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Are Incentives Broken in DeFi? 💰 The Aggregated Ep. 129
Recorded: Sept. 12, 2025 Duration: 3:41:13Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. you
well good morning everybody nicole is that you no i mean yeah yeah oh this is nicole's voice okay okay
yeah you broke my music um yeah we'll uh get people up oh i'm sorry um i don't know
you're good you're good i didn't even hear music that's so weird i apologize
okay figure out where rockin' Asdeck are. There we go
morning everybody and uh is music playing because i can't hear anything either no yeah I messed it up I think even though I never
heard it but I probably messed it up I can almost hear like the song in the background but can we Can we like play? Yeah. Can we play Polygon Pump It Up or something?
See, the issue is that X updated how they handle music.
And now like even soundboards get like the noise cancellation on it
when you play music.
I don't know if too many people were just playing copyrighted music
and they were like, nope, none of that.
But it comes out crappy now.
And I haven't been able to find a way to fix it.
I did ask people that are smarter than me.
And someone suggested just buying a large diaphragm mic.
That's like the best option.
Interesting.
I don't even know what a large diaphragm mic is so yeah neither do i i just
remember the words i i might actually have one and not even know that i have it because i have
several mics i think it's just taking more pitches so like the issue like i don't know
if you remember you leave song
But it really dislikes you lead song because there's a lot high and I like bassy notes
So all you hear is the voice in the background instead of the actual music
Okay, that makes sense rocks here. What's up? I can try it
You know,
I don't know why that made me
think of the old
I don't know if they were very popular
but the female
diaphragm condoms.
Wow.
I remember this it actually
it made me
what
back to bed for rock
it reminded me of the
some kind of
record player.
There's these record players that had this like,
almost like a saxophone-like component
that sat on the top.
And I don't know, I was just thinking of that.
But anyways, good times, guys.
It looks like everyone is coming in slowly.
All the guns here.
Some guests have joined us.
Thank you everyone for being here on a Friday.
We do this every Friday.
This is episode 129, our incentives broken in DeFi.
So we have a great discussion we're going to be diving into
in just a second.
Actually, after we get everyone introduced.
And are we going to play a song
or are we just jumping in?
Let me try it and we'll see how we go.
Okay. everyone grabbing their coffee or for some people
friday night and they're ready to party so they're grabbing a beer
they're pre-gaming.
This is the pre-game.
Probably like, what, in Dubai?
Time zone?
Okay, yeah, it doesn't want to play.
Yeah, it's 7 p.m. in Dubai.
This is jumping.
Yeah, it's about pregame time if you do that.
All right, let's go, guys.
It's Friday.
I'm going to start introducing everyone here.
So we just go left to right on the panel.
Take 30 seconds to talk about what you're doing in this space.
Introduce yourself.
Please feel free to drop a link on the Jumbotron,
maybe a major milestone that you recently hit.
And after we get everyone introduced,
we'll jump into dynamic conversation, free-flowing.
You don't have to raise your hand. and after we get everyone introduced we'll jump into dynamic conversation free-flowing
you don't have to raise your hand we just all it's like we're all a bunch of friends around a big table
and uh rock likes to say like we're all in the roman bath house together sharing philosophy
drinking wine and all that so first first, let's introduce everyone.
I'll go ahead.
Actually, let's start with Rock, man.
Tell us what's going on, man, and introduce yourself.
Cindy tricked me last night into thinking it was Friday.
And so I took her out for date night last night.
I think I'm getting older thing. I completely lost what day of the week it was.
And we had a, we had a nice dinner and I had several drinks. And then I realized she's like, I'm so surprised you had drinks before a work day. And I was like, what are you talking about?
And then I told me that it was Thursday.
So that was pretty funny.
Yeah, I'm like, I religiously will not drink on a work night.
Here we are.
A little slight hangover on a, on a Friday morning.
Uh, I'm Rock Zacharias.
Uh, I'm the CEO of Lunar Digital Assets.
Uh, we are a venture studio and we incubated Polygon and Quicksaw and others.
Um, I'm a mentor for Tim Draper's Bitcoin Fi Accelerator.
I, uh, serve on the board for Polygon's grant program. I am the head of global
leadership council for Michael Turpin's BitAngels, co-founder of QuickSwap. And for the first time
in five or six years, putting my co-founder hat back on to co-found LitVM with Aztec here,
My co-founder hat back on to co-found litvm with Aztec here, the Litecoin layer 2, using ZK rollups that roll up straight to Litecoin and also to Ethereum so that we're bringing proof of work chains and also EVM chains together.
and also EVM chains together.
And yeah, it's endorsed by Charlie Lee
and the Litecoin Foundation.
And it also uses Polygon AgLayer
to plug into all EVM chains.
That was a long intro.
If it does help, it's actually frowned upon
to not have a drink on a work night in Scotland.
Thanks for making them feel better.
And I think it's great that you had time with Cindy.
So kudos to you.
Yeah,
it was nice.
Sounds like a good time.
I'll,
I'll go and introduce myself very quickly.
Maztec.
I try to show up as much as I can to the show.
And I'm the CSO at Lunar Digital Assets,
co-founder with Rock on LitVM.
And recently, Joyce from BitAngels made me the city leader of Arizona or, well, Phoenix, Scottsdale area for BitAngels.
And let's go.
And yeah, good times.
Yeah, thanks, Rock.
And I can't wait to talk with all of you here today.
So I'll go ahead and straight pass the mic.
Let's pass the mic to Cryptopolitan.
Welcome to the show.
Hello.
Hello, everyone.
Really nice to be here.
I'm a journalist.
My name is Katerina. I'm coming from Cryptopolitan and one of the media partners for today's space.
I'm here to listen in and capture all the great things we are going to discuss.
For those of you who don't know, we have been in the industry basically since 2018.
We have a global team of more than 40 journalists reporting across different countries,
continents and languages. And we are quite addicted to creating cool conversations online,
especially with political leaders who often retweet our things. And it's kind of like creating really good ambience.
So yeah, I'm going to be here really excited and interested in the conversation.
We often see a lot of projects or writing analysis
and collaborating with them on basically experimenting
how they experiment with different incentive models in Web3.
So yeah, it's going to be exciting to see how discussion will flow thanks very much for having us beautiful
thank you for being here and i i do remember that we just leveled up so cryptopolitan
is joining us as an official news partner covering our upcoming x spaces in real time
and shout out to them for amplifying the voice of the crypto community much love thank you for
being here of course i'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to two cent timmy what's up brother
gm how are you guys good morning yes i am uh two to me. I am on the Polygon marketing team. Do a lot with Aglayer, considering Aglayer is one of the Polygon's biggest products. And yeah, I'm very excited to be here and talk to DeFi because I have a lot to say about DeFi incentives and what I think needs to be fixed. So it's an issue near and dear to my heart.
what i think needs to be fixed so it's a an issue near and dear to my heart
oh i can't wait to pick your brain bro because we so just so everyone knows uh once a week we
we jump on a call with polygon and lda quick swap and figure out you know what we're going to do for
the next couple weeks and and talk about the show and BD and all that.
And to send Timmy is instrumental and,
and carrying the show and helping.
And we had a small conversation about some of the topics or, well,
the topic at large. And so I'm excited to have you here, bro.
And pick your brain more because we, it's like, we, I could have kept going,
but of course had to go to another call.
But I could tell you have a lot of thoughts
on this subject.
So great to have you here, of course.
And thanks for everything you do.
I'll pass the mic on over to Tom.
You know, I'm just here, big advocate for Polygon
and the Ag Lair basically taking over
and being the next step in the future of Web3. you know i'm just here big advocate for polygon and the egg layer basically taking over
and being the next step in the future of web3 so uh yeah i just uh glad to be here and uh
here's to us still hitting number three
like yeah i love that man yeah top three by impact and i I think it's it's definitely possible very excited to have you here and I love your sentiment man yeah thank you I'll go ahead and pass the mic yeah definitely
uh Varun hey hey please introduce yourself Great to have you. Hi, guys.
Am I audible?
Yes.
Yes.
So I've been into crypto space for almost eight years now.
I was a designer for Tether.
I worked on Lightning Network, what Tether announced recently now as Plasma.
So I worked with Polo and the founding team there.
I was also previously co-founder for Asia's first NFT collateralization platform called
Strip.
I was also founder and CEO for CDP backed stablecoin on Polygon, which is backed by Polygon.
It's called Davos. And right now I'm building Hyperbola, which is like data programmability
layer for agent tech economy.
for agentic economy very cool you have a great resume I think you did are you still there was
okay awesome man I didn't want to interrupt you if you were talking i and i was rugged or something but uh cool resume and that's
uh those are some really cool projects great to have you here can't wait to pick your brain
uh definitely rune bond how are you doing today very well thank you so much and thanks for allowing
me to share the link up top we did hit hit a really important milestone. Hey guys, my name's Denny.
I represent Runvon.
I'm also part of the ThorChain ecosystem,
educator, content creator.
Been doing it for five years now.
ThorChain is a decentralized Dex,
the first cross-chain Dex in the world
with real layer one,
no intermediary like bridge layers,
no KYC permissionless. Very excited for the topic today.
Thank you so much for allowing me up here.
Let's go.
Very cool to have you here.
I love we got some really strong DeFi minds here.
And we have one more person to introduce before we jump into the conversation.
Boba. person to introduce before we jump into the conversation uh boba
gmgm can you guys hear me yes perfect awesome awesome cool my name is boba i'm a business developer with a bond and um yeah we we're kind of your friendly neighborhood bonding service
And yeah, we're kind of your friendly neighborhood bonding service.
So we help projects raise funds just with a token.
And yeah, we've been working with QuickSwap and the guys over on your side for the last two years, I would say two and a half years for the better part.
And yeah, man, excited for this.
Excited to give my opinion.
Hopefully it means something.
But yeah, I also have a lot to say
on this topic definitely definitely means something and great to have you here friend
of uh quick swap and uh it's it's awesome i mean i've i've used a bond uh whether that's like uh
integrations with a bond and you guys have been crushing it for years.
So great to have you here.
Also, I've used ThorChain over the years many times as well with Shapeshift and of course,
QuickSwap for yields since the very beginning.
But yeah, so I've used a lot of the products here
and we definitely have some really strong DeFi mines.
Looks like Cedra is back up.
I saw, I think you fell off for a second, now you're back.
Great to have you here.
We can have you introduce yourself and then we'll jump in.
Yeah, yeah, sounds great.
Thank you guys, thank you for having me here.
We are Cedra, open source public goods protocol.
We are on a test net now, so actively building our communities, including resources things from move and etc and now actively
awarding different projects so I would be happy to discuss a lot of a lot of
things regarding the defy and liquidity in defy mercenary liquidity and etc and yeah sounds exciting for me
perfect because we're jumping in right now uh again just to remind everyone just in case
you weren't here when i said it you don't have to raise your hand just jump in it's like we're
a bunch of friends around a table piggyback off each other's comments. And let's get into the meat of this topic today. So right out the gate,
one of the first things I want to tackle, because the question today, the topic says,
are incentives broken in DeFi? And the first thing that comes up to mind to me is,
DeFi. And the first thing that comes up to mind to me is, were the crazy APYs of early DeFi a
necessary growth tool or a long-term going forward.
Anyone can jump in.
If you don't mind, I'll jump on this one.
So yeah, back in the early days,
I can speak of ThorChain specifically.
So back in 2021, ThorChain released ChaosNet
and doing the first time with cross-chain swaps,
it was a nightmare, you guys.
All the different bugs.
We got exploited with the ETH router a couple times.
Because you understand, we connect real layer ones through daemons on something called Bifrost, okay?
So back in the early times of DeFi, we didn't have many nodes.
And the network had to be subsidized by block rewards from the reserve.
And this was a necessary bootstrapping measure needed just so we can figure out the bugs,
the idiosyncrasies between all the different chains and all their quirks and the consensus
mechanisms.
It was a nightmare.
I can tell you, we ran into every single bug that you can imagine, double spends, consensus
failures,
just weirdest stuff ever happened. Okay. Now it's working really, really well.
And we no longer do block rewards. Every, all the fees now on ThorChain, they are real fees from real swaps. There is no more like inflation. There's no more subsidized. So I think to answer your question directly,
you know, higher APYs in the beginning can be necessary until you can reach a level of
sophistication in any protocol. And then you can finally get to a healthy where it's,
they work on like market principles where it doesn't require you to dump a token in order
to get there. And that was the important evolution of ThorChain where we're at today's work. There is no block rewards. We
managed to get off the welfare, if you will. And now it just works as intended. So I think it
depends largely on the context, but I can speak from ThorChain's perspective that that was a necessary part of our growth. I'll kick it to someone else.
Yeah, I think that you run into this problem where you do need to use incentives and get
higher APYs to attract the capital. DeFi gets really interesting, though, when you have
new protocols spinning up that are able to raise money from VCs.
And then they basically just inflate and emit their token.
And you have capital come in because everyone loves 15%, 20%, 25% plus APYs.
But then what happens is the token may TGE or the incentives run out.
And then everyone just runs the latest, greatest protocol.
And it's really hard to find that balance. TGE or the incentives run out and then everyone just runs the latest, greatest protocol. And
it's really hard to find that balance. And it's almost like you get protocols that are just
killing themselves against each other. It's like a, I don't know, it's, I see it almost like
mutually insured destruction is what happens. Now, that's been the case. And that's been broken.
One thing that I think is really interesting is that we see new products come out, new
mechanisms to actually make sustainable DeFi.
It's really, really encouraging.
So like talking briefly, I'm going to show AgLayer product Takana, which is like a chain
built specifically to fix what's broken in DeFi.
And it takes different assets that are used to pump in that are more sustainable.
So AUSD Agor is the stablecoin provider and they take T-Bill yield and put it back on
the chain to boost yield. Aglair has a product called Vault Bridge, which essentially earns
yield on bridged assets from Ethereum mainnet and that yield gets put back into the ecosystem so instead of just emitting and then kind of running out of the funds like
there are ways to earn perpetual yield on assets you just have to be clever about that uh and I
think we're going to see a lot more DeFi protocols using their revenue almost as a way to reinvest and continue to grow
to have incentives. Otherwise, you're just going to race to zero basically because capitals.
If I use DeFi, why would I continue using your protocol if you went from 25% yield
in emissions and the emissions runs out and now it's 5%? I'll just go somewhere else that's
giving me the 25%. Tim, you can ask a question about that um do I understand you correctly what would this would
new chain would do like if you have a theorem for example and you had like a layer two scaling
solution that it makes the from the layer two scaling solution some of those rewards go back
to the layer one am I understanding that correctly yeah so the way it works so most layer two you bridge from ethereum to the layer
two and then those assets will stay in so let's take ethereum for example you bridge eth from
uh mainnet to your layer two and a lot of times that eth just sits there um what katana does is it
there um what katana does is it we use Morpho I say we uh I'm not a part of the team but katana
uses Morpho and gauntlet uh to curate vaults in very low risk uh protocol so you could think like
ethereum mainnet staking would be one where they are staking that ETH that's in the bridge and putting that yield back on the
chain. Now, Katana is very upfront about this. It's not risk-free, right? You are taking on
one more additional smart contract risk to get this. But the benefit when you say like,
When you say like, hey, this is just an offering, we're going to put it out there and hopefully be sustainable.
hey, this is just an offering, we're going to put it out there and hopefully be sustainable.
And then you use these trusted third party curators.
The idea is to minimize the risk as much as possible.
It's not risk free, but it's, hey, let's take on some extra risk.
If you're in DeFi, you're probably less risk averse than someone who invests in T-Builds to begin with.
So it's figuring out like what do DeFi super users want? And it's really high yield. And when you make swaps and not lose a whole
bunch of slippage. So like deep liquidity and high yield are the two. So you take on an extra
smart contract risk, you get these benefits. And if that sounds attractive to you, then you
put your assets on Katana is really the game now that but there
are other protocols within ag layer that like and chains that aren't going to do it so polygon for
example i would say uh had a governance pre-proposal like a pre-pip and the community was very much
against using bridge assets to earn yield so So Polygon said, hey, even though this is a product, we aren't going to do it.
So you can opt into, it's called Vault Bridge, but like some chains want to do it for reasons
and to execute, I guess, their strategy.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes complete sense.
Thank you for clarifying that.
Because I think the layer two scaling solutions, that's been a problem for a lot of layer ones long term right like
siphoning fees away from the from the base layer i'll kick it to boba i've spoken enough
no yeah i'm curious on that um a little bit more inside on katana because because i've obviously
played around with it a little bit so it is is method then there, you know, the KAT token,
the CAT token, is that essentially what the user gets out of it?
Or do they get interest?
I can't remember if I read that part of it as well,
but I don't know if you've got some insight to me.
Yeah, so I know, and I don't want to cannibalize this whole show,
but what Katana is doing, if they're using cat emissions early on to bootstrap the yield and get the TVL up.
But then as people bridge for those attractive yields, the vault bridge will essentially take over for the yield bearing mechanism.
for the yield bearing mechanism.
So right now they're emitting a lot of cat early
to get capital will come in.
I think it kind of is over 500 mil TVL right now
after three-ish months, three and a half months,
something like that.
But all that $500 million, a lot of it,
like if you're talking Ethereum ethereum usdc usdt um and a couple others are
earning yield on the bolt bridge um and that will then go to boost yield so um a couple weeks ago i
think they put uh i don't know a few hundred thousand dollars into their uh to give back to people who are
uh let's say lending usdc or locking their usdc in vault um to gain that yield and the idea is
over time that will continue to grow um but the token so the token won't be emitted forever
basically like you can't do that that's not sustainable but
you do have to take something to emit tokens um and i don't know if anyone's actually figured out
how you bootstrap liquidity in a protocol without giving away your own tokens to start i don't know
if like that would even be possible because you need some way to uh just get people to use your protocol yeah another another way of bootstrap
i mean there's other ways but one way that comes to mind is just don't charge any fees at first
right um there's traditional companies that do this as well there's a there's i think other
creative ways i'd love to kind of get the opinion of obviously Quickswap and Darren and the guys, because
they've been through the iterations of this to where there was high APYs in the beginning.
Everybody was DeFi summer, people were farming like crazy.
It was a good way to get your name out there, but then emissions do dry up.
So I was kind of curious how the
mentality has changed from those days to now, and what is kind of the meta now that you guys
decided on this is the way to incentivize liquidity properly.
Brock, do you want to jump on that question or Darren would be awesome?
Yeah, I'll take that one.
Yeah, I mean, so the way that quick swap has always given out rewards specifically is to the highest fee generating pools.
So the way that quick swap works is whenever someone makes a swap, a tiny portion of the liquidity provider fee
is used to market by quick. And then in the past, it was like given back to stakers.
I think like 80% of all the revenue
still goes to the community.
QuickSwap is actually usually in the top 20
of all protocols, including chains,
actually give holder revenue back on DeFi Llama.
So that's actually the revenue that goes back to
the holders um so what we've done with that yeah in the past was give that to stakers um recently
we've switched that up a bit so to make the protocol more sustainable i think 50 of all our
buybacks actually just go back into the farm wallet. So buy quick, we put that in the farm wallet.
And in the past two months alone, we've actually bought back a surplus of 2.5% of the supply
in the farm wallet on top of the emissions that we've given.
So we've bought back maybe 3% or whatever much we give out.
And 2.5% of that is just surplus we're actually building up the um the farm wallet building up
the sustainability side of quick swap um all will still given pretty decent emissions i mean the apy
is on uh on quick swap are generally very healthy anyway and that is because we do focus on the
highest we generating pools so um we've obviously done multiple approaches.
So there is like working with eight bond on projects that want maybe to own their liquidity
rather than rent the liquidity.
But we've always sort of just done a bit of everything to move with the way that the
DeFi is going instead of just being stuck in our ways.
Are you guys working on anything with like tokenized stocks i mean the stock word is usually pretty naughty um
in the past with past administrations and stuff We did look at maybe perpetuals and stuff in the past,
but yeah, I mean, crime wasn't legal at that point.
But it seems to be now.
No, no.
Yeah, no, it's sort of in the roadmap.
We try to do as much as we can,
as much as we can but stay within like the confines of what's acceptable
but stay within the confines of what's acceptable.
i was just seen recently a project on solana that is now doing pre-ipo
private companies you can trade them so and uh i was talking to some of the guys that were kind of like deeply
involved with it at an event they're saying that they basically have the green light it was fine
no issues so it seems like the
page is turned um of course i'm not a lawyer or anything. I agree with that.
I think now is the time to go, right?
I mean, everyone was so frightened during the last administration, last regime.
I know we were terrified.
We actually made thought changes as hard and as possible because we were always feared,
fearing like, you know, state actors attacking us.
But I finally, it feels like there's a breath of fresh air.
And guys, if there was any time to build, now is the time.
I don't even, you know, don't ask for permission.
Just go for it.
I mean, you're not doing anything wrong, right?
You're just building the infrastructure of the world.
And as far as I can see, it's a tacit green light.
You know, I'm not saying do anything illegal.
Of course not.
I just don't see, I'm hoping the roadblocks are largely gone.
So if there's any developers out there listening to this whether it's live or recording uh even if you're not feeling with thor chain or any protocols up
here just start building now we this is our opportunity everybody let's get this done let's
make the new economic doctrine of the world let's liberate the kids let's fix the problems
i'm so pumped up about this you guys so lfg let's go
pumped up about this you guys so lfg let's go
i love that man yeah fix the money fix the uh systems that that uh use the money and uh i think
we're it's going to change a lot of lives and create a lot of opportunity and i agree fully
agree this is definitely the time to build like crazy. I was in some conversations with Polygon recently,
and they're focusing on builders
and finding ways to support builders.
And this is, I think,
what all ecosystems really need to do is get out there
and help the builders build all the cool stuff that we need.
I'm wondering guys, uh, it's like a slight shift in the conversation,
but how should incentives evolve as the industry matures and a user
expectation shift?
And we've kind of, if, you know, we go, went around the room a bit and, uh,
some of the teams here have kind of discussed best practices or what they've done.
You know, Rune Bond was explaining with Thorchain that there was incentives in the beginning.
And now, you know, you guys don't need those same incentives.
But how do you guys see the evolution of these incentives kind of playing out?
We kind of lightly went over it today.
Wondering what you think, like, do these incentives continue as DeFi matures?
Are we, like, what are also like the focus areas that will keep the users there?
And are incentives even, you know, necessarily needed. I like, even if you're an aggregator,
I think it's there's probably a good chance that some
chain is incentivizing on some level to have
liquidity. What's your guys' thoughts?
I would say that incentivize are really crucial on project start, of course, as initial step with audience.
But the next one, next steps should be some extra value that you as a project, as a chain and other could give to your users.
uh give to your users you know maybe some cheaper uh cheaper swaps or better user interface or um
i know some uh some payments and etc so uh for as for me i would keep it i was gonna say i think that in the past
there's been a lot of different kind of investing but the new wave is where all the regulations have
allowed in institutioners to come in and basically take over this aspect that used to be only opportunity on the back end,
you know, and obviously a lot of that, you know, APY was diluted. And if you held most of those
coins like me, you lost a lot of money. But I think the next big step in the Web3 evolution
is the incentives from institutions coming in like, you know,
MicroStrategy, Sharplink Gaming. There's about to be an influx of these exact same things
happening with Solana, Polygon, every single big altcoin you can imagine that's going to create
the biggest price squeeze we've ever seen. So I think that maybe the
investing strategy might have shifted. I also think when we, I think yields on chain,
like using blockchain will always be higher than traditional markets simply because
you don't need 600,000 people that are regulating the yield.
When you have all these compliance officers for banks and things like that,
it just bloats the salary and they can't offer as high yield as we can
in a permissionless protocol.
So I think you'll always have better incentives on chain.
I also think, and we've kind of seen this a little bit,
and it's becoming a lot more common in
defy where a lot of platforms instead of launching their platform with their token right from the
start they're launching their platform and then doing a points program where they use their fees
to or you earn points uh and then a little bit and then you're basically speculating on what the
points you'll get for tokens. And that is almost more risk-free for the platform where they can
actually build up a decent-sized treasury before they launch their token in a minute where they
can earn the fees and do certain things. I also think we'll see i mean you talked about aggregators as that but like
you'll get uh projects like um something like a turtle club and all these points aggregators where
new protocols want users and then there'll be these aggregators that have the users that use
whoever comes to it and then people just um like you'll actually end up having middlemen that are earning a lot because protocols
could go to the points aggregators that people want to go to and use and then they get their
new users that way I think we're going to see a lot more I don't know if turtle has any competitors
right now I'm sure they do but they've been so effective that I wouldn't be surprised if you
have a whole bunch
of these point aggregators come up with a strong user base, and then you can get the capital that
way. And instead of bootstrapping with your tokens emissions, you just give people points.
And then those points turn into something at TG. And we see it even with something,
and I know it's not DeFi, but OpenSea is doing it. Like how long have they been, had their XP program going on before they airdrop and
they're just charging fees to help bootstrap their funding that way. And it's a little
bit more of a gamble. I think it gets into the more DGEN side of DeFi, but I think that's
also an effective way to run your protocol.
Definitely. That makes sense.
Is there anyone else that wants to kind of dive in on,
on the evolution of incentives looking forward,
how things might look
brock maybe you can add some uh thoughts here you're on the cutting or i think someone's
brewing yeah jumping about it yeah so i also aligned somewhere similar to cedra that um
Initially, it's just about vanilla token APIs where people just care about money because
the market is nascent and a lot of noise is being created to inform people and educate
people.
But as market has evolved and market evolves, it's just like the same how we saw
with bitcoin the initial mining block used to give 48 bitcoins but that's not the case as the network
starts building more and more trust usability factors start coming in as incentives so
the ease of accessibility the ease of usability and better value propositions that a user can extract in terms of opportunities, not just API is where I think or I see the evolution going forward.
Definitely.
I'll have some thoughts as well like i think at some level there's always
going to be some incentivization um maybe not like the super high uh apys that we've seen back
in like the food coin days of early d5 when we were kicking things off. But some type of incentives.
And as we evolve and we become more mature,
we're probably going to see these incentives become more like real yield,
you know, directly like Darren was talking about,
taking the fees and giving them back to the community
and trying to create like healthy pools and things
like that but on on top of of uh the decks layer and the the pools layer i think as these legos
stack up you'll just you'll see other things like aggregators built on top of that and then
on top of that and then strategies built on top of the uh those legos so and i think these
strategies might be like cross-chain type strategies or institutional type strategies that
maybe a decentralized uh asset treasury is building for specific asset because, you know, right now there's
all these debts that are coming online.
There's also all these institutions that want to build, uh, in the space as well.
Like we rock and I have talked to many recently and they've, they've talked about the
experimentation that has been done on chain.
Uh, we were just talking to someone that, that, uh, is talking to someone that does ETFs, crypto asset ETFs.
They want to do stuff on chain, but there's been various issues and things like that in the past.
But I think as DeFi matures, the UI, the user interface, and just general, the UX experience gets better
and everything becomes a lot more lubricated
and there's real yield
and then there's unification layers and all this.
I think people can more easily build strategies
on top of all this
and you'll have this more seamless DeFi experience.
Yeah, I will say right now, the user experience in DeFi sucks. It's just terrible still. And it's terrible even though we've made so much progress. We've traveled from here to the moon in terms of upgrading with speed, fees, bridges, safety, auditing.
We're constantly improving and adding new technologies, but the user experience is still terrible.
the user experience is still terrible um yeah just i mean simple stuff like trying to bridge
liquidity to a chain and figure out which pools are the best um and then you know not to mention
other fun stuff like decide trying to figure out if you're gonna have taxable events and
it's just still like uh i can't imagine regular people using this stuff.
It's pretty complicated.
I sent up a couple of days ago where like,
I don't understand why people don't participate in DeFi,
but also like earlier this week,
I was using folks finance,
unwound a loop that I had.
And it took me-
You were using what?
Folks finance, like old folks uh which
is like a cross-trained yield or a cross-trained lending protocol uh which is actually it's pretty
cool but it takes forever because they have to uh reach finality before they unloop the position
which takes a long time when you're talking about L2s and all of this stuff
and going through their routers. So it took me like two and a half, three hours to unwind a position.
And then I took, it was like a looped pole position. And then I bridged that to Katana,
which took about like another 20 or so minutes. Like, and it just, or I had to bridge my poll. My poll was on Polygon POS, and then I bridged to Ethereum,
which took 20 minutes, bridged from Ethereum, which took 20 minutes. It took me four hours
to unwind a position and then move it to the chain I wanted to, which is just a horrible user
experience. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do and i would say i'm probably more uh d5
native than 99 of the population so it's like and to your point i'm like holy crap this is like
way better than it was four years ago like and it's just it's fascinating
yeah it's way better than it was four years ago, but it's still garbage.
I've been using DeFi for a long time, so I feel like it's evolved a lot. I don't know if it's garbage, garbage, but I guess if you're brand new and you're coming in, it's still difficult.
But this will probably be solved by, and this is a question to you guys I mean
there's these one click strategies that are coming in you know these white label strategies uh
so instead of needing to know all the protocols to do a loop for instance or some type of DeFi
uh cross-chain strategy you know there there's just kind of like a vault
that people plug into.
They just deposit, you know, a single asset
and then they get the strategy.
I think things like that will really go a long way.
Also, AI to AI kind of trading
and strategies will probably help from a user experience. AI kind of trading and,
and strategies will probably help from a user experience.
Maybe those things can be built on top and,
and make things better.
Wondering what your guys are,
what your guys thoughts are on the next Legos that are going to be built on
top to basically fix what Rock's talking about.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, let's see.
Go ahead, Rumi.
Yeah, I was saying about this.
So because I come from like product design and like UX background,
and I've been part of a lot of infra,
and that's what exactly like we have been building
at Hypergola is to enable that data availability layer,
to enable a lot of good UX
and exactly to onboard people into DeFi effortlessly.
We also created like a bot,
not a bot, but basically text to swap mechanism using a bot
which uses our data layer.
And the way we abstracted things there is basically like the kind of stuff that you're
talking about.
You don't have to manually find the routes.
We created on our data layer, the aggregated routes
that you can filter based on cheapest and fastest.
And we are also enabling now that you don't have to go
to like any particular finance
or search for like different protocols.
But just like if you have used Zapier,
you can just stitch your own trading strategy.
Just like how do you do Zapier tool automation?
You just select verified pools and zap, zap, zap,
and you can basically deploy your own strategy
and you can run your own manual strategy.
You can use other strategies.
And we kind of tested it with our users.
We already clicked like around 15 million plus volume
within the first 10 days.
And some of like more UX around spot that we tested is
enabling stop loss over cross-chain executions, enabling the configuration of trading strategies
over cross-chain execution. So almost enabling like what options you have on a SIGS,
on a decentralized exchange, and truly on-chain. You don't even need to create a vault. It's still possible to do on chain. And even
Paradigm is trying to fuel a lot on that incentive on top of Porto. And we have been experimenting
with them in order to enable that. And I also see that that's like definitely next set of
evolution, which is there in the market that a lot of users want as more and more fragmentation is increasing.
Brock, were you going to say something? Or can I go?
Yeah, go ahead, man.
Oh, thanks, brother. Yeah, I agree. The problem is complexity abstraction. If you can abstract
away the complexity, then we win. Because it's right, using some of these DeFi protocols are a massive pain in the butt, right? It's just terrible. Why did S-curve adoption
happen with smartphones? I mean, you know, you could say, try to rewind your brain, like for
those who are older who had like flip phones or, you know, non-sip phones, right? Like there was
a barrier to entry, but I would say it takes about maybe a few days, too late, maybe like one or two
weeks, and then you're pretty efficient on a swipe screen. Your brain readjusts. It's not the same. Like there was a barrier to entry, but I would say it takes about maybe a few days to maybe like one or two weeks.
And then you're pretty efficient on a swipe screen.
Your brain readjusts.
It's not the same with DeFi, right?
It requires a decent amount of knowledge beforehand.
So UI is very important.
And then, of course, complexity abstraction, as I said, where everything is committed by one action.
Like, for example, on ThorChain, if you want to make a swap to another asset, that pathway may involve lots of DEX aggregation routes. You might have to go from
Thor chain to Uniswap to this, to that, right? And that all is committed by one single transaction
where the starting asset pays for the gas of all the intermediary actions thereafter.
That's so important. And so yes, this is the next problem is making these things seamless.
You know, we have an app layer called Regera, which is trying to make essentially decentralized
Binance because on centralized exchanges, too, there's still like a problem. Like if you want to
on ramp or take assets off or go on, you know, you need to wait for your assets to be approved,
blah, blah, blah, blah, KYC, all this stuff. There's all these edge points. But I am so
convinced you guys that we
are going to solve this problem that we are figuring this out and we're smoothing it out
in real time so um yeah it's not that good now but hold on your butts we're about to make it a lot
better yeah there's there's a path to there's a path to, there's a path.
I think we have a roadmap kind of as an industry in front of us of what needs to be done.
You know, we don't know exactly how we'll solve every step, but there's all kinds of theories and things that people are already in the midst of building to make these things better.
People are already in the midst of building to make these things better.
You know, one example that Polygon and myself are very focused on is, you know, proper interop, trustless interop.
Instead of, you know, having to use a bunch of different third party bridges, having things be like more natively bridged with ZK rollups.
I think that's a huge part of the industry in the future.
Imagine if there was to bridge between whatever polygon, base, any optimism chain, etc.
any optimism chain, et cetera. There's just like, you know,
a ETH foundation website you go to and you,
you can bridge between all of these seamlessly or even in the future,
if the assets are all ZK versions,
you could see a world where you kind of don't even need to bridge.
Each of the chains are talking to each other.
And, you know, your asset on one chain is as good as an asset on another chain.
This is also possible.
I mean, we'll solve all these things, but it's still, I mean, it's slow.
This is a, it's a very unique industry with the whole blockchain and things, you know, you're not using central servers.
One thing that we sort of haven't touched on here specifically is the use of AI agents eventually and now that can abstract all of this stuff away.
So I did summon Adam because I had a call with him yesterday and what they're building actually could hopefully solve a bunch
of this stuff so i'm gonna just pass it to him and uh he can talk about what what they're building
and how that can help uh like defy ux and all that fun stuff
gmgm can you hear me loud and clear all right perfect thanks Perfect. Thanks for, uh, thanks for inviting me up and yeah,
great catching up yesterday. Um, so yeah, really quickly, uh, Adam, I run go-to-market and, you
know, all business development partnerships for circuit AI. Um, we're currently in private beta,
but basically what circuit AI is, is two things. It's a developer platform, makes it easy for anyone to build
and deploy an autonomous financial agent on their existing wallet, or rather deploy the agents.
On the user side, we're also a consumer application that makes it basically so that in three clicks,
a user can deploy these autonomous agents on top of their existing wallets. So
that's one of the big game changers from any of the other existing AI agent projects that you've
seen come to market today. Typically, they're spinning up a new smart account for you.
They're just sending you an address to deposit into. It's kind of a black box.
We actually enable users to run these agents on top of their existing wallets. So it's
fully self-custodial. Our platform never has control of the user's keys. And again, a lot of
what you've seen in the market today, it's not really autonomous. There's not really reasoning
going on with these agents. There's still a lot of manual user input required to interact with these platforms
and the protocols that they run on top of. With Circuit, there is no LLM interface. You don't have
to talk to a chat bot and tell it what you want to do. You're actually just going to have a
marketplace where you can, like Amazon style, where you can scroll through all of the agents
that have either been developed by our team internally or by third-party developers.
And in three clicks, basically, you're selecting the agent you want to run, you're choosing
the wallet you want it to run on, and you're clicking start.
From that moment on, these agents are running 24-7 fully autonomously on top of your existing
wallet.
So as a little bit more background on the team,
you know, FUBAR, I'm sure a ton of folks in this space follow our founder and CEO,
FUBAR on Twitter. You know, he's our CEO. At CTO, we've got Tan Liu, who was the co-founder
and previous CTO of Kraken. And then rounding out our executive leadership team, we brought on Dr. Joe Miller,
who actually, for those who are familiar with kind of the TradFi space, he built out all of
the AI systems for Bridgewater directly reporting to Ray Dalio. So largest hedge fund in the world
for those who aren't familiar. He is running a team internally of agent protocol engineers.
So we've actually got this team that has already built,
I think we've got about 15 agents running in production right now.
So again, look at the market today.
I think the closest, you know,
maybe you've seen some agents that can do like yield optimization
across different DeFi protocols.
That's great for simplifying UX.
We have a yield agent, right?
But we also have developed a lot more advanced agents
that can do things like trade basis trades on hyperliquid.
They are placing with high degrees of accuracy bets on polymarket,
political markets, NFL markets, college football markets, MLB markets.
And we've also got the agents doing things like building index baskets for the user,
doing momentum trading.
The list goes on and on.
And we're also already working with, as we approach general availability,
we're working with some really impressive and talented third-party protocol developers.
And this is a piece I want to touch on in a little bit greater detail, where I think
speaking to what this space here is all about, which is that frankly, it's just too difficult
to use a lot of protocols.
There's all of these yields out there.
Put aside whether these yields and incentives are sustainable, but they're out there.
It's basically free money on the ground to be picked up. And for better or for worse, it's still just
too difficult for the majority of users, especially kind of a quote unquote normal user, someone's new
to the space to go and take advantage of, use these protocols and earn these returns.
These developers are deploying, they're deploying circuit agents on our platform that basically
make it so that users can access their protocol without even having to know the app, navigate to
the app, make sure they have the right wallet, the right tokens, et cetera. In one click, they can
perform the core functions of these DeFi protocols. I'll call out one explicit example,
liquidity providing on the decentralized exchanges.
We've got some leading DEX developers
that we're working with,
who are basically making that LPing process on their DEX
a one-click experience for the user.
So now all I need to do is come to the Circuit platform,
click deploy on the LPing agent, and I need to do is come to the Circuit platform, click deploy on
the LPing agent, and boom, this thing is going to be making money for me, LPing 24-7 while I touch
grass. So that's the high-level overview of what we built at Circuit. Again, we're in private beta
right now. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you're interested in receiving access to that. And we're working towards, you know, a broader release in the short future.
I won't short a date on that at this time, but it's coming very soon.
Yeah, Adam, are these AI agents, are they cross-chain or are they on a specific?
Great question. Great question.
So it's both,
actually. We've got some agents that are running protocol-specific strategies. So like the hyper
liquid, one of the hyper liquid agents we have, for example, that thing's only executing its
strategies and trades on hyper EVM and hyper core. We've got other agents like the yield optimization agent, for example, that can actually
move across different lending markets across different protocols. And again, this requires no
manual input from the user. So, you know, maybe the user's just coming and showing up with some
Outh on, I don't know, like Polygon or Arbitrum or whatever the chain is.
But the strategy is actively swapping and bridging those tokens behind the scenes to get the user into the assets required to go do lending across all, you know, kind of
all of the major protocols.
Other really cool thing is we're very flexible in terms of protocol deployments.
So again, like I've already called out, we're on Polymarket. So we're on flexible in terms of protocol deployments. So again, like I've already called out,
we're on Polymarket, so we're on Polygon,
we're on Arbitrum, Base, Solana, Hyperliquid.
This is just the initial set we're running on
in the private beta.
I would expect by the time you see us launch
in general availability,
that set of protocols will expand pretty significantly.
So fully cross-chain in short.
That's awesome.
That's a bit of what I was envisioning earlier on the conversation I was talking about.
I think as all these DeFi Legos stack at the top, to the the user experience that rock was talking about you know it's either
he's like one click type solutions where there's uh
verified strategies or or in these ai agents that basically work for you and i i don't know
if there's like anyone else here that has like other ideas of how
the the user experience could be fixed from here but these seem to be like very very promising and
and it it seemed like it was going to be something that was going to take a while um you know maybe
another year or two to kind of get fleshed out but it seems like teams are right
or either right around the corner from completing uh i guess like the first
real iterations of these that can really do some damage like and um but, uh, yeah, what's, what's your guys thoughts on like timelines and also
are there any other types of solutions to the defy user experience that I, that we haven't
talked about today.
And also I want to welcome a hummingbird and Matthew.
They just joined us as, uh, Adam joined us.
Welcome.
Welcome.
I guess I have a quick comment on that.
Obviously, these agents will help us a ton.
I have been playing around with a couple to kind of see its power.
But it's still, I would say, probably six months to a year away
where you can actually prompt it with creative language, right,
to get done what you want it to get done.
And what I've kind of experienced, you know, using just a couple,
is that, you know, you need to still prompt a lot.
It doesn't like tell you, hey, I've seen this healed,
that's cool over here, and you can add X amount of dollars and you'll get within this range of an APY, right?
And so that's kind of what I expect to have happen in the future.
Because ultimately, you know, the majority of users can't sit around and try and find yield opportunities and what's best.
You need some sort of AI feedback loop that tells you like, okay, great. So if you're looking for
yield and ETH, you can get it via these steps. And this is kind of the way to approach it.
I can automatize all these things for you. Let me just do X, Y, and Z. And so the ones I've been
using haven't done that yet, but I'm
pretty confident that we'll get there pretty soon. You know, obviously AI expands exponentially.
I think it's going to be a big, you know, just written language will be a big step ahead for
how you use your wallet and interact with your wallet, how you interact with DeFi protocols.
with your wallet, how you interact with DeFi protocols.
I think this is going to become like the next thing
where somebody prompts, you get your yield,
you can even tell it like, listen,
I like this protocol on quick swap.
I don't know how to do V3,
but I definitely want to add V3 liquidity in these ranges
and then the AI can prompt you back this is a good decision
or it's a bad one and i think that step of an agent hasn't yet happened but i would love adam's
opinion on that and you know kind of that's probably where they're heading um but i do feel
like that's going to make a big difference to the layman to the normal person that obviously don't know, you know, DeFi as DeFi natives do.
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting consideration.
And I do think it sounds like you're already using some of the protocols or platforms rather
that are taking a stab at this today, right?
You've got things like Banker.
You've got things like Wayfinder out there, right?
I think-
PayAnon.
Yeah, PayAnon, exactly. So yeah, I think these guys are all making really interesting attempts
at solving the usability problem. And I do think that there is a space for that LLM chatbot
interface for the user. I just am not convinced that that is going to be the primary interface for the user.
Again, folks like you and me, we can sit here. We understand what the difference between,
you know, V3 and V4 is. I think, I just think it's a long way off for the average user
who is just coming into crypto, you know, and maybe has some stable coins in a wallet, that is so far away from
their consideration. So I think those types of products, in my view, are still very much
catered more towards the sophisticated or power user. And so I think they'll have their place.
Where I do think the LLM can still come into play here or the chat interface is kind of as a sidekick, so to speak, for the user. So
you may want to come into the platform and say, hey, can you give me an overview of what's going
on in the market over the past 24 hours and give me an update on the positions that the agent has
taken on my behalf? And then it can give you that response. Hey, yeah, actually this agent, you know, swapped you into these tokens. This is the reason. This is the yield you've earned. This is your return profile. This is the future plan of what I'm going to do with your assets. that simplifying that user interaction down to as few clicks as possible and as little
manual intervention as possible is kind of going to be the right approach, right? So
you can get a very clear understanding, again, by going through this agent marketplace
of what an agent is, what it does, what its strategy and mandates are, who created it,
what's its performance track record, right? The high level details and things that a user would really care about to understand, hey,
can I trust this thing? Do I want to deploy capital into this thing? And once they've made
that assessment, they can just click deploy and this agent is going to transact on their behalf.
I think the other really cool thing that we've done with that, by the way, is that can still feel a little obtuse
and a little bit of a black box to some users, right? Like, oh, okay, I'm just going to hit a
button and this thing's just going to trade on my behalf. What our platform actually does is
surfaces to the user the full reasoning and thought process that the agent is going through, and it will help you understand
why it is or is not taking a certain action. So much like when you go into like Grok or
ChatGPT or any of these LLMs, and you can see when it's doing its deep thinking, you can see
the thought process that it's going through to arrive at the answer. Very similar what we're doing here at Circuit, where I can go
in and say, okay, maybe I deployed Solana meme coin momentum trading agent, which may or may not
be something what we'll have on our platform. You'll actually see the agent in a certain view
going through its full process. Okay, I'm looking for these conditions to be met across these
markets. I'm not currently seeing any of those conditions being met. I'm not taking any trading
action. Then on the flip side, when those, those metrics that it's looking for are met,
it's going to call that out that it's seen it. It's going to execute the trade on the user's
behalf. And it's going to have a link right there to the block explorer to show that that trade did actually take place.
So really powerful.
And I think, yeah, it remains to be seen what the ultimate UX looks like for all this.
But what I do think, regardless of the form it takes, whether it's our kind of approach with the one-click deployments, whether it's the LLM interface approach, whether it's some mix of the two,
deployments, whether it's the LLM interface approach, whether it's some mix of the two,
I do think we're going towards a world where the wallet in general for interacting with crypto is
completely being reimagined. I don't think that the current wallets that exist today
are going to continue to be the leading form factor for how users engage with these markets.
And then especially when you look forward into kind of the convergence of a lot of these super apps, right?
You've seen a lot of the traditional finance platforms
that enable equities trade.
Did he rug or is it just me?
Yeah, I think so.
Sorry, Adam.
He's back.
You rugged for about five seconds
and now you're back.
You're going to have to stop all that again.
Okay, let me start with a talk.
I'm lifting here, man.
I'm on the edge of my seat.
Yeah.
No, the last thing I was going to add there was, I think you're basically right, seeing this convergence of the assets that are available on crypto rails and on traditional rails.
And so I think where we see this space going is to a place where,
yes, today the agents are strictly conducting your crypto operations. But I think you'll very
quickly going to see this transform into, well, now the agent can not only see what's in my wallet,
but it can see what's in my brokerage account. It can see if I want to give it access to my
bank account. So it can really become almost like a personal financial advisor that can
understand, you know, my balance sheet. It can understand me as,
as a person, my risk profile, my preferences, my, my goals,
and it can basically suggest the agents that are going to best help me
achieve those goals across different asset classes, you know, stocks, bonds,
commodities, crypto, et cetera. So etc. So I think it's a really
exciting time. Yes, that's exactly what I want. That's my dream. That's what I want, certainly.
And so that's why we're building it. Yeah, I agree with you. I think a lot of the things too,
is like, for example, if you take a computer you haven't turned on in like 15 years, the moment
you connect it to the internet, it's bombarded.
It's under attack, right?
Because of the old operating system.
I think you're right, Adam.
And I think it even goes further.
I think people, especially these new entrepreneurs, like an AI assistant of some kind will be the preferred method to interact with the Internet at some point just because it helps you keep you safe.
You don't be quite a sophisticated actor.
I mean, there is a lot of different exploits.
What I'm curious,
there's something that I roll around in my brain a lot,
is if I imagine these AI trading bot strategies,
could you make AI trading bots essentially
learn the behavior of other trading bots
and then trade against that strategy
to siphon revenue from the other?
You see what I'm saying?
Like,
I'm curious to see with not only your bot,
but then all the different bots come out,
how that plays out to me.
Next level,
man.
Yeah.
That's like,
that's like,
it's the ultimate like blood in the streets,
war meritocracy thing,
which I personally enjoy.
But that,
that to me fascinates me.
I'm so excited to see how that turns out.
I'll kick it to someone else.
The question blows my mind, you know, thinking about it like that,
because, I mean, we haven't really gone to that experience
that Adam is describing, which is something like,
I have these conversations at LDA, Lunar Digital Assets.
It's our full stack venture studio.
Rocks the CEO'm the CSO. And we have
these deep conversations about the future and where we're placing
investments and even different projects that we're incubating
for direction where we're discussing these kind of things.
I know one of the things that we talk about
a lot or recently we've talked about, not a lot, but just it's come up a couple of times then you know to take it a whole step further with what you're saying you know being able to use your ai to trade against others or um you know optimize
a trading strategy or maybe follow a famous trader or or just all these other next level things is
just like i i would just be on the computer all day like
just just playing with the eye because i already have these long conversations with grok and i'm
probably i don't know if i'm maybe one of those weirdos out there but i love talking to grok
um and just picking its brain and and going back and forth with it. I can't imagine when you have the full access of Web3
at your fingertips with your personal sidekick
and he's helping you get the best yield
and trade against other people and things like that.
So this is a very exciting future in my opinion.
Maybe I'm a nerd.
I'm gonna say you're not a weirdo for using ai
i literally in my chat gpt have like a project called d5 strategizing like whenever i find a
new project i upload all of their docs and i'm like here's the yield they're giving what are
the risks what should i do like compare like and just ask ai to help me think through things and
just it makes things a lot easier even when it comes down to like here's an lp position like what will it take to get out of the range and like run for the
basically and like it just works so much better than the way a human brain could work and so much
faster too i think that's like one one of the things that i think is really powerful about the DeFi AI space isn't necessarily that it can think better than humans, but it can give you the information and break it down much, much faster.
So you can be way more efficient with what you're trying to do on chain.
And I think that's one part of AI that a lot of people miss.
And I think that's one part of AI that a lot of people miss.
It's like you don't necessarily need to do all your thinking and tell you what to do,
but it can get you information a lot faster so you can be more productive and efficient
with what you're trying to do.
Exactly correct.
It increases your bandwidth exponentially, right?
I mean, ordinarily, you have to use your own calories in your brain to siphon through the
information.
It can quickly and efficiently give you a summarization of everything.
And to talk about RuneBond for a second, RuneBond was created with AI tooling by Chatton the information it can quickly and efficiently give you a summarization of of everything um and
to talk about rune bond for a second rune bond was created with ai tooling um by chat and build and
it was created by someone who was not a developer you know vibe coding right simple english prompts
just simple language i want an interface that's thor chain theme that allows people to bond their
rune blah blah blah blah and then in minutes, it makes it.
And then you hand it to a developer
to make sure that it's coded and all that stuff correctly.
And now rune bond, I put up top,
we have done over a million rune bonded.
It is incredible, you guys.
The tools that are available now.
Dude, congratulations.
Sorry to interrupt.
I love that people,
I don't know if everyone's going to love, especially if you went to school for coding and everything.
And so it's probably a controversial take.
But the fact that just the creativity of someone's mind that maybe it's just getting out of high school or a kid can just vibe code and create protocols or solutions for the world.
It's just amazing.
But kudos to you guys for utilizing AI like that.
I mean, I personally just think that it's really cool.
You know, it is really cool.
And the people, like that's the thing with AI technology.
It's obviously not going away. The way we defend ourselves against the maybe possible dangerous aspect
is just to give it to everybody,
you know, just to make it homogenous
and allow the ordinary person to utilize these tools.
And there's going to be so many incredible things
that are built.
I mean, that's why,
I don't know if you guys look at the RuneBond account,
you know, oh, it has less than a thousand followers.
It's new.
It's a new account.
I mean, it's months old, right? And it was built in five minutes. We coded it and it's already
providing an incredibly important function that would have taken a developer without coding,
with a developer with good coding skills, like weeks, if not months to make. It was made in
minutes. I mean, this is a new level this is the exponential increase
of utility functionality and um like i said earlier hold on to your butts hold on to all of
your butts put three hands on your butts because this is just the beginning it's going to get wild
you guys buckle up can we get a hi everyone alex from link coin here uh sorry for being late i want to hear what
the cedric has to say i think he's a developer head of development relations and they are just
launching um yeah we have a lingo we have like two very experienced developers uh and i just
talked to them recently two guys that you say are on daily basis and they said like we do until someone notices it because on a
higher level I mean you still have to double check the scores and do everything
like that yes you to jump in I'd love to hear how, I mean, maybe we could take 10, 20 minutes just to discuss, like, from a development standpoint,
how much of these DeFi solutions are being created by AI and how much are our teams?
I mean, because, like, from my understanding, a lot of teams that do
use AI
VibeCode and all this, they
still have to come by, debug, defrag
you know, I'm not a developer so
I'm just kind of like shouting out a bunch
of like technical terms I hear
but you know, they're coming by and
kind of optimizing things
but what's your guys'
thoughts on this?
I don't know.
I thought Cedro was gonna speak, but I asked the same question
and yeah, this is 100% correct.
I mean, it still needs this handheld in some ways, right?
You don't definitely wanna trust it, but you know,
it's just getting better and better.
And it's, you know, it's the next evolution.
Cedro, is your mic working? I don't know. I think they were trying to kick it to you. it's the next evolution uh cedra is your mic working i don't
know i think they were trying to kick it to you i don't want to hog your uh mic time
okay might be having problems it's x spaces that's just what it is guys but
yeah i mean it's still neat you still don't don't ever trust code from ai tooling just yet always
have some developers professional but i mean you guys gotta think you know accountants um maybe even attorneys this these toolings i mean we're already seeing the
medical profession i was i was in the medical industry for 10 years i mean we were using
ai tooling on radiographs and we're finding you know hairline fractures and and you know
everywhere it's it's incredible um or early diagnosis. I got a medical diagnosis in the Uber last night from AI.
I uploaded an image and got a diagnosis.
It's freaking ridiculous.
Oh, my God.
It's the worst.
I mean, now it's not as bad as it was to be.
I remember like half a year ago, like every time I asked something, he said, like, I have a cancer.
Now it's much better.
Oh, yeah.
That's always the worst. Everyone thinks, you know yeah that's that's another issue but uh i mean it's there they're getting they're getting
better so fast and i i i will bet man i don't uh i don't say 100 ever it's like a pet peeve of mine but I'm 99.99% sure that AI will be
10 times better at diagnosis than a human in the future I mean that's a whole separate topic but
like doctors are insist incentivized to give you certain medications you know they incentivize to
give you another consultation to talk about I don't a pimple in your ass and they can get money from it.
So it's, I mean, AI doesn't have an incentive.
Actually, it has incentive to do less work.
So just like you straight up answer.
Just say, relax.
But it might someday. hey this is a concern that you know these ais will have biases or you know they'll have um
you know ai could become sponsored in the future that's not out of the realm of possibility right
if ai gets big enough and strong enough and everybody's using you know a few big players
and they start inserting kind of ads into it or biases towards that it's totally possible yeah
to be honest it almost feels like inevitable like since you talked about it's a it's an
interesting topic i mean i mean right now i just talked to a guy who is uh search engine
optimization for ai basically if you want to uh ask about some specific token or product or service, it can
actually give you directions towards somewhere. But AI is taking information from somewhere as
well, right? From Wikipedia, from Reddit, stuff like that. And there are people who know how to
trick it. So right now it's like a dark industry, but I was reading this article recently
that every technology or every product goes from this stage.
First it's good for customers, then it's good for business.
And once it's good for business, yeah,
could be the case with doctors or AI as well,
getting incentivized to tell you something,
to take certain medication, I mean,
scary future that we have what are
you hey happy to hop in here great great combo this is one we're actually didn't even want to
talk a whole lot because it's just so interesting on the ai side but the bias thing brought up a
monetization opportunity what if people wanted bias in their ai you know so say i'm a trader
and i've got you got a yield optimization agent
or something like that that I'm using, I could maybe do a subscription because another trader
that's really good that has certain parameters that they're feeding into the agent now become
something you could license. Or in the medical field, you like this doctor's practice in Michigan or Singapore, and you
actually want their bias along with the AI. What do you guys think about where people might
actually want bias in their AI? Because what it's learning from isn't just like the whole
internet, it's actually, you know, a subset of that for people they think are, you know, either more credible or more experts. I, I think like one bias that, that I personally, that my, it's my own bias. So like,
I would, I would want my, uh, let's say I was using an AI investor agent. I'd want a contrarian bias.
And I might even prompt a particular investor and have the AI agent feedback some information based on a contrarian approach.
Just because I find that the contrarian approach has actually been very
Beneficial for me over the last, you know, six years. So I
Could see
I guess there's like different ways to look at it
but one of one of the things that I've noticed is that if you if you are doing your research and you're looking at a bunch of different
projects and you're trying to figure out you know what's the most future-proofed
where's where is the direction of you know the industry going or a certain type of solution or
technology going i noticed that in many cases that when something first comes out, there's a lot of doubt.
The general market doesn't understand, you know, particular technology.
And they say, this is just opium or this is never going to work or flat out, like there's another technology that does this
and this technology will never replace it.
Even though it sounds like it could be better,
it's more future-proofed,
like it's never going to take out X,
you know, X like solution.
And from a contrarian standpoint,
like from an investor outlook, I've noticed that like if I find something that is, has a solid team, cracked, you know, dev team that you can trust
and is actually building something that's like future-proofed and it's coming out and no one
knows about it, maybe it's really hard to understand. That's not necessarily a bad thing. You know, that's,
especially if there's a lot of people that are saying this, this is not going to work.
Um, I like, this was part of my investment thesis for Polygon. There's this like bunch of,
back in the day, there was a bunch of, they were calling themselves Layer 2s.
Obviously, the idea of Layer 2s has evolved and become more mature.
But, you know, there's these different types of like side chains, essentially.
And the thesis was that I thought that Ethereum needed layer twos to scale.
And particularly with Matic Network at the time, there was all these other people saying like,
you know, XDAI is going to be the best one.
We don't understand Matic Network or some you know, some other of these plasma technologies.
These are going to be it. Nothing's going to replace this.
And the fact that people didn't understand it and that there was so many people kind of going against the idea of this technology taking off,
really was like one of the indicators that made me believe that Matic was going to take off this is like back in 2020 but just just an example i guess that's one
way to look at um contrarian bias but there's there's other ways to kind of unpack that but
i'll stop there that that was me a bit that i mean i love that you say that because that was me with bitcoin in 2015 2016 i'm a trad fi guy and and it was actually really hard for me to get my head
around like why this was going to work right because in like coming from the us we didn't
have the same like you know huge currency depreciation stuff like that so it was it was
hard for me to understand like why would this protocol why would this thing that's you know, huge currency depreciation, stuff like that. So it was, it was hard for me to understand,
like, why would this protocol, why would this thing that's, you know, that, but I now call it
my what and not, and it's not FOMO, it's the what if I'm wrong filter, you know? So it's always like,
I'm looking at something and I'm like, yeah, but like, if I'm wrong, then that means this thing
is going to do really well, you know? So let's take a stab at it here.
And that was me with Bitcoin in 15, 16. But yeah, I love the contrarian thing. And maybe that's even
like a toggle or a filter in an investment thing is like it starts to learn about you,
but then you like click a button and it's like play devil's advocate to me.
And maybe it points out something that
you didn't understand uh that was that was me with facebook metastalk way back in the day too
me and a buddy were at the office and we were just like i mean this was way back when and
we were like we were talking about how facebook was going to go mobile and i was like who cares
if it's on a desktop or mobile how are they going to make money off of people like
sharing pictures like i was we were just kind of like it was before ads had really taken off and
all that kind of stuff so i was just like i don't see why mobile makes this i mean i understand why
it makes it more broad but how does it make the company more money and so we dove into like the
10 q's and we were just like hmm on the revenue side they're bringing in advertising so we were just like, hmm, on the revenue side, they're bringing in advertising. So we were like, okay, well, people are on their phone way more than PC if it's all about advertising,
you know, so click the buy button. So yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see how
people use AI to, you know, to support what they're doing, but then also so that the agents
that are learning about you, they also kind of learn your pitfalls, right? Like,
they're like, hey, you always kind of gravitate towards this, and you always have this blind
spot. So yeah, I think that's going to be a good one with agents. Yeah.
Yeah. So Adam, because I know you're building, you know, these AI agents, maybe, maybe to,
to what, you know, we've just been talking about maybe there's uh one of these
agents that that could be an investor that's uh has a contrarian bias and maybe they can filter
based off of um info fi sentiment uh but i'm just i'm just throwing i'm just spitballing yeah i mean
i think you you've got the idea. So I would say
come, come build it as a circuit agent. It is, it'll be super easy for you to do. And we're,
we're happy to help you make it a reality. But that's exactly what we're hoping is that
there's so many of these ideas out there. We want to make it as easy as possible for folks to
basically codify those containerize those into an agent and let other users come in and take
advantage of those strategies. The really interesting thing here, it actually touches
on something that you brought up previously, which I wanted to touch on further, which is like the
idea of copy trading, right? So like right now you're talking about, okay, maybe, you know,
I want a contrarian. I want something that's against a certain KOL or I want it
to do the opposite of what a certain wallet that I've identified that I like I know this wallet
always loses money I want to fade this wallet call it like you can someone make this agent and
trademark it trade or fade okay so you you've got the claim I don't mean to interrupt you, but the cream, the James, the Jim, I didn't want to interrupt, but that would be perfect.
Like, I hope so. I hope someone builds this again. Anyone who's interested in this, please,
please reach out and like, let's make this a reality. But so I think this, this convergence
of like the social element is also super interesting. And I think the writing is kind of on the wall.
You look at Robinhood, for example, they're getting to kind of roll out, getting ready
to roll out a social feed.
I think that's like the first instance, right?
But copy trading has always been something top of mind.
I think especially in crypto, right?
Everyone's always working to identify what are the whale wallets?
What are the whale wallets doing?
What are the sharp wallets who have identified or seem to have alpha and how can I copy trade them. I think this gets
really interesting in the agentic world here because now you can go from like a KOL or someone
who has alpha, right? What would you do to monetize if you're a smart trader with alpha today?
Well, you'd launch a hedge fund, right? Unfortunately, you do to monetize if you're a smart trader with alpha today? Well, you'd launch
a hedge fund, right? Unfortunately, launching a hedge fund comes with a ton of baggage, right?
There's a ton of legal overhead and complexity. There's custody complexity and risk. There's so
many different things that you need to go through just to set up a hedge fund. And then you're just
in a totally different world of risk
to monetize that alpha that you have. Well, now in the agentic world, I can codify my strategies
into an agent, put that agent on this marketplace for any user to come and take advantage of with
any amount of capital, right? Whether it's an institutional investor who's going to deploy
$10 million, or it's an individual investor who just
wants to deploy $100. But they get to do so without all of the inherent complexity and risk
associated with a hedge fund model. Now I'm just monetizing my alpha by collecting fees, you know,
when folks deploy my agent. So I think there's like a really really interesting and compelling like creator
monetization angle to all of this agentic stuff and again that could be like you want to copy this
guy or it could be like hey i've identified these wallets that are really bad at trading come deploy
my agent which will fade these these you know uh for lack of a better term i guess dumb traders so
i think this stuff is going to get really
interesting. We do have some folks working on these ideas as well. Yeah. And almost like slots.
I don't know. I don't know how to like, almost like you've got a computer, like, you know,
if you build towers or whatever, you've got all the different slots on the motherboard,
you have like your eight year trading agent. then you're like i like these three different i
want to copy trade like these three different wallets or these three different people i pay
you know 5.99 a month or whatever to get their kind of feed or their what their filters are
right like i think that would be something cool is that you can you can get the results of someone's
filter like a trader's filter but you don't actually get
to see them so that you have to keep you know this subscription up so like if you're like hey i want
to scan what xyz is looking at it'll show you what they're looking at uh but it won't tell you like
the filters on charts and stuff like that they're using because as soon as you learned that you know
you probably wouldn't have to subscribe to the agent anymore but then you would have like these
feeds all coming in and then you know you could have consensus you know you're probably wouldn't have to subscribe to the agent anymore, but then you would have like these feeds all coming in and then, you know, you could have consensus, you know, you're like,
okay, I have, you know, I pay, you know, six bucks or 10 bucks or 20 bucks a month to have this feed
of what they're looking at. And then you're like, okay, as soon as, as soon as I get three of these
five that all like the same thing, like that's when I go in. So yeah, the, the portability and,
and the way that
people could make money from this yeah it could be could be really fun and really huge
yeah i think i think that uh another thing that i'm very like a big advocate of and very bullish
on is privacy so i i wonder how privacy, like will the rise of privacy solutions finally
really take off because of the agentic world? And will the AIs basically still find a way to
figure out these things? I know this is like a kind of a crazy hypothetical
question, but just wondering what do you guys
think about that because yeah can i say something real quick oh yeah and also i just want to shout
out uh omidy thank you for being here thor chain is here now um yeah i think i got everyone that
just recently yeah please please jump in yeah i have, I hate to say that I have to go.
Can I just like 10 seconds show?
Yeah, go ahead.
We have upcoming Apple iPod Air and other raffles at Lingo.
You can visit the link in the bio.
If anyone is interested, just very simple.
Take the token and get power miles.
And for those who can participate in raffles,
thank you, Rock and QuickSwap team as always for having us.
Have a great evening, good-bye.
Hey, thanks for being here.
And if you have, before you go,
if you have a post that outlines the giveaway,
please just drop it in the Jumbotron or DMm uh me aztec or or the quick swap account
darren's back there he can he can put it up there yeah just thank you so much thank you uh
so art just i jumped in here and i see the uh the title is our incentives broken in defi
and you guys are talking about ai so So I was really curious if anybody,
like, not even a side note,
like it goes like hand in hand.
Has anybody read about,
or are you guys doing anything now
with State of Magic?
Now that we've hit State of Magic with Quantum.
Yeah, anybody working with like AI
and State of, you know, now with Quantum?
Or like, what are the possibilities that we're going to hit
or is anybody even looking at this
I don't know enough about it
yeah Omnibity
we're not doing hands you just jump in brother
so basically if you don't
not knowing it's basically super
computers are obsolete now and we have
basically quantum computing I wouldn't you don't not knowing and it's basically super computers are obsolete now and we have basically
quantum computing i wouldn't say that we have quantum computing but there's a step before that
right you have to have incentives for the operator too like the person who makes this available from
an infra level they've they've got to have some motivation we can offer them tokens but um me be
available for that person is insane that
that's a whole other facet of privacy and ai go ahead though i don't mean to cut you off
yeah it was like god it was it was just recently it was like just last month that we
that we hit this we finally broke it through from like um to get to stay are you familiar
with state of magic not i no okay so yeah this is totally
different than what than what i'd recommend if you guys are looking into quantum and you know
i know a lot of people keep saying that it's you know years out we're worried about like three
five years now it's here um like they've they've officially been able to um pretty much do it and basically what it is
it's now that you know you're able to um be able to pretty much just solve all the complex
algorithms um without you know having a fault or some kind of tolerance so it's it's it's
basically at like full force now from what i understand um
obviously it goes deeper in it but i mean if you know what supercomputers are i mean we're we're
we're in the quantum realm i am gonna guess this is uh and i doubted you once before when i was
and and i later apologized because i well well, there's no, okay.
The thing we were talking about previously was that, you know,
how far out is quantum?
And I was saying it's a long ways away.
And you were saying you thought it could be sooner.
And then basically David Chom, through lots of time speaking with him,
because we're helping him with some, something, a Chom, through lots of time speaking with him because we're helping him with something, a quantum project, but he said we shouldn't be so sure.
He doesn't know either, but we shouldn't be so sure because the government is doing this stuff in the background and they're not going to tell anyone what they're doing.
So we only know what the private companies are doing because it's in a game kind of best interest of the government not to tell people what they have.
The U.S. versus Russia versus China versus North Korea.
None of them want the others to know how far they are with quantum because you're actually better off not tell.
You don't want someone to know you have it because you could do stuff with it and they aren't defending against it right so you you could break their messaging
um protocols you can cyber attack them you can steal their funds you could cause
havoc you know and they don't know what's happening they just think they're being hacked
they don't know if it's a quantum attack or not. So they might not even defend against it.
So one of the things that was interesting for this, just really quick, I'll finish this, Richard, and then jump in.
But then one of the things that we were talking to Chalm about that was interesting is there was an executive order by the Biden administration for all government communications to be hardened against, uh, quantum. So become, they have to implement quantum resistant, um, uh,
algorithms or whatever. Um, that probably tells you that
there's only like four.
What, what, what that might tell you is that they know that
quantum is closer than people think, or it's already here.
There's no real evidence of this,
but now, so now you're talking about, we've solved this magic state. If we really broke quantum,
I mean, I did. Yeah. I don't know, man. If we broke quantum, there would be chaos in the street.
Stock market would be down. Everybody would be talking about it on every news station.
Market would be down.
Everybody would be talking about it on every news station.
I kind of doubt it, but go ahead.
So, okay, if you type it into Grok right now, I mean, I can show you.
It literally says in July, MIT, and MIT in July, they basically were able to make the breakthrough
and demonstrate it.
Researchers from Q-era
computing at Harvard University
and MIT using a
neutral quantum
computer.
They were
basically
able to demonstrate it and execute it or hit a magic state. you know, they were, they basically, yeah,
they were able to demonstrate it and execute it or hit a magic state,
which is farther beyond than like a supercomputer.
So basically it's like,
like it basically takes away the, the, the,
the limitations of what previous computers were able to solve, whether it was like being too slow.
I mean, I'm not 100% sure on these, but the realization of logical qubits had never been accomplished.
And this is something that they solved.
So is it one qubit?
I mean, I'm not a quantum expert, but you need lots of qubits.
You need error resolution.
From my understanding, we're still 20 steps.
We have to solve 20 for four hours.
Let me do this.
Let me do this because I know everybody always thinks I'm crazy.
Here, let me just do this because I know everybody always thinks I'm crazy. Here, let me just do this.
I have put it inside the...
I just posted it, pinned it to the top.
There it is. There's the article right there.
It's the Church of Grok, isn't it?
It is the Church of Grok.
And I am recruiting deacons, you know, looking for people who want to be... I'll ask you a picture of your butthole, man.
Come on, dude.
I've been looking for ushers, too.
If you guys haven't bought us, I highly recommend it.
But anyways, yeah, so it's turned up to the top
good times man i i i have no clue i to be honest um but but it is a fascinating thing to think about
um i i guess my thoughts on quantum is that the government always has all these technologies that talk about way before the general public does.
You look at like how the United States government and the space programs had GPS like 60 years before it came out commercially.
And, you know, people have been working on AI for a long time as well. 60 years before it came out commercially.
And people have been working on AI for a long time as well. Obviously AI's definitely evolved over time,
but I guess governments have things before the general public
at some level, but is it like at a level,
is quantum at a level that is dangerous or worrisome?
That I don't know. And, and, you know, even the conversation I even,
I had with CHOM,
there's four actually approved NIST algorithms and neither of us actually
are both. We're not, we don're not we don't we don't we have
pretty much the same thing if if nist isn't proven them then who's to say that they haven't already
broke them and you know now now we have a full case studies on how to break into them and then
even having a conversation with xx network which is already phantom they're already basically pq and that's actually the chain that
chomp had developed um in the past and i had a conversation with them and they pretty much were
telling me um that even one of the favorite crystalline algorithms they they they don't like
them um and it's one of the heavily favored one that everybody, like most people are using now,
the only people that aren't using them right now is something like if you're using like Falcon or Sphinx,
and those are like,
like Falcon is like the newest approved NIST algorithm at all.
So the reason, right, Richard,
and you know this,
but I'll help add some color to this for everyone.
The reason that it's dangerous to use these approved algorithms, apparently, and this is something David Chom told us directly.
And he's like, you know, he invented a lot of the stuff that's led to what we are building all here in the crypto space today.
The father of the foundations.
He is straight up the foundation, like 100%.
Yeah, he invented MPCs and a lot of the early technology that led to ZK rollups, etc.
But he said the reason you don't want to use some of these like kind of government approved algorithms is because it's very likely they have government doors.
So, yeah, makes sense to me.
Hey, guys, we were like way off the DeFi topic.
I'd love to bring us back to DeFi just because we have so many DeFi minds here.
have so many defy minds here um but uh yeah is there anyone else that wants to chime in on the
the quantum uh i'll take the defy part if you're up for it because i mean this is a little bit like
platform oriented uh trusted execution the idea that someone could like run a node for an ai
agentic platform or for any kind of crypto system and then not be able to front run what's happening on their own computer.
Like that's an underserved section of the market for privacy,
for, you know,
protecting PQC execution because post-quantum compute is still pretty
fragile to your points.
Like there's a handful of blockchains that have TEE or trusted execution
environment solutions.
And none of them are durable.
None of them pass the test.
No, because they all attack it.
Most of them are all actually storing it on like cloud.
So it's all on AWS Nitro or something like cloud fair.
That is like extremely vulnerable.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, even if you run it yourself locally,
there's still such a small amount of code that's executed
in this new billion dollar world of value that is actually excluded from the local operator.
The only magic of doing that today with a TPU or some other security-oriented chip is that you have encryption between the processor and the memory, and that encryption is not something that a local person could just bypass.
And that encryption is like not something that a local person could just bypass.
Right.
Like there are such thing as UART buses and little tricks that you can do to see inside
of a computer's guts to see what's happening.
I'm not trying to turn this into technical buzzword conversation, but the incentive for
DeFi has to also exist for the operator.
It's not just about the person who, you know, comes up and receives the benefit.
Right.
Like this is how banking has worked for a very long time, well before it was totally ruined post-Glass-Steagall, even post the Great Depression. Even before that, there was a really simple axiom that as the banker who held everybody's money in your fort or house or mattress or whatever, you ran the risk, right? Like you were the operator who's liable for being the steward
of that value. Like we're not approaching it as much that way anymore, but it's still very much
true that if you're, you know, a local operator of a majority of the top 100 blockchains that you
can conduct some form of MEV by front running people who use your infrastructure. Like that's
that's got to end. There has to be an incentive for the operator that isn't perverse.
I think every blockchain right now is trying to do some form of this platform-level security stuff
because they know that for enterprises to get involved, you can't be doing corporate espionage.
I can't be starting a new blockchain tomorrow and then Goldman Sachs joins
and then their traders all of a sudden get to front run everybody because their liquidity is coming in from a bigger chain like Polygon.
There's a really straightforward march for the users of DeFi and for the consumers of DeFi, that pipeline, not just the blockchain itself or the contract itself.
You know, there's still a very long list of, you know, HSTS, encryption between yourself and the web interface, encryption between the web front end and whatever else is happening,
probably, you know, calling the blockchain directly or some other backend service that
calls the blockchain for you.
There's a lot more of this on the operator side
that I think is a little bit broken. And it's easy for us to chug through that because the
consumer side just wants more. We're willing to just degen away and have some fun. But the people
who run servers to prop these adventures up, they recognize risk, right? Like do the broken
incentives for operators
on a risk perspective does that translate to a user at all i i come from security engineering
nobody cares about the risk stuff that i point out i don't blame them for that but isn't there a a
model for defy that is a little bit more sensitive to risk in general like i don't think franklin
templeton is going to come on chain and try anything right now it's just not worth it for them you know that's got to change yeah that makes sense i
know alex wants to jump in here i just want to what was the last thing you said about welcome
to the show and also uh uh wolf swap welcome to the show hey just hey alex sorry sorry about that
aztec but what did you say about Franklin Templeton?
The last one?
Franklin Templeton is an example of like a crypto bold organization that could be willing to try things, right?
Maybe a Fidelity, right?
Because they have the whole organization for digital assets research.
But even them, they're hesitating to participate directly in DeFi because of this sort of lack of structured risk or very, very young risk, when software
engineers drive that risk forward, the people who normally worry about back-end and architecture,
their focuses aren't the point.
The point is the value of the new consumer that's coming and the new DeFi that's rising,
right?
That risk doesn't come into it as the forefront.
It's kind of a secondary thought.
It's a standard problem in enterprises. They're like, hey, make money oh wait oh hold on we might lose that money let's
spend one percent offset some risks like a large organization a large entity like franklin templeton
or fda they they won't jump into modern d5 because these risks are still so wily like that's incentives
that are broken on the enterprise side and we're not going to care more about that until there's more consumers
hanging around making that complaint.
But aren't they already jumping in?
is FDA and Franklin Templeton active on chain besides holding assets?
Not to my knowledge.
I know they hold some,
but no DeFi.
They're in real world assets.
There's some experimentation with real world assets for years now.
I know that there was some institutions that were working with Aave.
I don't know if they're still working with Aave, probably.
And then there's some institutions and organizations that are working with Chainlink.
It seems to be like real world assets and DeFi as well.
But I think it is more like experimentation.
So I only have about 30 minutes left, but it's always a great topic. It's great to see everyone
here. I was just kind of hanging out in the audience. I think there was like a little bit
of a disconnect of trying to get up, but it's great to see you guys, and thanks for the invite
as always. So, this is a really interesting topic yeah omnidy and and rune and it's great to
see you guys and uh and we had a rune and i had a great discussion yesterday where he was this
devil's advocate against all the women talking about like should women be in crypto poor rune
was like i'll say no which is really fun i was hoping you were going to talk about that,
but that was me.
Someone said
that women should not be in crypto?
Should not be. Well, no, he was
trying to take a more nuanced
view, and
everybody there was like, no.
You're
wrong. And he's like, but it's a
discussion.
But it was really good. It was for no, you're wrong. And he's like, but it's a discussion, you know?
So it was just, it was a, but it was really good.
It was for Dash's space and it was really interesting. Well, at some point someone called me or him,
like said something like, shut up.
You're a white man.
You're not allowed to answer or something.
I mean, it's not really a space about gender.
If someone doesn't say shut up, you're a white man.
I mean, come on.
There it is uh but that's what we're talking about here so uh but it was really good it's good to see you guys
so because it's always a it was just i just wanted to mention that it was a yeah it was it was a
really good discussion it was so it was just fun he was like I'm out here alone guys somebody help me but for this
discussion so I'm actually doing a discussion today on on how to invest in in crypto right
for and I'm doing it for like people of various different types of risk and and I have like
action plans that I've developed for you know like like like like one to five year plans because that's how I roll.
And and I was looking at DeFi because DeFi is part of it, depending on, you know, the level of aggression and incentives.
It's interesting that incentives are actually one of the things that comes up because the risk is so high relative to the return.
And one of the things that comes up is when you examine what are the risks and why, it's such a big issue. And this is something that I
wrote about in my book, right? So I have a book on DeFi. And one of the things that you see when
you're looking at DeFi is one of the biggest problems that is different from the banks.
And I am not ever here to talk about yay banks. That's not me, right? I'm not the person that
goes yay banks. But one of the things that banks do do with the money that they're investing
is they're investing in real assets and real economic movement. DeFi has a real problem there.
The future of DeFi is investing in an asset-based economy,
but we're not there yet.
Right now, it's so much churn.
Like if you look at, for example, a lot of the liquidity,
like all the liquidity, you know, there's this like,
it's like an 8% return or 7 and something percent return
that you get on Aave.
If you stake USDT, that is, there's one liquidity provider, one. And that, that's risk. That's a huge amount of risk, right? And what is that person doing? Like, that's not, that's not.
Wait, what do you mean one liquidity provider?
There's one whale. One whale is supporting all of that liquidity.
And that is a huge amount of risk.
Like what percent?
Like nearly all of it.
Like nearly all of it.
That's an enormous amount of risk.
So that's one of those things where if you,
the difference between what's happening in decentralized finance is that we're not at the finance part yet.
We're not financing things yet. We have to move into that part yet. The reason the incentives
are not aligned is because the people who are offering the incentives, what happened with
Justin Sun, you know, with the WLFI and all of this stuff. The reason that it's kind of stuck in this
churn motion is because the money that's being put on there is not funding anything, right? It's
funding founders. It's rewarding people. It's not funding things. It's not funding activity that's generating revenue. That's what we really
need. That's where incentives start getting aligned, right? That's when everybody gets
rewarded because the people who are lending money are then actually getting returns from the money
that's coming back from the revenue. And that's the part that we're missing, right? What we're doing,
it's not really lending. It's lending for more lending activity. It's not lending for revenue
based activity. We're missing that end. So all of this still, this mess of activity that we have
is just, that's why there's this whole like, oh, is it money laundering
or whatever? You know, there's a lot of it probably, right? But the biggest issue is that
we're not creating value. That's our big problem. We have to create value with all this money
movement. We need to create more value. Then incentives naturally align.
So that's what we're missing. Yeah, I think that's well said. And, you know, to talk a little
bit like Omninity and Alex, you know, you can have no trust assumptions in any design. There is no
altruism here, right? If like for say Alex example, if you have one liquidity provider and some DeFi
protocol, I don't know, just making something up. And especially if they're in charge, if you have like a pool and they're swapping in
and out, and especially if that same liquidity provider is also the arbitrage, that's a disaster,
right? And so Alex is a hundred percent correct. When you have any DeFi program, it has to have
utility, has to be finding a real world service. And this is something we talked in the last space
we did, where like on ThorChain, I think we really cracked this code.
Like right now it's swaps, right?
You want acid A to acid B and then there's a small fee incurred, you know, like small amount of basis points.
That's where ThorChain makes its butter.
But now people are building things on top of it, like Mocha, for example, which is a settlement layer, right?
Like if you have a business, for example, and you sell products, good services, hot dog station, right?
You want to use Litecoin, just random example, or we don't have Polygon, but just it could be
Polygon, right? Any example. You have these decentralized pools. The customer sends their
Litecoin to ThorChain. That asset is swapped in the settlement layer, in the settlement layer that
the business wants. and then that is deposited
in the business as well. Like, or it could be Litecoin, in which it would just be a direct
send, right? But that's what we need. That's how you take the normal population and get them on
ramped onto crypto, especially because doing it that way is far cheaper than like using like a
master card visa, where, you know, sometimes they're charging 150, 300 basis points.
This is the real opportunity here. And this is what makes me so excited because we are cracking
that code. And if you want a good metric to determine if a DeFi protocol is actually doing
things correctly, you should use a lot of the same standards that Alex highlighted. They were excellent. I mean, we need to start instead of,
not with Visa, we need to be financing companies instead of Visa, right? We need to basically be
going to these companies. We need to be the alternative to Visa and the alternative to banks.
We need to be going to them instead and saying, here, look, we have this pool. Like,
why doesn't like, you know, you know, the lending pool or something on Uniswap say, look, we've got
all of these lenders and we're going to be able to finance your growth. Like, you know, there's
someone who just completed a Series C or something like that, they could, you know, do some sort of
like, like, they could do a like some sort of a loan instead from from one of the lending pools,
like we need to start getting creative with what's happening with this kind of activity,
instead of going to traditional banks and going to, you know, like there's ETFs
that have various, and I'm sorry, I'm like, I'm not caffeinated yet. So it's coming out in sort
of fits and starts. But there are ETFs that have various different bonds, right, that are offered,
that are a range, you can get a range from like, you know, three to
12% returns. And those are all companies that are offering debt in order to fund their growth or
something like that. Instead of those companies offering that to banks, they should be offering
it instead to pools of people from DeFi, where we're getting those returns instead, right?
They're funding real growth and real revenue, and they should be paying us back. And that's
actual revenue and value that's being created. So we should be offering a product that is going
instead with a lower interest rate, right? Because it's so much cheaper for us to offer this to companies.
And instead of just offering it to companies that are like, you know, offering it to Apple, we could offer to companies that aren't getting great rates at banks.
Right. So we could offer to like regional companies.
We could offer to even local companies. Right.
We could offer to even local companies, right?
And then we could pool them together to manage the risk.
But we could be offering like incredible deals because there's trillions of dollars locked, right?
We've got all together, we've got huge, massive amounts of money in these protocols.
Why don't we offer lending to real businesses and get real returns?
lending to real businesses and get real returns. So I just, I think we're thinking so small here
and we're thinking short term and we're thinking, you know, petty values and look at what I did.
I got a steak dinner in Vegas or whatever. That's crazy to me. We should be building
instead a method where we can say, okay, you, like you're building a business. Okay. What do you have? What
kind of waiting list do you have? Or what kind of revenue do you have? Oh, you have this ARR or MRR.
Okay. Well, we can lend you this much money and the return will come back in and we're getting
paid back, not by some, you know, locked vault, but we're getting paid back by revenue. So I think that's awesome.
What do you think about it just enabling basically a lower entry into bonds, like stocks and bonds?
So there's a lot of offerings where you can actually just use BeFi to enter into a bond
and where typically it would be at like a way higher entry.
I mean, is that what do you think about that?
I don't know that we even need to do like formal bonds.
I think what we need to do is we could start off just with factoring.
And I mean, there are regulatory issues, but we can address those fairly directly.
But we could start off literally just doing something where we're getting a piece of,
say, accounts receivable, right? So instead of getting a ridiculous-
There's companies doing this.
There are very few, but I don't even know if they're doing them for average-
No, why would you share it? You don't want to share that if you're doing them for like average um like average no why would you share it you don't
want to share that if you're the one doing the business development and the factoring and you
have all that you're not going to share that to a pool of money i mean that's that's the that's
the issue there if you unlock the pool should do it yeah but the pool should do it why don't they
actually but who's going to go get the business for the pool? Who's going to underwrite it? Who's going to do diligence?
Why don't they do a Dow that does that?
Like, this is the thing is there's so much like there's so much here.
This is the whole idea that if we're like the idea that we can't be something like, you know, money for the people, right? And money for me,
right? We can't be this alternate financial system and also be, I'm going to be greedy,
greedy like the banks and only do whatever it is that I get, I keep, right? So either we work in teams and build as teams,
or, you know, we're kind of everybody out for ourselves. It can't be both, right? So either-
I agree with you, you know, so you have decentralization, which is everybody goes
into DeFi and takes their own risk, calculates how the pool is going to yield, everything like that.
And there's not a centralized entity to do it.
But you could know.
But what you can do is basically say, like, let's say we set up something like, OK, I have you could do a marketplace.
okay, I have, you could do a marketplace. You could say, and eventually, you know, if it does
well enough, and I'm literally, okay, I'm non-caffeinated and thinking right now of how
we might do something like this. But let's say we do a marketplace. And if once it becomes like
popular enough, then there's, you know, little internal work that has to be done. Essentially,
both sides start feeding it. But let's say you have a
marketplace and you've got a number of deals that come in where people are, where businesses are
coming in saying, we need funding for particular things. Some of them are secured, some of them
are unsecured. And then there are people who want to fund various different things with various
different risk. You can still do that in a decentralized manner by basically exchanging crypto for various different levels of risk
on these different deals. You can do something like that. It doesn't have to be like the whole
point is basically being able to invest in something without a bank, but you're still
able to invest in it. So it doesn't mean, you know, you know, everybody has
to be out for themselves. You're still able to, to, you know, determine your own risk. You're
still able to determine whatever you want to invest in, but it's a totally doable thing.
I mean, again, there's still legal issues you'd have to overcome, but it's totally doable.
You could actually, you know, create something that has
people able to invest in various different types of things where you determine, you know, okay,
I want to be able to invest in, you know, this kind of product with this kind of risk and this
kind of return, and here's what I'm going to invest in. And they're getting better rates than they are from banks,
if only because the cost of investment is so much lower.
And it works differently than crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding is, like this was,
there were a lot of problems with crowdfunding.
So you have to make sure that you don't fall
into the problem of crowdfunding, which had a lot of securities risks and issues so you'd have to make sure that you
design it so uh it doesn't fall into that issue but you could do it in a defy mechanism
yeah and um i put some things in the oh i'm sorry i'll let you go in a second i apologize i hope i
didn't cut you off um yeah i put some things in the comments Oh, I'm sorry, Bob. I'll let you go in a second. I apologize. I hope I didn't cut you off.
Yeah, yeah.
I put some things in the comments, guys,
because there's a lot of things to build.
There's a lot to unpack there,
and I'm not going to unpack.
I mean, there's a lot of things to build.
To people who are interested in Mocha
and also the app layer on ThorChain,
because we are actually building these things
where you just bypass these third-party intermediaries,
banks, and things like that.
Like it is happening to you guys.
I put it up top.
I put in the comments, check it out.
You know, this is what we need and it is going to happen.
It is happening.
Go ahead.
Was it,
was I just talking about you without even knowing who you were?
What's the room bond about the lower bond?
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Awesome. No, I i mean i wasn't but i just like looked at your profile and i'm like you did rune bonds i'm like oh okay oh yeah god
yeah i kind of just want to respond to what alex had to say. I guess we're trying to build something like that, right?
So look into us, Alex.
We're called ApeBond.
It's a way for people to crowdsource fundraise.
And I know you said there's a lot of issues with it.
I definitely would like to know kind of the issues that you see.
But, you know, we've built a mechanism working with bonds,
and we've been around for four years or so.
So, you know, and we've built it from the ground up.
You know, our mechanism works with the financial NFT
and it's kind of like a purchasable event that happens.
So yeah, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I guess the other big thing that you were discussing was basically loans, right?
Or bonds in the traditional sense.
And that can be done on chain and people are doing it, you know, like people are even doing
the under collateralized, zero collateralized loans these days on chain.
And yeah, there's still a lot of legwork that you need to do.
You need to do the bd yourself
as the protocol but then obviously if you can charge your fees you make that back some so
yeah just just just wanted to say that you know we're not that far off i i feel like you know
rune bonds us a bond uh you know we're looking into mechanisms and we've built mechanisms over the last
how many ever years you know rune bond actually built it in a day like like like the man said
um but but in essence you know there is mechanisms out there to help protocols and to make it
crowdsourced right like or to make it democratized i would would say. Again, I feel like the reason crypto really exists
and could help a lot of protocols out and help people out
is that it's easy to start up a protocol.
It's not that difficult to test your ideas.
And you kind of need to see if these ideas are going to find the attraction.
And if you have the
building blocks, like what Dexas offer, what we offer with bonds and fundraising, you know,
that's enough. You don't need a lot more to test your idea. And, you know, if it's an idea worth
people investing in, if it's a million dollar idea, people will come and people will start investing and you'll get that traction and you'll clearly see people flocking to you as a protocol.
So, yeah, just dropping that. That's kind of my opinion on it. But, yeah, I would love to know what you think is wrong with crowdsource at the moment.
Oh, there's a I mean. Oh, sorry, Rune. I didn't mean to.
I'm sorry, I really don't want to miss the opportunity.
And yeah, I'm going to let you go right away.
Rich, Aztec just dropped.
And I feel, I was chomping at the bit.
You know, this is such a great space.
And I believe the important guys,
like follow like all the speakers,
reshare, repost, you know,
like real connections are being made.
And I think it's great.
Rich, I want to speak to you.
I saw you and Aztec's, your profile,
I'm sorry, your profile. I can't speak right now um you are having the litecoin um we're having a
space um on litecoin specifically i'm not sure how if you're adjacent or your part there on the 11th
i wanted to invite you guys and you dropped off i'm just kicking myself i didn't ask him earlier
so i just wanted to extend that to you real quick i don't want to hog the space yeah we're actually
yeah we're like super
close to litecoin in fact uh we're building loop vm which is the like one layer two that is the
only the first and only like one layer two that's actually endorsed by charlie lee and the foundation
themselves so yeah if you're that would be perfect you're wanting to pretty much bring them onto the
on the show yeah okay well we're doing a litecoin update, and it would be great just to have you.
I would love that.
If you could follow me, and we're getting DMs.
But I don't want to take away from what Alex was going to say.
Yeah, I'll DM you right now.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, I don't totally remember what I was going to say,
but I do know that the one thing about bonds that is interesting to me, and there is an opening in bonds, in corporate bonds, especially big corporate bonds.
This is like kind of a loophole sort of opening.
There's a rule, a securities rule, that is killing corporate bonds and has been for years. And there's an opportunity if we design it well. I mean, I actually considered at one point just creating like sort of a warehouse just to get around, not like, not an actual warehouse but like a digital warehouse
just to like get around this one rule because it's so stupid and it's killing the corporate
bond market for no reason um but there is a kind of an opening for defy it has to be defy it can't
be just crypto right it has to be like the defy area, but DeFi to take over the bond market to get around this rule.
Now, it would mean institutions would kind of flock over into DeFi.
And that's kind of like we'd have to figure out how to make it.
Not their thing, right? But it's a hugely powerful
opportunity to get a bunch of people who'd ordinarily get no part in this, right? Corporate
bonds, for those who don't know, right? And I was trying to explain this before, it's, you know,
big companies that raise money. Like, I did so many of these when I was working at, you know, big firms that, you know, where you've got
companies like, you know, Apple and Kellogg and whatever, when they're raising money, they get,
like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds at low rates, and then they repay them.
And so, basically, it's just sure returns for people. They keep them as sort of a fixed income amount of money.
And people buy tons and tons of these things.
But it takes time to sell all of these bonds.
So there's an angle on here that could be used for the DeFi market.
Again, we have to think beyond just spin it and get like this.
I got $1,000 here or $1,500 there.
And I recognize that's significant money for a lot of people.
But there's so much more we can do with this. I mean,
there's so much more financing we can do. We can, you know, help people buy houses. We can help
people, you know, invest in major projects. We can help people like invest in wineries and,
you know, major projects. And we can even do project finance. Like we can, you know, the energy,
And we can even do project finance.
Like we can, you know, the energy, our energy system has to be rehabbed, for example, right?
Like there's a big fight that's going on right now because of AI and its toll that is being taken on our energy systems and the data centers that have to be built.
I think that the DeFi cash could be a player in redoing this.
And then the money from those systems could come back into DeFi, right?
That's a huge amount of money that could come back in.
But that would work primarily best in something like Texas, right, where it's like not regulated or whatever.
But we could actually, like project finance is a huge area.
I did a lot of that too. project finance is a huge area i did a lot of
that too project finance is a big money deal but that's something that you have to think like could
could people in defi be the people who are now financing major energy projects major water
projects major like you know redistribution projects of something.
And that actually could happen.
Because this is really interesting.
I got rugged for a second. But what do you think is missing in DeFi to get to a place where you can do this on
chain?
Like what type of solutions?
You know, obviously, an Oracle is going to play a big part of this.
Is it like a credit type system?
Because obviously if you're going to finance businesses or big projects, you know, there
has to be some type of way to identify whether or not, you know, they should receive the
loan.
And so like, what do you think is missing that needs to be built?
I actually don't think at this point that technology is the limitation for the most part.
I think it's vision.
I think it's having somebody who's saying, like, let's get together and do this and, you know, going out and getting, you know, going to get deals and bringing them to people.
And then being able to gather people and say, this
is a project.
This is a project that people can invest in.
And I want people to start looking at this as this is the kind of project DeFi does.
And people who are in it, people who are investing in crypto can now invest in this kind of project
as well.
And this is not just a churn it kind of project,
but this is the same type of project that you get in DeFi.
There's no reason why that couldn't be the same kind of project
that you would get in DeFi.
You want to invest in a hydroelectric plant?
There you go.
You want to invest in a set of assets from a bunch of, you know, companies that are regional in this
particular region with this, you know, general rate, then there you go. But we also need people
who know how to determine average risk or how, you know, to value different things. We need some
people who are, you know, grownups in the industry who are going to determine risk, who are not just
here to, um, you know, the turn and burn DGENs, right? This is like, okay, let's do this,
but aren't going to kick out the people who are already here, right? Like, no, no, this is our
one second. I actually got a drop. Uh, sorry, but yeah, I just didn't want to just leave. But, yeah, I got to drop.
I'm on a flight.
So, later, guys.
Nice talking to you, brother.
That's a lot, bro.
See you, Richard.
Yeah, Alex, you were saying.
So, I don't really think that it's actually a limitation more than it is like, all right, we're at a new point now in industry and we're
at a new point in, um, in, in, in our growth. And I think it just requires a different type
of person. Like, just like that, you know, we we've gone through phases, the cypherpunks were
one phase, right. And then we had, um, the next phase of people who were bringing people in with
all the original coins that came in. Um, and then there were, you know, the phase of people who were bringing people in with all the original coins that came
in. And then there were, you know, the group of people that came in with the, you know, super
exciting original, like, you know, the original like meme coins that came in. And then there were,
you know, like there's, we've had phases of people that have brought people in. I think we're in the
next phase where it's like, okay, well, now we have the actual finance phase. I think that's where we are. And I think there's stuff that needs to
actually be, you know, built, but I think it's like made to order stuff as opposed to, oh,
we're missing this technology. We've got to wait a few years for it to be developed. I don't think
we need, I think it's like, okay, we've got to build a few things.
It's just going to take us a few months to get this pulled together, but let's actually
pull the deal together while it's being built.
I think that's kind of where we are right now.
That's an interesting take.
I mean, I personally, I think there's, to get to what you're talking about, I think
there's a couple of things that, that I personally want to see built.
For instance, with identity and ZK technology, there's got to be ways to build something that proves credit worthiness or on-chain credibility of some sort.
And I'd love to see something like that before I, like,
aped into a, like, particular project, you know,
IRL project or business.
But, yeah, I mean, like, and then, you know,
basically some type of UI platform.
That probably wouldn't take too, too long,
but almost like a pump.fun, you know,
where it's easy for IRL business or project developers
to put their project out there and get funded.
You know, something that would be easy for them to put their project out there and get funded,
you know, something that would be easy for them to get in front of people.
I think these things are probably needed,
and there's probably maybe some other things I'm not thinking of,
but yeah, maybe it's not too far away, and maybe that's, I think that sounds definitely exciting,
you know, to think that, you think that crypto could do that.
Well, if you're thinking about the lending part, so what I was thinking is like the larger projects.
But if you're thinking about like the lending part, the things that, you know, I would start with collateralized rather than non-collateralized.
I don't think we're ready for non-collateralized.
And we tried that.
I mean, even think about like just regular Web 2, non-collateralized, like LendingTree and stuff like that, that originally did like the non-collateralized loans.
And everybody realized, hey, I have money and people have no way to collect it. Ha ha ha. Then they just ran off.
I think that that's problematic and we do have a few things that we need. And those are primarily
things like insurance. And we need to be able to track the location of the collateral. The
collateral should not be something like a crypto, right? I'm talking about real world collateral.
So like, for example, and this is the thing that's in the book is, is like, for example, if you've got, let's say, a vineyard and you need money for crop,
then you have something like, instead of going and borrowing money from a bank where they'll
give you 20 to 40 percent of whatever you collateralize, instead you go and you draw
NFTs on, say, a half-matured bottle of wine or brandy or whatever the hell it is that you make.
And you're in the business of producing this.
So the likelihood that it will go to maturity and be sold is high.
But you get it insured, and then there's someone else who's basically caring for you.
You've got third parties.
There's real world implications. And you've got right now there are already the ability to track and hold all of these things, you know, in the real world.
That sounds awesome.
But you've got to have what?
I said that sounds awesome. But yeah, definitely would probably need some type of like ZK identity kind of system.
Yeah, well, they're NFTs where the money that's sold,
or the NFTs that are sold,
the money goes directly to the person
that is getting the vine,
that is getting the seeds.
And then they plant, they grow, they make more money, you know, because they actually have a crop this year.
And then when it's matured and it's sold, so you're buying at a discount, when it's sold, everybody's NFTs, including the Vintner, can actually also have NFTs, right?
who has NFTs then cashes out and the ownership is unified again in the new owner who can then
spill it, sell it, whatever they want to do. Alex, it's good to see you. I apologize. I have
to step off, but I think that you're alluding to a really good point about incentives and DeFi
in general. But we hope that we can see that point where the end threshold of an NFT issuer
or an asset issuer, that they can be liable on chain, that they don't just have their liabilities out in the real world where I can't get wine, you know, to my house because I'm somehow disenfranchised as the receiver of the NFT or something like that.
So just wanted to inject that on the way out. I have to drop it. Thanks so much for uh contributing and thanks to quick swap and rock
and the the team at polygon for supporting these spaces we'll we'll see you all next time cheers
i gotta hop off too great seeing you guys thank you so much i appreciate it it was really fun
i'll talk to you guys later bye bye nice talking to you ciao ciao good stuff been you, Alex. It's been a while. I'd like to add just something to what Alex had said there is, yeah, all of this is possible, right?
We do have the tech to do it, but it's pulling all of those elements together.
And as a bond, we've thought about that for the longest time.
And we're still thinking about how would be the way to go about it, you know?
about how it would be the way to go about it, you know?
And again, you know, as we move into from a bull to a bear market,
you know, we clearly know in DeFi,
people are less interested in tokens and more interested in real yield.
And so that's kind of stuff we've been thinking about for the longest time
and kind of experimented with.
And I feel like she hit the nail on the head there where she was saying,
you know, there is a way to pull in the real world. But again, yeah, I do agree. It, you know,
kind of needs to give somebody confidence on chain. Maybe there's an underwriter in the real
world that if anything happens and people's money goes down the drain. They do get a refund of some sorts.
But I do feel like there's no way of just having it on chain.
There's just no way.
You would have to have like a trusted system
where you trust the projects or companies you onboard for the crop.
And you know that once you onboard these people,
you kind of have to have a couple of insurance companies
on that money that was loaned as well.
So your users are always whole,
and they never lose their money.
So I guess those are the things I just wanted to add
to what she said.
Yeah, I do encourage that,
that DeFi has a role to play,
and I think that's, again, where I come in as crowdsource.
You know, like, that's what DeFi is,
right? Somebody sitting in the US can essentially loan money to somebody with crop in Italy that
does wine, and they can get a yield from it. And that's a real yield. So I guess that's what I'm
trying to say. Again, I think crypto sits in the middle of crowdsourcing and we shouldn't like downplay that.
You know, that's essentially, you know, what the power of it can be is helping people out and, you know, having easy access to capital and people making a buck, you know.
It doesn't matter where they are.
Yeah, I love that idea and i agree with
you mostly there the only thing is like i do believe a big part of it can be on crypto with
smart or blockchain with smart contracts but in the short term it's probably like this c5d5
uh frankenstein of a solution just because of like, like you said, the underwriter or,
you know, something to, cause like, I mean, there's no way to take all the risk off the
table. Like in any investment, there's going to be some risk. And, but, but you can help prove certain things. Maybe there's information that's uploaded from the government or an underwriter or even some on-chain identity things just to kind of gather the business history or something, the legal side of where the legal side of like where they're, um,
they're based out of and things like that so that you can kind of make a little bit better
determination on whether or not crowds, you know, this crowdsourcing kind of investment
that you're about to make into an IRL project or company is a good choice or not.
So, but yeah, it's probably a CFI, DFI kind of thing.
And it's interesting to think that nobody's really done this exactly.
I think what she was describing is really interesting.
It could be really useful.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Okay, I'll go. Yeah. I agree with that. And you know,
you really can't abstract away the risk when it comes to things that are tangible. Right.
And you know, that's what we're trying to build as a system where everything is on chain, at least when it comes to terms of the decentralized finance part, like,
like a real true decks, right, right? Because like you said,
you cannot abstract away the risk from things that are tangible in the real world that have
valuations, that have cash flows, that have teams. And like for FTX example, right? People were using
the primitives on FTX, but the numbers were not real. And when the money came in and pushed it
in a certain direction, the whole system
collapses. And this has always existed, of course, like Enron had a valuation in the market until the
market figured out the numbers were not real. So what we have to build is literally everything we
possibly can be on chain, on chain. Everything's audible. You can literally see everything. There
is no obfuscation
there is no separate data ledger that it removes you from the ability to understand what's going on
when it comes to tokenized stocks things that you guys are talking about you i don't think you can
really fully ever obviously fix that because it is what it is but um with ThorChain, Ruggiero guys
we are getting there i i promise you that and Aztec i know you dropped earlier and i panicked
and i was talking to rich um i just wanted to i don't know if you heard me speak i was like oh
aztec left um we are having a litecoin space it looks like you have like a layer 2 scaling solution
on october 11th on thor chain we would love to have you aztec you are a great speaker man so i
just wanted to shout that out real quick before uh i forget i sent you a DM. Oh, awesome. You sent a DM? Perfect.
I'll definitely be there.
I have a lot of...
Lots of...
I'm surprised.
Love it, man. Perfect.
Yeah, I'm surprised we haven't heard of this already.
Are you talking about Ruggiero?
The spaces you're having.
Oh, well, it's a month out forecasted out.
So we have a lot you know
um we're constantly choking for nothing the litecoin space was not um it wasn't necessarily set in stone we did get johnny litecoin to go so you know we just want more people that's the whole
thing guys like that's why i love this guy's space you do quick swap and rock is like you allow me to
meet people who are the real deal because it's so hard like when you're because there's so much
information so many teams and ecosystems trying to figure out in parks like who are the people who are the real deal because it's so hard like when you because there's so much information and so many teams and ecosystems trying to figure out in parks like who are the people who are really
like in the weeds doing things who are the people you need to talk to um very confusing so i love
these spaces so shout out to the host co-host polygon um you guys are absolutely legendary i
really appreciate you so much yeah much love and uh please come back on when it gets closer and we can even if you have
this space link we can throw it in the jumbotron and tell people uh you know that's coming up i i
don't know um i don't know what day that's going to be on but i but uh if you jump on maybe
honestly okay so we do this every friday so if you jump on the Friday before that day, we'll hype it up for it.
Got you, brother.
Thank you so much.
Let's go.
Definitely.
And everyone follow everyone on the panel.
And if you want to join that Litecoin space, please follow so that you'll get the link.
Jump in. Yeah, definitely. that like coin space you know please please follow so that uh you'll get the link jump in yeah definitely so uh yeah ai quant i so i invited them because we were talking about
like agentic trading and all this stuff uh with ai earlier and they're building some really cool
stuff with this um one of uh one of my you know good friends and colleague michael
turban um basically said this is one of his biggest bets of this cycle um so it's pretty
bold words coming from i mean he founded bit angels actually it was uh kind of interesting
i think yesterday or the day before charles Hoskinson was on an interview and mentioned, you know, he was talking about the early days of crypto, reminiscing to the 2013 era when, you know, their conferences started and things started taking off.
And he mentioned BitAngels building and their involvement in MasterCoin, the first ever token sale, which was on Bitcoin on Omni.
master coin, the first ever token sale, which was on Bitcoin on Omni.
It was kind of cool to hear Charles Hoskinson reference BitAngels as, you know, the early days of crypto.
But yeah, so Michael Turbin, the founder of that, turned me on to AI Quant here.
And we're looking at, we're considering from LDA making an investment in them and working with them on some stuff.
But yeah, so wanted to bring them here and let you, Marlon,
go ahead and tell people what you're doing here.
Sure, sure.
And thanks for the invite, Rock.
This is an amazing space.
So we certainly appreciate you bringing us on.
us on um you know we've been building in d5 for a bit and brock you know we kind of went back um
You know, we've been building in DeFi for a bit.
to our uh 2017 days and how turpin was uh so when we first met and he helped us with some of the
projects we're working on uh including telos and and you know ideal platform bsc starter and others
the IDEO platform, BSC starter and others.
And we spent the last, you know, I'd say seven or eight years in the token launch business.
That gave us a pretty good insight into the life cycle of a token, right?
I mean, we've done over 100 token sales over the past eight years.
Personally, I love to build all the stuff that we work on,
meaning, you know, I built the Launchpad.
I was a coach of the Telos team.
I just love software.
You know, I built anti-bot code years ago
before it, you know, became commonplace today
when you launch a token contract.
And I say that to say, you know,
it gave us a pretty interesting perspective on the life cycle launch a token contract. And I say that to say, you know, it gave us a pretty interesting perspective on the lifecycle
of a token.
And with the proliferation of AI now, I thought, hmm, what if we take all of the knowledge
that we know about how tokens are launched and we kind of train AI to understand the same thing
and see if we could follow the lifecycle of a token,
grab all of the real live pricing data,
social sentiment data, which we partnered with Luna Crush on.
So shout out to Joe for his support over at Luna Crush. You know, all of the
on-chain activity. So, you know, what's the trend in the unique wallet growth, right? What's the
buy-to-sell ratio for the trades? What's the volume? What's the larger macroeconomic climate,
right? So are we still in the BTC dominance? So, you know, is it alt season? What's the larger macroeconomic climate? Are we still in the BTC dominance?
Is it all season?
What's the fair green index?
We just give these agents all of this information.
We're making a bet that the models are going to continue to get smarter and smarter and
smarter.
There's billions and billions of dollars going into these models.
So our AI agents would automatically inherit all of the advancements
that's happening with these models.
And the whole idea is to combine all of this together
and allow the agents to decide whether opportunities in the on-chain
economy are worth investing in, right? And that's what we're building. We're basically building
AI agents that knows how to trade because they understand the life cycle of a token.
They trace the life cycle of a token and all of the activity around
that token right throughout throughout its life cycle in that way traders don't need to go to
deck screener and then go to token sniffer for the security check and then go to luna crush manually
for the social sentiment or other you know or x or telegram for social sentiment, they can just have their quant,
have all of this information in one place.
And so, you know, we've been building it for,
October is gonna be a year,
time flies when you're building.
And for the past five months,
we've been doing paper trading, right?
So based on real data, real scans,
and it's highly performing. I mean, we've had at least half of the quants at times outperform
the market. We've done over 20 million in paper trading volume, but again, based on real data,
and over 100,000 autonomous trades. And these are all agents that's doing this stuff and we're still
early right i mean we just enabled live trading last week uh there are a couple quants in there
that are trading one is up 10 the other i think is up 64 uh with with real money and uh it's it's
really early rock i think you know we're going to continue to invest in making the agents more intelligent by the day.
And we do think that this is going to be a pretty interesting project.
And the last thing I would say is we were accepted into the Google for Startups program.
They gave us a 200K grant.
And so we have currently zero direct infrastructure costs for the next two years.
So that allows us to spend as much money as we want to on Gemini 2.5 Pro. Hopefully Gemini 3
comes out soon and we can automatically switch to that model and see how it makes our agents
more intelligent or if they're better performance.
So it's an exciting thing to be building.
And we appreciate you for bringing us on to talk about it.
Yeah, I mean, it just goes with my kind of thing
that AI is going to basically be better at everything
than humans at some point.
I don't know what that point is.
I don't know if that's five years down the line,
10 years down the line,
100 years down the line.
I think it's sooner than later,
but I do think that AI will be better at everything than humans.
I said it earlier on this show.
I think we were talking about medical you know, medical crises and, uh, I was saying that I think, uh, at some point,
like with 99.9% probability, AI will be not only better than the best doctor at diagnosing something,
maybe 10 times better or a hundred times better than the best doctor at diagnosing something, maybe 10 times better or 100 times better than the best doctor
diagnosing something, the AI will have seen every single x-ray ever, you know, done as
much as it can get access to data.
It'll have seen every single, you know, photo of a disease in the world, whereas a doctor can only see probably 0.1% of all the photos of that specific case.
It'll be able to ingest, like, every single piece of data possible.
It'll know everything about your health at some point. And we need to, of course, have ways to protect ourselves against privacy.
And there's all that, I think, HIPAA stuff, right?
And so all kinds of things we need to solve.
But at some point, it'll be able to diagnose everything perfectly.
And it'll even be thinking outside of the box.
And it'll even be thinking outside of the box.
Something really interesting that we're seeing is there was a group that uploaded all of the human genomes that we have from like, I don't know, 23andMe or something.
And it was basically recognizing sequences of DNA that could be pathogenic, so basically could result in diseases.
This particular AI model had not ingested any other stuff from the internet.
It had only been trained on DNA sequences, so it didn't know about malaria, or it didn't know about any modern
diseases. All it knew was it looked at DNA. And just by looking at the DNA, it was able to figure
out, hey, these DNA sequences could lead to diseases. And they cross-checked it, and those
DNA sequences did lead to diseases. So what I'm saying is AI will be able to find things that we as humans
just weren't able to find in really unique and novel ways. Yeah. As someone from the medical
industry, the way that AI can process information, especially on radiographs and ultrasounds and
things like it's just a human can't compete. I mean, it literally can go pixel by pixel.
compete. I mean, it literally can go pixel by pixel. A defense against AI are probably
jobs that require extremely fine motor skills in arbitrary environments. So like
doctors or, you know, their AI is being replaced in their diagnosis, but a nurse
will likely have a job for the foreseeable future, trying to place a catheter in a geriatric
dehydrated patient, for example, that requires such precise motor skills and
experience to know that the vein's going to blow or what have you, right? So those jobs will be
probably safe in the foreseeable future. But yeah, Rock, I agree. I mean, I got to challenge
you there. I can give you something way more precise. What's that, Aztec?
I was just going to say until the robots come because I actually see this robot that could...
So I was in the medical field previous to going full-time crypto,
and one of my specialties was I was a vascular access specialist.
And so I fully get what you're saying.
Like there's a lot of skill that goes into placing any, you know,
PICC lines or, you know, A lines or like any of these,
even just like a general, just any of the type of lines that you're going to do.
So that makes sense.
But I did recently see this machine where people, they just put their arm in.
And I think it's using like AI and the software to essentially just place a catheter.
Now, like even in like small veins with precision.
But it's like this massive machine.
And I'm pretty sure that's extremely expensive.
And that hasn't been really like commercialized. Or, you know, it's not something you machine. And I'm pretty sure that's extremely expensive and that hasn't been really
like commercialized or, you know,
it's not something you're going to see at every hospital very quickly, but, uh,
crazy because, because, uh, yeah, AI is replacing these, these doctors.
Um, and you can get phenomenal, uh, information about, you know,
your health and, and, uh, AI is not a doctor.
It's always tells you that, but it gives really great advice or not, you know, your health and, and, uh, I is not a doctor. It's always tells you that,
but it gives really great advice or not, you know, it's not called advice, but you know,
it gives a good information, but, uh, but these robots are coming too. And that's,
they're going to clean up the rest of us. Yeah. That was going to be my, my challenge
to you is when you say like, it's not coming for nurses jobs in the
foreseeable future look i don't know when but it sure is coming i i promise you i i guarantee this
i and i and it's unfortunate or fortunate i actually think it's greatly for it's greatly
net positive for society but there will be turmoil there will be job loss there will be
we'll have to deal with this stuff and and the
example i'll give you that has been around now for quite some time that is incredibly precise way
more precise than placing a catheter i think is uh lasik lasik is not done with by hand anymore
it's done with lasers and they're doing like thousands of cuts a second or something crazy
whatever it is and they're way more precise they have a way
higher success rate that you can just walk right home after the recovery is much better um and
these things are doing like micro incisions with i mean if it could be that precise uh and that's
not even like danced llm ai you know these things are going to be better than at everything than humans
yeah so that's true and i've had lasix for you by the way so you're 100 correct um the instances
i'm talking about it's like you know aztec talked about you know a machine that places a catheter
in your arm and yeah and that's a controlled environment right you have a patient that has
their arm it's still but then you know you're going to have circumstances where you have a patient that has their arm it's still but then you know you're going to have circumstances where you have a patient that's you know coded and they're dying and then that's where
humans i think really excel because someone's doing chest impressions and so the patient's
shaking and then you have to try and place a catheter while they're and that requires such
an incredible amount of speed and like it's basically humans just piled on top of each other
just butt to butt just everyone's working on the patient that like that probably is going to be a long time away but you're right guys
it's only going to get more and more um um segmented really yeah i just invested in uh
intuitive surgical they have the da vinci robotic um device that like basically does those like
device that like basically does those like super like surgical things you know like
remotely like the doctor doesn't even have to be in the operating room that is wild i i've seen
some of that stuff too i i just want to welcome uh king dang kush hey bro jared what's up brother
always good to see you and cK, bro, you don't
have to raise your hand. We love to hear from you, man. Love your voice. Love this, you
know, every time you join us in conversation.
Yeah. Oh, I heard you guys talking about AI. So like, that's a topic where I could definitely
chime in and share.
Can I ask you a question if you don't mind about AI? A topic we talked about earlier was
AI trading bots and strategies. And one thing that really interests me, and I know Aztec talked about
this as well, is that, yeah, we'll have these AI trading bots that are going to go live, and they're
going to have parameters, right? And they will execute based on those parameters. But how do you
foresee the competitive nature against AI bots competing against other AI bots?
For me, it sounds like it would be really cutthroat where you have an AI algorithm, a bot.
It executes, you know, within certain parameters, thresholds.
And then if another AI bot could figure out the behaviorism of that AI bot, you could then take the counter trade or you see it.
You can modify your AI bot to trade in a way that could siphon value from the strategy of the other.
So how do you see that playing out?
And the AI bot eventually, well, the AI overlord then eventually just decides who gets money and who doesn't.
Yeah, I mean, this is like something that's literally already happens every day and has happened since humans first started
trading rocks i mean like you know shovels or whatever the hell we traded right i mean this is
this is happening in trading right now right like there are traders who will trade astrology
like they'll trade the the full moons and, but they don't even believe in that.
They're just trading
because they know other traders believe that
or that it's become this pattern that is recognizable.
That's what TA is.
That's literally what TA is,
is you're just looking at these charts and going,
here's a pattern
and here's what we think other people are going to do.
So I'm going to do something different.
And so of course, AI is going to do this.
It'll just be, it's an arms race.
It's a constant ever evolving arms race. True. I'm just curious. I think it's is going to do this. It'll just be, it's an arms race. It's a constant, ever-evolving arms race.
True.
I'm just curious.
I think it's just going to get wild real quick.
That's what I foresee.
I see, you know, these first examples coming out.
Exponential.
Yeah, exponential.
100% correct, King.
I agree with that.
And what's crazy is you guys were talking about how it's disrupting various industries,
you know, like all the Uber drivers.
You know, Uber was such a huge company,
but like now with Dynamo and the RoboTaxi and things like that,
like boom, gone.
All these like OnlyFan girls and like these other like streamers,
like soon, like because of like AI avatars and all that stuff,
like boom, gone.
Like the entire gig economy that a lot of people rely on is
like their second third jobs gone boom um and like you guys are talking about robotics you know
amazon's buying like those optimist robots like was it 200 000 a year for the next however many
years or something like that it's going to be replacing all the warehouse. Bye bye. Boom. Gone.
All the people.
So like,
I don't mean to.
go ahead.
Justin.
Connection issue.
Recently is.
is it,
is it me?
Is it my connection?
I think it's me.
I think I'm having issues here.
Sorry guys.
I'm going to get to a better connection,
but I'm like, it seems like the time now,
which is kind of, I don't like the idea of this but you know um a lot of people are
pushing it is you know ubi is the only solution universal basic income because everyone's going
to be you know a lot of people are going to be displaced not everyone because you know uh ai
at least for now still requires like a human input for a lot of things um but i think a
lot of people will be displaced yeah i think a lot of people will be displaced but at the same time
it's going to create new opportunities and i believe in humanity to where you know they'll just figure out how to use ai to either do things more
efficiently um or create jobs around these new emerging technologies so you know it'll tell
that's the microsoft and amazon all these people laying off thousands of people right now
yeah but like so for instance thinking about it like this if you let's say you're a video
game industry like they're laying off so many people because so much stuff now can just be
generated like your 3d uh meshes your textures like everything just like you know yeah no it's
it's a good artist and everything are being it's a good point it's just like you know yeah no it's it's a good artist and everything
or being it's a good point it's just that uh that like as people are
displaced other opportunities emerge like other you know you can build AI
company but it's happening so fast that people don't have time to like learn a
completely new trade like voice actors motion capture actors um
yeah it's getting crazy like uh just look at look at what ai video for example just because like
that's what i do a lot of um look at where how far it's come in a year look at what people were
creating a year ago with like the destabilized diffusion models and things
like that versus what you can create now and like every week they're coming out with new stuff that's
crazy that's true right right but it also means that someone that's not an animator can now join
the this like animation workforce and and join teams or create their business or create
business models you know and that opportunity wasn't available a year ago so it's like there's
two ways to look at it yes people are being displaced there's probably a portion of the
demographic unfortunately where it's going to be extremely challenging for, you know, many different
reasons for them to maybe keep up. But, but at the same time, it might make, you know, it might,
it's going to also provide a lot of people new opportunities, you know, and new ways to think of
new types of business, or to become more efficient and, and, uh,
make more money. So it's, there's good, there's obviously like pros and cons,
but, um, I do think like people will adapt. It's just going to take
just like everything, you know, as a disruptor comes in, you know,
it just kind of makes things more efficient and then
creates different types of jobs but i that's that's how i that's i mean that was my initial
thinking about ai and i still think in the in in a certain time certain timeframe, you're totally right.
So I guess to me, it becomes nuanced about timeframe.
So I think in the short term, there'll be creative disruption that will lead to job loss and job creation.
There'll be all kinds of crazy efficiencies to be had.
It'll drop the cost of producing goods and services down significantly.
Think about in the future, instead of spending $500 million budget on making a blockbuster movie,
you know 500 million budget on making a blockbuster movie uh you know someone in their
basement some kid with a creative idea will be able to make a and just the same movie i think
there may be a world where that can happen and um and so you could think about all things so
if you don't need people working in, uh, McDonald's,
instead you have McDonald's is a ghost kitchen and you know, it's a, it's an assembly line of
robots creating the food, uh, cooking the food. And then it goes in a little drone, picks it up
and drops it off at your house. And now instead of your Uberber eats costing 50 your uber eats is costing five dollars
um so as the cost of things uh go down wages also may drop as human labor becomes less valuable
i don't know if it'll if the cost of living ever gone down, uh, always actually. Um, but
except for when there's interruptions or artificial like interruptions. So, I mean,
you have to look at, there's, there's, there's nuances still, but like the cost of computers,
look at how much it's like, yes, you spend more on a computer.
You might spend more on your phone than you used to spend on your phone, but you might spend triple
of what you used to spend to buy a phone, but you're getting a phone that is 10,000 times more
powerful. Right. And you can do, you know, you've gotten rid of 50 other gadgets you used to have
to buy because your phone does those gadgets now. But anyway, so like...
They're subsidizing it by taking all your data and selling it.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And we do that voluntarily.
And maybe that's a bad decision.
I think in some cases, it's a good decision.
Some cases, it's a stupid decision.
But anyways, my point is that eventually down the line,
I do think, and I'm very against UBI right now, um, in the
short term, I think it could just totally destroy the kind of fabric of society and the incentives
of society and the way we get meaning in our lives and all kinds of things. Um, it, it, it messes up
the incentives to work and produce and be a productive member of society.
But I think if AI goes the way I think it's going to go, which is that it'll be better at everything than any human in the world, and humans will basically be obsolete, then I think we might have to go to something like UBI. I don't know if it'll be UBI or if it'll be something else.
Maybe companies will give their services for free or discounted, or I don't know what it'll look
like. But I think if automation and robotics push down the cost of human or the value of human labor too much and people are you know
uh unhappy and there's uh you know i like right now we have we have low unemployment but wages
are not are not growing uh to keep up with cost of living um or or at least even if they are
they're not growing as much as productivity. And you would ideally
want to see in the world, if productivity is growing by some amount, and we're getting more
efficient at making things and creating whatever food, goods, services, then you would like to see
the average person also see that productivity gain in their wages versus inflation, but we're
not really seeing that. And we haven't seen that for a long time. And it looks like from,
if anyone's seen the charts on WTF happened in 1971, it looks like it's because of inflation,
but I, I'm starting to think it may be, I think that's probably the main driver. I think inflation
is this, this theft that robs the average person
and because they don't know how to navigate it and in your way just go down against inflation
by default if you don't ask for raises you're actually getting a pay cut every year um you
know by a few percent but yeah i'll pause there i there's a lot of points to touch on.
I don't know if someone was going to jump in or not.
Yeah. Rock asked me to ask him for a raise.
Now, now everyone else is going to ask for a raise, bro.
Hey, I actually have to hop.
We've been going for over three hours.
Might be. Yeah. hey i i actually have to hop uh we've been going for over three hours uh might be yeah i don't know if anyone else wants to wrap up and and uh comment on what rock just said man if i don't know if you're talking about other ai topics like i'm you know
i'm down to talk about ai if you guys want to talk about AI for a little bit. I love it, man.
Can you all hear me?
I don't know.
No one has a pushback on the UBI being possibly necessary.
And this is coming from someone who I am very against UBI.
But I think if human labor becomes completely obsolete and all the value is occurring, like there's a running kind of, not joke, it's quite serious,
but there's a running kind of thing going in Silicon Valley right now
of like who's going to be the first company to have one employee
or three employees but become a billion-dollar company.
Now, that's not a bad thing.
I mean, if you can have a company that gets to a billion dollar
valuation it means they're creating you know more than a billion dollars of value for the world
so that's a good thing but that company's not hiring people right because they're doing
everything with ai agents so it's it's a net positive for society if you could create billions of dollars of value with only a few people. That's incredible. But it is counterproductive to kind of driving up wages and labor.
Someone was talking about the notion of like, look how far AI modeling has come with respect to video like Will Smith eating the spaghetti.
And then we imagine George Lucas at 18, right, with AI technology that will exist in three weeks, nevertheless 12 months from now.
Right. And so and so just now that I understand that my microphone is actually working, I just want to say I have been quietly like wanting to just say a thousand things, as I'm sure many of us have.
But I just relish this intersection of ideas and the high quality of the of the of the exchange, even though I think there are so many layers of fruitful disagreement.
Right. So, for instance, going all the way back to when when Alex was here, the notion of scalable algorithmic Nash equilibrium, right?
So for those that aren't familiar with what Nash equilibrium is, essentially it's the state in which all players in a game are maximally advantaged, commensurate with all of their available options and no single player deviating from essentially this universal
approach to maximizing your advantage. I should have stuck the landing on a little bit, but look
into Nash Equilibrium. It's really great. And with UTXO-based deterministic blockchains that
have hard cap supplies, there is implicit fundamental economic theory there when you have supply and
demand, for instance. The 21 million units of Bitcoin is the only aspect of that network that
Saylor is maximally advantaging in Wall Street. He's basically borrow infinite fiat dollars,
acquire finite 21 million UTXO assets while the rest of the world adopts it, right? So with this model,
Saylor could literally say, hey, guys, guess what I'm going to do? Not buy any more Bitcoin,
no more debt. But I will contend this, that the burning house of the dollar will levy the argument
gain theoretically and economically for Japan to acquire more Bitcoin, for China, Russia,
Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, feel me? And ergo, micro strategy, if they can win the war of attrition of debt, you know, they're going to be just fine.
So I just want to say a shout out to a scalable algorithmic Nash equilibrium and the 10 Totems project, which is this notion of.
So imagine this to mind model is doing this as quick as possible.
You fund a million unit account and you say,
hey, here are 10 people. So in this instance, we're talking about marketing and blockchain,
right? And when we understand what marketing is, it's an inspiring idea that can also educate such
that you can not only induce participation, but empower those participants with the fruit of
learning so that they can go, wow, thank you, Bodega Cardano or Polymarket.
Now I know that I can wager on this Canelo-Crawford fight.
And I can do it with, like the platform will even subsidize if I live trade because, oh
no, Crawford got, you know, in the eighth token from Canelo.
And look how we move $5 million together as these two meme coin communities now feel me.
Now, so I love what Rock was saying. So
I'm just going to shout out to how we can actually have decentralized governance. But UBI, let me
touch on that for a second. I contend that vibing with friends at 3 a.m. or 3 p.m. at cafes,
lounges and different spaces will prove to be a more popular and compelling choice than just
sitting at home looking at your
phone. Whereas right now in our economy, one is prohibited from participation at the bar with the
honey because they can't pay the fee. Whereas if everyone was suddenly secure, had a roof over
their head, and it's like, look, I can just sit here on the dole or these blockchain baddies that
realize, look, you know what? It isn't right that BlackRock is buying all these single family homes. So what if in this window, in this next 18 months before AI takes
over OnlyFans, what if all these young ladies said, you know what? In Wisconsin, in Maine,
in Washington, in Texas, in California, all over the world, shout out to Brazil and all this,
right? Imagine if this millenniaazee majority that has been left out
of the economy say, hey, we have been forced to be the infrastructure that moves the food.
So really, it's a killer app away from directly monetizing. F you, McDonald's. Why don't all of
the Malenazees say, hey, how much is burger in your local neighborhood? Okay, we're going to
mint a billion unit meme coin, right?
Or, and if you have the meme coin, our burgers, it's 75% off, but the baddies that run the block that bought all the houses in the neighborhoods. So you can actually afford rent because it starts
with the sisterhood and the brotherhood. And guess what? Maybe you find a date. You feel me?
But we all know it may not make economic sense for seven friends to take $50,000 in debt,
sense for seven friends to take $50,000 in debt, sit in a dorm room for a piece of paper and debt,
or seven friends, $50,000, that's $350,000 capital. Seven friends with 50,000 could have a
house for a year. So suddenly you have seven friends in a house in upstate New York. They
now have $30,000, $300,000 of capital because they each took a small business loan for 50,000 USD.
And these seven 20-year-olds, shout out to the real world and old folks, right?
So do you see how there's these evergreen models where we can actually take over coffee?
We can take over burgers, burritos, and pizza because we're already doing it for not enough money.
But suddenly we create a token where it's like, oh, yeah, get the coffee token and go to the the fuck you freedom coffee shop. Right. And so we can say,
hey, buy your coffee here. If you come in with your smartphone and the coffee token, boom.
And suddenly Pete's coffee and Starbucks have a real big problem because no one's delivering their
coffee because why am I going to be a slave for you? Feel me. And so there's a lot of models here
where a free market because right now, for instance, Bitcoin and Ethereum have enjoyed king making.
Hear ye, hear ye. If you grow potatoes or pumpkins, you can sell them in my court.
If you sell corn or turnips, you're in the forest with the brigands.
Fortunately, this isn't a free market economy, but you wouldn't know it to hear some of these folks on the talking heads that say the market is speaking.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are more successful. Well, they are the only two assets that Wall Street has access to, the spot ETF instruments.
But we know clarity is coming here very soon. And in the middle of October, we're getting a lot of
ETFs approved. And if we know how to read the T, we know exactly what those are. Watch. I guarantee
you Litecoin will be approved. And get this. those that know for every one Bitcoin, there are four Litecoins.
So I'm going to land the plane here because you guys are indulging me with this awesome ramble.
I believe in this like villains to heroes project.
What if before October 10th and all these ETFs approved, what if Walmart said,
Walmart employees of America, of the world, you can elect to take 10 to 50 percent of your paycheck
in Bitcoin, Litecoin or Cardano. Thank you. And so just suddenly all Walmart employees and Amazon
employees, Chevron employees, if you like, again, this is these folks that get static for what the
free market has done. Let's let's show how powerful that can be with a free market economy.
Right. So now suddenly all these Walmart employees that elected Litecoin, by the middle of October, if they took 10% of their paycheck, they might be
sitting on 30 or 40 Litecoin by October 10th. And then suddenly, Grayscale's ETF approved,
and 21 shares and coin shares, and then all these other ones that are waiting.
And shout out to MyPharma that's rebranding to LiteStrategy. Now again, I'll land the plan on
this. Remember, for one unit of Bitcoin,
it's $110,000. For four units of Litecoin, right? Because it's a one to four ratio, guys,
you can get, it's $500 for freedom. So I'm going to land the plane with this. We stop these public acts of violence by giving people hope. Hope comes with economic empowerment. I say, Mio,
you're there at the fryer. Guess what that $50 you have at the end of every
week? Don't believe these toxic Bitcoin maximalists. There is another way to freedom. You know what
Maya protocol is. You know what quick swap and Dashpay and all these freedom tools are building
here. There are freedom liquidity pools. So here's what you do, Mio. You take that $50 you have at the
end of every week and you buy that Litecoin. Walmart employee, yes, opt in for the Litecoin payment for 10% because then suddenly look at what Bitcoin did.
But instead of taking 10 years, it's going to happen in 18 months.
Look at Litecoin's all-time high.
It's around 420.
Nice.
That means there's a 4X from right now to its all-time high.
For Bitcoin, Bitcoin will be a million dollars, right?
But that's got to go from 100 grand to a million. That will happen. But is that in 18 months? I don't
know. With Litecoin, that same move is a hundred dollars to a thousand and its all-time highs,
420. So this is how we give people hope, tools to freedom. And then suddenly the seven friends,
right, that decided to take the debt, they're using all these blockchain technologies,
educating the world, creating TikToks, creating the coffee shops, and then using these free
market tools that the young know how to use. So I just want to say, I don't know if we're
going to stick that landing, but there is a golden thread, ladies and gentlemen, right?
The better angels of our nature, hey, you know, I will land the plane here. Why I really like the
idea of a Mars mission is when we watch that rocket fly, we will be watching in a concrete articulation of the mastery of our engineering such that the plenty of the people of the Earth is a matter of our collective choice, not our capability.
I love your enthusiasm brother and uh i fully support freedom tech and i love your thesis on
litecoin as well it's it's basically a big part of mine here as well so um always good to talk
to you man and i think uh king dang kush you you want to jump on it being like yeah I have to go so I just
want to say real quick much love everyone we do this every Friday join us
again I have to hop for another call I'm actually 17 minutes late but I just I
just couldn't jump off because we were having a you know really great
conversation but I I do have to at this point so much love everyone nice
cheers aztec man and i'll definitely be rolling through that litecoin space wherever that is i heard that's popping up october 11th if folks don't know i think that might be celebrating
the launch of the network but cheers bro uh litecoins and that's 14 years ago for folks
that don't know litecoin is celebrating it's 14
years of flawless uptime next month um some somewhere between what october 7th and the 23rd
maybe the 11th i have no i honestly have no idea and that's interesting i'm just we're bringing
them on there just as like random things so but if there's some event that coincides with the space
then that's another talking point. Love it.
No, no, you absolutely planned that if anyone asked. Yeah, right.
I'm a master genius, of course.
There you go.
Yeah, that date, if it's happening on the 11th,
so I believe the Litecoin,
similar to how Halloween night 2008
was when Satoshi released the Bitcoin white paper,
then the Genesis block January 3rd, 2009.
I believe there's October 7th was when Charlie Lee might have published documentation.
And then the launch of Litecoin 14 years ago will be on 2025 October, what is it, 11th or the 23rd of the 7th.
Those three dates, 7th, 11th, and 23th are sticking in my head for some reason.
There you go.
Rock and the quick swap there.
The universe is naturally aligning dates.
You guys are like the creators of connections.
I mean, this is happening in real time.
There you go.
It was meant to be.
Universal synchronicity.
There you go.
It's happening.
You guys have powers.
I appreciate you sharing them.
So there was a talk earlier. You guys have powers. I appreciate you sharing them. I didn't know if you guys wanted me to be like kind of a provide a counterpoint. Sure.
Okay.
So I think with Bitcoin and any crypto and the same thing,
actually with our fiat money, it's all, you know, a belief system.
You know,
there's no difference between a $1 bill and a hundred dollar bill other than
the print that's on the paper. And digital currency, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum,
whatever, you know, it has, you know, has a lot of use cases. And, but I feel like it's,
you know, a lot of it's based on belief, you know, Bitcoin's valued at 115,000 or 116,000,
because people believe it's worth that and they're willing to
trade whatever assets, you know, that are relative to that. But, you know, things can easily change.
I mean, just look at like meme coins. Meme coins are also a belief system. People
develop cult-like mentalities and believe in something and things can change really quickly.
and believe in something and things can change really quickly.
And so my counterpoint was like, you know,
at least with, you know, the big ones that we all believe in,
Bitcoin and stuff, I think, you know, as far as like what we're doing,
we're all building out the infrastructure, building the technology,
we're doing all the troubleshooting.
But I have a feeling that that might only be good
until they develop AGI.
You know, like we're all talking about the race.
It's the race to develop the best AI
because it gives you the competitive edge,
whether it's the United States against China
or it's open AI versus XAI,
or it's, you know, you versus me.
It's about who has the better better AI but I think their
goal is to reach um was it AGI and then what's the one above that the super AI that basically
just takes over and runs everything for humanity like at what point do you think AI will take over
and then decide you know there's what millions upon millions of cryptocurrencies.
And at a certain point, everyone's going to be running on AI rails using their various AI agents
to do all their trading and things like that. The AI will decide to siphon everyone's assets to a
single coin or, uh, or maybe a handful of coins or whatever um
like what are your guys's thoughts on that one interesting thing i've seen the other day about
giving our lives to the hands of ai is that um i mean i think it was a comedian in the uk
he was talking about it and he said that like say for example your nephew gets hurt and you're like
okay i'm gonna write him a little card hurt and you're like okay i'm gonna write
him a little card and then you're like okay i'm gonna get chat gpt to do that because i'm lazy
um and then you go okay can you write uh a note for my nephew that's just like empathetic like
can you just say okay yeah i hope you get well soon whatever um the ai obviously in llm just
takes like past experiences all the stuff that it, and then fakes empathy because it doesn't actually know empathy.
It just goes, yeah, this is what I think empathy is.
Makes that letter.
And then you can send it and everyone's happy.
Your nephew thinks that you like it.
But faking empathy is literally the definition of a psychopath.
So we're putting our lives in the definition of a psychopath. So we're putting our hands,
we're putting our lives in the hands of a psychopath.
And right now it's on rails.
You know, you got Sam Altman and Elon Musk,
and these are the types of people that are
building out AI that we're all using, you know, unless you're, you know, using an offline
model, you know, something that, but like the mass majority of people, you know, people are already
developing tribes, you know, like I was talking to my wife's friend a few weeks ago and she was
talking about applying for a new job and having to write an application. And I was like, oh, have you tried using Grok?
And she goes, oh, no, I could never switch.
I only use ChatGPT.
It knows everything about me.
I looked at my wife.
I said, see, it's already happening.
And I think, too, like back to my point about like how it's like a belief system or how things quickly can change, All it's going to take is maybe Apple to come out with their own coin or something.
And how much money in the crypto market is going to flood to that instantly within just a couple of days.
you know um it's so i don't know yeah if an apple comes to the blockchain and launches a coin
So, I don't know.
you gotta know that that is one last exit scam mass extraction one last hoorah goodbye everybody
just like many of those b-grade uh celebrities that uh that do that. GM, everybody.
Releasing the same AirPods
every two years and then just telling people
the new AirPods is probably a much
easier exit scan.
Right.
And their logo is the
bite of the forbidden fruit.
I mean, thankfully, I did
see the new AirPods had live
translation, so you could hear people speaking in Turkish.
So when you're at the barbers and they're speaking about you, you'll be able to actually listen to them there.
But thankfully, I think it's got no idea how to translate Scottish slang.
So I'm all right for a little while. I can still talk about yours.
Yeah, you can probably use slang or euphemisms
if you want to insult somebody because you know like this this has a oh can i say that here oh
no you just did don't ban me please yeah yeah the polygon handle isn't here anymore you can see
the swap is banning me oh no all right darren loves this kind of stuff. Cool. Yeah. If I'm a barber and I see some smug MFA come in with ear pods in the ear,
I know this guy's probably going to translate me.
So I'm going to use a euphemism,
call him names that only my friends in the barbershop can understand.
I would use that to my advantage.
If I was a barber, I would just speak real kindly about the guy said
this guy has the best hair i have ever seen in my life and hoping you get a nice fat tip you know
what i'm saying oh yeah you're brilliant bro like and look at this hairline financial advice this
the symmetric oh these eyes are just symmetrical well you might become i mean i might be gay
actually i don't know i'm not sure if that's good but you know what i mean you can you can run it right here you know what i'm
saying that went from zero to ten percent that's how i roll baby a quick thought back on the
the topic of ubi you know what if like uh walmart rolled out like a social program
you know for all of their the people that shop at walmart
but you can only use the walmart token at walmart
you're trying so hard to keep it on topic well done i mean this stuff
i mean this stuff can happen yeah great idea but like i think it could happen you know like
because they have like a Walmart fricking
credit card and checking, you know, your cash, your check and Walmart dentist, Walmart.
I've got a more realistic one that, that, uh, will likely happen.
That might happen, but I mean, look, we had dentcoin and all this stuff in like 2017.
I don't know that you need a coin for every genre.
But sure, sure.
I think it's possible people do stuff like that,
especially once payment rails are more ubiquitous
and you can like pay with any coin.
Sure.
But I will say
uh one that will happen is and it's already kind of happening is banks will say if you use our stable coin we'll give you uh either a higher yield or just in general we'll give you a yield
uh if you hold yeah so that's already happening because circle does this if you hold uh if you hold so that's already happening circle does this if you hold uh if you hold usdc
on coinbase you get that you get the treasure yields basically so if you use their stable coin
they're giving you the yield uh or at least part of the yield or most of the yield it's pretty high
it's i think right now it's like 4.2 uh you get just for holding stablecoin on Coinbase.
Now, they're not legally allowed to say that they're sharing the treasury yield with you.
And this goes back to the conversation I was having with the head of the SEC, Paul Atkins, recently.
It's weird.
They don't want to...
A stablecoin to not be a security cannot give the, cannot promise any yield.
So they can't say we're going to give 90% of the treasury yield.
But what they can do is just say, we're going to give you some rewards.
And they're just calling the treasury yields.
We're going to give you rewards for using USDC on our platform so yeah banks will do this for sure
they're like all gearing up to do this now absolutely man and and what's really so in
the same way that when we deposit our you know we say you have a hundred thousand dollars in a
savings account right the bank lends that money, makes say 10%,
15%, and then gives you 3%. In a similar fashion, you can go on Coinbase, for instance,
have $1,000 in USD in circle, and then you're right, they give you around, I think, 4%.
And then on the other hand, if you have the people that go full self-custody, well, you take the
risks and the liabilities, but you also get the freedoms. And we know that we can lend and borrow USDM, Moneta, USD Anzins. Both of those are fiat
one-to-one backed, compliant, regulated stable coins. And both of them, I think, are yielding
over 8%. So if you, for instance, have a Ledger or a Trezor or a Keystone or any of these, I
recommend open source hardware wallets, these kinds of things.
And Casa HODL, multi-sig options, understand your custody.
Point that I'm trying to make here is you're right, Rock.
You can get 4% with custodians.
But if you actually fully advantage yourself of these freedom tools that are built on these
globally decentralized and distributed validation and consensus blockchain
publicly distributed ledgers, you can get 8%, 16%. So there are the fiat-backed one-to-one
USDM and Anzins. Those are also UTXO-based, which means the clawback mechanisms aren't the same with
Hey, CK i i apologize for interrupting
but actually i do have to go uh right now for a call and i i did want to shout out audience members
before we uh cut the space uh darren i i didn't realize until now i have to go for this call but
um do you want to shout out audience members and uh if you'd like, you could read some comments, if there's some interesting comments.
And you guys can just wrap it up with that.
Yeah, I mean, there's only 186 comments.
Is there really?
Yeah.
Yeah, if you guys want to stay on,
Jared and King Dank,
AI Quant, Rumban, CK Cardano, Boba
can help either answer these questions from the audience or comments from the audience.
And shout out some audience members.
That'd be great.
But I do have to go to a call.
I'll stick around for a little longer.
Nice talking with you, Rock, as always.
You're a great guy.
Yeah, cheers.
Thanks for inviting me up to talk, guys.
And yeah, check out AI Quant, guys.
If you're interested in agentic trading
what what they're doing is definitely really interesting cool see you guys bye bye bye bro
okay i'm not great at reading so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna describe the pictures
so there's um pepper head in the audience we've got star dogs i actually think there's Pepperhead in the audience.
We've got Star Dogs.
I actually think there's a star and a dog there,
so we're good to go here.
We've got... I'm not going to read out what that looks like.
No, I'm joking.
I'll read some names.
I'm so sorry.
We've got Pee-Pee.
That's not a great start.
We've got Urnscape, East Daily, Elisa, Moonlight.
I'm going to have to click. Yep. Just full names. Moonlight. Leslie Mata. Okay. Got any more fun names here?
um okay got any more fun names here clutch then there's beans everyone loves beans we've got stewie
the rule hits in here franklin's tower uh luxie rose yeah there's there's so many people in the
audience did you see the high name the what was the thai name like written in thai name the what was the thai name like written in thai no i've not seen that yet unfortunately
wait a minute the fella dropped off do you want you want to read it is it sick damn i can't read
it it's like yeah that's not what you read it's not abc's oh yeah he's still there. He's got like a yellow background.
Wait a minute.
It's like a Pokemon with huge balls.
Dude.
Yeah, I thought that looked like a scrotum.
You know what I mean?
I was curious.
Yeah, I mean, I was describing the photos for a while.
So yeah, that's good to go.
Everyone in the audience is the future.
Like these people are rewriting the economic doctrine of the world.
So I love it.
This is great.
The future of finance with Pokemon and huge balls.
That's what it's about.
You need big balls to do with this stuff. Okay.
I'll read some comments.
We'll see if there's a question,
and we'll see if anyone can answer any of the questions.
Sounds good.
Okay.
There's no questions um good morning aggregated from king dank kush uh hummingbird got rugged the token said hi um someone chilled the token
you know i can maybe describe uh a model for this scalable algorithmic Nash equilibrium where a global community could
work together. Okay, cool, King Dash. I mean, if you don't mind, would you guys mind if I tried to
kind of articulate one of these models? Because it also touches on how can humans anchor with
smart contracts their delegation, let's say, like they can say, I command eight Bitcoin,
3000 Litecoin and 4000 Cardano, for instance. And with so here's here's fun little things to kind
of weave together the tau of totems, talismans and time. OK, so a totem, imagine a totem is like an
NFT. And wherever you send this NFT, right, let's say, hey, I want to migrate my Bitcoin, my Litecoin, all my sovereign digital assets or just digital assets.
I want to migrate them quickly.
I just send my totem to a new wallet.
And with where this open source contract is going, you could send that to the Bitcoin network, the Litecoin network, the Cardano network, the Midnight network.
coin network, the Cardano network, the midnight network, feel me? So suddenly these magicians out
Feel me?
here in this age of magic that understand what these decentralized public ledgers and technologies
and networks can do. Imagine if you go, okay, there are algorithmic trading bots. Okay. And I
know that there are certain assets like Bitcoin, there are 21 million units. Litecoin, there are 84 million units. Cardano,
there are 45 billion units. If millennials and Gen Z who are writing these smart contracts,
even if they're working at Walmart or McDonald's, cooperatively cook a recipe together and go,
oh, I'm going to take the slave man's money, sink it into these sovereign digital assets,
SDAs. Those have hard cap supplies, UTXO basis, and a global distribution and
decentralization of validation and consensus of their networks, their blockchains,
however you'd like to articulate that. But if you have the first one, just like the dollar,
anyone that held a million dollars in an account January 1 of this year has lost 11% of its value as we speak here on September 12,
2025. BarChart, I think that's their handle, has published, has kept up with this, the inflation
of the dollar just this year. So literally, you have had to make an 11% return on your cash to
keep up with inflation, to stay at zero. So if suddenly all these folks that are working at
Jack in the Box and McDonald's and Walmart and Home Depot say, hey, and what if we get this one woman that we heard made as much as
LeBron James on OnlyFans. So what if all these OnlyFans girls went, hold on, hold on. Why are
we putting all our money in this dollar when someone just told me that I'm burning 11% of it?
I've done that in the last nine months. What if all these Bitcoin baddies get together using Culturified Vi-Fi, right?
And they all say, hey, we all lock our value in Litecoin.
Why?
Because we know Larry Fink and Grayscale and the rest of sovereign humanity is going to understand, oh, hold up.
You mean Michael Saylor was playing the 21 million unit game?
And suddenly this October, we're going to play 84 million unit game?
And instead of being 100 Gs a unit, it's $100 a unit. Folks aren't dumb, nor are the suits in the quants. Now, the 65-year-old CEO
might not understand what a UTXO is, but that 23-year-old quant with that math degree that's
really bright that took the last week to read about it goes, sir, we should probably be
aggressively acquiring Litecoin because it's 250 times dollar for dollar more capitally efficient, sir. So even if our
thesis is 12% correct, we're going to outperform Bitcoin here. So anyone that does the math,
this is not a debate, this is an information asymmetry, is going to note that a 90-10 Bitcoin
Litecoin portfolio is going to be likely double the value of 100% Bitcoin portfolio in 10 years or less.
And this is just because of those aggressive valuation paradigms.
We'll watch it happen.
Just note to yourself that Litecoin currently around $100 going to $1,000 is the same move as Bitcoin going from $100K to $1,000,000.
But consider how many fewer dollars, right?
It's why these meme coins can fly into a 30X because its market cap is a million dollars.
Right now, Bitcoin's valued at 2.2 trillion, last time I checked, 2.2, 2.3 trillion with a T,
whereas Litecoin is less than 10 with a B, billion, right? So when we have this
MyPharma that's rebranding to LiteStrategy and they've committed $200 million, their cost basis, here's some alpha.
Cost basis is $107, okay?
And they have another $100 million lined up, okay?
And all-time high is $420.
So I'm just saying, the people that make money, right, in TradFi, this is how they trade.
money, right? In TradFi, this is how they trade. So get this, agentic algorithmic arbitrage is
So get this.
absolutely going to happen, particularly those that know how to use these hard cap supply assets.
Because really, if we're being like Ethereum and Solana, you do not control the supply.
If you say, what is the, if I hold three Bitcoin, right? And you say, global economy is this,
Bitcoin is this much of that network value. And you say the subject in their portfolio has three Bitcoin. I can tell you exactly
how much that value is worth. Whereas with Ethereum and Solana, they have infinite supplies
theoretically, right? So we do not have that. So you can't do that same math and not even getting
into the mathematical determinism, formalism, parallelism, security, all this stuff.
But I think there's going to be a bifurcation of society. Like I think there is a golden thread, but I think what's ultimately going to happen, borders are going to go away. The Genius Act
is a speculative attack on the fiat regime globally. We're seeing tariffs are the stick,
crypto is the carrot. So in the last six months, this administration has used tariffs as a auspice to renegotiate fiat denominated obligations and percentages and deals. But what
it really is, is a Trojan horse to open up the phone line. Because on the other side is the
crypto is the carrot. If tariffs are the stick, crypto is the carrot. So for instance, how are
we going to fill the US strategic reserve? We're going to have oil trade with Bitcoin as the preferred unit of account. So we say, hey,
China, Russia, anyone that wants to trade with the US, guess what? You can spend, well, flat
tax, 15% tariffs on any trade or Bitcoin or Litecoin or Cardano. There you go, Bob Junkle.
And then suddenly we use the free market. We advantage the soft landing. So and
then suddenly we gain theoretically give a reason because Bitcoin is and Litecoin and Cardano are of
no country. They are for all, you know, so to speak. So, yeah. So when we look at what we can
do with these smart contracts, though, even if we have AI agents that are algorithmically trading,
let's return back to that tau of totems, talismans, and time.
These AI agents live in the talismans, okay? So the human, the magician, the holder of the totem is the custodian of the keys. Tau is basically your value, right? That's your life essence,
however you want to call. Oh, and also just shout out to the classical definition of a currency,
because this comes up a lot, but this is very important when we look at the verbiage of the
white paper, right? Pure to pure electronic cash, Okay. So what is currency? Just economics 101.
The first, it's three, three primary things to find a currency classically. And the first one's
the hardest, but once you get it, you're starting to win. One, a mutually agreed upon medium of
exchange. Two, a store of value. Three, a unit of account.
If you have those three things, you have a currency.
That's a classical definition.
So if you and I agree that it has value, Bob's your uncle.
Doesn't mean everyone has to.
And then we go to Manhattan seashells, da, da, da, da.
And then a store of value, like an egg.
If I say, hey, Jared, I want to build a smart contract for you.
It's going to take me six months.
Will you take eggs?
And I say, okay, Jared, I'm going to put these eggs in escrow. In six months, when I deliver,
these eggs are bad. Not a store of value.
