot of consumer crypto use cases right now. Like, how did that come about? What has it been like incubating something like that inside Coinbase?

• 3:09:15Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, a lot of people have asked me about that because they're always surprised that like a relatively big company can still innovate or whatever, but I think the way that, you know, I can't take too much credit for it, by the way. The biggest thing that I did was I, we have, we have a very entrepreneurial culture, different people we've brought in, and Jesse Pollak came to me at one point, he was like, "Hey, I want to work on a new chain." And I was like, "Cool, like, take a small team, go run at it." You know, like, two pizza team or whatever, like, five people. And I had no idea if it was gonna work, but the biggest thing, I didn't, he deserves all the credit, to be honest. The only thing I did was I kind of shielded it from the rest of the organization a little bit, and just gave them time to cook. And he went through like five or six iterations, and I saw a couple of these along the way, and I

• 3:09:58Brian Armstrong?

  was like, "Honestly, I have no idea if this is gonna work." And it turned out to actually really hit. And so that's, if there is like a secret to this, which I don't, I don't know if it's a secret, but it's like, you have to allocate some percentage of your budget to these venture bets, and make them small bets, because, you know, you want to have two, three, four people like working on it, kind of like a YC company, not like, don't put a hundred people on it or something, it's gonna be like a big bureaucratic thing. As long as they're small bets, you can tolerate like, you know, 75% of them not working out, and once in a while, something hits, and it pays for all the rest of the bets. I mean, it's just, it's kind of like having a venture capital internal at the company. So we actually set up this thing called, we call it like Next Bets, and twice a year, anybody in the

• 3:10:41Brian Armstrong?

  company can come pitch, it's like a group of people, we call it like internal venture capital, and they're basically the people who run different product groups, but there's also some really kind of like, smart young engineers, etc. Basically, if any one of them raised their hands and said, "I want to fund that out of their budget," then you're greenlit to go do it. You don't have to get a unanimous yes, you just need one person to say yes. And there's, there's actually some pretty big, like, USDC, I will tell you, I actually voted no on USDC, like, which was a terrible, now it's like, it's like almost a billion dollars of revenue or something for us. And I voted no, because I was like, a little skeptical, I didn't think it was like, decentralized enough or something, but luckily, somebody else on our team voted yes, so it got funded, and it turned out to be a massive thing. So it shows you how much I know.

• 3:11:26John Coogan?

  That's incredible. I want to talk about putting stocks on chain. You go back to that original like Peter Thiel lecture in the 90s, talking about maybe we could have a digital dollar that's not backed by gold or the treasury, but actually backed by stocks. Is there a world where that happens? What needs to happen? Is there a world where Coinbase shares are securitized on chain? And I know you probably can't give like forward guidance around that, but like, walk me through the changes that would need to be made? And is that even a good idea in your mind?

• 3:11:58Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. Well, just starting first with that PayPal point that you made. I mean, there's a great book, I think it's called PayPal Wars. I believe it's about the founding of PayPal. And, you know, it really, there was a lot of like that libertarian ideology of like economic freedom was in the origin, the founding team. As you can imagine, they went on to do many other things. And I think, like, in many ways, crypto is fulfilling the vision that the early PayPal team started with around economic freedom. And the main reason I can think of for that, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. They got acquired by eBay, etc. The team changed in some of the motivations. But, like, at the end of the day, nobody wanted a US company to run the global financial system. Like, if you were the Indian government

• 3:12:40Brian Armstrong?

  or random person in some country, like, you didn't, do I really want to put all my money in some US company? But if it was a decentralized protocol that nobody controlled, like, kind of like the internet, it's like, okay, we'll all kind of integrate with that. And so Bitcoin was like the key innovation, I think, that unlocked that opportunity. You also asked about like, kind of tokenizing securities. And I do think that's an exciting area. We're pretty interested in that as well. You know, it's like, the trading of stocks is just one more area of financial services that could be improved by crypto. I mean, as an example, there's a lot of people around the world who want access to US securities, but they don't have a simple way to open a brokerage account and track that. So it's like, the international access would be better. You could get like perpetual futures markets spun

• 3:13:24Brian Armstrong?

  up for these stocks, which would give traders more leverage. You could do 24/7 trading. You could do fractional shares. So I actually think like, most traditional securities are going to get tokenized on chain in the next five years. We've been working a little bit with like the SEC task force on this and trying to find the right path to do it. So it's something we're interested in. But yeah, obviously, nothing to announce today.

• 3:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Where are you getting the most leverage from AI internally? I can think of a bunch of different potential applications, but I haven't seen you do online virtue signaling about it yet, like other certain CEOs have. But I'm curious, you know, what you're excited about.

• 3:14:02Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, okay, well, so I think we're doing a lot of the current best practices that most people are doing with well-run companies. And then there are a couple of areas on the horizon that were that are more crypto-specific that I'll tell you to. So I mean, the basic ones, you probably know, it's like, we got onboarded all of our engineers to co-pilot and cursor and everything like that. So we got 100% of them onboarded. That was good. Our customer support, I think, like maybe 60% of inquiries are being answered by AI now, which is really good. We also, for a long time, have been building AI models around fraud prevention and like detecting risky transactions. So, but you could, yeah, obviously, like any process within the company that has a clearly defined input and output, you can train a model on and like generating compliance reports.

• 3:14:46Brian Armstrong?

  Like there's, so we're trying to integrate it everywhere. The ones that are a little more on the frontier or like crypto-specific for us. So one is that, I guess people are calling it agentic commerce, right, which is like, you know, your agent is increasingly kind of like your assistant and it might need to book you a ticket to go somewhere or it might need to get through a paywall or something like if you're like, hey, go read all the research papers from Nature on this topic and give me a report. Like, okay, those cost money to ingest it. And so AI agents are going to need to have a wallet to go pay for stuff. We think that crypto will be the backbone of that. Like USDC on base is, is starting to be adopted by some, some, we actually released this open source thing called AgentKit,

• 3:15:31Brian Armstrong?

  which makes it easy for any LLM to have a wallet. And we're working on a couple of checkout type solutions with other players that we'll announce soon, where AI, the AI agent can actually get through the checkout flow in many of these e-commerce sites and pay with USDC on base. So I think agentic commerce will be a big one. I think it's also, we're gonna get like AI agents that can be kinda like your RIA, like your registered investment advisor, or almost like your trading bot. So imagine like you, you're in the Coinbase app and you kinda tell them, hey, I wanna put like a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, something into this account. And you're talking to a trading bot and you're like, just go make me money, you know? I don't know, like.

• 3:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes. Don't make, tell it, you know, make me, I joked about this before. 10% compounded return daily, don't make mistakes.

• 3:16:19Brian Armstrong?

  Don't make mistakes. Yeah, yeah. And it may have some questions for you, or like it may make mistakes. And like, there's a lot of details to figure out, but I think having a trading bot like do a lot of that for you. And it's like, hey, make sure, like if I, if it goes up a lot, lock in some gains, you know? So I don't regret it later. You can give it kinda abstract concepts like that and it'll go, it knows how to make the limit orders for you or whatever.

• 3:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how do you think that, how do you imagine that type of capability really being dispersed? Because I imagine, I mean, obviously there's people with, you know, trading bots today. And they're actually, I imagine, some of them are so effective that they just say, well, we don't actually wanna release this because we should just use it ourselves. But it sort of could potentially tie into this dynamic between closed source AI and open source AI. And is that, do you think part of Coinbase's opportunity is to affect, if, you know, make sure these types of tools are available to as many people as possible versus just a handful of traders?

• 3:17:21Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, it's kinda, I mean, so we're not doing prop trading on our own balance sheet. So we're not like trying to be a hedge fund or something with a proprietary algorithm. So our goal would be to like make this available to as many consumers as possible. And yeah, I mean, it might, it's kinda adjacent to financial literacy, right? Like many people might come in and be like, yeah, I wanna make like crazy returns. And this thing can kinda tell you, well, okay, that's pretty high risk. Like, why don't you like dollar cost average into this diversified portfolio over time? And like, that might be more in line with your risk appetite. But if you wanna take 10% of it and try something more high risk, like, you know, so it can, it can teach people about these concepts. And while also doing what they ultimately wanna do, what they would have done anyway in the app. But it's just making it easier for them. Totally.

• 3:18:04John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the extortion attack? How you handled it? And I'm particularly interested in going forward. There's a lot of tools in your toolkit. You can throw more money, more people, more technology at the problem. What's gonna, what's the next few years look like in terms of beefing up security?

• 3:18:23Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, we've had a really good track record on security at Coinbase over the last 12 years. And even in this attack, you know, we didn't see any private keys or funds accessed directly by the attacker. So what they, unfortunately, they were able to do is they were able to bribe some of our customer support agents and to share with them like personal information on, on customers, like name, address, et cetera. And, you know, they want this information, attackers want this information because they want to text people, call people, try to socially engineer them and to get them to send their money. And so unfortunately, they were able to successfully do that with a handful of customers, which we've reimbursed 100% at this point. And then they sent us this demand. Once, once we were, you know, they realized they'd been found out and customers were kind of getting educated about this.

• 3:19:05Brian Armstrong?

  They sent us this demand for $20 million, or we're gonna release all this information. And it was an interesting moment. We know, we came together and thought about it. And, you know, on the one hand, we could have paid them the money, right? But we were, we, we talked to a bunch of security researchers and people and they were like, you know, there's really, what typically happens in these cases is you, if you pay the extortion, they're just gonna come back in three months and extort you again. And, and it's like, do we really want to be in this situation where we're like funding their next attack? And like rewarding this kind of behavior? Or do we want to try to create a deterrent to this kind of behavior? So we, we tried, we decided to flip it. And as you probably saw, we put out a $20 million bounty for any information leading to their arrest and conviction. And that's been kind of a crazy experience.

• 3:19:49Brian Armstrong?

  I mean, just as one data point for comparison, after 9/11, the US government put out a $25 million bounty on Osama bin Laden. And we put out a $20 million bounty on these guys. So we had like maybe 5,000, like tips or inquiries like come into the, the email that we put out there. Most of it was junk and we, we kind of whittled it down. There's about like 70 or so credible leads, I would say. We always have to be a little careful because some, you know, some of these could be like the, the, uh, the threat actor themselves sort of trying to throw us off the trail or run down some wild goose chase. Some of the other people sending in, uh, tips or leads are like other threat actors who kind of have beef with these guys or like they're, um, kind of like no honor amongst thieves.

• 3:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Right? Yeah.

• 3:20:34Brian Armstrong?

  And, uh, so, you know, I'm, which is fine with me, but it's.

• 3:20:37Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I really enjoyed the, the, you know, I saw the video that you put out and I enjoyed imagining the dynamic of the thieves, really, you know, sitting, sitting around a table, realizing that, you know, that the sort of game theory of who's going to turn in, who, you know, it, it was a, it was a nice, it was a nice visual.

• 3:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:55Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. So that's exactly what we're, we, we wanted to create was a real, a real deterrent here. It was like, if you're, if you're going to attack our customers, you know, you need to look over your shoulder, um, and always wonder like who's going to turn me in or who did I interact with in my entire life, who might've known about this, who's going to turn me in. So anyway, I can't say too much more. We're working closely with law enforcement, but we're going to run down those leads and, and hopefully get a good result. I mean, you, you asked about beefing up security too, I think, and.

• 3:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, just kind of going forward, you can imagine, let's, let's, let's hire more people, better people, let's throw a technology at this, let's monitor comms and where data's flowing. Is this more of a technology issue or a talent issue or an oversight issue or policies? Like, like, how do you see investing in the next round of security?

• 3:21:41Jordi Hays?

  The thing that popped into my mind, the way that you're already leveraging AI is there's a world in the future where a, a more secure CX function would be entirely code. Right?

• 3:21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:51Jordi Hays?

  And, and you wouldn't, it'd be much, you know, you could create an environment.

• 3:21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, or at least AI oversight of everything, of every interaction. But yes, I'm interested to hear what your take is.

• 3:22:01Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, it's a great point. I mean, the, the 60% of inquiries being answered by AI now, I mean, they're, they're not going to get bribed. I mean, there are other threat act, threat, threat vectors with AI too, right? Because people are always trying to jailbreak these agents and things. So it's not, there's not a perfect solution and I don't think we're going to have, we're, we're still going to have like human in the loop on a lot of things for a long time. But yeah, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste. Like, this was definitely a good moment for us to go implement a bunch of changes. And we mobilized a team of about three or 400 people like right away that just went into overdrive, kind of trying to lock down a lot of these systems. A lot of it was not just our own systems. There's vendors that we work with that, you know, we needed to push them to hit a higher bar as well.

• 3:22:44Brian Armstrong?

  We did relocate some of our customer support operations. You know, the ones that got targeted the most were these overseas contractors and things like that. And, you know, you can imagine, like, some of the money being offered as bribes would have been like pretty impactful even in the United States if people were there. And we need to have 24/7 coverage, etc. So it's not a perfect solution to like, just move it all in the US and pay people more. Like, it doesn't 100% solve it, but we are relocating some of those support operations and then essentially just hardening our systems. Like, luckily, we had, we had some good controls already, which limited the scope of it, but we obviously didn't do enough, and so we've got to keep investing in that.

• 3:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any advice for younger builders, maybe the younger version of yourself? You know, we had Chris Dixon on the show earlier today, and he said that crypto, you know, one of crypto's biggest problems now is just a lack of talent. There is talent here, but it's probably, you know, could have 10 times more to create a lot of great outcomes. I'm curious if you, if you feel the same way around kind of talent in the industry today.

• 3:23:53Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, I think there's a, we, we've never been, we've never had it easier actually recruiting great people into Coinbase. I think there's, there is like a great, and partly that's due to our scale, right? Startups have to really fight for talent. But I think if you look at like the top five most exciting tech trends in the world right now, like, my five would probably be AI, crypto, for increasing economic freedom and all that, brain machine interfaces.

• 3:24:18Brian Armstrong?

  Fusion energy and longevity, I think, is also in no particular order, by the way. Like, you know, there's a biotech company I co-founded called New Limit, which is working on epigenetic reprogramming, which is really cool. It's a longevity company.

• 3:24:29John Coogan?

  We talked to the founder, we were blown away. We came away extremely excited by that conversation.

• 3:24:33Brian Armstrong?

  Nice, nice, that's awesome. Yeah, I mean, so I think, to me, it's like, how do we accelerate progress?

• 3:24:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:24:40Brian Armstrong?

  And I think the smartest people, from a talent point of view, like, the smartest kids, up and coming, you know, people, whatever, they all want to work in things that are going to change the world. So like, those are, those are the top five. And, you know, I think, like, there's actually a pretty incredible amount of talent in crypto. It's like, you've just got to go try, you've got to go try ambitious bets and be okay with some of them not working. Like, I think sometimes people think that, well, Coinbase started and now it's big, and so they're just a success. And it's like, no, that's not true. Like, we're, we're trying these venture bets all the time. Like, I told you about USDC and Base. I mean, there's others that didn't work, right? Like, we, we launched Coinbase NFT, and it was pretty much a flop. Like, we launched Coinbase in Japan, we invested all this money and time, like, didn't work for a bunch of reasons I can tell you if you want, and we shut that down.

• 3:25:24Brian Armstrong?

  And so, we're constantly like, you know, stay hungry, stay foolish. Like, we're trying new ideas a lot, and you have to be okay with like, two or, two out of three, or three out of four, just not working.

• 3:25:33John Coogan?

  What about the Super Bowl ad? Was that a similar, one person greenlights it? And who greenlit it? And what was the, what was the story with the QR code?

• 3:25:42Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, as, as usual, like, success has many fathers and mothers, but, you know, it partially came out of a rushed, like, a short time, you know, time, constrained speed creativity, right? So we actually didn't, I think by the time we bought the ad, we didn't have enough time to like, go film something for months and months. And so, the team just got really creative, and, and I don't even remember who it was in the meeting, like, our, our CMO, and there was an agency involved, and it was a collaborative effort where someone was like, you know, well, what if we did kind of like a direct, direct marketing type campaign where we want people just to install the app? But the, you can never measure the result of most of these brand ads, right? You're always like, I don't know, did it drive revenue or not? Nobody really knows. So we're like, well, we could actually measure how many people just like, scan it and sign

• 3:26:27Brian Armstrong?

  up if we, if we just put a QR code on the screen. So, I don't remember who said it, actually, in the room, but it, obviously, it worked. It was cool.

• 3:26:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and you tracked the ROI, and it was positive?

• 3:26:38Brian Armstrong?

  Okay, so that, that's actually a very complicated, we, we looked at the-

• 3:26:42John Coogan?

  I'll

• 3:26:43Brian Armstrong?

  bore you with the exact details, but um, long story short, like, so our site actually crashed because we got about like

• 3:26:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:26:51Brian Armstrong?

  twenty, it was like twenty or thirty million visits in, in twenty seconds.

• 3:26:57John Coogan?

  Oh my god.

• 3:26:57Brian Armstrong?

  And we, we knew there was gonna be a big surge and so we had like, I think the first page loaded and it was heavily cached, but then um, like twenty million people started going through the signup flow and like everything shut down. So we had to email a bunch of them later to come, actually come back and finish it. Um, long story short, so we lost like probably about a third of the, the value in just like overwhelming demand that we unfortunately couldn't scale to, but it would have been very profitable. It's, it was still profitable depending how you count it.

• 3:27:27Jordi Hays?

  The fact that we're talking about the ad today means something.

• 3:27:31John Coogan?

  Very memorable.

• 3:27:32Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, the brand value alone maybe, maybe paid for itself even with none of the direct revenue.

• 3:27:37John Coogan?

  I have one last question, then we'll let you get out of here. Um, uh, and feel free to just, uh, take it as like meta commentary on the nature of the question. But who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

• 3:27:48Brian Armstrong?

  Um, so, well, the official answer is it doesn't really matter because like the idea stands on its own. And so if anybody ever comes out and we find out who it is, like in their, their will or, you know, whatever I, but, but the, the unofficial answer I think is is probably some combination of like Hal Finney and Nick Zabo and um, maybe one other person, but um, that's my guess is that it was a collaboration between those people. Um, and, you know, but ultimately it doesn't matter. Uh, and Hal Finney is frozen at Alcor, but he's, he's no, he's no longer living, so we don't, you know, uh, but maybe if Alcor actually works, which is a big if, in the future we can bring him back to life, we'll find out.

• 3:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be amazing.

• 3:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Then.

• 3:28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have him on the show. We'll have him on the show.

• 3:28:34Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:35John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic. Uh, Jordy, any other questions?

• 3:28:37Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great.

• 3:28:38John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thank you so much.

• 3:28:40Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're our first public company Fortune 500 CEO.

• 3:28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. So thanks for doing this. This is a big milestone for us. We really appreciate it.

• 3:28:47Brian Armstrong?

  Well, I love that you guys are championing tech and it's, yeah, the enthusiasm is palpable. So I get to see your clips all over.

• 3:28:55John Coogan?

  Enthusiasm? What are you talking about?

• 3:29:00John Coogan?

  Enthusiasm?

• 3:29:01Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need a bigger gong.

• 3:29:04John Coogan?

  We're gonna need a bigger gong. Thank you for stopping by.

• 3:29:06Jordi Hays?

  It's great having you on, Brian. And thank you for the work that you do.

• 3:29:11John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:29:12Brian Armstrong?

  See you guys soon. Bye, cheers.

• 3:29:15John Coogan?

  I love hitting the gong.

• 3:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Great, great hit.

• 3:29:18John Coogan?

  The gong is, it's working wonders. Next up, we have Suna from Volt Capital coming in. Is it Volt?

• 3:29:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna take one minute.

• 3:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll talk to Suna.

• 3:29:28John Coogan?

  Let me tell you really quickly about Wander. I gotta sing the song alone. Find your happy place. Find your.

• 3:29:35Brian Armstrong?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 3:29:39John Coogan?

  Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities.

• 3:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Series B today.

• 3:29:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, today. Congratulations. Hit the gong one more time.

• 3:29:46Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 3:29:47John Coogan?

  You're already on your way out. Size for Wander. $50 million Series B. Congratulations to the team.

• 3:29:54Jordi Hays?

  John, Andrew, Kyle, the whole team. You guys are crushing it.

• 3:29:57John Coogan?

  Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 3:30:04Jordi Hays?

  And John, Andrew is coming on the show tomorrow, finally. Very excited about that.

• 3:30:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:30:09Jordi Hays?

  But amazing milestone.

• 3:30:10John Coogan?

  Well, stay locked in. We got four more guests. Our next guest is Suna. Hopefully, we can bring her in and and keep the conversation going. How you doing?

• 3:30:24Speaker 13

  Hey.

• 3:30:25John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 3:30:27John Coogan?

  It's been, it's been a big stream, been a big day, but glad to have you here. Would you mind kicking us off?

• 3:30:32Speaker 13

  Bliss, I was so happy about it.

• 3:30:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We, it was, it was great puzzling everyone together, getting everyone. It's also hard because I'm not, as it's very clear from this stream, I am not crypto native at all. And so the first time we, we tried to schedule this, we tried to schedule you was during that big crypto conference in Dubai. And everyone was like, what are you thinking? Everyone is going, everyone who matters in crypto is going to. Be busy and they're going to be 12 hours off your time zone. And then we wound up scheduling it today and there's this massive Bitcoin conference. Unfortunately, some people, you know, were able to hop on the stream. But it's but it's a great community and so everyone's been able to break it down and explain it like we're five. Because we effectively are, but would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself?

• 3:31:18John Coogan?

  And and yeah, what you what you're excited about?

• 3:31:23Speaker 13

  Yeah, sure thing. So I am at Volt Capital. What we focus on is pre-seated and seated crypto companies. And I mean, the reason we even started Volt Capital is if you look at the landscape of crypto funds, there aren't really that many that have a senior partnership that have all founded companies before or built a team from the ground up and that really is the DNA of the fund. And so what we what we do is we focus on founder first philosophy in terms of the in terms of how we index on investments and then also we've all been founders ourselves as well. And we're focused in terms of like on a barbell strategy in terms of the thesis. One, there's there's a

• 3:32:07Speaker 13

  like there's established markets like and by the way, this isn't live, right?

• 3:32:12John Coogan?

  It is.

• 3:32:13Speaker 13

  Oh, okay. So there's there's established. Okay, there's established markets like payments, DeFi.

• 3:32:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:19Speaker 13

  And I think the cameras. Okay, there's established markets like DeFi, payments, stable coins that are taking on these tens of trillions of dollars markets. But then also, I mean, if right now, the rest of the world is waking up to stablecoin potential.

• 3:32:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:32:35Speaker 13

  Stablecoin started about five, seven years ago.

• 3:32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:37Speaker 13

  So if you look at what the net new narrative is right now, it's largely around real world case applications for crypto. And what we focus on is largely crypto AI intersection. And then that oftentimes looks like crypto and robotics or like crypto and. And strictly crypto and AI or also D-Pen. And Jordi and I, like you and I, had collaborated on that essay a while back where we go through the different verticals and potentials.

• 3:33:02John Coogan?

  That's cool. Yeah, what is the state of real world assets on chain? I remember during the last cycle, Sam Altman or Sam Lessin was on the Logan Bartlett Show talking about maybe your mortgage will be on chain, maybe physical real estate will be on chain at some point. And there was a whole bunch of legal and technical and financial issues to work through to actually make that happen. Are people optimistic about that narrative in real world assets? Or has it moved to a completely different trajectory?

• 3:33:31Speaker 13

  Yeah, no, we're absolutely excited about that. I think for a few reasons. One is institutional demand is here. Secondly, a lot of the tech has been figured out, but the tech wasn't really the tough part. The tech was probably an iota of it. If you look at the distribution of teams, it's like, all right, you have an engineering team of like 20 or 30, but then you have like hundreds of people focusing on recourse. And the ratio was pretty disproportionate in terms of what they were focused on. And with regulatory language being cleared up and getting more approval from the administration and I guess more legitimacy for the space, it's, it's really paved the way. But what we're focused on when we talk about real world applications, in addition to that, are like, we're seeing companies at the intersection of crypto and robotics that are finding innovative

• 3:34:15Speaker 13

  ways to collect and check for quality assurance of data in massive global ways that you aren't able to do with existing rails, particularly for robotics, because there isn't really a common crawl equivalent for robotics like there is in the way we train web two, like internet LLMs. And then also like space and crypto, we're seeing companies build at the intersection of there, like out of steady research, like really domain experts in space that are finding really interesting ways to create data marketplaces at the intersection of crypto and space.

• 3:34:48Jordi Hays?

  One thing that we've seen, and great, great to see you, by the way. One, one thing that we've seen from, I think, a number of the different conversations today is it feels like consensus that agents will use tokens or that the agentic web will be leveraging tokens. As an investor, what are the kind of different kind of layers of the stack that you're looking at, whether it's, you know, the agent layer, infrastructure, the actual tokens themselves? How are you thinking about investing into that trend broadly?

• 3:35:19Speaker 13

  So I'm going to say something contrarian around banking agents. And I don't think from a venture standpoint, it's, it makes sense to, to, to invest like via private equity, particularly because a lot of that value capture is going to be done through enterprises. We already saw Coinbase roll out X four oh two, which allows agent to agent payments. And they already have massive distribution channels. So you are already starting off a massive disadvantage as a startup. And instead, what we're looking at in terms of crypto AI, there's a lot to be done on synthetic, uh, synthetic data generation. Um, there's a ton to be done on the federated learning side, um, in terms of like, how do you train models when you're dealing with sensitive data around health or finance?

• 3:36:01Speaker 13

  So there are way bigger markets to go after that I think are more appropriate for startups versus companies that can be rolled out, uh, as we've already seen from, from these larger incumbents.

• 3:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're talking to the founder of Prime Intellect, kind of similar idea of distributed computing, wiring it all together with crypto makes a ton of sense to kind of use those latent resources. But you're saying that the same thing can exist, uh, for data markets is the, is the, is the goal there? Is it like with regard to like robotics data, uh, you would think that if this, if this, uh, evolves the same way that like the L L M R L H F market evolved, you know, it's like scale AI is just going to go and centralize it all and then sell access to that. Is there some sort of underpinning fundamental difference with robotics training data that would make it more native to an on-chain environment?

• 3:36:56Speaker 13

  Yes, so a few things. So one is, um, up until recently, a large way that we would train these robots is through physical sensors and actually having to run physical simulations. And what DeepMind came up with was a paper last year where they showed that you can train robots purely on egocentric vision data. And egocentric vision data is point of view data. It's like GoPro video. So, um, they trained robots to play soccer using egocentric vision data or this video. And there isn't a common crawl equivalent, or just like these massive data sets where you have footage at the right angle or right height to then feed to these robots to be able to train them.

• 3:37:37Speaker 13

  And the problem is not everyone has like the balance sheet of like a Tesla or like the ability to go and then collect that. And so the best way to do that is distributed in a distributed way. And so there are companies that are working on, on one hand, compensating users for uploading video data that specific companies need. But then on the other hand, and this is like where more like the scale AI piece comes in, is you can disincentivize or slash users, essentially like a built in penalty for uploading poor quality data that's like pixelated or at the wrong height or angle and streamline that all in the protocol level. And so that unlocks a massive amount of potential in terms of the economics of these marketplaces, in terms of the amount of data that you can collect and the diversity of the set of data.

• 3:38:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting to flip around because we've been talking about VO3 and Google's massive advantage there with the YouTube data set. I've produced, I mean, through the show, we produced hundreds of hours of video content. It goes on to a few platforms, doesn't go on to every platform. Like now we're on most of them. So most of the hyperscalers could effectively train on our data. But if you have a, if you're a YouTuber and you're just releasing on YouTube, vending that data to another training platform is something that's not really accessible. Because obviously YouTube's not just going to go license all that data to another, to another company to train. Very interesting.

• 3:39:02Speaker 13

  The problem is worse for robotics, right?

• 3:39:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:04Speaker 13

  Because you have to task specific footage.

• 3:39:07Jordi Hays?

  What um, how, what is the state of the crypto seed market today? Is it, is it collaborative, sharp elbows?

• 3:39:16John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, the dynamic I'm interested in is like, it seems like it's easier than ever to just like spin up a coin in two seconds with one of these new pump coins and then that's your seed round. But it feels like that's still not a perfect substitute for traditional venture capital. But is that competitive with what you do these days? Like, there's so many alternative sources for funding in crypto.

• 3:39:38Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, you could also make the argument that companies are going, you know, creating tokens so fast that it's potentially good for seed because maybe you need a seed round, but you don't need the series A or the series B.

• 3:39:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:39:51Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, maybe limit dilution.

• 3:39:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe don't get squeezed as much, yeah.

• 3:39:56Speaker 13

  Yeah, so every cycle, we see this meme where it's like, will crypto kill VC? And every single cycle, it doesn't work. And the reason is because the quality of capital matters. And what founders, like what first time founders or founders or people that aren't even founders, what they don't realize is that when you have, and you guys, it's like when you have a venture fund on the cap table, it's not just getting the capital. Capital is now a commodity more than ever. It's the support you're getting from that particular fund and the legacy or brand name that they are going to give your company to help de-risk it, which helps you recruit better, be on news outlets or otherwise. You know, wouldn't really listen to you because you don't have a brand name around you and it's just your startup.

• 3:40:41Speaker 13

  And so those intangibles matter more than the capital you're taking on. And that's the lesson that you see these founders learn over and over again, when they think they can just like launch a meme coin and then call that their financing for the rest of their lives.

• 3:40:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are the other value adds that VCs are pushing right now? In defense tech, we're seeing VCs effectively set up like lobbying firms in DC to help with that go to market with the Department of Defense. I imagine that at least staying ahead of regulatory changes in crypto makes a lot of sense. But what are the other vectors other than, hey, we might refer a couple of engineers, we might get you a couple of press pieces. What are the outside the box value adds that a VC can bring to the table?

• 3:41:23Speaker 13

  Yeah, on the defense note, I've also heard some funds purchasing the American flags that they all have. Because there's actually like a division of the government that provides them.

• 3:41:33Speaker 13

  You're not getting it from any retail stores. But in terms, and that's, I guess, out of the box in defense. But in terms of out of the box, like value add and crypto, there are the universals, like you said, like recruiting and, you know, helping put together the roadmap and helping like next rounds of financing. But one thing that we're doing at Volt that I think is pretty unique is we're actually building. Simulation engine for deep in protocols where you can input different parameters for the network that you're building out and see based on average inflows and outflows, how you can expect that network to perform in different environments over time. And you can update number of nodes, number of like, like what you anticipate and number

• 3:42:16Speaker 13

  of end users being. And so getting really sophisticated around technical value adds that help the team move the bottom line in terms of revenue generation, I think, is the, the real thing that crypto venture funds should be focusing on beyond introductions to people they can recruit or market makers and things like that.

• 3:42:35Jordi Hays?

  What do you think the, the first truly breakout deep in product will be? Is it, is, is WorldCoin classified as, as deep in, or is that not the right framework? Uh, I know there's, there's the cell company, there's hotspots, but, but what, what do you, what kind of categories broadly are you most excited about?

• 3:42:57Speaker 13

  Yeah, there's this joke where if you squint hard enough, almost everything's deep in, like even Bitcoin is technically deep in because there's a harder component, but WorldCoin absolutely has broken through mainstream. I mean, they were just on the, I believe, Time Magazine cover. The things that we're more broadly interested in are in deep in are, like I said, the crypto robotics angle, but then also the crypto space angle. So there are teams that are building out. I don't know if you've seen that chart from our world and data where you can see the number of objects we've launched into space.

• 3:43:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:43:27Speaker 13

  Um, and it is just, I mean, it's not even hockey stick growth. It's like a vertical line almost. And these are like CubeSats, Probes, Landers, like whatever, um, or Crewlanders and others. And, um, and that, that's going to be a problem real fast, right? Like we need better anti-collision software. We need to be able to, um, track like silent satellites, which are almost like second strike defense capabilities, but in the sky. And one way to do that is by booking out commercial-grade telescopes and being able to have eyes on the sky data that way, but usually they're booked out days in advance. You have stale data when you get access to that. The other way is to just crowdsource it. Like, a lot of people have electronic telescopes they use anyway around the world that are hobbyists are taking imaging in the sky 24/7, and you can compensate them.

• 3:44:12Speaker 13

  And then on the demand side, charge companies to access that data. And so we're seeing a lot of interesting plays around orchestration and data marketplaces that are tackling very unique, dynamic, up-to-the-minute data that we don't have in traditional rails.

• 3:44:29John Coogan?

  Hmm, very cool.

• 3:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:44:30Speaker 13

  I think the broader...

• 3:44:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, I got... I don't want to make too much of a joke, but I do think we should let the aliens access pump, you know, pump fun.

• 3:44:38John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 3:44:39Jordi Hays?

  They should be able to...

• 3:44:40John Coogan?

  100%.

• 3:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Extraterrestrials should be able to launch.

• 3:44:42John Coogan?

  That's the first thing they should do when they arrive.

• 3:44:43Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a gateway.

• 3:44:44John Coogan?

  It's kind of welcome to America.

• 3:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:46John Coogan?

  Welcome to humanity.

• 3:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, but I, I, I believe we should put crypto in space.

• 3:44:50John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:44:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited.

• 3:44:51John Coogan?

  Crypto everywhere. Uh, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a lot of fun.

• 3:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:55John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for helping us understand all these different things.

• 3:44:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 3:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:44:59John Coogan?

  Uh, we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one, Tuna.

• 3:45:00John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:45:01John Coogan?

  Um, next up, we have Mert Mumtaz from Helios coming in the studio. Um, we, uh, we'll get a little intro from him. Uh, we got to talk to you about Bezel first. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 3:45:17Jordi Hays?

  With Bitcoin at 110ish K, you can get a Nautilus.

• 3:45:21John Coogan?

  You got to take in Nautilus's. Uh, welcome to the stream, Mert. How you doing?

• 3:45:25Mert Mumtaz?

  Good, sir. How you doing?

• 3:45:27John Coogan?

  I'm great. Uh, would you mind taking us through a little introduction of yourself and your company, just to kick us off?

• 3:45:32Mert Mumtaz?

  Sure, of course. Yeah. Uh, my name is Mert. I work on Helios, which is not helium. Uh, I know Kyle was on. He was talking about his investment in helium, which we get confused a lot.

• 3:45:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:45:42Mert Mumtaz?

  Um, and Helios does, uh, infrastructure, high-performance infrastructure for Solana. Um, and I also shitpost a lot on the twitter.com.

• 3:45:52John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for, for all of that.

• 3:45:54John Coogan?

  Sounds like you're doing God's work.

• 3:45:58John Coogan?

  What does infrastructure mean in this context? Are you building data centers? Are you just managing them? Are you just deploying nodes? Are you writing software? What's the shape of the team look like?

• 3:46:09Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, I mean, the the short answer is yes. And what I mean by that is we do some combination of all of those. Probably the least worst way to think about it is like some combination of Cloudflare, AWS, and maybe Stripe. And so in this context, we basically help developers or traders or whoever wants the data to get data from Solana super fast in a structured way and also write data to it super fast.

• 3:46:38John Coogan?

  Got it. What are the different trade offs? You mentioned Cloudflare. Like, is geolocation important as you build out infrastructure like this?

• 3:46:46Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, so it depends on the blockchain, but Solana has a lot of pretty advanced trading activity. Now, the assets that they're trading are a little funny because you might get like, not Citadel, but like, let's say, similar types of players really co-locating their servers to a like Fartcoin or something. But like, the co-location and like these latency games do play a pretty big role.

• 3:47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. How how are how advanced are the high-frequency trading operations? What are they using? I know Jane Street writes everything in OCaml. Are we seeing like low-level programming languages being used to trade these meme coins now?

• 3:47:26Mert Mumtaz?

  Oh, yeah, definitely. Like, you have people. I mean, I don't know if the audience here would consider like C and Rust that low level, but like, everything from C and Rust to some people will get extremely degenerate and start going into assembly for certain parts of the stack or like raw networking code.

• 3:47:43John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:47:44Mert Mumtaz?

  So, yeah, it's quite a serious game played with very interesting assets. A lot of fun.

• 3:47:50Jordi Hays?

  What what kind of players exist that don't like to talk about what they're doing and aren't aren't loud? That maybe aren't that maybe aren't doing anything that's that's, you know, morally wrong or anything like that, but are just sort of?

• 3:48:05John Coogan?

  Under the radar.

• 3:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Under the radar.

• 3:48:06John Coogan?

  They just don't want to talk about their alpha because they don't want to bring a bunch of competition.

• 3:48:11Mert Mumtaz?

  So the question is, what kinds of people like that exist? Yeah, like, are they?

• 3:48:15John Coogan?

  What's the shape of their operation? What's the scale these days?

• 3:48:18Mert Mumtaz?

  What are the different types of?

• 3:48:18John Coogan?

  Are they, are they coming from other? Is it, is it a new desk in an existing hedge fund? Or are these completely new operations that have just scaled up from like an individual trader?

• 3:48:30Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's, it's pretty unique in that you have the existing types of like quants from Chicago or New York, who will have some sort of operation. Not all of them, but like probably the ones that you know of already from TradFi. A good amount of them are already kind of playing this game. And then they'll compete with like a set of interesting actors. Some of those actors might be like some of the prop trading shops from like Tokyo or just other parts of Asia. But then they'll be like competing with like this random 17 year old kid from like Estonia in his basement. And like that kid actually tends to compete. And it's not just like a specific kid here, but like that persona.

• 3:49:12Mert Mumtaz?

  And so crypto is interesting because you now have all these guys kind of on the same, roughly the same playing field. And it's interesting because it's also kind of why Solana was started by Anatoly, which is he basically wanted, he had this vision that I think he got a front run like once or something on, on one of these things. And he got so mad, he's like, okay, you know what? I'm just going to build this decentralized NASDAQ where everybody can compete.

• 3:49:40John Coogan?

  That's amazing. What is, in your mind, what's the most important elements of the Solana roadmap going forward from here? It feels like a lot's been built out. There's a very healthy ecosystem, but job's not finished. What's, what, what, what in your mind is like the most exciting upcoming improvements?

• 3:50:00Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, so we have a very detailed roadmap that I wrote about on SolanaRoadmap.com. And when you go to that site, basically you'll see four words and it just says increased bandwidth, reduced latency, nothing else to it. And basically, everything is centered around making the thing go faster.

• 3:50:18Mert Mumtaz?

  And like, there's, I think Kyle was talking about Double Zero as well, which is like a new fiber layer where you can do some more advanced like network level filtering. We have like Jump, for example, building a new client in C, which is meant to be much more performant. But everything, roughly speaking, on the tech side is always centered around, how do we just make the thing go from point A to point B faster? And from a, let's say, a cultural or socioeconomic lens, it's very much about what we call the FAT thesis, which is Founders Apps tokens. So really just how do we attract? How do we form this association in somebody's mind if they're like a product builder?

• 3:51:04Mert Mumtaz?

  How do they think about, or why would they think about Solana first, right? So that when you have Ben Pastor and Ax or Lucas of the world or Alon, why should they pick Solana? And that's because like, people like me, but also everybody from Solana Foundation, and like investors and whatnot. How do we set up like the best friendly, friendliest founder infrastructure? So it's kind of like, you know, the Y Combinator of crypto in a sense.

• 3:51:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What is the state of the UAE crypto scene? And how much do you actually feel inclined to travel outside of the UAE versus just waiting for people to come to you?

• 3:51:43Mert Mumtaz?

  Oh, that's a good question. Well, I am in the UAE like 360 days out of the year. But then now I'm in Montana where it's like UAE has no nature and then Montana has all the nature. So it's like this barbell strategy.

• 3:51:59Mert Mumtaz?

  But like, so I moved to the UAE from Canada, Toronto specifically, where like it is illegal to hold over or trade over 30,000 chat.

• 3:52:10Mert Mumtaz?

  Which is really like $8 USD. Worth of any coins except for Bitcoin, Ethereum, which fair enough. And then Litecoin and then Bitcoin Cash. Okay, so like. Vintage. And leveraged trading is illegal. So just to give you an idea.

• 3:52:27John Coogan?

  They banned leverage? That's so un-American. I'm unsurprised. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. Okay, so.

• 3:52:33Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, I think. I think it's because like one of the pension funds was like an investor in FTX or something.

• 3:52:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 3:52:38Mert Mumtaz?

  Which, you know, interesting. But like in the UAE, in terms of crypto specifically, for example, I can pay my phone bill in USDC. And I have, which is pretty crazy. And and and the government actually is like quite interested in like getting you, you know, on the phone and really trying to work out, how do we actually like support the builders here as opposed to some other jurisdictions? But like the UAE, I like referring to it as kind of like the hotel for crypto where like it's kind of just in the middle. So whenever you're flying anywhere, people just stop by. I remember the last time you wanted to host this Crypto Day, there was like a massive conference there. And I was like, John, what are you doing?

• 3:53:23John Coogan?

  It really shows you how native I am to crypto. I'm completely out of the loop. In fact, it ties to my next question. The last, during the last cycle, I was really captured by the story of Solana. I thought the founders had a fascinating story. Obviously, still kind of coming from the outside of perspective, but I appreciated the technology they were building. There was that meme of like Sequel Lana, it's not as decentralized as it should be. It's not, it's not as pure of a technology as other, as other chains. Talk to me, give me an update on that. Has that, have the problems that people were surfacing, have those problems been solved? Or were they never problems to begin with? Is it all just memes and it doesn't really matter because it's just about the perception? Obviously, the perception of Bitcoin has changed a ton.

• 3:54:08John Coogan?

  It was originally like, oh, it's going to be completely private, privacy based and, you know, it's very traceable. There's been an evolution of the Bitcoin narrative. Has the Solana narrative evolved and kind of take me through the last couple of years?

• 3:54:23Mert Mumtaz?

  Right, so with Twitter, most of the debates or discussions, let's say, happen on crypto Twitter, which is an amazing place for intellectual sparring, let's say. Definitely, nothing gets straw manned or taken out of context. And so like Sequelana, for example, was a jab from somebody from Ethereum, who obviously is not a very big fan, but that's okay. And it was basically trying to draw the parallel that Solana is actually like this centralized database. And basically, I made somewhat of a career out of saying that's wrong aggressively on the internet.

• 3:55:03Mert Mumtaz?

  And it's, of course, wrong because fundamentally, Solana is a blockchain where you have thousands of different nodes. And really, what a blockchain does is it's a bunch of different nodes functioning as one node, right? So that you can't, you shouldn't be able to actually tell.

• 3:55:20Mert Mumtaz?

  There was some certainly quite valid criticisms, and there are still today. One of those was that like Solana would go down at like very high activity, right? So in 2022, there was this whole NFT craze where people would like really try to mint pictures of like these stones, pixelated apes on the internet. And it started on Ethereum, but then Ethereum fees obviously went up, and so they came to Solana. But like Solana was not expecting people to be that passionate about certain pictures. And so that exposed a lot of interesting engineering problems in the core architecture.

• 3:55:59Mert Mumtaz?

  And we basically took those learnings and then we iterated a few better designs for the blockchain. And so what that allowed for is now when the next cycle came, which was with, you know, meme coins and, you know, the President of the United States launching Trump coin and then his wife following right after that. When that actually happened, this time the chain was actually ready to handle it. And that's why Solana has been basically like the main venue for most of these crypto cases.

• 3:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Where were you when you opened X and saw the President posting a meme coin? Do you remember where you were? Were you sleeping?

• 3:56:38Mert Mumtaz?

  Oh, man. This is a, okay, so I had just bought Eight Sleep, okay?

• 3:56:44Mert Mumtaz?

  It was, it had just came to the UAE.

• 3:56:48John Coogan?

  It's literally the last ad we have to do.

• 3:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Perfect segue.

• 3:56:53John Coogan?

  Five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns.

• 3:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Code TBN, TVPN.

• 3:56:57John Coogan?

  Free shipping. Go check it out.

• 3:56:59Jordi Hays?

  Continue. So you're in a deep slumber. You're like, you got 90 minutes of deep sleep. You get, does somebody shake you awake? What happened?

• 3:57:07Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah. So I'm like extremely pumped. I'm like, oh God, this is like the first night I'm gonna get a great sleep tonight. And at like, I don't remember quite the time, but I remember just getting all these calls. And like, I slept through most of them because of how good the, like, there was like a new future on it. And then so one of them finally broke through and I opened my phone and I was like, oh shit, Solana has gone down. I'm gonna kill myself. Everybody's trolling me on the internet. And then I look at my like company Slack because we power like a lot or most of the infrastructure on Solana. And then I'm like, dude, how come I'm getting paid so much? And then my co-founder was like, oh yeah, like Trump launched a shitcoin. And I was like, what?

• 3:57:49Mert Mumtaz?

  And I was like, is this real? I was like, Chad, is this real?

• 3:57:53Mert Mumtaz?

  But then like,

• 3:57:57Mert Mumtaz?

  it was handled so well by like the existing infrastructure and the team that like, nothing was actually happening except for just a lot of like shenanigans on the internet. So that was, that was the story of Trump and it was a very chaotic day. And then so at the end of the day, I was like, oh, finally let me just crack open a beer and, and, and, you know, watch like an episode of Mad Men or something. And so I sit down and I shit you not, the, the second I cracked it open, I get another call and it's like, dude, Melania just launched a coin. And it was like that George Bush meme.

• 3:58:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:58:31Mert Mumtaz?

  Where it's like, sir, a second shitcoin has hit the blockchain. And I was like, oh no.

• 3:58:39Mert Mumtaz?

  And then that's when things started going really haywire because you could not tell if it was a hack or like it was legit. And, and so those were a very fascinating, it was very hard to describe to my dad what was happening and what I do for a living.

• 3:58:53John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 3:58:54Jordi Hays?

  Hey, well, hopefully he understands.

• 3:58:56John Coogan?

  What fantastic war stories. Yeah, thanks for taking us through those. Those were really fun. It was great talking to you. We got to have you on again. This was fantastic. We'll talk to you later. Have a great time.

• 3:59:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Mert. Have a good one. Enjoy Montana.

• 3:59:09John Coogan?

  Get a nice, nice, nice round of sleep. Well, next up, we have Dan from Farcaster coming to the studio. And big news, you can watch TBPN on Farcaster. Someone built a Farcaster mini app.

• 3:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Which is a very cool, novel, sort of experience that you have on Farcaster. People can create kind of sub apps within the app and they live in the feed.

• 3:59:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's bring Dan in.

• 3:59:34Jordi Hays?

  I think it's Jamie Hoffman who built this for us.

• 3:59:38Dan Romero?

  Good to see you guys.

• 3:59:38Jordi Hays?

  Dan, what's going on?

• 3:59:40Dan Romero?

  Are you talking about the pirate feed of TBPN?

• 3:59:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:59:43Dan Romero?

  Authorized reproduction on Farcaster?

• 3:59:45Jordi Hays?

  No, no, it's authorized.

• 3:59:46John Coogan?

  As long as it has our ads on there, we're happy.

• 3:59:48Jordi Hays?

  It's authorized, fully authorized.

• 3:59:50Dan Romero?

  You guys are like the Grateful Dead. Anyone can record the episode as long as the ads are on there.

• 3:59:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:59:55Jordi Hays?

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:59:56John Coogan?

  It is fascinating because I remember, I mean, when Farcaster dropped, it was like very much like it looked a lot like Twitter back then. But you look at the trajectory of the two platforms and now like you think about like, oh, you can build a mini app that like repurposes TBPN. And like, that is something that's completely not on anyone else's roadmap and the product's evolved in a very, very interesting way. So, I mean, anyway, can you just give us kind of the update on like how things are going? What, what, what is the current pitch for Farcaster? Where do you see it going? And kind of take us through a little bit of history.

• 4:00:30Jordi Hays?

  I have to say, Dan and I were neighbors. We lived on the same street.

• 4:00:34John Coogan?

  No way.

• 4:00:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's just been amazing to watch, to watch you build Farcaster in such an intentional way from the very beginning. I think you kind of had, I don't know if you had a master plan, but you, you guys seemed to have this pace of building, but also like patience and just like long-term thinking the entire time. So it's been awesome to see.

• 4:00:54Dan Romero?

  Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I wanted to point out that I am the almost last person in the group chat that started the Moz podcast back in the day that's been on your show. Antonio has not been on your show yet.

• 4:01:07Jordi Hays?

  We missed Antonio today. That was a miss by us.

• 4:01:11Dan Romero?

  I'm just gonna say, I'm so happy I'm on this show before Antonio.

• 4:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bragging rights forever.

• 4:01:16Dan Romero?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:01:17John Coogan?

  Open invite to Antonio.

• 4:01:19Dan Romero?

  Yeah, so Farcaster, five years in this year. When we started decentralized social, pretty contrarian. I think Elon changed the dynamic a bit in the sense that all of a sudden, people got interested in building alternative versions of Twitter. I think we've tacked more into crypto over time. And so I think where we are today is we're decentralized social network, but it's targeted for crypto native folks, right? So there's a built in wallet and many apps, as you point out. And so it just, if you want to do fun things in crypto, you use Farcaster. And we're increasingly making that happen in the sense that we support a bunch of different chains. So you can use Ethereum, you can use Base, you can use Solana. I think we're gonna add other ecosystems over time. So if you can

• 4:02:03Dan Romero?

  kind of think of like, if you've ever had to do something in crypto where your friends tell you, oh, you gotta get into this, you gotta mint this, or do whatever thing that you're trying to say, you could just get on Farcaster and it's like two taps away. And then there's no complexity around switching chains and bridging and gas and all this other kind of stuff that if you talk to like the average Web 2 founders, like the UX that's acceptable in crypto is crazy. And so, you know, 2025, we finally actually have the infrastructure to be able to like build decent consumer experiences. And so that's what we're trying to do.

• 4:02:35John Coogan?

  Do you think you ever loop back around and go back into crypto non-native folks and tuck some of the crypto features under, under kind of like a stablecoin wrapper or something that like, like abstracts it away over time? Because you've gotten that like core fire going and then you need to turn it into like a raging fire and people. I guess the meta question is like, in 10 or 20 years, does the average consumer just in America, are they, are they, do they, does everyone become crypto native? Or does crypto native cease to be a, cease to be a concept? Because everyone just.

• 4:03:07Dan Romero?

  I think it's probably more cease to be a concept in the sense that I think stable coins are working. So we do all of our weekly rewards. So we pay out $25,000 a week in our version of X payouts. It's a little bit broader base and you can be a much smaller account and get it. We do that with stablecoins. So we do that every week, works perfectly fine. We didn't have to integrate any other fintech provider or there's no, just every user has a wallet. We're able to stream stablecoins to them for a ridiculously cheap amount.

• 4:03:34Speaker 09

  That's amazing.

• 4:03:34Dan Romero?

  In terms of like fees, there, you know, so there's no middleman. So that, that's for sure working. I think, um, so we, we originally tried to do this whole thing where we were using crypto under the hood, but the whole point is like, we're using it as a technology, not the kind of forefront. And I think that the reality is, um, 2022 left crypto with a pretty big black eye with like FTX and a bunch of that other stuff. And so I think there are a bunch of people that I think otherwise, um, are pretty intelligent and, and I would say reasonably open minded. But when you talk to them about crypto, they just, they, they froth at the mouth in terms of, you know, it's all scams and grifts.

• 4:04:10Dan Romero?

  And look, there are plenty of scams and grifts. It's, it's a reputation that it's earned over time, but I actually think there's plenty of good stuff being built in increasingly. And so I think stablecoins is probably the, the thing to highlight in the sense that that's just been chugging along, right? And, and where did stablecoin start? Tether was a scam and a grift that for 10 years, everyone kept saying it's, it's, it's on the verge of exploding, right? And it's now the most profitable business in the world. I think it's like, they make like 80 million dollars per employee. And so stablecoins have taken a while to bake. The infrastructure is finally there where it's like, I mean, now Stripe's in it, right? So it's like Ramp, you're one of your sponsors.

• 4:04:46Dan Romero?

  So I, I, I think like, stablecoins are just going to make crypto way easier. Um, and then I think there's this concept of embedded wallets, which you, you know, you may have heard of, but like, there are a bunch of providers. We use a company called Privy. And basically I think over the next three or four years, like every app, uh, whether it's like a, you know, kind of fintech app or consumer app will have built in wallets. They probably will use stablecoins. Now whether you can buy like fart coin or whatever meme coin in your, you know, Bank of America account, probably not. But I do think, um, everything will get kind of like crypto enabled.

• 4:05:23Dan Romero?

  And to the degree that you're using a more crypto forward product like a Coinbase or a Robinhood, or like a completely crypto native product like Farcaster, I think it's just like a more of a personal preference.

• 4:05:34Jordi Hays?

  It's top of mind for me, yesterday you launched Farcaster Pro, a subscription. You brought the 10K NFT collection back. Talk through the whole process there. You know, why use kind of that mechanism and it's sold out? So it sounds like, you know, a cause for celebration?

• 4:06:00Dan Romero?

  Yeah, as Kobe would say, job's not finished. So I think, like, good progress. I mean, we sold 10,120 subscriptions with stablecoins in a little less than six hours. The 100% of the revenue we're generating, so this is kind of like for the protocol, is going back into creator rewards. So effectively, we've doubled the amount of like weekly payouts we're going to do for the next year. And I think, I think you had Chris on earlier, but this idea of like a zero take rate network, I think is pretty powerful. And going back to your question, John, of like, how do you actually get out of the crypto native and move towards a broader base? It's just like most social networks you use today. What percentage of the value are they capturing? Like, you know, Meta's market cap's pretty high. Like, if they're capturing a lot of that value.

• 4:06:45Dan Romero?

  I think that the way for protocol-based social networks, and specifically ones that use crypto for the economic plumbing, the way for them to win is to have it be as close to zero take rate as possible. And basically, you, by participating on a crypto social network, one, you're a decentralized social network, you actually own your audience. You can't get your links nerfed. Like, you guys are building like an amazing media brand. If you lost your ability to do streaming on a couple of the major platforms tomorrow, that would hurt your growth. And so the idea of like actually having a social network that you can be guaranteed to have direct access to your audience, I think that's-

• 4:07:21John Coogan?

  Built different, we would just mail everyone a DVD every day. Easy.

• 4:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Daily.

• 4:07:26John Coogan?

  Problem solved.

• 4:07:26Jordi Hays?

  Daily DVD.

• 4:07:27John Coogan?

  Daily DVDs.

• 4:07:28Jordi Hays?

  With stablecoin payments.

• 4:07:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, with stablecoin payments. I want to know about some of the economic incentives on a social network. Uh, it's been like the micropayments thing has been floated around. Is there a world where with AI slop, we need to be charging people to post, or can just algorithmic feeds kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff? Does any of that make sense? Are there any new trends in kind of like the design of a healthy social network that has high, I guess, not just high retention and ARPU, but also maybe high NPS? Because the, the classic thing with a social network is like, it's printing money, but everyone says they hate it.

• 4:08:08Dan Romero?

  Yeah. So I think that's a stated reveal preference where

• 4:08:10John Coogan?

  Exactly. I agree with that.

• 4:08:11Dan Romero?

  People are, they actually love it.

• 4:08:13John Coogan?

  Totally. Totally. I completely agree. So yeah, what do you, what is your deeper take?

• 4:08:16Dan Romero?

  I actually think you bring up a great point, and we are for sure at the forefront of this because if you know anything about crypto, and people think there's an economic incentive, you, you bring out a lot of, uh, coin operated, uh, users, right?

• 4:08:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:08:27Dan Romero?

  I think that any version of pay money as a solely a mechanism for like, oh, there's some version of quality or non-bot-like behavior, not going to work. I think any version of, I prove that you're a human. Well, you're proving you're human, but I could go use ChatGPT to write the responses. So like, I think this is an extremely hard problem. If you actually go look at like Metas 10Ks, like they specifically say that like, they are the biggest and best in the world. This, this is still an extremely hard problem for them to solve. They estimate something like 10% of like all users are potentially like spam or

• 4:09:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 4:09:02Dan Romero?

  Is it still, it's, it's, you know, but I think it'll be kind of a, a variety of tools, right? So I think economic activity is really hard to fake. Like one thing we had yesterday is a bunch of accounts paid $120 to a protocol. No refunds, right? Like, you know, stablecoin is a nice thing. It's like, you can't charge that back.

• 4:09:22Dan Romero?

  Whether they're a bot or not, that money is now going to an algorithm. And this is where I'm actually a big fan of algorithms. Now maybe algorithm choice we could talk about, but the algorithm, if you design it right, is going to reward the interesting posters, the best posters. And you're extracting revenue from the bots. So I do think charging is actually a good idea. And then I think algorithms are the way to actually, as you point out, wheat, wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

• 4:09:48Jordi Hays?

  How do you see crypto long-term as a funding mechanism for creators, artists? I mean, we had Ben Pasternak on earlier today to talk about, you know, his vision for Believe. And it's, yeah, you people are using it to create meme coins, they're also using it as a, you know, funding, you know, funding mechanism for different projects. And I bring it up because we've talked about, you know, we had Chris Best from Substack on maybe a week or so ago. And there's this idea that like, people subscribe to Substack to get value in the form of content,

• 4:10:29Jordi Hays?

  but it's also a mechanism to just support, support somebody to just do interesting things in the world and be able to spend all their time, you know, thinking about a specific area or sector. And it feels like there could be some element, you know, some, I could imagine a world in the future where Farcaster is powering that type of activity. Is that correct, incorrect? Is that, is that a problem space that you think about?

• 4:10:57Dan Romero?

  Yeah, although I, to Substack's credit, I think they're doing better than the vast majority of Web 2 in the sense that I think what they take 10% and, you know, like YouTube, I think, what is it, 70/30 cut in terms of, I think they take 70% and you get 30?

• 4:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:11:13Dan Romero?

  Right? So, so like, we're improving in the Web 2 spectrum. I think what crypto does in a world where the UX is good and it's pervasive, I think these are like embedded wallets with stable coins, you just start competing things down to zero, right? Like, the ability for the platform to take a cut of payments, I think, drops pretty significantly.

• 4:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:11:32Dan Romero?

  And what the platforms that do take a cut, they are going to say, hey, I'm getting you distribution, right? If you go on an app like Substack, a lot of, when you talk to Substack newsletter writers, they're getting a lot of their subscribers these days from the Substack app. So, that's value that Substack is providing. I think where...

• 4:11:50Dan Romero?

  Crypto is interesting is that, you know, like, basic payments are like, you're talking like 10% improvement, like marginal improvement. And I think where you're looking for is like 10x improvements.

• 4:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:12:01Dan Romero?

  As you know, you're pretty aware of the space and believes a great example. This is like, I think, capital formation, fundraising with big quotes around that because obviously that's a pretty loaded word. But the ability to kind of like internet flash mob money into a certain thing, whether that's a meme coin or like a GoFundMe equivalent or Kickstarter. Actually, someone built a mini app with stablecoins called Crowdfund on Farcaster. Basically is Kickstarter, right? Like you use a smart contract, you put your USDC, like stablecoin in, and if it hits the funding threshold, it's unlocked. So that was a venture backed company 10 years ago. Now, now it's a, someone vibe coded over three days, right?

• 4:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it makes so much sense as a mini app because in many ways, people would just go to GoFundMe, create this thing and then take it to social to promote it. And why doesn't it just exist naively in the product?

• 4:12:51Dan Romero?

  Yeah. And I think the other thing that you, you have is like the liquidity in the sense that I'm not fragmenting. I don't fund my GoFundMe wallet over here, or I have to like connect this payment method for the seventh time. And again, anytime you're using like a card based payment method, Visa and Mastercard and the banks are getting their 3%, right? So I think it will be slow in many cases, but this stuff will just become increasingly pervasive and people will choose it. If the kind of like platforms or creators are giving an incentive, right? Like if I can not have to pay 3% to a card network by having used a stablecoin, I'm going to make that the default payment on it. And maybe I give you a 2% cash back or you get some loyalty points or an NFT or whatever reason to get you to switch your, your payment method.

• 4:13:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What are, what are you seeing? How do you think about international long-term? I know the Farcaster network is like default international because, because crypto is default sort of borderless and international. But I feel like the, the conversation in, in the, the beginning of the 2020s was really around sort of social media censorship. And then, you know, we had Balaji on the show earlier and he's talked about this moment with X where created this kind of fragmentation and, you know, censorship on, on X potentially being solved. But then there's plenty of countries, you know, globally that

• 4:14:11Jordi Hays?

  That are that have even bigger issues than we have today around censorship. And so how do you think about, you know, enabling, enabling free speech through Farcaster over the long run?

• 4:14:24Dan Romero?

  Yeah, so we're a US-based company, so I'm a big believer in the Constitution and US laws. Farcaster basically is exporting that as like our social networks policy. So if I get a local jurisdiction somewhere in the world and says, please remove these activists from Farcaster to quote Elon, they can shake their fists at the sky. We're beamed in over the internet. If you want to block, you know, our, our app or the network, go for it. But I think-

• 4:14:52Jordi Hays?

  But then in theory, somebody, a dissident could build up, spin up a new iteration of the app on the Farcaster network theoretically, and it would be out of your control, right?

• 4:15:01Dan Romero?

  In addition, that that person could be directly posting like via the command line or something and having it go to out to a global audience. And so I think that the network design of Farcaster looks a lot more like a blockchain under the hood. And one of the reasons is it actually provides really strong censorship resistance, whereas something that's a bit more federated. So if you kind of look at like Mastodon or Blue Sky, like there are instances where they're already complying with local law of like, okay, well, we won't be able to serve our other users in this country because they will just shut down the whole site. So I think, again, it's not like a primary consideration, but should we be successful in continuing to scale the network? I'm confident that if you think that the US free speech laws are like a good baseline

• 4:15:45Dan Romero?

  global policy, that's basically what Farcaster is going to follow in terms of our app.

• 4:15:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:15:50John Coogan?

  Amazing stuff. Thank you so much. We'd love to have you back and get more updates.

• 4:15:55Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 4:15:56Dan Romero?

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:15:57Jordi Hays?

  I'll put it on the record, some of the best taste in crypto. I put it out there. It shows up in the, it shows up in the app and everywhere. And yeah, it's great, great to finally have you on. Come back on again soon.

• 4:16:10Dan Romero?

  I love the new studio.

• 4:16:11John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 4:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come by, do your next appearance in person.

• 4:16:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.

• 4:16:15Jordi Hays?

  It's only three hours away from the West Side.

• 4:16:17John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Dan.

• 4:16:20Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 4:16:21John Coogan?

  Uh, next up, we have the CEO of Lava, Shazan, coming in the studio. Uh, we've been talking about with Bitcoin, it's at 107. You can lend against that, you can borrow against that and buy a Patek Philippe.

• 4:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 4:16:36John Coogan?

  No brainer.

• 4:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 4:16:38John Coogan?

  No brainer. Use leverage to buy, to buy a luxury watch. Anyway, welcome to the studio, Shazan. Hopefully he is here. How you doing?

• 4:16:47Shehzan Maredia?

  Hey, can you hear me?

• 4:16:47Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 4:16:48John Coogan?

  Yes, we can.

• 4:16:49Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 4:16:52John Coogan?

  Take us off with an introduction to Lava and then I definitely want to know about the announcement that just went down.

• 4:16:58Shehzan Maredia?

  So Lava is the most secure way to borrow against Bitcoin. So a lot of Bitcoiners, they believe that Bitcoin is the greatest appreciating asset of all time, which, you know, historically it has been. And if you can avoid selling your Bitcoin, why wouldn't you? And historically, if you wanted to borrow against your Bitcoin, you had to use a custodial platform. So give full ownership of your Bitcoin to someone else and kind of trust them with it. And we all know kind of what happened with these custodial platforms like FTX or BlockFi or Celsius or Voyager. Uh, they took your Bitcoin, they'd start trading it or rehypothecating it. And ultimately, over the last few years, these custodial platforms have lost around $100 billion in customer funds.

• 4:17:41John Coogan?

  That's so much money.

• 4:17:46John Coogan?

  We don't like losing money.

• 4:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Not good.

• 4:17:48Shehzan Maredia?

  Not good.

• 4:17:49John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 4:17:49Shehzan Maredia?

  Not good at all.

• 4:17:50John Coogan?

  So what's the solution?

• 4:17:52Shehzan Maredia?

  So Lava, what we've done is we've embedded the logic for a loan into a Bitcoin smart contract, which basically means that when you borrow against your Bitcoin on Lava, you can verify on-chain, like you can go to the Block Explorer, for example, and see that your Bitcoin is safe and secure, that it's not being rehypothecated. And you have cryptographic guarantees, not just legal or reputational assurances from Lava, that your collateral is safe. So that's why it's the most secure way to borrow against your Bitcoin. And not only that, Lava has the lowest rates on the market, even lower than custodial platforms by 20 to 30%.

• 4:18:30Shehzan Maredia?

  And we can fund loans of any size.

• 4:18:32John Coogan?

  You said Bitcoin smart contract. I thought that was an Ethereum thing. How is this working? This is new technology. Is this something that wasn't possible previously? Because the basic pitch seems like we should have been doing this all along. So what had, what needed to happen to get us to today?

• 4:18:49Shehzan Maredia?

  You know, it's it's kind of surprising to me because Bitcoin always had like scripting. Uh, um, like Bitcoin's always had like programmability. It's not just like moving money from one address to the other. Lava's kind of leveraged certain like core Bitcoin primitives to kind of take that and use what primitives Bitcoin has available and create this like loan contract. Does that make sense? Uh, Bitcoin's not like Turing complete. So what you can't do is like, you can't do all sorts of things that you would want to, that you could do in Ethereum on Bitcoin, but you can do certain very important things. And one of those is non-custodial borrowing. And honestly, if you look at the rest of crypto, uh, I think the ma- ma- majority of like the main use case of DeFi really is,

• 4:19:31Shehzan Maredia?

  in my opinion, being able to borrow against an asset and see that it's safe and secure.

• 4:19:35John Coogan?

  No, I imagine that it's pretty expensive. That's the whole narrative. May- maybe that's not true, but it feels like if I want to borrow fifty cents against my Bitcoin, probably not going to have a good, a good time. Is that roughly correct? Like what, where does it start to make sense? Um, uh, you know, taking out a hundred thousand dollar loan, the gas might be, or whatever the equivalent is, might be a little bit more reasonable. Is that, is that roughly correct?

• 4:19:58Shehzan Maredia?

  Uh, the gas fees on Bitcoin are extremely, uh, like there, Bitcoin is like really inexpensive right now, like being like less than a dollar. But what you could do is like, you could lock a bunch of collateral up and over time, take out more and more in loans, right? So, uh, we have a product in beta right now where you basically can lock your Bitcoin up and get a card. And as you swipe the card, more and more gets borrowed. It's kind of like a line of credit, if that makes, uh, yeah.

• 4:20:24John Coogan?

  And then what, what, what was the announcement today?

• 4:20:27Shehzan Maredia?

  So today, we actually like fully officially announced lava loans like out of beta, alpha. Uh, we announced that we can fund loans of any size from a hundred dollars to a billion dollars, just based on the capital that we

• 4:20:37John Coogan?

  Billion dollar loan?

• 4:20:40Shehzan Maredia?

  Yes.

• 4:20:40John Coogan?

  That's so insane.

• 4:20:42Shehzan Maredia?

  And we've already done, we've already made loans, uh, like millions of dollars and, uh, like a single loans that have been worth like five million dollars already, which is pretty interesting. Um, and we announced that our rates are like twenty to thirty percent lower than the next best rate on the market.

• 4:20:57John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. And then? Walk me through all the different counterparties, who's getting paid? Obviously, as a consumer, I have Bitcoin. I want to take a loan against it. At some point, I'm probably getting stable coins out. But then who's on the other side of that contract? Or how much money are they making? How much money are you making?

• 4:21:18Shehzan Maredia?

  So there's a bunch of different lenders on the other side that Lava works with to facilitate these loans. So as a borrower, the way it works is you go to, you download Lava, you put your Bitcoin on there. It's all self custodial. You say, okay, I want to borrow $10,000 for one year. And then your Bitcoin gets moved from one address to this like smart contract address. And when that happens, you get stable coins directly to your Lava app. That's all abstracted away from you. For us in Lava, we leverage stable coins because they enable us to do instant dispersal of loan capital. But it's just seen as dollars, like you just see like dollars coming into your Lava app. And you can even use Lava to withdraw those dollars to your bank account.

• 4:21:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:21:59Shehzan Maredia?

  Within Lava, you also have global free instant dollar payments. So kind of like what Cash App, Venmo style payments, you have that within the app for free as well. You don't have to worry about any of like the blockchain complexity. We abstract away all the blockchain stuff, the gas fee stuff, the stable coin stuff. And you can even use a card that we could issue to you to start spending those dollars that you've borrowed.

• 4:22:22John Coogan?

  It's cool. And then what drives the interest rate? Is that just driven by Bitcoin volatility? Or is there some sort of like underwriting of the individual? Because I imagine it doesn't necessarily need to know anything about me, other than the fact that like the Bitcoin is in the, is in the wallet and that's it.

• 4:22:37Shehzan Maredia?

  Yep, exactly. There's no like underwriting of the individual.

• 4:22:41John Coogan?

  So everyone gets the same interest rate?

• 4:22:43Shehzan Maredia?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 4:22:44John Coogan?

  And how are the interest rates calculated? Where are they sitting right now? Where they've been historically? And, and, and how, how do the lenders like think about that risk?

• 4:22:52Shehzan Maredia?

  But today, if you borrow, you can get a loan from 5% for a one month loan up to 9.99% for a 12 month loan. And that's really like the sweet spot in duration that people want. People can like refinance, like extend their loans later if they want to.

• 4:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:23:07Shehzan Maredia?

  And like Lava earns like a little bit of a spread and the rest is kind of sent to the lender, essentially, like the rest of the interest payments. Historically, The, I think over time, the rates will just come down. I mean, they're always going to be somewhat variable to whatever like the treasury rates are, right? Because you're going to want some premium over that. But I think long term, the rate for a Bitcoin backed loan should trend towards the rate for borrowing against equities. And in fact, like borrowing against Bitcoin, like lending against Bitcoin is a lot less risky than lending against equities because it trades 24/7. So it's way more liquid. Uh, it will over time, it is already more liquid than most like stocks, like individual stocks, right?

• 4:23:49Shehzan Maredia?

  And as the market cap grows, it will become the most liquid asset in the world. So I think you could even argue today it is that because it trades 24/7.

• 4:23:58John Coogan?

  And is there some sort of like reserve ratio where if you have 10 Bitcoin, you can borrow X amount against that or?

• 4:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:24:06John Coogan?

  How does volatility, yeah, how does volatility work here? Because I imagine if you borrow, if you borrow against all of your, at some point, they're going to take your Bitcoin, right? Uh, but, but, but what, what triggers that?

• 4:24:17Shehzan Maredia?

  So when you borrow, there's like an LTV, right? So kind of like if you borrow against your equities, you can maybe get 50% against the value that you collateralize, which is similar to how lava works. And there's flexible LTV. So maybe if you want to be very conservative, you might only want to borrow 20% against the collateral that you put up.

• 4:24:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:24:34Shehzan Maredia?

  And then every loan has a, like a price, a liquidation price where if Bitcoin gets there and you haven't repaid your loan or added more collateral, there will be a liquidation, but you can kind of verify that lava sends you notifications all the time to make sure you're, you're aware if you're getting close to that liquidation price.

• 4:24:51John Coogan?

  Yep. That makes sense. Jordy, any other questions?

• 4:24:54Jordi Hays?

  No, very cool.

• 4:24:55John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 4:24:55Jordi Hays?

  A lot of our listeners are going to go lever up and use it to buy fine.

• 4:25:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Swiss watches.

• 4:25:00John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess the, I, I, I guess my, my, my last question is there's, there's, there's this weird dynamic in crypto right now where there are some seriously scaled. Founder mode companies in the space that have huge distribution advantages that can that can offer competitive products. And then there's kind of this history of when something's working, it gets forked and open sourced and there's a lot of competition there. How are you thinking about the competitive landscape as it evolves over the next couple of years if you're really successful?

• 4:25:29Shehzan Maredia?

  It's interesting. I actually think there's no company in crypto today. Like I very, I very much view Bitcoin as being very distinct from crypto. I think a lot of the companies in crypto today are serving this like trading speculation use case, whereas Lava is really serving this Bitcoin savory use case. Like these, there is these Bitcoiners out there, they don't touch any asset in crypto other than Bitcoin. They just want to save in it. And what we're really building are like North Stars, whatever fidelity kind of offers equity asset holders, we want to offer Bitcoin asset holders. So there's people out there that we're serving that have basically replaced their savings portfolio that's, you know, with equities or real estate with just Bitcoin. And they don't really have a trusted brand that they can go to, that they feel is secure,

• 4:26:14Shehzan Maredia?

  that they can rely on to borrow against their Bitcoin, to start spending dollars to buy more Bitcoin. And that's really where Lava is headed to.

• 4:26:22John Coogan?

  Is that a common use case? People take a Lava loan and just buy more Bitcoin?

• 4:26:25Shehzan Maredia?

  So it's not like the most common use case. We've had people borrow against their Bitcoin to buy houses, which is pretty interesting, buy cars, pay their taxes, like fund like vacations. But there are some people who will borrow to buy more Bitcoin. But what's like more interesting is a lot of people come to Lava, they borrow against their Bitcoin, but then they like stay to do the other things that they were already doing, like do like dollar payments, or when they do want to buy more Bitcoin later, they can actually do, use that, use Lava to do that as well.

• 4:26:53John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, good luck. Thank you so much for hopping on. This is great. We'll talk to you soon.

• 4:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the lunch. Cheers.

• 4:27:01John Coogan?

  Bye. Next up, we have a last minute ad. Brandon.

• 4:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Last minute surprise guest.

• 4:27:06John Coogan?

  Surprise guest.

• 4:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Brandon, co-founder and CEO of Phantom.

• 4:27:10John Coogan?

  Phantom.

• 4:27:11Jordi Hays?

  One of.

• 4:27:12John Coogan?

  Wallet.

• 4:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:27:13John Coogan?

  I have.

• 4:27:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how many billions they're worth now. Brandon, welcome to the show.

• 4:27:18Speaker 17

  Hey, what's up, guys? Thanks for having me.

• 4:27:21Jordi Hays?

  The Wallet King.

• 4:27:22John Coogan?

  The Wallet King. The second greatest wallet salesman in the world.

• 4:27:26Jordi Hays?

  One of our, one of our dear friends.

• 4:27:27John Coogan?

  Only to Sean Frank, the CEO of Ridge Wallet, direct competitor to you.

• 4:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Direct competitor, both whole assets.

• 4:27:34John Coogan?

  Ridge Wallet, you can only have one.

• 4:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Collaboration.

• 4:27:37Speaker 17

  We got him on the bullseye in the office.

• 4:27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Sean, you're on notice. What's happening? Where are you right now? Are you, are you in Vegas like a lot of our other guests or?

• 4:27:48John Coogan?

  Dubai or Monaco?

• 4:27:50Speaker 17

  In San Francisco, in the trenches, so to speak.

• 4:27:53John Coogan?

  The trenches.

• 4:27:54Jordi Hays?

  The trenches of S.

• 4:27:55Speaker 17

  Yeah, that's where I'm from.

• 4:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 4:28:00John Coogan?

  I mean, how are the trenches these days?

• 4:28:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Phantom needs a ton of introduction, but because our audience is not typically, you know, super crypto native, it'd be great to give a quick kind of backstory on your history and then the company and then, and then we can kind of talk about a number of other things.

• 4:28:17John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 4:28:18Speaker 17

  Yeah, totally. Well, yeah, thanks again for having me on, guys. And you know, you guys have been on quite the crypto marathon today. How long have you guys been going at it? Like?

• 4:28:29John Coogan?

  It's been about, since 8 a.m. I think I finally understand it. It's like electronic money is what I'm getting from people. It's money, but digital, digital money. That's, that's my takeaway.

• 4:28:41Jordi Hays?

  The big takeaway from today for John.

• 4:28:42John Coogan?

  Takeaway, yeah.

• 4:28:45Speaker 17

  Well, totally. Yeah, I can, I can give a brief overview about myself, Phantom. You know, got my start working in Silicon Valley back in 2013 at Twitter, pre-IPO. So that's where I cut my teeth on building mobile apps. You know. Working on tech that reaches millions of users. Around 2017 was bitten by the crypto bug, that's sort of like the white paper ICO era. Did a tour of duty there from 2017, 2021. At this early-stage DeFi startup called ZeroX, which is still very much around active. It's where I met my two other co-founders.

• 4:29:29Speaker 17

  And that's basically where we decided, hey. You know, at that time, most-used wallet was MetaMask. We had this kind of very unique perspective, not only being power users of MetaMask, but also developers in the ecosystem as well. And basically recognized that the number-one problem holding crypto back today still, back then, today still is usability. And the wallet is essentially the key to unlocking the ecosystem and supercharging everything that everyone had been working on. And so, yeah, that's when we decided to start Phantom. And yeah, four years later, Phantom is now the biggest wallet in the ecosystem.

• 4:30:14Jordi Hays?

  What went into the decision-making to choose Solana when you guys came out with Phantom? I know now you support a bunch of different chains, but I'm sure that was somewhat contrarian at the time, or at least, you know, very early to kind of make a bet.

• 4:30:30Speaker 17

  Totally, yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, I think the initial insight was focus on, like, build a wallet that focuses on an ecosystem that was not Ethereum. You know, we had spent, you know, four years in the Ethereum space and I think had a number of pretty interesting insights. One, MetaMask continued to be sort of this monopoly, monopolistic product. And despite a number of different attempts, they were sort of, everyone kind of understood and, you know, it's not great UX. So like, obviously, we should try to attack them by solving that problem. But despite that, it was very difficult for people to break through. And then I think the second thing was after spending a while on Ethereum,

• 4:31:14Speaker 17

  we kind of actually just got a little bit, I think, jaded by the culture, being very dogmatic versus pragmatic, and not really emphasizing user experience, cost efficiency. And so I think those two kind of insights combined, we decided, hey, how about we, we essentially create our own home turf on an up and coming ecosystem. That ended up, that choice ended up being Solana, and that was, that was all being contemplated like late 2020, so that was pretty early on.

• 4:31:48John Coogan?

  A lot of people have flagged that dogma today. What is the shape of the Ethereum dogma right now? Like, what are they dogmatic about specifically?

• 4:31:59Speaker 17

  Yeah, well, it's definitely, it's definitely up and flowed. I mean, I think from the very beginning, it was, it was all about decentralities, decentralization at all costs, which, and decentralization as this meme, which was attracted a number of different folks for a number of different reasons. You know, people who are more anti-disestablishment, people who felt like the centralization was a, a method of security and all of that. And I think that it ended up, it, obviously, the spirit of it makes total sense and is something we should all be striving for.

• 4:32:38Speaker 17

  But I think in practice, the sort of decision by committee nature that that kind of bred ended up, basically fast forward into the state of Ethereum today, where it's like, there's no really cohesive strategy, I guess. There's no, there's a lot of different competing L2s and different technologies and that the end stage, it's very confusing and quite frankly, just dangerous for like an end user to use.

• 4:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 4:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Have you, I'm sure you guys have been hit up by a bunch of your investors, you know, sending you tweets about Pumps, you know, revenue being like, hey, have you guys thought about, you know, doing this? And from what I can see, you guys haven't built a launchpad to date. Talk about kind of how you view Phantom's sort of interaction with, with some of these new, you know, we've had both the founder of Pumps and Believe On today, which, you know, are getting quite a lot of attention. But I'm curious to get your point of view on how you think of that market or category evolving and how you see Phantom interacting with it.

• 4:33:53Speaker 17

  Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, really, at the end of the day, it's all about tokens, essentially. Tokens being this common sort of protocol and format that is emerging from the ecosystem. And then all of these apps sort of in this open and permissionless way coming out and creating different mechanisms for creating tokens. And so I think what we're trying to do is just ensure that users can navigate this new trend and meta like in the safest way possible. And that's something that we've done a number of times before,

• 4:34:30Speaker 17

  whether that's with the NFT wave, or whether that's for, you know, emerging stable coins and, and real world assets trends. And so, yeah, I think we're just kind of trying to promote the folks to sort of easily discover and use these things. And yeah, I kind of see how, how all the trends shake out. But yeah.

• 4:34:56John Coogan?

  Can you talk to me about Apple's role in this ecosystem? I remember I first on-boarded to Phantom as a Chrome plugin. I believe there is an app, but Apple has not been historically the most receptive to crypto native apps interfacing with all the different UI elements all over the all over the phone. Coinbase was kicked out of the App Store for a while. They came back. And so what has it been like historically?

• 4:35:30Jordi Hays?

  I love thinking about the Apple execs being like, wait, Coinbase does billions of dollars in volume and we're not taking 30% on that?

• 4:35:39John Coogan?

  But but but it feels like from the other stories that are going on in Apple world that there's a little bit more pressure right now than in years past to open up, whether that's the Siri button for other AI apps or the App Store with what's happening with Fortnite and Epic.

• 4:36:00John Coogan?

  Give me like the State of the Union on how easy it is to implement crypto wallet features on Apple and where you see it going over the next few years.

• 4:36:11Speaker 17

  Yeah, so yeah, interestingly enough, like when we started, like you called out when we started, we actually started Chrome extension first. That was actually a pretty contrarian thing to do. I think it was kind of a mixture of a couple of different reasons. One, the predominant use case of crypto at that time or on-chain crypto being DeFi and that being sort of more of a power user thing that people like to do on desktop anyway. And I think the also the prevalence of sort of Ethereum as the main L1 that people are using.

• 4:36:47Speaker 17

  Ethereum is just not really compatible with mobile as a technology in terms of people who want to use people who want to use things on mobile. They, you know, they want things to feel fast, cheap, instantaneous, you know, fleeting, all of that. And so nowadays, because you're seeing the protocol layer of crypto get an infrastructure layer get a lot more mature, now we're seeing the a lot more prevalence of crypto on on mobile. So I think in the next couple of years, mobile is going to be a huge story story for crypto. And yeah, I think generally, you know, personally, we've we've had a great relationship with Apple. We've never had any big scuffles or had the app taken down

• 4:37:30Speaker 17

  or anything like that. Like you said, I believe that as an eco as a general tech player, they become more open and are facing down a lot of competitive pressures in in different areas like the Epic case and and all of that. So yeah, I mean, I do expect them just very similarly to all other, a lot of other tech players like big fintechs, etc. I do expect them to be embracing crypto more and more often, or sorry, more deeper. And yeah, yeah, and making it easier for for folks to deploy apps.

• 4:38:05Jordi Hays?

  Last question on my side. What is the state of SF's crypto scene today? It's certainly not getting nearly the attention that AI is. But but is it alive and well? Or are you traveling a lot and hiring outside of the city quite a bit?

• 4:38:24Speaker 17

  No, yeah, I mean, we so all three co-founders are based out here in SF. Been living here for 12 years now or so. And yeah, crypto scene is definitely, it's definitely not AI, but it's it's alive and well of us, folks like Paradigm, Alchemy, some of the A16Z folks, etc. So yeah, definitely alive and well. New York is definitely another huge scene. But I think places like Miami, they kind of they kind of turned over a bit during COVID.

• 4:39:02John Coogan?

  I love Miami.

• 4:39:04Jordi Hays?

  I love Miami.

• 4:39:04John Coogan?

  Weather is undefeated. We're in the Miami of California. We're in Los Angeles.

• 4:39:08Jordi Hays?

  We are.

• 4:39:08John Coogan?

  What's not to like? This has been fantastic.

• 4:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for joining and capping off.

• 4:39:12John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. The first inaugural crypto day.

• 4:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 4:39:16John Coogan?

  First week, maybe we should make it weekly. Weekly Crypto Day.

• 4:39:19Jordi Hays?

  That sounds like.

• 4:39:20John Coogan?

  Lot.

• 4:39:21Jordi Hays?

  A lot, but maybe quarterly.

• 4:39:24John Coogan?

  This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 4:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for popping on and.

• 4:39:27John Coogan?

  Good luck. We'll see you soon.

• 4:39:28Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 4:39:29John Coogan?

  Bye. This entire stream has been, has not been financial advice. I was thinking we should ask the guest. Hey, just, just, why don't you close that with some financial advice for us? How much everyone would hate that.

• 4:39:41Jordi Hays?

  We never, we never give financial advice.

• 4:39:43John Coogan?

  Massive, massive success.

• 4:39:44Jordi Hays?

  We're just a couple of golden retrievers.

• 4:39:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're just having fun out here talking.

• 4:39:48Jordi Hays?

  You ever.

• 4:39:48John Coogan?

  Pushing five hours on the stream, pushing 42,000 viewers. Thank you, everyone who tuned in. I think this is officially our biggest stream ever until tomorrow.

• 4:39:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 4:40:00John Coogan?

  Until tomorrow, when we got Ashley Vance on the show, it's going to be 100.

• 4:40:03Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got some heavy hitters.

• 4:40:05John Coogan?

  We, we do have some hitters tomorrow and there's some big news coming.

• 4:40:07Jordi Hays?

  And our first, first Fortune 500 CEO.

• 4:40:11John Coogan?

  Huge milestone for us.

• 4:40:12Jordi Hays?

  First of many, first of many.

• 4:40:13John Coogan?

  Huge milestone.

• 4:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, thank you folks for tuning in.

• 4:40:16John Coogan?

  Thank you. We're our sponsors.

• 4:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Day, but it was a great day.

• 4:40:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a great day.

• 4:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Our lovely sponsors. We will see you tomorrow.

• 4:40:23John Coogan?

  Goodbye.