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@APTOS IS NOW LIVE ON CUBE π§
Recorded: Aug. 26, 2025 Duration: 0:53:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yo, yo, GM, everybody.
GM, sorry for the delay
I think we'll probably get started
in maybe another minute or so
gonna just retweet
this from my
personal account
let's see
how you doing today so this is Ben GM, GM, let's see.
How you doing today?
So this is Ben.
I can call you Ben?
Ben, Ben, sir.
GM, GM, everyone.
Oh, shoot. Having a party, shoot.
Having a party, brother.
Sounds like.
What's up, Ash? How are you doing?
What up, baby? It's good to be here.
Yeah, dude.
Glad to catch up again, virtually.
I know.
We have to catch up IRL at some point i know are you are you uh
are you in the new york city area still i'm in new york i'm not going to give you exact
coordinates because you know we we work in crypto but i'm in the big city nice nice
same um cool uh okay i guess we can kind of get this started though um Oh, same. Cool. Okay.
I guess we can kind of get this started, though.
Welcome, everybody.
Thank you so much for coming today.
We are in the process.
Right now at CubeExchange, we are in the process of getting Aptos listed i'm just checking the uh
i'm just checking the slack at the moment and then we'll throw out the announcement so
probably at some point i'll go ahead and um pin that to the top but yeah welcome everybody uh
today is a special day because we are listing Aptos on CubeExchange this is definitely super bullish
given the fact that we're now adding another
non-EVM layer 1
for someone who has always been a big Solana
enjoyer, I like to see a lot of other non-EVM
more performant blockchains start to take the reins.
And I think it's even a little bit auspicious when we have a lot of...
There's a lot of hype going on with ETH and all this big institutional buying.
But I think a lot of people are sleeping on the fact that a lot of these non-EVML1s are also catching
a bit on the institutional side.
And I don't know, maybe we'll get some alpha later in this space about that.
But yeah, Ethereum isn't the only darling of this cycle, of institutional darling.
But anyways, let's introduce some of the people we have on stage.
I, myself, am Chitoshi.
I do community and growth at Cube Exchange.
And who we have here is Ash.
If you want to go ahead and introduce yourself, what do you do at Aptos?
What's up? I'm Ash.
I work on behalf of the ecosystem at Aptos Foundation.
Awesome. And Ben, I don't know if you're able to talk, but if you want to go ahead and introduce yourself as well.
Jim, Jim, guys, how are you doing?
A lot of background noise brother you good yeah sorry uh jam jam how are you yeah all right awesome just uh stay on mute for for the moment while i finish
introducing everybody thank you um so who else we got um i guess so is ben also at uh
Um, I guess, so is Ben also at, uh, Aptos as well?
It looks like it, Ash, right?
No, no, no, no.
It says-
A little mad love for you, Ben.
Oh, he's an Aptos curator.
I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so I'm just going to remove him from co-host.
LOL, my bad.
Um, all right.
All right. So, you know, we do have a bit of an agenda, so we'll kind of get right into it.
So, you know, we do have a bit of an agenda, so we'll kind of get right into it.
So for people who don't know, Cube Exchange is built on top of this intent-based network.
And what that allows us to do is basically remove the need for bridging.
It allows for our traders to seamlessly trade across multiple chains
without any bridging or wrapped assets.
And we do that by integrating chosen blockchains
like one by one, which is really cool, right?
So in the most recent past,
so like right now we have like Bitcoin, right?
So you can buy and trade native BTC and hold that natively in your Cube wallet.
We have ETH.
We have Sol.
We recently launched Sui as well.
And now we have Aptos, which is incredible.
So now you're going to be able to trade native Aptos directly on CubeExchange, swapping with USDC.
And then hopefully, I'm hoping that we can see some more Aptos native tokens as well.
Some meme coins, some utility coins, DeFi.
I think there's a lot of interesting DeFi things happening on the Aptos side of things.
on the Aptos side of things. So I'm excited to learn about that. And yeah, I think this just
So I'm excited to learn about that.
speaks to the overall vision of CubeExchange, which is making cross-chain trading very accessible.
So yeah, let's go on to the next part. Ash, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit
on the technical side of things. What are some of the major technical innovations that kind of separates Aptos from other EVM
chains, L2s, and some of the other emerging layer ones that we're seeing in the space?
What makes Aptos so special?
Yeah, man, that's a good question. First off, we're operating on hard mode. You know, we're
a relatively new O1, been three years in the market, but we're also architected through
the Move programming language. And that was a smart contract language that was developed at Meta to help process, you know, billions of dollars across their billion user app economy every day.
And so, you know, Aptos obviously spun out from that when, you know, the big people behind the scenes shut down the Libra project at Meta.
And so now that blockchain and our blockchain
is out there for use by anyone in a permissionless way.
So there's the move language,
there's parallel transaction execution.
We've seen a lot of great projects
starting to utilize that in their own world,
whether it's SVM, EVM,
but that's something that we kind of came to market with first.
And then we have upgradability.
So, you know, the modular architecture allows for faster feature rollouts.
You know, I mean, I don't know how many people are familiar with managing a blockchain,
but things change every day.
You know what I mean?
And so having an easy architecture, especially for high throughput blockchains to make those changes is critical. So I mean, that's the technical piece, all of the team at Aptos Labs, the product and engineering folks, which is the majority of the team at Labs, many of them came from Meta's Libre project.
project uh so they led you know the production engineering side that the system had to work for
meta's uh super apps and all of its big partners that were trying to co-form around the libra
project so the tech you see is the tech that was built for meta yeah that's fire and that's uh
that's also some really that's really that's some uh some pretty good lore to to be honest. I know. We need better lore, you know?
Baslamic Jihad.
This is the lore.
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah.
Dude, speaking of that, what's up with Aptos GCR?
I don't know.
Maybe.
I don't know.
I haven't seen it on my timeline.
Is he waiting to kind of cook on something big coming soon?
I don't know.
You know, large bears or large predatory animals
when they eat they have to rest a little bit so they eat more that's all i could say
yo fire fire um okay so quick question before we move on on the agenda this kind of this came to
me because we did have a you did touch briefly on some of the technical aspects.
Why would a builder choose to build on Aptos over Sui?
Because Sui was the most recent one that we launched on Cube,
and they also use Move as well.
So kind of curious on your take there.
I mean, I think about it less as a versus, right?
Like, you know, move is just a name, but the architecture,
how you built the move language is different, right?
And so for us, we chose the architecture to remain the same with what Meta incubated.
So it is the production-ready architecture of what Meta wanted in market.
When I think about a builder and why they want to choose to build,
you know,
we're young.
I think totally had a great post a while ago.
I don't know if you saw it,
but it was like when Solana was three years old,
what they were up against and all of this stuff,
you know,
we're three years old,
you know what I mean?
And putting aside EVM,
like,
you know,
we're,
we're,
you know, half the age of some of the other high performance chains that are non-EVM.
And so for me, I look at it as what do we need to prove?
I think every blockchain needs to prove from an ecosystem perspective, concentrated liquidity.
You know, if you're a permissionless network and you don't have concentrated liquidity where people can transfer value, make money
seamlessly and have exciting events that they can talk about on the timeline, your job's
going to be really hard.
So that's like a number one focus for us as a young blockchain to making sure we bootstrap.
And I think in the last six months, we've made sure to focus on DeFi from a core competency
level, right? Do you have good structured finance products DeFi from a core competency level. Do you have good
structured finance products? Do you have good money markets? Do you have good DEXs where people can
trade? And now we're just going to accelerate that. There's a project that was incubated with labs
and a new foundation called Decibel. There's a bunch of other Perps products coming to market.
there's a bunch of other perps products coming to market um and and that's going to create a
whole new plane of innovation on the defi side but outside of that when i think about our strengths
right you know um a lot of people on the timeline talk about how tech doesn't matter and i find that
funny like i find that really funny i find that like you know i mean like bro like we've we've fucking on board like i saw a
stat like uh you know 67 but this might this might be wrong but like 70 or something of finance bros
like don't own any crypto like what you know what i mean like there's like there's like we haven't
even scratched the surface of like huge adoption and so when people say oh tech doesn't matter man whatever
i feel like they're being pretty uh myopic and they're just looking at the feet in front of them
which is good as a skill you know what i mean to compete in this space but when i think about like
our advantage you know the team here and the architecture was really built to support friggin
visa you know what i mean was built to to move a dollar from instagram to whatsapp
across those user bases it was built like that you know what i mean and so uh i think about like
the strategic advantage there are some companies out there that don't that a lot of people do not
talk about on the timeline that are just trying to build real businesses and scale consumer growth
right or are working on hardcore infra stuff right right? You know, we have a protocol
called KGen on Aptos that, you know, started out as a gaming protocol, but quickly found from an
inside perspective that with AI training models, human verification is extremely key, you know,
and blockchain is one way to like, ensure that happens. I mean, this company is doing 30 million ARR projected this
year as some of the biggest partnerships with TradTech and couldn't actually operate their
company on a blockchain that was less performing. Like it wouldn't work. It would be like negative
ROI in terms of operating in infra costs. We have another project like PACT protocol, right? Which
is basically saying, hey, you know, you know,
we think that the that the real opportunity or one of the biggest opportunities is like microfinancing
emerging markets, you know what I mean, being able to loan a taxi driver 50 bucks to buy, you know,
get a new rickshaw as one breaks down, that's driving a ton of RWA TVL across the board, but also on Aptos.
And so the other areas like we look at in terms of a strategic advantage is,
you know, if you think about AI and robotics, right? I mean, if you look at, if you look at
like, you know, the VC narrative, right? And you think about like, oh, where's everyone thirsty
and like thirsting, you know what I mean, in terms of innovation, it's starting to converge with crypto and like
other sectors, right? So firms are not just purely crypto firms, they're basically like,
we invest in emerging technology, and we believe crypto will be an underpinning infrastructure to
that, right? So if it's robotics, we believe crypto will underpin that. If it's AI and ML data training models, we believe crypto will inform how that happens.
And so those are areas and for projects that have ambitious technical roadmaps, are huge
techno optimists in Silicon Valley that our chain is built for.
Right.
Like that's that's kind of, you know, when I think about the longer view,
like where the opportunity is.
So I would say to anyone building,
I think one, we're proving ourselves
to concentrate liquidity
and we're not going to stop.
So anyone who wants to help people
have fun on the chain,
make money, drive narratives,
we're hungry for that.
And then looking forward,
anyone who's like disrupting huge sectors
that are hot right now in terms of capital formation, there's probably a few chains that can actually function as they need it to function to build a business.
I kind of look at when it comes to blockchains
the velocity and acceleration
stablecoin payments
and just
the way in which
money is moving
and also growing on chain.
And those numbers
are relatively
small
for upcoming Layer 1s
like Solana, Aptos, Sui, right?
But essentially, they're accelerating at a much faster rate
than a lot of the older Layer 1s, right?
Which just aren't as performant right and for me
i'm a i'm a growth guy i like to invest in growth right i think i think like even in like you know
i think like crypto is kind of going through a bit of that um crypto is finally approaching that like
major growth phase and like we really need to start to be looking towards like uh
ecosystems that can really drive forward that growth and like be home to some of these larger
uh type of platforms that need to move money at like faster rates and i think like aptos is really
like a perfect fit for that and for that reason you know i i you know i i think that it's it's definitely something
to kind of keep your eye on if you're not already you know invested in the ecosystem um and i hope
that kind of like is really more of an eye opener for a lot of our listeners because a lot of people
kind of just look at like tvl or like what is currently on on a on a chain now and they're not
looking at like the growth metrics of like how money is moving through
these chains right now.
And I know like, you know, Aptos has, you know, a ton of stablecoin action happening
right now.
And I think maybe we can get into some of that, right?
Yeah, that's a really good point.
I'm a growth guy too.
You know, I got my like start in tech doing growth for like a scaling consumer
business and to me you know it's it's math and and a b testing and experimentation and i don't
think our industry really does that enough you know what i mean so it's really hard to like have
that growth lens but to your point like think about like stable coin issuers, right? USDC, USDT, USDE, you know, those are all
integrated into Aptos. And when you look at the volume, even just taking USDT as an example,
and that just happened earlier this year, right? We're top three. Now, why is that, right? It's
not like because we're, you know, we're doing something crazy and we're gaming. It's basically the venues, right, that have to
process billions in volume and transactions and stables are, you know, the key linchpin and on
and off ramping. It's an easy decision for them to make to say, hey, I have the same asset on this
network versus this network. What's more efficient? Because it's going to save me money and it's going
to be easier. And you're starting to see that, right that right that's why aptos is like peaking in stablecoin volumes even though
being integrated very uh you know very uh you know late and relatively to the other ones especially
on eath and even solana right so like i look at that as a signal right i'm basically exactly
faster and more efficient rails right the people who have to like manage these things for their
business they're like uh yeah i'm gonna just use that you know what i mean like yeah so that's what
we're seeing exactly yeah that's what that's what people are just fucking people are sleeping bro
i'm telling you yeah there's so much opportunity and i think aptos is something that people need
to keep an eye on so speaking to that can we actually talk about so one of the things that
i was reading up on was like this expo 2025 Japan digital wallet activation that you guys did.
I was really curious if you can kind of touch on the details around that, because I think that speaks to a lot about like, you know, stablecoin velocity and acceleration and some of the stuff we just mentioned.
Yeah, it's good and it's timely. It's been something we've been partnering on and working through for a while now.
You know, I think we've already onboarded half a million accounts, millions in transactions.
And I think there's some amazing demos like to that whole expo market that are being showcased.
You know, the thought there is like, it's interesting, you know, from an L1, like, you know, a blockchain side that's building an ecosystem.
Obviously, it's permissionless in global markets.
But I think in order to win and gain ubiquity and stickiness is you have to have a bottoms up localized mindset.
And, you know, Japan is a market where, you know, if you don't spend a lot of time there and you're not native there, it's hard to really
explain. But it is a highly cultured market, thousands of years of cultural conditioning.
And in terms of how heck is adopted there by consumers, it's a lot of based on trust and reputation. You know what I mean?
I mean, there's a few markets, right, where people are like, and I think America used to be like this
in the 50s, right, where your car manufacturer can also make your kitchen appliance, can also like,
you know what I mean, make the food that's good to eat, you know. And so I think for us, we wanted
to be very thoughtful around how we enter that market.
And we started that a while ago.
And the Expo just is this tremendous opportunity.
I mean, if you talk to anyone who grew up in Asia, right, they talk about the Expo as being almost this pilgrimage.
And so we were very lucky to get to work side by side with them and really showcase more of a real world adoption, utility based message there.
And, you know, utility-based message there.
And it's not stopping there.
It's just going to accelerate.
Hell yeah.
That's awesome.
If you have something that you want to pin around that to the top,
that would be great too. And it looks like we are live.
Aptos is officially trading on Cube Exchange.
I'm going to go ahead
and just ship this
announcement and I'll pin it.
In the meantime, let's move on
to the next thing.
I'm curious from your POV,
what is the most exciting
application being built around DeFi right now on AppDose?
Yeah, it's hard to pick one, but I want to highlight one called Panora Exchange that just closed its round, seed round, which is super exciting.
round, which is super exciting. You know, on its simplest level, it's a DEX aggregator. But when
you start to think about what that looks like from a user experience perspective versus
dApps or protocols built on other networks, you start to like see the imagination, right? Like
two things, right? One, obviously, like the finality is like leads faster than anywhere else on any other network where you can land that, but also powering gasless transactions. You don't need any Aptos in your wallet to make a swap. And that's huge, right? And I think that I'm very excited about that. Something like that is really the cornerstone of, you know, our trading engine or what we call our trading engine ecosystem. Obviously, on the DEX and
aggregator side, if you haven't been paying attention, in addition to Panora, Hyperion and
Thala are driving insane volumes. I think if you look at our surge in daily volume, daily,
we've been surpassing 150 million. that's multiples higher than what it was
a year ago multiples higher than when it was here so now we have amazing trading venues uh that that
uh essentially exist and and people can um you know do awesome things with that um i think what
we're very excited about like moving forward um obviously, Decibel entering the ecosystem. We're very
excited about how not only can that product operate and bring great experiences in a decentralized
way, but also partner with exchanges who are the consumer app venue for crypto, full stop.
So that's going to be super exciting. I feel like I published a blog post on where we want DeFi to go.
And the idea of that is basically, I think when you're an emerging ecosystem, you want to help kind of coordinate with protocols to build in the direction that is one-to-one in terms of growth with the network.
I think Solana did this really well
you know um basically you know hey what's the thing that's going to onboard billions probably
a wallet hey you know nfts uh we have our own thing going on we keep knocking on the door of
the big players what should we do well we should have someone build a native nft marketplace hey
you know what i mean like on and on and. And I kind of take the similar philosophy,
albeit in a different market, is we need to telegraph where we want people to build.
I think the other thing that was just pinned outside of that, and I published a blog post on DeFi in terms of the growth areas, but the other thing that's super interesting is Shelby.
And Shelby is another labs project incubated with Jump that essentially allows for,
in technical terms, hot storage, which means data is actually usable and readable in a decentralized,
fully distributed system. These are things that AWS, GCP on the Google side have built in.
They're at Labs and Jump are building a product that is on par with AWS and GCP in terms of performance and usability, but on a fully distributed system. incentives, right, for read data that starts to reshape the economy across stakeholders, whether
it's a DApp builder and a user or a creator and a DApp builder or everything in between.
When I think about, like, how these two things bridge, I think a lot about, okay, so how are
you going to onboard, you know, millions and billions onto, like, you know, open financial
rails? Well, the first thing they're going to look at is convenience, you know, millions and billions onto like, you know, open financial rails. Well, the first thing
they're going to look at is convenience. You know, not everyone has time to spend six months
researching protocols and getting rubbed four times and still saying, yo, I have more appetite.
That's just not true, you know, anymore. And so they're going to want convenience. So how do those
things come together in terms of a singular venue that's
simple for the user, but stacks an ecosystem behind it, powering those use cases
to let people trade, be risk on, buy spot, earn yield, whatever they want to do. That's important.
And then when I think of Shelby, I think of Shelby as essentially the entry point for the other end, right? Not the user maybe, but mostly a developer or builder,
right? As a developer, I'm looking around and we're going to see a big entrance of developers
who basically aren't web three native, but are crypto stuck in, you know, in terms of
empowering a core function of their business, they're going to look for simplicity, too.
You know what I mean?
They're going to be like, what's the one API I can use to build any DApp?
And so Shelby is really that other end.
And when I think about the marriage, right, between like DeFi and the trading ecosystem
and Shelby, you know, crypto has been amazing.
And Cube has been a large part of this right of value exchange you know and
yeah we've onboarded some new markets and verticals right so like you know ico days where
people believed in tech and decentralized technology to 2020 2021 days where solana
was like you know attention markets starting with nfts and then meme coins but that's not
going to stop right and so uh and now it's prediction markets coins, but that's not going to stop. Right. And so, uh, and now it's
prediction markets. And so like that's just going to continue to enhance. So the value exchange
piece is super important. And we want that stuff, you know, happening through partners like cube and
also on Aptos, but then what happens with value creation? How do we actually get more things
happening in the ecosystem and more differentiated vertical use cases and dApps,
well, you need a product like Shelby, right? Because all of these things rely on infrastructure
and storage, but it needs to be usable for them to actually be native Web3. And so
very excited about those two combos happening. Nice. Yeah. You know like the the whole decentralized storage thing has been so challenging i've seen
so many um like bullish narratives around past uh iterations on this across you know all chains
actually um and i you know like it's such a narrative during alt season to be honest um like a lot of these
decentralized storage plays uh they usually like giga pump that's not financial advice or anything
but um yeah i i'll definitely take a look at this um i think that is important i think the only thing
that you know maybe i'm i don't know enough about it but i feel like just like the aws like
i don't know like for me what i like about uh blockchains is that it's really you know at the
basic level is like prove out that your blockchain is a great payments rail right uh do that and you
know for the most part like that's enough for people to dip their toes into when it comes like to
comes to the other when it comes to like other pieces of the stack i i think like blockchains
are still early in like finding their like niche within that whether it's like storage or uh like
cdns or any other part of like the cloud infra stack um but yeah you know i i think that i think that we're we're definitely
gonna find some winners pretty soon so i'll definitely put this on my on my radar and
regarding that uh aggregator that you guys are building i think that's great i think that
all blockchains need to have a lot of different um like on-chain dexes for people to go ahead and
you know like create pools and you know kind kind of disperse the liquidity around.
And then having a strong aggregator with a simplistic UI UX really is a huge differentiator.
And we saw that with Solana. There's still nothing on like evm that comes close to uh jupiter um and it's crazy because
jupiter's has been around for a while now and just continue to get better so i'm excited to
see that but jupiter also doesn't have uh gasless transactions you said you were saying that you
don't even need aptos to swap with this one right um yeah and by the way this isn't something we
built this is what a startup in
the ecosystem built called panora exchange you know and if you think about you know cube wallet
you know like whatever you know all of your kind of product integrations if you think about what
would power the swaps this would be something that do it and you know users would basically
see like holy shit i don't need to hold any apt to like swap tokens that's crazy yeah that's always
like a that's always such a pain point i guess it's just like uh you you can use like usdc or
like any other token in your wallet or yeah i mean you just don't get stuck right like when you try
to like swap for solana or whatever right and you have a bunch of USDC on Solana, you can't do it if you have no Solana sold.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
You know what I mean?
It's weird.
It's annoying.
Yeah.
Especially on Polygon.
Anyways, let's see.
We're almost through.
So really quick, guys, if you haven't checked out yet,
Aptos is now trading on Cube.
We're running a pretty juicy campaign.
We have about $50,000 in rewards to give out to all of our top traders.
So if you want to go ahead and get started and start trading Aptos, our first contest
is out now, which is a week-long contest and a $25,000 prize pool.
Super juicy rewards highly recommend everyone to go ahead and create a cube account if you haven't and you know show some love for aptos
um so let's see uh okay so i guess we're kind of close to the end here uh i did want to ask a
little bit about you know the aptos team you know are there any like new hires um you know
what specifically uh yeah yeah like are there any new hires any like any like news coming from like
the team internally because those are always like bullish indicators for me um when i'm like looking
up like new ecosystems and such 100 um so i'll just give you kind of like a covering of what,
you know, my team and we get to work on. So we focus on DeFi, obviously, liquidity, grants,
accelerators, and, you know, what I like to call founder relations. And, as well as like partnerships with folks like cube and exchanges, uh, writ large,
um, in terms of how we, we, I'm, I'm kind of thinking forward.
Um, so I actually, you know, I actually think that, uh, we as an L1 or let's say a foundation
or ecosystem, part of the challenge, right.
Is you mentioned it before, right? Like,
I feel like, like this space is so fun and interesting, but also so infuriating, because
in a lot of ways, the technology has outpaced the adoption, right? And you basically have had,
you know, consistent innovation in the technology, consistent like improvements on infrastructure, new debates, endless fucking debates on fucking design philosophy over and over and over and over.
And I'm always like, damn, dude, like how did people get so much time to talk about this shit before anyone actually before anything really broke?
You know what I mean?
To demand change.
But that's fun.
You know what I mean? That's also fun because
you basically can say, all right, how do we think about how AI is going to use crypto and how do we
be ahead of the curve? Right. And so when I think about the like challenge we need to do is there
are some things you need to do to observe in market and say, hey, we need to have a horse in
this race. Right. So like, you know, I mean, I think ETH has like dominated DeFi forever. And, you know, you have to think about like,
well, what could like a highly performant chain unlock in DeFi, right? And how can we accelerate
that? But then when you think about like, you know, everything else, even payments I put into
that, right? You know, I think payments in terms of a breakout app,
like, you know, usurping some large fintech is, you know, two to five years away, you know,
it's not so evident right now, you know what I mean, in terms of what will take the cake,
you know, in the US, a lot of this stuff works well. But if you go to Nigeria, right, it's a
different story. So like, maybe unicorn will spark, you know, spark out just about out of
Nigeria itself. But in India, the government subsidizes all of these transactions.
So it's free.
You know what I mean?
So it's like, well, you know, so like I think that is an area where we need to like take
earlier bets and also not be so hung up on whether we're making the right one, to be
quite frank with you.
And so that's an area.
And then everything else, right?
Like, how do you actually see around the corner right now? It's, you know, before it was like, you know, obviously trading
and prediction markets, but like, what's it going to be around the corner? And so I think about that
challenge, right? For us. And in some areas, you need to kind of be first or your last,
you know what I mean? Especially in these new areas. And so we've really built a team and
starting in May, all of our founder development team
we've, we've built up and I need to get them more exposure here and do more talks, um, are from VC
backgrounds. So they worked at places like big brain and worked at different venture firms that
were more on the ground, um, that saw a lot of deal flow, that have relationships with founders,
maybe helped them got funding in a previous life. And that's kind of the team we have now.
And we've started to bootstrap starting in May. So now what I'm excited about is seeing
to complement the already existing ecosystem is new projects. We get the feedback a lot from
the community that say, we need some more fun shit to do on this chain you know what i mean like defy is great but like
let's have some fun shit to do and that's kind of the goal moving forward yeah i love that i love
that my only my only pushback on that and you probably know this too so I don't know why you said that, but I don't think that first movers actually have much of an advantage in crypto.
And the reason being is that most users in crypto aren't very loyal.
It's very hard to build a moat.
It's very hard to build a moat.
And I've seen countless times that first movers get flipped.
Like, I've seen it with Magic Eden.
I've seen it with a lot of these trading apps.
I've seen it with a lot of DEXs.
Now we're starting to see it with L1s.
And that's why I'm not discounting any of these L1s like Aptos. If anything, it's like
the market is discounting them. The market is mispricing them. You need to look at the underlying
technology. You got to look at the team. You got to see what they're doing. And you got to look at
those growth metrics, like I said,
because I think that, like you said,
we definitely are in the early innings here.
And I think the fact that you guys are putting together
a team of people who have spent a lot of time with builders,
investing in a lot of startups,
whether they're B2B or B2C,
I think that's bullish because we do need more applications. And I think that like
perform L1s are going to be the home for a lot of these breakout crypto applications. So
I'm really excited. Yeah, I feel you on that. And just to add, I completely agree. If you're
a product or startup, right? You should, you know, it's not about being first to and say,
if I'm first, I'll win. I mean, we've seen this with Perps, Texas, you know what I mean? Like
the graveyard, you know what I mean? What I mean is as an L1 foundation ecosystem team is
if we can have the right energy to say yes and experiment and give people shots to try some shit. And we can see that whether or not it like lasts
forever or gets product market fit, it was first to try something that to me says we have the right
muscle fibers. You know what I mean? From our perspective, right? Obviously, if you're an app
and you say someone's done prediction markets, it's's a lost cause that's not true at all but you know what i mean i mean from our side it's it to
me it tells us all right the temperature are we being fast enough are we being um experimental
enough and i think uh you know i even think solana right i mean like the thing that people don't know
here is is is me and jatoshi we we you know we're in the salon ecosystem right
i was at least yeah so like dude experimentation man you'd find a good founder right and they'd
try four things in six months you know what i mean and it would just be like that that third
or fourth thing would hit and that's that's kind of where you know that's kind of where i want to
get to in terms of just being quick twitch like that hell yeah yeah that this has me uh this has
to be bullish on Aptos.
And honestly, that's why I was most excited
to kind of host this space
because I really just wanted to see
what you guys were cooking on.
And it sounds like there's a lot of core DeFi printers
that are being built out,
which are obviously the foundation
for a lot of other applications to be built.
I'm excited.
So I think we can wrap it up here.
Curious if there's any other things
you might want to touch on before we call it,
or up to you.
And if we do have some people requesting,
maybe you might want to ask
some questions but i'm not sure so yeah i uh just timing wise i have to meet a founder who's coming
in the office in 10 minutes okay but i can stick around i can stick around till that sure i mean
you know is there anything else that we haven't touched on then i guess i mean i guess like i
would love to hear your thoughts uh man like you
know you've you've been around the space i mean uh look i think uh there's been catalysts right
that have like formed an ecosystem right and you know a catalyst i'm not talking about the
exogenous catalyst like fucking covid and shit like that you know what i mean i'm talking about
just use case catalysts whether it be nfts meme coins now prediction markets you know what i mean i'm talking about just use case catalysts whether it be nfts meme coins now
prediction markets you know what what's your kind of thoughts on a catalyst coming around the corner
right um yeah i'm just curious to hear some of that yeah um you know so like from like
for me what i feel like i i think like the most important thing in crypto is to constantly keep your ear to the ground.
Whether you're like a founder or just like a market participant, like keeping your ear to the ground and like, you know, working, right?
Like being like very consistent on your day-to-day, whatever that might be, right?
on your day-to-day, whatever that might be, right?
Like sharpening that blade.
Like sharpening that blade.
Because there's always like these moments that pop up
like throughout the bear, throughout the bull, whatever,
where there's like an opportunity for ecosystems
or in founders to kind of jump on, right?
I guess like a good example of this would be,
I think like a good example of this
would kind of be like, you know, like PumpFun, right?
Like PumpFun kind of like launched
and like the opportunity there was that
a lot of people realized that like making tokens
was like lucrative.
And now you have like a ton of teams
who are like
you know launching multiple tokens like a day or like a week and you know they're you know they're
outsourcing and they're like also launching tokens on other chains right and they're like building
economies kind of like all over right so like the opportunity kind of was like you know you're just
a builder in the space you know how to like develop some like on-chain tooling, right? And then you see like this whole like meme coin
thing is kind of going crazy and you kind of like just pivot and you like, you know, you go and you
start building for that. And I think like, I think like early in the Solana days, right? Like Solana
was live for a year and there was, there was no applications, right? There was actually like one
hackathon,athon really early.
I remember watching the YouTube videos.
Most of those applications don't even exist today.
It wasn't until the second hackathon that they had where we had some solid DeFi projects
that actually came from the first hackathon.
And those actually made it to mainnet, right?
And the catalyst for those applications
and for like Solon to start taking off
was actually like SBF.
It was SBF like bringing like his money
and like the interest of the money of other people
like in and around the crypto
space onto Solana.
Because then all of those applications start to gain funding.
And all you really had to do as a builder and as an ecosystem in the space was just
wait around for that moment.
And you had people like Chase, who was head of DevRel,
who was just doing a really good job at being very vocal on the timeline. And he was not only
highlighting the applications that were starting to gain traction, whether it was liquidity or
venture funding, but he was also highlighting the builders that were also coming into the space.
So that moment of liquidity injection like solana just jumped
on top of it right and obviously everyone knows how the whole spf thing kind of like went down but
you know it's like solana is like you know and you know you can debate it but like it's a king
king of the hell type right now for them right so i think that yeah that makes sense i mean like
look like that's the beauty of crypto right is what worked last cycle or at a place of time you
have to keep reinventing and thinking you know my question is like you know institutions are
super bullish you know what i mean they're super interested right and the belief system i have is
okay great they're bringing capital and attention.
Like, I still think like startups and like web three native people have the most to gain in
building like multi-billion dollar businesses. Right. Because if you think about all these folks,
right, they're like hedged, you know what I mean? They like have 10 different revenue lines. They
have shareholders in some cases, they have all these things. What they're, what they're pilled about is the technology and the potential but someone still needs to fill
that gap and be like yo i'm gonna run it you know what i mean like i'm gonna fucking take down ramp
you know what i mean through on-chain rails i'm gonna fucking you know like do all these things
you know what i mean i'm gonna make rwas better utilized, right? Like in DeFi protocols and, and things
like that. So, um, I still fully believe that. I think that, uh, my perspective is, I think that
capital formers, right. Or VCs or whatever. Um, I'm curious to see where their mind is going.
You know what I mean? Like, and the reason I bring that that back is like i feel like the last cycle a lot of folks were front ran because of memes right
completely community driven you know what i mean bottoms up and then you had hype that said you
know we don't need nobody's money you know what i mean everything's back to the community and so
now i'm curious to see like where they kind of expand and also like you know the more trad like
vcs coming in outside of a16z right saying hey how are we expand and also like you know the more trad like VCs coming in outside
of a 16 Z right saying hey how are we investing in crypto startups you know the sequoias etc
yeah yeah yeah I guess like you know so like for me it's like the opportunity for aptos is like
you know continue to refine the primitives continue continue to improve the chain, and then continue to
push hard on the dev rel builder side of things.
So then when some sort of opportunity arises, you just hop on that and you ride that wave.
And then you continue to ride the next wave after that, after that, after that.
But it's early innings.
That sounds so cliche, but the reality is that it actually's early innings and that sounds so cliche but the reality is that actually is or
early innings and as long as like a team is competent enough like you know you keep your
one runway low and you focus on you focus on what is most important in like cancel out all the
bullshit then like it's you know i think i think there's going to be a few winners because i guess
my my final thing is that like my whole thesis on like blockchains in general is that like each blockchain is like its own like
nation state like these are literally just like digital nation states and that's why they have
like their own like native gas currency gas you know gas token which you kind of look at like its
own like native currency right um so that would you say would you say the un are uh stable coin issuers
yeah yeah no literally like the dude honestly i don't even think like hot take i don't even think
like fucking stable coins or crypto to be honest but i knew that i like i like i know that like
the chains that could that could provide the best growth metrics for stablecoin adoption on their respective chains are going to do well no matter what.
That's just it.
They're going to have fee generation.
They're going to bring more types of businesses and builders onto the chain.
That just is what it is.
Also, that narrative is very early
too so it's it's definitely an exciting time to be a more performant l1 in my opinion
100 100 i i know i only have seven uh i gotta bounce in like three minutes but i'm happy to
take a question or two uh so do you know this cat these these building cash markets?
Cash.
What's up, Cash?
All right.
Let me add him.
We'll do this one question, and then we'll wrap it up here.
Hey, Cash.
How are you?
This should be able to speak.
Let's see.
Cash, Cash.
Hello, Cash.
Are you building on Aptos?
I think they're muted.
They.
I think they are muted.
They.
They are unmuted now.
Let's go.
What's up, Cash?
Hey, guys.
Cash here.
They, them.
Building on Aptos. Welcome, welcome.
Indeed.
Nice.
Did you have, like,
anything you wanted to, like,
ask or kind of, like,
add before we wrap it up here?
Yeah, I wanted to add
some context
to your whole
talk about how, like, Solana
got really big from SBF.
A lot of people are predicting that when spf gets
out he's actually going to come not back to solana but to aptos yo boy so that's that's the bull
thesis for a couple years from now and uh also um if you guys didn't know, FTX invested a bunch in Aptos.
So, bright future ahead.
Yo, send it.
Send it.
Crime's legal.
Anyways, Aptos is now live on Cube.
We're running a massive pool prize over the next two weeks.
First one is $25,000 prize pool. Go ahead,
create a Cuba wallet for free. And yeah, get started and start earning blocks. Ash,
thank you so much for having this little talk with me. I think there's a bunch of really good
clippable moments here. Maybe we can talk about that on the back channels.
But thank you so much for everyone for showing up.
Thank you, Aptos Foundation.
Ash, keep crushing it.
Excited to see where Aptos is going to be by the end of the year.
And yeah, thank you, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.
Awesome. Blessings, everyone. Thank you.
