What's up guys? What's up man? You guys hear me? Yeah, you're good man. Yeah, I think we should just start talking until Calvin arrives man, but Jeez man, what a way to start off today brother
I always find that funny man these things are always these things are always set off right before at local bottom. So I was gonna be like just text my friends the same thing I was like brother these things are always huge local bottoms
When you go down like 6% in the day on majors, it's probably just been. Yeah, yeah, I haven't even looked at like prices to be honest man. I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just
holding what I hold and not really looking at charts. I mean, you know, that's just violently cascaded. Violent. Dude, nothing will ever violently cascade more than December of
21 where BTC went from like 56 to 40 I mean, I'll do that unless we're like unless we're like under like 10k I'm not I'm not freaking out whatsoever dude Like I think once you get below 9k you're playing with fire
I wouldn't be surprised if we went to like, I mean it just depends on how it contained the situations but this is going to be like a multi day thing or not.
So, yeah, I'm sitting in a new, Ethereum's holding up better with VTC though. Ethereum didn't get name business security either, which I think is pretty significant.
I think they named, uh, we'll see which ones.
Who are you? Calvin he's down there in the audience I I just sent in the coast invite
Dude, what valid cascading would imply like a 30% drawdown? That's a music cascade. But anything less than 10% for Al, less than 15% just another day.
I mean Apple hit an all-time high today. Which out of all days man. Out of all days. I'm sorry, dude, dude. We would have ripped. We would have ripped so hard if this had not happened. Like the setup was there.
Hey, Calvin, I send you an invite to speak in a close invite brother.
of that. And then Abecoin started catching a bit which was like weird because I thought Abecoin was just like, I thought Abecoin was just some like infinite twop cell.
Dude, they're selling them for like two grand a piece I'm like Are really that many people gonna buy them for two grand a pile? I think I think so I phones are about a stack I phones are a stop that's true
Yeah, I think it's like a stack. Two grain of pieces and two bad for if it's like actually a really good product that uh you're good man. What's going on brother? She's sending you co-hosts right now. Same thing with me. Yeah, what's up?
All right, Payne, I sent you a call this as well, brother.
Hello, hello. Can you guys hear me now? Yeah, we're good now. What's going on brother? What a day bro. What a perfect what a perfect timing to talk about all things finance
you Calvin, we were supposed to have a guest right at the day that USDC DPEGged. It was a D5 protocol that pretty much just went ghost on us and they had the
I could start off the space by just asking, "Brother, how many of these events have you been through? How long have you been in crypto and what are some of the events that you've witnessed and what are some of the aftermath of what occur after events like these, brother? We can start off like that."
Yeah, if I heard you correctly, I think you said local bottom and I actually kind of agree with that. But obviously in the moment, I think these moments always look a little bit scary just obviously Binance has insane amount of foot traffic. I think by centralized exchange, web traffic, status,
I think they have more than two to three X more web traffic than the next closest competitors. So obviously this is a pretty big magnitude of impact for this face. That being said, that as an ex-finance employee myself and I think somebody that's already kind of gone through lots of different
both personal side of things as well as on the career side of things just seeing how many things kind of happen every day in inside crypto. Unfortunately, I feel like nothing is brand new news for us in the space anymore. So it's just another day in crypto, I guess.
But that being said, I do think that there are some interesting points that I'm still making my way through this. Don't as well. So I haven't finished all 136 pages of this letter from the CC, but generally speaking, I would say that there's definitely some.
parts that are interesting that have been pointed out in this show we can touch on more. And then also I do think there's still some things that to be honest I would directly call us somewhat of a reach. I personally don't think that some of the content was a very in-depth research that
would reveal actually more round doings and I think it's up to us as a space as a whole to try to make sure that we are holding, you know, our partner is the project teams that we work with accountable. I think it will always be difficult for any government or any regulatory body to be able to do a good job in trying to
protect its citizens and people. I mean you go look at like the I think it was like the Ontario school teachers union or something invested hundreds of millions and FTX. So like everybody possible that you could imagine that's supposed to be doing safeguards there, but also you know
have made mistakes in the past and I think that it's up to us to try and do more things as a whole not to point fingers on any particular individuals but rather I think it needs to be a space level effort not just one ruling or one kind of
of the letter will just solve everything. Calvin, and during your work at Binance, how was the work culture like? How is it like working alongside CZ? One thing that CZ always talks about is work culture and how if you're going to work in crypto, it has to be more than just
Just for just more than a check, right? Because if you're working crypto, right? Everyone that you work with has to be basically like family and there's a connection that that you don't really feel anywhere else. And I think being a market participant myself and an employee here because Bitcoin
Often times I find myself having a separation of friend groups, right? Like you have your crypto friends and then you have like I guess your quote unquote IRL friends, right? People kind of separate the two, but for yourself you have you have an experience that not many people will ever come close to
right, working alongside one of the pioneers in the space, right? When we think of crypto, it's essentially everything outside of Bitcoin, right? Or at least that's how I see it, you know? And so I guess that's my question to you is how was that experience like and how is the work culture there and working alongside CZ brother?
Yeah, I would say I wouldn't even point out specifically CZ I would just say that a lot of the people that entered finance at that time wanted to be a part of a very interesting startup So it wasn't so much I would say credit going to any particular individual but that in the early
The early days, everyone that joined was really there to try to learn together. I can definitely say that I spent plenty of weekends and late nights at the office. I slept at the office before. I think this was not unheard of. I wouldn't say that I was special. I think that many other hardworking people around
me also instilled a willingness to try to just keep up with this space. You guys all know everything always happens so fast and so I think we've just been lucky that you guys since 2018 when I think a lot of us joined I think I was about a first maybe 200
15-ish employees from that range on for that maybe year or so we grew from 215 people to 1,000 people and even in that kind of time frame I would say that the level of participation
definitely deferred quite a bit. So I think some of it is just what you see from any company as it kind of grows over time, right? That there's a lot of kind of startup growing pains that happened. And I think that I was lucky enough to join in at an early enough stage that I did feel like there was this level of culture.
But definitely as any company kind of skills, I think Binance before some of the recent layoffs was definitely like the 7 to 10 thousand employee range. There definitely is a very, very different vibe today than it was when I first joined.
I'll let pain go ahead. I don't want to overtake the conversation and I'll just see we have max on so We'll go over to pain and then we'll go on over to max to give his introduction, but pain go ahead brother
Yeah, I was just gonna ask about like B&B specifically because I know that you guys It was probably insane working there like during B&B's growth and like did you guys have high conviction that it was gonna perform the way it did or
Did it kind of catch everyone off surprise like even even higher ups and stuff? Even people like CZ or were they you know was it kind of like? The culture was like oh yeah like this is gonna be you know a huge huge performer We're gonna have a ton of you know money behind this and stuff
Yeah, I think a little bit of both. Obviously, I don't think that anyone expected B&B to become so big, like to the market cap of science that it is today as employees, but I definitely think that there is a level of self-confidence.
confidence that definitely kind of existed across the team where I think everyone was confident that they were putting in the hours. You guys might have seen this like when CZ like really rubbed it in when last time I think there are some cuts at other exchanges and then he was like oh where's
still hiring. Of course, maybe the whole company didn't stay as humble as it maybe first started, but I was pretty confident that the amount of work, the amount of product lines, the amount of user bases and the amount of countries that finance served was just magnitudes more than
other exchanges that we're getting a lot of the spotlight in 2018. So I think there was at least a level of confidence of saying that at that time we were doing more than a lot of people but not getting the recognition. Of course today, like finance, obviously everyone recognizes there is this volume and there is this
size of user base is obviously the listing that people and product can likely cover the most. But I think in the early days when I first joined, I think the trading volume will still maybe like top five to top seven, sometimes on most given days. And so it was actually a
the enjoyable journey to be a part of a team that could kind of go improve itself and climb from outside that top five on some days to becoming number one in trading volume consistently every day. And so I think that that was definitely one piece of the confidence that there was internally.
like if we focus on the things that we worked hard on that eventually people would see the value of that. Of course, I think that some things were quite extreme and that maybe not everyone would be able to structure their compensation packages
such that they could have more upside in BNB. Obviously, a lot of people have bills to pay mortgages, whatever it might be. And so unfortunately, I would say that actually a lot of really hardworking people didn't get the upside that maybe they should have been able to get from helping build the company to be this big.
It's super interesting stuff man, thanks. And then my follow up question is do you have any day or vivid memories of working there where like just basically the most extreme days whether it be up
up or down. Were there any days that you vividly remember where it felt like the office was either on fire or printing money or anything in between just some of your favorite memories working there?
I think one of the most baller moves that ever happened was there was a pretty big hack where Binance I think lost something 7,000 BTC. I'm not sure how quickly this was communicated to the outside, but basically I think once CZ was aware of it internally, he instantly sent a message saying that we would take it as
as a loss and write it off for the company, no users would be affected. And then the marketing team just started writing an announcement, basically on the moment that CZ responded. There was almost no, there was not a meeting meeting to make the decision. It was like users will not get fucked.
is what we're going to do. And then we'd even take a call, just everyone just started doing work to rally around, letting people know that this was the decision. And so I think that was a moment of merit that I would look back to and say, I feel confident that if you speak to
Basically, any finance employee, obviously much can be said about different culture elements. But one thing that I think is very clear is that people internally felt like users should be put first. Of course, obviously some of the allegations inside this paper and other things, I would argue that a lot of employees may be working on.
to every possible kind of decision, but at least in times of crisis is actually very clear that there are actions that everyone could take to try and protect users. And I did feel like that was pretty, I would say, kind of standard. I consider, for example,
our third year anniversary gift of being a finance employee at that time. We actually received AirPods and on the AirPods were engraved with the words user-focused on those AirPods. So I think it was something that was pretty, I was proud of being a part
of in that sense of seeing an ecosystem that at least from the inside, I could at least point to directly things that happened that were not bureaucratic and instead were very clear why we were existing was to try and help users at least inside the scopes that we as employees could control.
4. That's all. 4, man. Calvin, man. Calvin, I have to ask real quick. And where did that start from?
like what was he just like he just threw up the four one day and then it just kind of became a meme right within I got no he obviously tweeted about it and stuff but
Yeah, like where did that start from really?
You mean the four or you mean the four? I think you wrote like some guidelines somewhere and four is just a number of one of these like like don't spread fud UILR kind of thing. And so that
That's what the four references to. I don't remember the exact word, but it was like one of these like CG guidelines to working crypto or something. And number four, something like that. Yeah. So you'll be able to search it later.
for sure Calvin man admittedly this was a meme that happened after I left so this is just public out there not not something I knew I said in play sorry sorry to cut you off for while we
No problem, men. Collins, do you think AI would be implemented on newer exchanges to safeguard user deposits and also to social transparency? If there is a basket of funds that aren't meant to be
touched on the centralized exchange the right and so I'm going to try to withdraw the AI can alert other members of that exchange to alert them that x, y and z entity is trying to withdraw these basket of funds from the treasury.
What do you think that'll be implemented? Because I think that AI would have been useful in something like FTX. And it would have alerted other employees that didn't necessarily have much to do with what SBF was doing at that time. And perhaps
Sorry guys, I'm getting completely spanned by telegram. I apologize for that. But perhaps AI could be implemented with things like exchanges to alerts of nefarious activity. Wanted to know your thoughts on that and then we can touch upon impossible finance for a bit.
for sure. Yeah. So I would say I'm not, I can't speak for FTX, of course, but I would say that actually a lot of other exchanges do have a type of department that I would say is actually not unlike traditional banks as well, but I would call them the risk
teams that exist on many teams. Effectively, they might do some machine learning work or AI work to guess, is this transaction potentially fraudulent or have any other potential impacts? I wouldn't even want to brag about this as something I just
it's particularly does, but that I believe that many platforms should have this and it usually should not be turn offable like it should be something that is always there. I think at Binance we had like emergency protocols so that then we could alert people
people if any particular triggers were ever hit on different departments and such. So I would say that this is probably just reminiscent of what you would expect from a traditional bank where a literal physical bank has some kind of alarms, right?
have these types of measures like a die pack so that people don't, you can easily identify what money was physically stolen from a bank. There's definitely a lot of technology inside most exchanges already. It's just that in a way, your best security is to not also tell people that you have all the security because you
want to get like a hacker to walk directly into your trap, right? You don't want to be too blatant about where you place your security otherwise. It's a little bit easier for any perpetual bad actors to try to avoid them. So I would say that actually I don't think the crypto
anything in the AI side of things or more like preventative measures. If anything, I think we're just going to see more exchanges talk about the fact that they might have these features. But personally, I would say probably by late 2019, I would say that if
If you were a centralized exchange and you didn't have these features, I would be disappointed in you as a centralized exchange. Of course, that's also where I think it's a kind of nice segue to some of the deep, I think, that you and I have chat about before and a lot of the things that we're looking at impossible is obviously not to have any of these central points of failure and be able to focus
focus a lot more on decentralized ecosystems that hopefully we don't need to give so much trust to any particular entity whatsoever. So that's obviously the kind of direction in world I hope we are able to move towards. I know we're not there yet and I think there's still a lot of user frictions and things that make it very difficult
for that to be a reality currently, but that obviously in the long run, I would expect us to be able to kind of overcome some of these types of situations that we see in the current market, like this Binance situation, to hopefully use it as a good impetus to try and get
get more ecosystems to be decentralized. Calvin, and being that impossible does work with some startups. If you can give us a blurb on what impossible finance is, I think we can touch upon some insights that you might have working with these startups.
Yeah, so I guess yeah, impossible is a decentralized incubator and we work with a lot of early stage projects. I would say that given that a lot of teams, I think they kind of need a total package, right? Whether it's some technology side of things, some marketing, obviously,
Not everyone's as good as running Twitter spaces as you guys, right? And getting all the different hosts and guests that you want to bring in. So I do think that there's a little bit of work of both the theoretical side and the practical side of getting projects to be able to be ready
launch and I think that's something that I've been lucky enough to be able to kind of work alongside not just my own team but also lots of community folks. I actually see one of our community members Huang in the chat as well. Somebody that's been very active throughout
I actually see a map from Unile is also here, Chris from DXDow and dose of DeFi. It's been I think a really cool journey to be able to be a part of a lot of ecosystems and kind of see what kind of happens across any of them and see how it empathizes with the environment.
and support any other projects that we bumped into on a day-to-day. Calvin, how is it like working with you start up during the FTX debacle and some things that occurred last summer? What sort of the strategy
that they implement for security reasons to avoid situations like these because a lot of projects actually had their treasuries on these exchanges for for for for essentially for market making right these exchanges would have market makers to run up these projects treasuries
Yeah, I think so I just want to be super transparent as well impossible did also have funds and fx and Unfortunately it was also not because of any of the market making side of things we simply at that time I would say had been more familiar with Alameda and fx given that they use solos would be a
very large find at Binance that we never could have imagined that this could happen and I felt like we as a company also had quite a bit of insight into the company of FTX and was still then we had no clue as you kind of alluded to in some of the
comments that you made earlier as well. It's honestly I think a little bit frustrating as well because obviously we do stand for so much to use centralized stuff but that I think sometimes there is still advantages to centralized exchanges and the simplicity of not having a self-custody and then
in particular for different things such as entities setups and things like that with once you have a regular company. It's still I think not so easy to report fully on chain holdings and so we weren't actually even doing any trade or anything else. We were just holding stable clients and paying out salaries
is it's easier to distribute monthly salaries to employees via our contractors via a centralized exchange. Unfortunately, we were actually blocked from being able to withdraw in time. So that's actually something that I will still kind of feel
about personally, of saying that I don't know why R with draws didn't go through, because we actually did submit many withdrawals at the time. Once we saw some of the on-chain data kind of point towards something, on-tourds happening inside FTX, and we still don't know why. But the
that's obviously another situation for another day. But I would say that in terms of working through product team, working with project teams during that situation, I think it also galvanizes the community and the stance that you might have in working with project teams because I think it's everyone
even if they don't necessarily have funds inside FDX. And so it's how do you try to kind of maintain your community and do more things to help those around you not just kind of think about how you can help yourself. Of course there are a lot of teams that simply, you know, let's say dumped all their tokens or tried to
to exit crypto right as they got hit with the FTX situation. And I think these types of moments tell you who's in it for the right reasons and who's just here for the short term. So maybe it's my eternal optimist and myself, but I do feel like there's always some good
things that can come from any type of event. I just how you try to respond to them. Hey man, man, optimism definitely is the key and the longevity of this game. And also optimism during times of low pain. I remember you were saying something
about an episode of Up Only where Kobe allude to the fact that people oftentimes only get excited in crypto when things are always good when they're super hype and they end up leaving right at the bottom of the bear market and then look
Looking at it as prices recover and then just completely forgetting about it and people will often times have known about crypto for years and years but only participate during the tail end of a bull cycle and what really builds characters sticking through the downturns and
the lulls in complacency times within the crypto space but Calvin Manopologies for that didn't know that impossible had some fun stuck in FTX but I'll go ahead and move on out over to Wozowl. He's had his hand over a while and I understand that we're needing to halfway point.
for the space, but guys if you wouldn't mind retweeting the space, I would appreciate that. We're just talking shop here with Calvin from Impossible Finance and touching upon off things crypto and what he's doing with Impossible and some of his experiences in the crypto space, but Will's Outlook, go ahead and give us your Outlook man.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not too worried I would say, but I think there's gonna be a headwinds personally with what's going on. It's kind of like what Calvin said though, you know, if you stay through the space and you stick through it, then you
you know, you'll it'll work out in the end. Yeah, I just I would think also to kind of the Calvin's point with the what we'll say the scenario of these different platforms being able to identify whether or not, you know, money's being used in the wrong way. I think Coinbase is another one that
does that too as well as a couple other platforms. So I think there are some leaders in the space but you know Binance has been doing it the longest obviously so they have I would say the most data out of everybody in the space when it comes to platforms. So you know overall I'm optimistic. I wish that Binance could listen
more items for US citizens, but I know there's a lot of things that the SEC would consider securities so they're not able to do that. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like, what are your thoughts on other platforms? Like, we'll say something in comparison. Let's talk about something Coinbase compared to Binance.
Is that a question? To be honest, I just don't think it's even on the player level. I think to be honest, these types of kind of rulings and limitations, I do feel it's just going to stime the capabilities of America.
entrepreneurs, the buildings inside crypto. Like I feel like Jesse the Dex was a Kraken CEO as well and I think Brian Armstrong like I respect the way that they've all tried to do things and I do feel like they did try with honest efforts to try to
to adhere fully to all regulations that were presented to them. And then you can clearly see other teams like an FTX or others capture a lot of market share and audience by not necessarily following all the rules. So I feel like a lot of these teams are all just put
tough positions, not necessarily how any of these centralized exchanges might be doing anything good or bad, but that I do feel like regulation, if it's designed in a way, only to limit and restrict the space because it cannot be controlled, I would go so far as to say that
This doesn't sound like the American freedom that I think I grew up being able to understand or learn in the textbooks that I read. This feels a lot more like the types of societies that I think the Western world generally likes to criticize. And it feels quite hypocritical to me.
I do feel maybe I'm a bit controversial on this front, but I do feel like after being able to have the experience to travel a lot of the world in my time working in crypto, I do feel like some of the rose tinted glasses that I have towards the kind of
of quote unquote American dream that myself and I'm sure many of you guys listening have immigrant family backgrounds that kind of chased this American dream. I do feel like these types of limitations just feel like that dream has already kind of closed for a lot of people and I think that's the most disappointing part for me
that I would much rather see the young computer science students that maybe now are the ones that are being mentioned as projects that are labeled as securities here. I think this just scares every possible kid that's a straight-laced kid that wants to do good things in the world.
And I think that's my biggest worry for this type of restriction of legislation that I think at some point if it gets more extreme than I think that the brilliant kids that go to the Harvard's that might use the Stanford's and whatever places, they're never going to want to touch crypto if they see their friends go to jail.
in what mind would you ever want to be the most brilliant guy that stuck in a cell? I think this is almost the worst thing that you could possibly do in terms of encouraging next generations to be able to build and take advantage of the great resources that exist inside the US.
I was really proud to have gone to an amazing public school that gave me such a wide range of education kind of growing up, right? And I definitely felt like even though I joined Binance as a fresh grad, I felt like I had a lot more perspective than a lot of the decision makers in different roles and Binance at that.
time. And I would say that that's something that America currently still has a huge advantage on. But with this type of restrictions of regulation and other issues, safety, whatever it might be, right? I honestly would say, and I'm curious to hear your guys' kind of
perspective on this given many of you still are in the US. But at least to me, I feel like I see more and more expats that have zero desire to want to go back to the US whatsoever because it just doesn't seem like a place that is safe for builders to build. So I think this is more of an attack on our education system.
them more than anything. If you deny your people a way to make money, right, to make ends meet in a fair and distinguishable fashion, at that point, it's an attack on the citizens, but we'll go on to have a look at the
look, see how it's just hand up. Well, is that looking then we're going on over to pain? Go ahead, Will. No, I just wanted to respond. Yeah, no, I completely agree with everything you said there, problem. 100% I agree. But I also agree with the fact that I think that is exactly what they're trying to do. Is they're trying to stifle innovation through regulation?
right and you know while it made sense back in a day when you saw things you know continuously collapse at their collapse at their collapse when you saw businesses or basically individuals you know swindling billions of dollars from people and millions of dollars back then but billions of dollars right now you know swindling that out of people in ways
that were pretty much money laundering and pyramid schemes and stuff like that, then they come in with the regulation, but they over-regulate in a way that's stifles innovation. So I agree with you on that. I would say in the X-pack part though, like there's a two-sided coin with that. One being, yeah, we could say builders,
not getting to be able to build the way they want to build. I would say to being cost of living in the US is probably the other half for a lot of people not wanting to come back once they've made their wealth or been able to create a vision or roadmap towards making wealth. The US moved pretty much from a leader in innovation to
Obviously being coarsed is different, but like if you're not being coarsed and there's basically, you know, incentive there, you want to throw into a shit coin, you want to throw it into a centralized exchange, you want to put it in somebody's pocket, you want to send it to somebody, because I sent out a wall address and said, "Send me money." That's your decision at the end of the day. You've got#
if you're making bad decisions, but that's what the US used to be. It used to be that type of freedom, but now it's turned into, you know, we'll decide what's safe for you. You're not allowed to decide what's safe for you, even though it's your money. The only thing I can say is not safe, and I say this as a Christian audience is also alumni, it seems
school as me. To know that since I've been abroad thanks to having an opportunity to join Minus in the early days, since I've left I think there's been three or four students that have been shot dead on my campus. I don't think that's fucking safe. Part of my language. But yeah, that's kind of the
scary part that I think when you see more and more of this talent just be scared off by all the things and kind of I would say risks that exist as somebody that wants to be just a legitimate hardworking student in the US. I do think this is a pretty disappointing kind of spiral.
that I'm not sure if there's any good ways to try and get out of this type of negative momentum. So Calvin, I'll give you some perspective as far as like the American dream or whatever that you were mentioning earlier. I guess just to tie it into crypto real quick, as far as like I'm not
as pessimistic I would say as American crypto regulation as a lot of people maybe and part of that I guess is because I live in Texas and thankfully Greg Abbott has been super super open to things like BTC mining and he's like openly encouraged the whole industry to come here and we saw
lot of Chinese miners like migrate here back in 2021 when they banned that whole thing initially. And yeah, so I mean, I live in Austin and there's tons of teams building like there's really truly a bustling culture here as far as crypto.
that if you want to get tapped into it, it's not that hard. There's meetups all the time. You can go and do events constantly. It's super fun in Miami too. I feel like there's a great scene there as well. I think it's just a matter of time as far as if the
like if the regulators come in and they make it super, super hard for builders, then yeah, I probably, you know, I probably wouldn't doubt that they'll go and migrate to some other countries and stuff, but as far as like the American dream goes, I guess, you know, I think it's still alive.
I think you just have to work a lot harder to achieve the same things. For example, my dad, he moved to Austin in the 90s and he wanted to play in a band and he worked part-time at a grocery store and used to find that he didn't need to work any harder as far as
his, um, as far as like, you know, his rent was like 300 bucks. And, you know, I feel like as far as quality of life, you have to work a lot harder to maintain the same things. But the flip side to that is that I feel like our generation has infinitely more tools to make money than having
I think if you really want to leverage your skill set, the internet is just such a powerful tool that can't be understated that they didn't have. And so I would say yes, like I would say the difficulty now is greater just for the average person, but I would argue that the upside is higher.
Yeah, I actually think so to your point I actually think you mentioned both Austin and Miami and I feel like these are both like growing I would say not just crypto, but even just tech and entrepreneurship hubs So definitely I do feel like the vibe is different across
across different places. But I do feel like I would expect a country that is a kind of world leader to have more than just a handful of cities that feel like they're in the uptrend of kind of builder adoption and so on and so forth.
But totally agree on the fact that there are definitely some interesting things that happen happening. I think the China Minor one is an interesting one as well. There's I think from my perspective, sitting in Asia and seeing a lot of these players, I actually also kind of feel like...
Those guys weren't necessarily I would say well protected in terms of their industry either And so it's actually good that they were able to have a chance to go elsewhere To build but that I see that not so much actually as a policy
win of the US but rather a policy loss of China and other places that previously had a lot more mining. So I kind of feel like if in the first place China just wasn't so draconian about some of these things either then that wouldn't have even been a relatively
it's kind of opportune. So obviously I've been studied politics or anything from a country perspective but mainly what I want to be able to see is obviously more genuine people wanting to build cool stuff. That's why I'm really excited to be on this
you guys because I think it's always rare to see folks that want to put in this much effort to learn about what's happening across the space, not just building just quote unquote just another media platform, but trying to be involved in a lot of different things that happen across the space and embed yourselves to be as native
of as possible. I think that's something I respect a lot. And I think that's what I think should be the kind of merit that earns, I think, the respect that you guys have already started to earn in Cycrypto. And I think that's kind of the way the world should be. At least that's the type of world I want to live in.
Thank you so much for the kind words sir that means a lot to us. We'll go ahead and see you. Thank you man. Thank you for the words bro. We're coming here. Well that will go ahead brother. Now we'll pass on over the Tom's Nurex.
Yeah, I just want to point out like I don't I don't think that the government specifically is going after smaller or mid-tier people I don't think they'll go after developers to be honest with you I think I think the government's overall target is to create I would say disruptions into on ramps in the crypto
to create disruptions into ease of access to crypto. You can't destroy crypto, so the only thing you can do is disrupt the on-ramps and the access. C-E-X is one of the easiest entry points for a lot of new people. I would argue,
I would really argue this that it's almost criminal in a sense for the government to put, I would say, US citizens funds at risk by kind of going about this the direction that they're heading, right? But that that parts never looked at from a government perspective is that, you know, they're talking about
protecting citizens, but they're actually harming them through bringing these allegations out without doing formal investigations to prove the factors of what they're talking about. Because at the end of the day, the way I look at it is they don't have access to finances books. They can request access to finances books, but to accuse
criminal charges before knowing that there's charges available by looking at their books, I think it's almost criminal to the actual investor that has money on their platform. So I just want to throw it out there like I think that's the direction they're heading. I don't think there's a way to go after developers specifically unless there's a tax situation. I don't think there's a way to go after investors specifically.
And I think like the lower tier you are, the sky's the limit. But the higher you get, kind of like where finances are, you kind of get capped, right? And that's exactly what the US is doing to them. They're trying to cap them from growth. At least that's the way I see it, from a bigger perspective.
Yeah, I think I would generally agree with all of those points. And I think whether or not it's good or bad to cap big players. So I think that's a different philosophical discussion for another day. I just think that for me, I actually don't really care what rules are created. I just want those rules to be transparent.
And I think that's also my gripe towards a lot of the legal side of things that's happening across this whole sector, not just in the US in particular, but in other places. But I'll just kind of give a comment of a region that I've been quite interested in.
of Southeast Asia. In particular, I personally think that just to kind of illustrate what is possible in a more positive crypto attitude, the largest bank in Thailand actually made quite a few early stages
investments into data providers, KYC providers, institutional custody, lots of other things that would help clean up the space for the talent ecosystem. And that they even already have a crypto incubator where they actually already have one project successful.
exit from their startup incubator to one of the aforementioned data providers that they made an investment into. So when I think you create an environment where it's okay to do crypto, you can have a lot of the biggest players in a country actually get behind something and bring their
brightest talent to try to build things that really do protect users. I think that is the extreme kind of, I would say, more embracing crypto type of attitude that I've seen some countries already take. And I don't expect anything less of a country
feel like the US is the way I would play it. Calvin, I had a quick question for you. So where do you see crypto going in the future just in general? Do you see as being a thing that we are all using for everyday payments between countries perhaps or
like do you see it as something that's going to, you know, perhaps your place, Venmo and, you know, Apple Pay or possibly be integrated with them in the future. Or do you think it's just going to be just this market that people like to trade Ponzi schemes on and, you know, they keep around
similar playbooks as far as like what's being developed in the space. I'm curious as to like whether you think that you know I feel like there's two sides of crypto there's like the quote unquote in it for the tech people and then there's um you know the people is trying to make money and
I personally am leaning towards the casino side of things becoming more popular rather than the utility side of things, but I'm bullish regardless as far as the growth of crypto, but I'm just curious to see your thoughts of what you think and where you see the industry heading in general.
Yeah, fantastic question. I think actually my time in Asia has given me a lot more perspective on both of your kind of points to this question. The first just to answer like the payments side or the useful info that things like
them or Apple Pay have given to regular users. I've seen that every country, I would say nowadays, has something like this that has gotten some level of adoption and users and it's clear that this type of stuff is just useful for people, right? That's why it exists and that's why it should exist.
That being said, I would say that the payments use cases, hopefully just only one use case as you kind of mentioned. And I've seen it from, you know, let's say the 10 cent and we chat and all you pay
a kind of domination in China in terms of their payment systems as well. I do think that payments are very good in trouble. So, letting people inside a certain country be able to transact amongst each other is quite better, even in the last
5 to 10 years, but that cross-border payments is still a pain. And I do see crypto still being incredibly useful for fully permissionless transfers between different ecosystems and different countries. I do think that's going to be very important. Business as you
mentioned, or I forgot who mentioned earlier, about just more opportunities for our generation. I think everyone in the world is now a lot more global and that that also should mean that the transfer of money and transfer of ideas should be correlated in the sense that more ideas
will be shared globally and more money. We'll likely need to be transacted globally and I see crypto still has something that's an important feature for that. I'll say as an example, given that I'm not in the US these days, I don't usually have a US phone number.
And then that means that it's really hard for me to SMS verify for most Financial products even my own banks and other things that I in theory own Bank accounts I own and it's actually very difficult for me to Log in with two factor authentication or other things because they don't even support like Google authenticator, right?
So I do feel like there's still a lot of things that traditional payments and traditional tech still need to figure out in order to be able to do cross-border payments and more cross-border access to tier or money, whereas crypto from day one already has this built-in. For better words, maybe when