Alpha Hour (part Deux)

Recorded: Aug. 13, 2025 Duration: 0:37:19
Space Recording

Short Summary

Backbone's SCAR campaign launches its token, Soul, with a commitment to community-driven growth through revenue buybacks. The project emphasizes innovative fundraising strategies and partnerships, positioning itself for significant growth in the crypto space.

Full Transcription

Thank you. All right.
JG, can you hear me now?
Round two.
Round two.
Oh, my God.
What the hell? Have you not figured out how to make a co-host,
because if you make a co-host, you can actually lose your signal
and it won't kill the space.
Are you using your phone or are you using the computer?
So I'm using my mobile telephone.
But I added GenZio as a co-host that time.
So I do not know why that's
done that. I hate it.
I hate Twitter spaces. It's so
annoying. I don't like... Why does that
keep happening? We had
112 people on and
then it's restarted
the whole thing. It's all good.
They're going to come back. You know why? Because we're actually
doing interesting stuff and people
want to learn. So I wouldn't even sweat it.
We were just about to get into chatting about Scar as well.
Something sad.
This one's recording as well. Part deux.
uh we're all good um
We're all good.
i wanted to finish telling uh um the other guest kind of the simple reason why i think prism
is a bit exceptional you know in like a layman's terms why why does it why do people why should
people want to use it right like simply so i don't know if um if we have our our speakers back but i think that's kind of a good thing to
tap on yeah let me let me ask them we need to we need to we're trying to um if everybody retweets
the space real quick let's just retweet the space and like just hang out for a minute because
these are great talking points yeah yeah good point point, dude. Let me share that part is going.
In the meantime, in the meanwhile, Gentian.
Sorry, I know you had your hand up on the other one.
Is it Gentian, Al?
So I just came in mind, like I was reading before the Prisma Academy.
mind like I was reading before the prism academy so because let's say when you enter first and in
the platform you search for information and maybe we could tell him the simple presentation of
prism like when you go to a bank you have one thousand dollars to deposit and if you put that locked in
for a year in the deposit you get the principal token and the the yield token and that yield in
prison you can trade it right away so that was a simple example for even for the strangers. So that is.
Yeah, I agree.
I like that one exactly where you sort of.
That one's a good one for just explaining the difference between like what is.
Yeah, what's what's money in a bank like a stakes, a stakes position is you go and lock your money in the bank and they pay you out.
They pay you out interest daily and you need to give your bank 21 days notice period before they'll give you your money back.
A liquid stake token is like you deposit your money into the bank and you're earning interest on it the whole time.
And the bank takes your interest that you're earning and reinvests it for you and the bank
just gives you a liquid receipt token that you can trade around and swap at any point but then
you can but then you can also go back to the bank and say okay I want to redeem my money now with 21
days and sort of here's my liquid receipt token tell me how much i'm owed now and give me my money back
and then a principal token is saying okay well we'll give you two tokens one token is going to
give you uh all of your yield that you get paid in the bank and we're going to pay that yield out
to you directly if you hold that token and the other token represents your original deposit of a thousand dollars into the bank account
um and you can come and redeem that thousand dollars at whatever the maturity date is that
you choose for your token for how long you want to lock it so yeah like that that's a those are like
good examples but like those that like that that like small thing which actually like when you
think about it is actually kind of simple,
like unlock so many different use cases of what you can do and how you can
speculate on yields,
how you can hedge,
how you can sort of raise some cash up front with your future yield whilst
like not affecting your deposit.
and it's absolutely huge in traditional finance and still,
still like basically still like a nothing in defi
like like prism prism is kind of the only one really dealing with like proper cash flows like
this like you would in traditional finance with a year with a yield curve um other places
on on ethereum you know it's like pendle, for example, are dealing much more with points campaigns for stable coins.
But, you know, this is super interesting because you're, you know, you're not in TradFi.
Like you're looking at the whole yield curve.
Like what money do I get if I lock it for a year?
What money do I get if I lock it for two years?
You know, et cetera, et cetera.
And so like bigger rewards and larger yields and some people are probably familiar with that in
their own countries with term deposits and banking accounts and stuff but yeah we're trying to that's
the but that's the backbone of prism built into the blockchain and then now we need to you know
now we we want also to build like cool products and uh and all the stuff
on top of it that use those unique features so like you build the you build the foundations
which is what you know in our view what prism is is prism is the foundation um and then tons of
interesting use cases and utility can get built on top of these things so that's the plan did i did did i have to adjust this jv no you did you did
but i think i think even the more simple message is prism enables you to make your money work for
you and and that's a novel idea most people sell their time for money and once i realized if the
there's strategies that can be implemented and and, you know, it might not be tremendous amount of money immediately, but if I start to utilize the auto compound within five years, a small amount can actually become a tremendous amount. They are putting these tools in your hands and we are basically bringing the people together who are creating the strategies for us.
Right. So you don't have to be the genius. You can you can let other smarter people make these strategies.
But these tools are simple and they will continue to get simpler.
And when you look at the TV, like what the actual revenue is being produced in comparison to the like the fully diluted valuation.
I mean, to me, like we are like in a golden pocket opportunity.
And like, you know, that's why Backbone is like, you know, I'm really passionate about crypto.
I'm really fired up about Prism because, you know, after being in the trenches for this many years, I've been able to see the playing field and who's doing what and who's like honorable and who's actually got something of real substance to actually contribute. And,
and, and, you know, cause as a layer two builder, you know, we, we, you know, we want to champion
the base project, uh, first and foremost. Right. So, um, you know, that's why, you know,
I'm going to just jump into our second campaign for SCAR is live.
We're testing out different products on Prism.
That's an instant yield campaign.
It's currently live right now, SCAR 2.
The first campaign did really well.
We're excited for the second campaign.
Tweets coming out about that.
And I know Ali touched on the refracted beast.
And unfortunately, the artist is still on vacation.
That's whatever. But that doesn't stop Backbone from, you know, getting ready for the prism grave digger.
We're getting ready for B prism.
We want to I've been talking to Calo B.
We want to get the prop up to either utilize part of the treasury or some inflation, something
to create a mechanic where we get a staking and a yield system happening
and get the economy flowing. I think right now, if we do these couple of things together in tandem,
I think we'll have a really good reaction, I'm telling you. There's not a lot happening that's
a real substance. And right here and right now, we have this chance to really get the message out
Hope I didn't get rugged.
No, no, no.
Sorry, I rugged myself with the mute button.
I'm like, oh, shit, I get rugged.
No, no, no. You're all good.
You're all good.
Yeah, no, like completely agree.
I think there's like quite a few things, you know,
quite a few, there's, you things. The nature of it being really early in the than you know some general purpose chain or like some
you know uh some some very niche uh some very niche type of chain you know focusing on a focusing
on something specific like say uh celestial with data data, for example, means that this stuff that we do is a lot more,
I'd say, consumer-facing than other more niche ones,
which for users is a good thing
because there's lots more stuff for them to actually do,
whereas other general purpose chains,
you're not necessarily looking at like cloud storage
or, you know, data availability or those kinds of things
as an end user.
Whereas here, you know, Bitcoin staking is like an end user.
But here, like there's stuff that people are doing
as end users that they're using.
And then we're rolling out, trying to roll out more features
and improvements to the web app and more products and, you know,
the community stuff that obviously is so important with, like, NFTs
and, you know, LFTs, as you say, like Backbone Labs and, you know,
B Prism and stuff.
So, yeah, it means there's lots of flux for users but i think it's
quite cool because people get to come along in the journey and actually see the changes on a
day-to-day basis hopefully um rather than rather than it being something obscure that you're then
trying to explain to retail users why the change that you've made is so important for your, for your business customers rather than your like actual users.
But yeah, there we go.
You know, the other thing I really appreciate, especially, you know,
after building this for like these last four years is that, you know,
the project has clear leadership. There's not confusion.
I'm so tired of like these super decentralized projects
that really just kind of feel like they go nowhere um and so again like it's really important
to have this clear vision and and nobody is really bringing this suite of tradfi tools
to the table and and in tradfi people who run these these these strategies and run these products
these people generate a lot of money that's the truth right like ollie like in how much in trad five the people doing
these things how much are they generating it's got to be a huge market right it's insane like um
i uh when you when you just think when you think about it like so yield yield derivatives I think I say the headline number to people before,
but yield derivatives is like a 700 trillion notional market
at any given point in time, which is like the biggest market by a mile.
And then it's the biggest profit generator at the banks of any department.
So like, you know, I don't know, not naming names
because I wouldn't be able to talk about my former employers,
but like the swaps desk at these banks were making, you know,
500 million, 600 million, 700 million dollars a a year and that was just a swaps desk
of like four or five people um for the bank you then have uh and that's that's the banks taking
some proprietary positions but also um facilitating lots of flow for their clients and their clients
were things like um you know anyone you'd have like you'd have someone
like apple for example that would come in and say okay we have just lent to the market and we've
promised them to pay uh you know we promised them we'll pay them an interest rate of um you know
five percent plus you know libel which is like a sort of variable component
of the rate and so they'd come into a bank desk like you know goldman jp morgan morgan stanley
whoever and say oh we want to swap that um that floating rate that we're going to pay people into
a fixed rate so that we have certainty knowing what we're going to have to pay people so you'd
get people that come in and do that but the people would make a huge amount of money of this
is uh is hedge funds and so you know you've got hedge funds like uh you know some of the larger
ones in the world you know funds like blue crest and those those sort of people these are funds
that are making um multiple billions of dollars a year
uh you got like ray dalio's fund he ray dalio has written quite a lot bridgewater
capital if people have ever read any of ray dalio's books definitely definitely would recommend
but the um you know that's a hundred billion fund making 10 15 a year a lot of that in interest rate
swaps so that's done you know they're making five to ten billion a year trading this stuff uh and previously like and that's just them speculating
on you know do i think interest rates are going up or interest rates are going down do i think
five-year interest rates are looking expensive versus 10-year interest rates do i think
u.s interest rates are looking expensive versus European interest rates, etc, etc.
All of this stuff happens in absolutely enormous size in traditional finance.
I've seen it firsthand, dealt with the clients firsthand, dealt with the banks,
as part of the banks firsthand.
And I'm completely convinced that exactly the same thing will happen in DeFi
on a much, much larger scale than it is at
the moment and so it's you know building the software to do that and also in tradfire like
no one can do this stuff no one no one's allowed to access it like if you know if you turned up
today and said look i want to i want to go and uh trade some swaps please like you're not going to
be able to you're not going to be able to trade any interest rate swaps or yield swaps whereas um you know the fun thing about defy is like anyone can trade it you
don't have to be a hedge fund you don't have to be a huge corporate like apple um so that's why i'm
that's why i'm uh excited about it hey but you can be a hedge fund we we are definitely inviting all those
participants right oh yeah like 100 i think like when you know if you are a hedge fund or you are
a big corporation who want to trade on prism i mean they probably should contact you directly
to arrange something like that right exactly i mean we just want to get that out there
that's not just for the little guy we also want the big guys to come participate too
oh 100 but like i i i took a view with my trading like this is just this just my own
like personal view with my trading right i was like if you're not gonna you know if you're betting on the big things
like you know bitcoin or you know nasdaq or apple or whatever it is like like what's your what's your
edge over these like super sophisticated trading firms like if you're betting on gold price or
you're betting on something like that like you know you you have and i've seen
these you know these these were my clients so like i know what resources they have available to them
you have you're playing a game where the odds are completely stacked against you when you mess
around in these big things and so your advantage that you have um like to my mind like the advantage that you have over these big funds
is that you have permanent capital theoretically so if you if you're not if you don't have an
asset liability mismatch and you're not over borrowed um or anything like that you have
permanent capital so you can take a longer term view so that's a big advantage whereas these
head funds a lot of them will have quarterly redemption say which means that investors can come four times a year and say
oh i want my money back please so that means that they have to hold assets that are very
uh liquid or at least enough liquid assets so they can meet their redemptions and they've been
like you know block fi and all of these are are a prime example of that sort of stuff where they didn't have enough liquidity to meet redemptions.
But that's the advantage that a retail user has over a hedge fund is that they have permanent capital.
And the other thing that you have, to my mind, that you have a lot of advantage on is because of this liquidity thing where they need to have decent liquidity,
because of this liquidity thing where they need to have decent liquidity um they aren't going to
be able to like uh they aren't going to be able to punt around in stuff that doesn't have a lot
of liquidity so that's why like i really like i really love the trenches meme in crypto and like
it's so true in crypto and in trad 5 to me like retail have a real advantage messing around in the trenches
and you didn't get that advantage as much like yes you could do like penny stocks and stuff that
was listed uh but like you didn't get the advantage to trade stuff before it was like
listed properly um in trad five whereas actually like the trenches um like really actually give you a massive advantage
uh or a massive opportunity that um these institutions don't get unless they write some
like huge otc ticket or private capital ticket at the start um so yeah like i i i think like
i think that's that's pretty cool and then like a few earlier points jg like on compounding like
I think that's, that's pretty cool. And then like a few earlier points, JG, like on compounding, like compounding, I wish I'd, I wish I'd, I wish someone had like sat me down and given me a proper beating around the head about how important compounding is and how important it is to start early with compounding and how like even just making 10% a year and starting from the age of 15, 16 versus waiting until you're 30 to start 10 a
year like um i'll butcher the maths on it but like if you started off with ten thousand dollars or a
thousand dollars or whatever's kind of like material to you and you made 10 a year on that
and you start one of those you do the maths where you started when you were 15 and you do the maths
on the other one when you started when you were 30 and you look at the difference in your total wealth um by the
age of 50 or 60 like the numbers are like absolutely eye-watering so it's so important
it's so important to compound to me or for me personally well i think it's really important
like these are like the like the things that I think get missed in school.
They teach us a bunch of shit that really is not helping people become free.
Most schools teach people how to become worker bees, right?
Not really...
I did not need to learn about photosynthesis and Pythagoras at school.
I know, right?
When is an A squared plus B squared equals C squared?
I needed to learn about compounding.
I did not learn that.
Yeah, exactly.
Like good fiscal hygiene too.
That's another huge topic.
I just totally missed because they don't want people to understand this.
Yeah, exactly, dude.
And the other one that i'm interested in people's
thoughts on so like like feel free to um feel free to write something in the comments if people have
anything uh will i add on it but like i think one thing where compounding is missed and part part of
the reason we're doing seal but just generally like for me whenever i trade i i'll always leave a limit order and i don't know whether it's just like me being
um uh you know me being sort of you know having uh just like a hangover from like um working in
tradfire but like to me like when you're trading an asset any asset like crypto that has huge volatility and say you do a trade
say you do a trade a day and the the asset price swings five percent a day or sometimes ten percent
a day or something like that so you go to do your trade and your um and you don't need to trade
immediately like there's very i think there's for me like and
obviously correct me if i'm wrong but like for me there's like very rare occasions where you have
to trade instantly like if the price if you like the price and there isn't some immediate thing
that's like exactly moving it at exactly that particular point in time you're normally much
better just leaving a limit order like two percent above the current price or three percent above the
current price like say you want to get your order executed in the next hour you might be like okay well i'll
just leave it one percent above the current price say you want to get it executed within the next
day you might be like okay i'll leave it five percent above the current price but like the
difference in compounding on doing that with every single trade if you think you make two percent more or five percent more every single
trade is like absolutely mind-blowing um and so i think like i think like lots of people still just
do like basic swaps and i think i think doing that is is it's it's harder because it's not like it's
not like you see the it's harder to conceptualize i think because it's not like you see the cash flow like you do with you know when you're compounding and stacking and farming your yield
but like the difference to your compounding of leaving a limit order and getting your price hit
one percent or two percent above uh where you would have traded at spot price every single
trade is like absolutely enormous um i don't know what you think and what you do for your trading,
but I always think that's kind of a mad one for compounding.
Hey, Oli, as Prism matures and as we start to have more assets,
yield-bearing assets that participate,
I think especially with stocks, right?
Because I think that's where we're going to get a lot of the traders that are coming in.
Is there any roadmap for that?
Because I know that there's, was it Ondo?
Is it Ondo that has the one with the pass-through of the stock?
Yeah, exactly.
Ondo are going to be doing these total return tokens where you you you don't you have you hold the token and you automatic
it automatically compounds if you get paid any dividends or it automatically sorts it out if
there's any things like stock splits or rights issues or stuff like that so you don't get you
don't get um hosed like you would like you do with some of these other uh stocks that people are
trading or tokenized tokenized stocks that people are trading?
Or tokenized stocks that people are trading, I guess.
I mean, just, you know, knowing that the world is really becoming, it's going tokenization, everything, from companies to governments to economies
to just, like, you know, tracking, you know, manufacturing parts all over the world.
Like, everything's going to end up being on a blockchain and tokenized. I mean, it's a no brainer. This is why, you know,
Backbone tries to fight tooth and nail just to continue to participate. We feel clearly,
very strongly that being in this industry and helping share this knowledge is going to change
lives. Like that's what's going to happen you know crypto
and ai are going to be bigger than like the industrial revolution that's that's a fact
right like i mean i i'm getting excited again guys 700 trillion dollars in trad fi and and
most of the world is locked out of that locked. And now, as everything tokenizes and you're democratizing that activity, we really have an opportunity.
Man, I'm trying to shout this from the rooftops.
I don't know about the rest of you guys.
people talk a lot about how money transfer and money remittance uh like you know money remittances
and foreign exchange it likes it is like super inefficient and it is but like it when you look
at how like stocks and bonds are traded um and you look at how like uh the process is when like
you know a client buys a bond off of a hedge fund or some sort of fixed
sorry a fixed instrument income instrument off you know bank a buys it off a hedge fund and bank
a then sells it on to another hedge fund like the back process that has to go there with like
um you know agents whether this thing ends up going through clearing whether you end up like um having like manually people chasing up because like it's delivery versus payment so it's like
the settlement happens three days or one day after um the trade happens and like you know the bank
the hedge fund might not have even had the thing to deliver in the first place so they might have
like short sold it and then need to go and like borrow it and it's like all this stuff it's like it's so inefficient like
things like stocks and etfs getting tokenized by ondo things like fixed income instruments and
bonds getting tokenized which i think you know will be the next will be the next big thing after
etfs and stocks i think it's going to be like you know it's going to be absolutely uh that seems to be
like where a lot of the um energy and excitement seems to be going at the moment rather than you
know everyone wanking themselves off about roll-ups and data availability and uh and the rest of it
so i'm i'm much more excited about that stuff that's going to have like a real tangible use case for, you know, everyday users.
I mean, for building wealth, that's what it's for, right?
Like, let's be really clear in a very simple term.
These tools and these simple strategies of just leaving a limit order, like you just stated, these are wealth building strategies.
And these are the things that aren't hammered in when we're young like i get so mad about it sometimes yeah exactly complete complete you should have been
complete you should have been um what was i gonna say oh damon i'm sorry i just see i just saw your
request now let me add you up you've got we've only got we've got we got a hard close, but Damon, how are you doing?
Anything you were specifically going to ask, sir, or just a general hello?
I just wanted to comment on the real world assets there.
Did you see that Injective had a huge success in that a stock got stopped on the regular stock exchange
and they got a huge flow come over to injective to actually trade it while it was stopped.
And I think that's the kind of stuff that's going to bring over the traditional finance boys over to crypto.
And they had a huge, like a massive volume blow up on that one thing i remember i remember mirror
protocol um back in the day where you had like gme blow up and then people were still able to
trade it on uh on mirror protocol i think i think that was what happened uh i need to remind myself
but yeah like that kind of stuff you don't have you don't have exchanges shutting down
liquidity for it um i think it's super cool i think injective stuff i don't have you don't have exchanges shutting down liquidity for it um i think it's
super cool i think injective stuff i don't know i don't injective stocks um someone correct can
correct me here but i don't think they factor in um dividends or stock splits or uh rights issues
so i think you just need to make sure your time frame, you can set your time frame with those and you're
sort of careful
if they don't.
You're basically just trading
price is what you're saying.
You're just trading price.
It's the same as mirror.
If there's a big stock split
then you potentially can
um if your one token worth a thousand dollars suddenly gets uh the underlying share suddenly
gets split into like four different tokens four different shares worth 250 dollars each and then
your one token is only redeemable for one of those shares still because it was like a one-to-one exchange rate um so it's those those
uh can be a bit more confusing they might end up manually adding more tokens but
definitely definitely want to definitely good to just be aware of like what the what the risks are
when you're definitely trading it yeah the the i asked that on injective is it's only for trading the price but
i just mentioned as an example of like the flow that yeah we're gonna get you know i think so i
agree dude and also people are now going to be able to trade all that stuff with limit orders
hopefully soon when we get seal i know you can do a bit on uh you can do a bit on injective as well
but this way this way you get to earn yield when people uh default on your order
um for sure i was wondering is does is prism's um base that they've created so far the the way you
can split tokens and all that does that play in at all into the things that you're building with
seal and hedgehog and any of those do you need that base for that yeah like so we wanted to so particularly on
the money market side like i don't think uh you know i think things like principal tokens are like
really good collateral assets as are lp tokens but if you look around at any money market at the
moment you can't really you know correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think there's any
mainstream money markets where you can sort of lend an lp token or borrow an lp token which is
silly because this thing's earning yields and this thing's um you know a revenue generating asset like
why would you have to choose between lending on a money market and being a liquidity provider you
should be able to do both um so that's like one of the
big reasons that we're building uh squirrel the money market seal is like because you need you
need good order books um to be able to scale yield token and principal token trading so it's like
adding utility for it that was the original idea to like add utility for that but then it's obviously has a lot more use cases as well um and then similarly as well like with with uh you know
hedgehog the options i think that's important because like you know one of the cool things you
can do with crypto is like you can leave a limit order with a yield bearing asset and you can you
know you could leave an order to buy a token uh with a yield bearing
asset so like a yield bearing stable coin so you're still earning yield whilst your order
waits to execute um and i think that that's the same with options where you can you know buy a
call option um but you can also sort of fund that with a yield bearing asset or you can sort of write effectively what's called like writing put options where you deposit your yield bearing dollars.
And then you say to people, well, I will I'm selling you the right to sell me a Bitcoin at 100K or 80k or something like that and so you're earning on your yield bearing stable coin
but you've also so you're effectively getting paid to leave a limit order
when goes down to 80k again someone can come and know you bitcoin at 80k
so you're sort of earning on earning kind of on both sides there um so yeah it's like i said is it
it's trying to add lots of utility to the prism assets but there's
much wider implications for what these things
can do as well
yeah that's a big thing that I don't know
if people understand that on prism is that
you can hold the yield bearing and put
in your limit order and
I really want to drill that into people hold the
yield bearing what are people doing holding atom
with a limit order or holding any
equivalent without being in the yield bearing what are people doing holding adam with a limit order or holding any usd
um equivalent without being in the yield bearing it's crazy
agreed i think it's going to be really interesting as well what happens when the seal order book goes live um i think it'll add the seal order book hopefully will add a lot of liquidity between
c assets and um the underlying assets where people can decide where they want to switch between the two of them.
I think DCAing does a bit of that
at the moment, but
you'll be able to do a much bigger size this way
I think it's
definitely going to be interesting.
to close it out.
Is JG gone and he's
back again?
Thanks very much, everyone, is JG gone and he's back again but the
yeah thanks very much everyone for coming
JG is there anything you'd add
just on the SCAR campaign or any other
bits just before we head out
I mean besides the fact that it's live
and we're just continuing to
utilize the tools available to us
and to just try things out
that's pretty much it and if you want to
I mean for anybody who doesn't understand what SCAR is, this is a
non-transferable token that will give you access to Sol tokens.
That's our project token that we're getting ready to launch.
We are basically a co-op that run a lot of different validators and marketplaces.
And we have a few DEXs.
And basically, we're going to, once Soul is live,
we will be using 50% of all of Backbone's generated revenue
to just buy back Soul off the open market.
You know, our goal has always kind of been like a communal earning paradigm project.
And so we are just, again, I just so super excited to have access to these
tools to showcase them to be like one of the first movers to actually participate like to us like
this is like what crypto is all about yeah i think i think it's great and i think like you know you
guys you guys are pioneering as a third party using this stuff and i think like i'd say to everyone in the community here like you know if you if you know of projects that you think would benefit from sort of following
backbones lead um you know i think i think we're all you know we're all in this together and so
like you know a strong community is like the best advocate for uh these kind of things so if you if
you think of others then then let us know.
But all right, well, look,
thank you very much, everyone, for tuning in.
If there was any questions that we didn't get to,
please ping them in Telegram and tag me.
But otherwise, yeah, hopefully a big week coming up.
Lots of different things.
Seal coming out.
We need to get some governance proposals up.
But yeah, looking forward to more conversations.
Cheers, everyone.
Thanks, Ollie.
Thanks, JD.
Thanks, guys.
Happy hump day.
Take care, everyone.