Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
BTC down to $85k
Recorded: March 28, 2025 Duration: 1:42:15Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, key topics included the decline of major cryptocurrencies like ETH and BTC, the unveiling of a draft stablecoin bill, and strategic partnerships such as the SAFE Foundation's potential acquisition of 23andMe. The conversation also highlighted trends in market dynamics, the importance of community engagement, and the evolving landscape of trust and reputation in Web3.
Full Transcription
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the modern market where every day we discuss everything
to do with the modern market. That is the crypto market, the NFT market, and how to make some
or a lot of money on the internet. Loaded up for discussion today, we've got ETH crashing
down beneath 2K again, down 5% as BTC is also down to 85K. We've got the draft stablecoin
bill getting revealed. Got some key takeaways to share what direction the stablecoin bills are moving.
And finally, we've got the SAFE Foundation exploring a takeover of Bankrupt 23andMe in the boldest Deci bet yet.
Very interesting direction SAFE Foundation is taking.
We'll tell you what you've got to know from that perspective.
And as usual, we've got a general set of takes on the crypto and NFT market and general market rotations and where
liquidity is flowing. I've got legendary Bread and David, investment partner at Silvermine Capital
with us today. We are ready to get into it. But just a reminder, friends, before we do nothing
that we say here as financial advice, this market is incredibly risky and we don't know anything for sure so please proceed with caution and exercise your own
judgment with that out of the way it is friday it is the 28th of march david welcome back with
us today how are you doing what are you up to where are you in the world thanks guys yeah um
i'm actually in cape town at the moment for a friend's
wedding but there is a solana conference on today which i'll be going to after this so nice check
out what the vibes are like over here and see it's good i think solana are really expanding right
they're putting on a lot of these events globally trying to reach different communities build out
developers in in different nations so it's always interesting to come to these places,
see what the sort of local communities are like and the excitement and these sort of things.
So I'll be able to report back on that.
Which way around was it?
Did you go to Cape Town for the Solana conference and then your friend's wedding was happening as well?
Or was it that you go to the wedding and you're profiting off the conference?
I'd love to say the former, but it go to the wedding and you're profiting off the conference i'd love to say the former but it was definitely the wedding and then there happened to be a solana conference i wish i
was that d-gen but unfortunately not there's probably something to go to wherever you are
in the world at this point um quick quick question on that david i'm kind of curious from a investment
perspective you guys obviously focus on pre-seed
and seed stage products you do run some liquid stuff too how much how much um how much importance
do you attach to finding these places in real life and just kind of catching the vibe and seeing
whether one ecosystem may be more vibrant than another because i remember back in i think it was
one of the break points a long time ago before
Seoul went on the huge run.
Everyone came back from that conference, like hyper bullish.
And suddenly there was this like explosion in the Solana ecosystem.
Do you have a thought there from like a pure investment perspective when you're kind of
evaluating stuff on the ground?
Yeah.
And it's, it's hard, right, to get a full picture of that from just going to little events and
sampling.
But a great signal is if there are loads of events going on that you can see these ecosystems
are doing and they're well attended, which you can obviously photos are pretty deceiving,
but videos or whatever, that sort of content, it definitely shows as a great metric.
Like, as we all know users of the
chain mind share of the chain attention of the chain let alone the actual developers on the chain
are the keys to like success within these within these ecosystems so i would say having those
events and seeing that obviously a lot of it can just be like treasury funded and and dressed up
so it's not the be all or end all but not having anything
like that is definitely a sign of like okay like is there actually does anyone actually care about
this because as we know online metrics and chain metrics are so easy to spoof it's harder to spoof
in real life excitement and being there and speaking to people and developers
interesting um yeah i think that makes a lot of. I'm curious to get some of your general
thoughts on the market in a little bit as well. But we're going to kind of hit the headlines a
bit sooner today, move through a bit faster. As I mentioned, or as I just tweeted, we're delighted
to have Serpin, the founder of Ethos Network, with us joining a little bit towards the end of the
show. So we've got that interview coming up. It should be a great conversation of how trying to measure and account for trust in the Web3 universe where that is a
pretty important commodity. So we're going to be getting into that conversation a little bit later.
Let's get straight into the headlines so we can get you up to speed with everything that's been
happening in the past 24 hours, starting with the price action we have. Apologies, guys, a bit of a red day today. We've got Bitcoin
down a couple of percent at 84K. We've got ETH down almost 6%, losing 2Ks down at 1.9.
XRP is down 6% to 220. BNB is down a percent to 620. And Solana is down 5% also to $130.
B is down a percent to 620.
And Solana is down 5% also to $130.
I'm guessing the meme coin side of things is probably not much better given that.
And you'd be correct to think so.
Doge is down 8% to 18 cents.
Pepe is down 8.
Trump is down 9.
Bonk is down 8.
XPX is down 10.
Fartcoin is down 13.
Whiff is down 10.
Pengu is down 5. Some of this stuff is still green
though on the week. Remember there was this big bounce in memes across the board. So it's not like
it's given up all of those gains. Pengu, for example, is up 4% on the week, down 5% today.
Fartcoin is up 38% on the week, but down 13% today. So not quite given up all of the gains
of the last week or so, but another red day across
the board, I think it's fair to say. Getting into the main headlines themselves, as we mentioned,
Legendary will touch a little bit later. Just on a quick note on where we think we are in the
market, it's down 5%, whereas Bitcoin is down to 85. The draft stablecoin bill has been revealed.
We've got some key takeaways there. For example, no yield bearing stables will be allowed and there will be a requirement to be
backed by cash, treasury bills, or other liquid assets. Also draw a bit of a distinction between
the stable act and the genius act, which are the two kind of stablecoin related bills that are
being worked on. And then finally, we've got the safe foundation exploring a takeover of bankrupt
23andMe, the boldest D site bet yet. bread's going to be breaking down what on earth that means um for d
sigh and how the blockchain is going to be integrated into this uh company uh getting into
the nft side of things laundry is there anything we need to know from the past 24 hours i'm gonna
keep you short because not really um honestly most
of the nfts are following the market and correcting down as it has been going down pudges falling under
10 eth 9.85 eth floor down five and a half percent little pudges down even more down 10
surprisingly though uh board apes they did go we said that above 14 eth and they're holding up
pretty strongly they're still at 14.3 ETH,
basically almost unchanged from yesterday and still up 14% over the week. But apart from that,
most of the collections have been following ETH on its way down.
Good stuff. Getting into the rest of the roundup, BlackRock's Global Allocation Fund disclosed a
$47.4 million allocation to Bitcoin ETF shares.
We had Hyperliquid refunds, refunding jelly positions at a price advantageous to traders,
except certain flagged addresses.
We addressed that kind of big drama yesterday on the show quite sufficiently.
We had Sony L2 Sonium announcing partnership with Animoca Brands.
Doodles announces DreamNet.
This is something to do with their token,
a protocol that empowers communities
to create interconnected story universes with AI
while capturing the value they create.
A lot of buzzwords there to the AI,
the creator economy.
Very interesting trying to make their token
have some value with a strong vision there for
dreamnet uh tapu wizards sold out at around 0.31 bitcoin in auction i believe those are going the
secondary market for those will be starting a little bit later today that is not they're not
trading at the moment so we'll see where they come out later premier uh ordinal in the bitcoin
ecosystem now bonk acquires the exchange art platform that's
pretty interesting move in the solana ecosystem and then also if you were trading this is you
know depending on your meme coin activity days jupiter will be airdropping to ape pro users
ape pro is like the equivalent of photon but the one that jupiter owns and uh so there's a little airdrop
for people who are using ape pro as their kind of assisted uh trading platform uh on solana so
check that out if you were active over there that's the web to round up to get to see with
everything else going on um brett maybe coming to you first anything catching your attention there what are you what
are you interested in uh nothing at all i'm still absorbed in the gibbification of the entire
timeline and all the knockoffs of that like uh i just saw pics on chain just did a bunch of ads
for different blockchains and what that looked like but then also like i just dropped a link
in our chat so you guys can see it there There's another one that was kind of interesting about,
this is just Twitter broadly, generally, and for CMO people.
And it was from Hasib at Dragonfly talking about characters that you play on Twitter or how you can successfully play a character on Twitter
and how you should perceive yourself in this environment,
like if you are someone to grow.
So it's just saying basically that like, hey, you come to twitter and if you're trying like you're a founder
if you're whatever you should identify the role that twitter is asking you to play and then you
should magnify and exaggerate that role um it's not about like being you it's about being the
character that you were selected for um i actually disagree with
it pretty heavily i commented on that um i like he's saying this like he's like i like as himself
as an example he's like you don't see me posting travel pictures you don't see me posting like
life updates like my role is not that my role is i'm assuming his perception is like to be this like
wizard grand like meister guider of the universe's hand of conversation
right um but i you know i comment on this it's like man like i'm still huge on authenticity
in this place and i think that's actually what resonates a lot with people even like i think
i've seen i've done it myself and i've seen other people attempt it right like if you try to play a
character that is not you it fucking sucks like it it sucks and if it's grading it's annoying it's it it's work right it's a task for
you um and if you're not someone that likes playing roles right like it's just even heavier for you
uh so yeah yeah i i disagree with it but it was a good conversation a lot of people actually
you know raw rotted like oh be powerful be bold be whatever it, motherfucker, if you're not that, don't be that.
Like, be you, and I think that's what's going to resonate a lot, especially in the AI digital realm.
That's a very specific reason why I agree with you so much, Brett, and very much disagree with Haseeb.
And it is to do with AI, because AI can, up to now, basically not be itself, not be authentic, because
it doesn't really have
reached that AI level to do
that. But what it can do very well
is play a character. And it can
be the grand master,
the wizard, whatever you want it to LARP
as. But it can't be itself, and that's something
that only humans can do. So if you want to play
a character, you don't actually need to do it yourself.
You can have an AI do that. you will have a hard time to distinguish yourself from um basically an artificial intelligence leaning into its own role so
that is actually the major major reason i would disagree with hasib's take
yeah i actually was very curious to hear your thoughts but because obviously
you're i mean mean, you've
built up your account in such a significant way, leaning into, as you said, like authenticity.
And I think one of the challenges with that is, sorry, not one of the challenges, what
you said, one of the challenges of trying to accept the role that is being given to
you is that you take, kind of takes your agency away.
Like how are you supposed to know what role is being given to you?
Surely it is a reflection of the things that you do and the things that you say. And then people
kind of decide how they want to pigeonhole you maybe. So I appreciate that at some point in time,
after you have, you know, put out a certain amount of content about yourself, kind of found your
voice, maybe then people start to categorize you. And then maybe it's worth leaning into that
specialism that you've kind of created for yourself rather than changing over and over again that's where maybe i think
what he might be suggesting which is well how i would how i would amend it is find your voice or
find the thing that you are passionate about the things that you do want to express and then after
that maybe don't flit around between you know know, wildly between, I don't know,
Deci and then DeFi and then AI and then whatever and whatever and whatever,
you know, try and find a niche and specialize and then, you know,
but do find some other things that you're interested about as well.
So, yeah, I take your points there.
Anything else?
No, nothing for me.
It's still just heads down doing mega stuff.
David, curious to get your thoughts
before we get into the headlines.
Like from an investment perspective,
I think since we last spoke maybe two weeks ago,
where were we at about two weeks ago?
Probably not a dissimilar point to now, right?
For all of the
jumping around and emotional roller coasters that people are going on in the timeline, maybe your
being on the show is actually a nice point to check in. How different were things two weeks
ago? If it's exactly the same, what torture are people doing to themselves in that period of time?
How are you viewing this still volatile period? Well,
actually, it's not a volatile period in the sense that the price is probably no different to what
it was two weeks ago. But this perception of volatility that could be coming in at any point
in time, how are you guys looking at it? Yeah, nothing's changed from two weeks ago, a month ago.
I think it's again, like we've spoken about before
in terms of like the timeframes people are working towards.
And a lot of people on the timeline
and potentially listeners of the show are so used to
or have been used to playing in these meme coin cycles,
which the timeframes of a meme coin,
if you're playing them the way you probably should be
playing them are very, very short, right? Two weeks is an age in meme coin if you're playing them the way you probably should be playing them are very very short right two weeks is an age in meme coin trading when you're investing in pre-seed seed
stage projects whether that's through echo syndicates or at a venture fund your time frames
are so so much longer and and even these days even longer than they used to be in this space so
like nothing changes from our perspective.
On the liquid side, I think it's honestly so important now
for everyone to realize where we are in terms of the market
versus if you've been around since 2020, how different it is.
A lot of people I speak to on the retail side
or whether it's in the Kingdom Ventures community
or things like that, you sometimes see people holding onto their bags
that they've had for four years,
just with an assumption that at some point
these are going back to either where they were
or up 5X, 10X, and it's just a waiting game.
That may not be correct anymore.
Like that is something that I think
could really change this cycle.
And we're gonna have these concentrated markets of meme coin mania, AI agent, maybe dino coins.
And then the new runners, the mega reads of the world, the monads, the movements, the barachains.
Your old coins may not get the love.
In 2020, it was like buy any old coin.
We're making money.
It's just how much.
Not sure that's the case anymore.
So I would say from that perspective, if that's the thinking,
maybe it's time to like recheck in and check your portfolio
and kind of think it's not just about being passive anymore.
And I think like the safest is obviously having a couple of the majors,
having with the majority, having a barbell with some memes,
if you want to play that on the short term,
just to keep busy and feel like you're involved.
But patience is the name of this game now, I think and just being being aware of what's going on not over trading i feel like a part of me just died
i'm sorry like i had like i had to just let go of something that like i'm from class of 2017 right so
like i i i remember i distinctly remember just like having that emotion
or that feeling like don't worry dude like at some point like the pool is going to slosh back
to your side of the pool like your side of the tub and your price can come up and then just get
off then right like that's going to happen pool's too big now right the pool might be too big right
now and like i'm i don't know i don't know that i have any positions in like these i'm totally out
of like the the major dino coins and like some of these old super ones but like yeah like i I don't know that I have any positions in like these. I'm totally out of like the major dino coins and like some of these old super ones.
But like, yeah, like I don't think I've ever had to like confront that emotion that I used to have and say like, OK, like I have to I have to like recalibrate my my like some like a seed in my brain like that.
It's no longer I have to put it to sleep.
It's done.
It's like now that's gone.
But I've never had to actually let it go.
So thank you.
And I hate you. And look, I'm not saying it won't happen, but everything's about probabilities,
right? Especially in investing. Yeah. Brett needs help selling his bags anyway. So if we just tell
him that he won't do anything about it for two weeks anyway. So that's not two years. Like,
you know, that's the part I'm having to deal with is like that the
two-year portion of me is like fuck like some of those guys are not looking great i think that's
probably fair um one other important question david that i had for you is like this liquid versus um
you know please you know you operate on both sides of mine, but are you noticing, because we actually noticed this
on the deal flow side as well. This is the key question for me as an investor at the moment.
Are you noticing any like urgency from teams that probably should have launched already
and are like trying to get out, but the market is obviously not as good as what it was I mean
to be honest I don't know 100% how teams have been thinking about this the market has allegedly
not been good enough for 6 to 12 months to 18 months even when it was good so I'm not entirely
certain that people are evaluating the market appropriately but for whatever reason now people
think this is much worse than it was two months ago and I think they are correct in thinking that
are you noticing any urgency or any almost any urgency in the deal flow where it's like okay
well on the liquid side we need some help when these tokens launch uh versus you know new teams
coming to market and do you have any preference on that yeah so i guess there's a few few things
there one i agree with you in terms of like when the market was ripping, but again, it was ripping in certain areas, right? And if you look at like the general altcoin market, which a lot of these teams are launching into, it was always pretty bleak. So it was always, every time in history, right? It's like Bitcoin runs, ETH runs, altcoins runs, and everyone kind of waiting for that waterfall to happen which which just didn't so teams were obviously waiting for that slightly better market and now it's a worse market
so you're seeing so many teams holding back which are now you're in a situation i think we talked
about it last year b check like q3 is going to be like a crazy amount of launches we're now going
into q2 next week and it's the next year and it's like most of those teams are still waiting so that's a bit of an issue but
obviously like the strongest teams
will still
do well especially from like
pre-exceed stage levels and that's the name
of the game like we discussed two weeks ago
it's normal venture
is you only expect a few to be those
winners and the rest either trend to
zero or you break even.
So that's the nature of venture investing. On the liquid side, we're starting to hear more and more
about deals where teams are getting liquid funds in to buy X amount on launch over the course of
a few weeks or months and getting kickbacks, right? Like how you know about those or how you see
those, you can't really on chain. It's super hard. So, but there are teams doing that. And to be honest with you,
like they kind of have to, we tell most teams, like part of your strategy now has to have to be,
to get liquid funds, to be investing on you post launch. So that there's a, there's a conflict
there, right? Because everyone wants to launch at super high fdv um but liquid fund doesn't want
to invest at a high fdv hence the reason why they get these kickbacks um so there's so many like
dynamics going on like behind the scenes so i always try and tell like retail investors it's
like you need to know the game you're playing especially buying things straight at launch
because there's like there's things going on behind the scenes that you're not aware of. So it's not a perfectly open and free market as you would hope.
Um, and we don't really, we don't do stuff like that on the liquid side, our liquid
side is much more like Delta neutral strategies, like farming, yield stuff, liquidity provisioning
versus like direct directional bets on, on alt coins.
Um, because it's so hard to know what's going on there.
That's super helpful because I think that's something we've been talking about a little bit on the show
because that's what people have been talking about in general, that that type of stuff exists.
So it's very helpful for people to know that that's happening along with that other conversation
we had the other day on the show with the market maker conversation,
the stuff that kind of came out with the market makers that were kicked off finance,
which were
connected to movement and realistically probably operating across the board in different projects
in that way so super helpful to have that color as part of that conversation um sticking on the
markets then let's maybe have a bit of a general reflection here. Ledge, you've got this headline.
ETH's down 5%.
And I don't necessarily want to talk about ETH all the time
because I guess we're kind of recovering ETH maxis maybe.
But it's down more than everything else.
Do you want to place this in the context of where we are in the general market?
Yeah, absolutely.
The market is so, so bearish that even the YouTube comments
are talking about gym routines and
supplements and even funky is part of that conversation the last person who i would have
expected to join the gym routine convos instead of the um up into the right market talk but all
the jokes aside taking a quick look at the market there's a couple things that are
applying quite some pressure on both bitcoin and ETH. On the one hand, we had the conversation yesterday on the car tariffs, which are to be
introduced on April 2nd. But that's not the only thing that is coming in terms of tariffs. There's
going to be some more global reciprocal tariffs coming on April 2nd as well. And that has impacted
the stock market quite, quite strongly, both the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is down yesterday, as well as it's
down on the pre market. But even more importantly, if you take a look at Asia, Asian stocks are down
across the board, all the indices are moving down anywhere between 0.6 and even 2%, almost 2% for
the Nikkei. And then on top of that, we are waiting today for the US core PC inflation
figures, that is the personal consumption expenditures. And it currently looks like
that month over month, it is expected to rise by 0.3% and be at 2.7% year over year in February.
And as a result of these higher core inflation than expected, the market is once
again more bearish on the Fed lowering rates and still holding rates at the same level at the next
FOMC meeting in May. And all of that together is not only applying pressure downwards on the stock markets, but clearly also impacting the crypto majors as well.
Very nice.
Very nice extra, very nice summary there, Legendary.
Appreciate that.
Coming straight to you, David,
what's your outlook on the markets at the moment?
I think you're pretty well positioned to have a thought here.
Q2, outlook, Q3, Q4, what are your thoughts?
Yeah, like short term,
and when I say short term,
I'm talking like Q3, Q4,
versus like the next couple of weeks.
Very important distinction.
Yeah, yeah.
It's unknown, right?
Like there's so much uncertainty
with what Trump's gonna do,
tariffs here, tariffs there,
the general policy and stuff like that and macro rules the world and especially like crypto um so it's
hard to really know because i don't trump probably doesn't even know and unfortunately he's kind of
the dictator of the markets at the moment um but i do believe like the long-term plan
and their plan is to obviously just get this debt refinance, get rates low, and then start easing.
Whether that happens in Q4, Q1 next year, I don't know.
But I would bet with a 90% plus probability that happens somewhere in 2026.
So in that medium term timeframe, and when I'm thinking cycles, if that even exists anymore,
or the next three years, I think we go to a very good place in the overall markets and
the crypto markets.
I just think the old school cycle of, okay, this is the halvening.
This is what we're following.
This is 2025, et cetera, may be broken or may be delayed or whatever that may be because
of this uncertainty that we're going to have this year.
But 2026 looks pretty exciting I think okay um interesting so I guess what do you think the
damage is in 2025 then so I think it is becoming more and more consensus to just want to push out
when things are going to be good because they can't see it around the corner what's the damage
in 25 like is it we stay where we are we chop or do we you know do you think there's further hits or you
think it's just related to the tariffs and the administration and basically whatever the
administration does will directly impact yeah it's it's super hard to say there's a lot of variables
right we're seeing institutional adoption across the board of our industry but a lot of that
adoption is coming through things like stable coins, which doesn't necessarily
impact your altcoin bags, right?
So it's hard.
The industry is getting adopted.
Bitcoin is being more widely accepted as a store of value or whatever you want to classify
it as.
So all those metrics are good, right?
But most of the headlines you're seeing are always pretty good from the general crypto thesis but then that's paired with very negative macro and
that macro could get pretty choppy and pretty down how far it can go down it depends how aggressive
the u.s become um but you have to remember look zoom out of the stock market as well right that
thing only goes one way and like you any dips are worth worth buying so it's
going to rebound how aggressive that is and how quick that is and when that happens with the
plethora of stuff we're seeing coming out and the positivity for crypto that creates an unbelievable
cast at some point whenever that happens now i'm not a trader so i don't really care i just just
buy and this this is personally not even professionally
just just keep buying the majors um when you get the signal that an alt season comes start rotating
in um that's kind of how i how i view it appreciate it man um interesting insights as you say i think
it's challenging to call precisely but damn YouTube comments getting bearish today, feeling, feeling pretty bearish in the comments. I wonder if it's a counter counter signal, um, in the comments.
Um, right. But you didn't, you didn't mention stable coins a lot. That leads us quite nicely
into the second headline for today on the draft stable coin bill. This is the news that the draft,
the stable coin bill act stable coin act was released yesterday. This is pretty important because obviously this is one of the main things which people are holding up as how our industry is kind of adopting crypto and it's being pushed as one of the most important things that the states want to get sorted so that crypto can be more regulated and do business, be ready for business.
and do business, be ready for business.
Key takeaways were the following.
And remember, this is just a draft.
So this is not set in stone just yet.
We have no yield bearing stables.
We've got bank credit unions and non-banks
being able to issue stable coins.
They must be fully backed by cash or treasury bills
or other liquid assets.
States can certify their own,
but they must exceed the federal standard.
We've actually heard, I think it was Wyoming who are going to be issuing their own one, and there'll be no algorithmic stables
for two years. So probably pretty sensible legislation there. Just in terms of the two
acts that are taking place at the same time, you've got the stable act, which is this one,
which is focusing on enhancing transparency and accountability for dollar backed stable coins.
And that's kind of targeting payment stable coins like USDT or USDC.
In contrast, the genius act, which cleared the Senate banking committee
earlier in March with by path by bipartisan support took a slightly different
approach establishes a dual regulatory framework, a stable coin issuers with
over $10 billion in market cap for under federal oversight, stablecoin issuers with over 10 billion dollars in market cap fall
under federal oversight while smaller issuers can operate under the state supervision mirroring
federal standards so that's when you kind of hear these two things being spoken about that's the kind
of small distinction there um i'd say the key reaction there has been some key reaction i think
the founder of defiama was asking the question
out loud, excluding lobbying by Tether and Circle to maintain their position and avoid a race to
zero. What are some valid reasons to forbid passing yields to users? This is why stablecoins
are the best business in the world, right? They can hold your money and they're not going to give
you anything for it. If you want yield, you've got to go and put it in arva you've got to go and do things with it in crypto but traditionally even though
banks don't give you very much for holding your money they still give you something and so stable
coin issuers get to keep all of that yield uh to themselves as things stand so the question was
you know what's what's stopping it uh kobe actually replied to this and said banks would literally just go to zero um with the idea being that money would just flow into crypto because you're still
going to get start getting like real proper yield whereas i mean i think the bank yield at the
moment is especially if it's just in a normal account sitting there getting almost nothing
um i think my take on this is that the point is, you know, this whole system, whether people like it or not, is not designed to usurp the current system.
The point is to extend the hegemony of the dollar.
So stable coins are not going to be used to make sure there's lots of, sorry, they are going to be used to make sure there's lots of demand for treasuries and they will not be interfering with banks' power.
So no, they're not going to do things which put
that status quo in jeopardy um i think that's that's the reality that people are going to have
to contend with yes on some level the spirit of crypto is to like become more bankless and
want to do all this stuff by yourself but it's not going to come at the cost of the banks i don't
think um curious for your perspectives here, Legendary, what are you
thinking? Then maybe come back to you, David, then Brad will come to you for the say stuff.
Yeah, I think it's a pretty sensible act, and I very much agree with that line of thought. The
point is not to have max yield going on and attacking the banks like that. Plus, I think
then it also would make it a bit harder to not view it as a security
of sorts. The thing that I've also been wondering is by that definition, what this implies for
Athena, which isn't really a stable coin, it's a synthetic dollar. And again, you said algo,
stable coins, not before the next two years are over.
The price of Athena is down 12% over the last 24 hours, but I don't think that this allows for any meaningful conclusion, given that ETH is down more than 6% now.
And all the other alts have moved down as well so i think we will have to watch that a bit more closely over the next week or so to see if the market thinks this should have a negative impact on ethena or if that
doesn't matter good question that's a good point i hadn't uh thought of that uh david what are your
thoughts and then funky has his hand raised we'll go straight to him yeah i think like obviously
this is this is good overall i think the yield bearing point is interesting like obviously
everyone's seen how profitable tether has become as a business right and all they do is hold treasuries
and issue a dollar on chain represented against that the question is always why does the user of
that not get that yield versus the company and obviously tether don't want to give that up but
you would always think over time with competition that that would change,
and then you as the holder. And that's different from the Athena model in terms of doing the long
short stuff. It's just literally passing back the treasury yield, which this bill states can
be the backing. So then it's a case of, as an end user or as a person, most people hold cash
versus treasuries because it's more complicated, it's liquid you can't use them day to day if surely the best solution is having this fully liquid on-chain treasury short-term
treasury bond that can be traded one for one and you're earning the yield for so how this develops
over time i'm not sure but i would imagine for me that the best end product is almost a liquid
one-to-one stable treasury bill that you are earning a yield on and can be almost
substituted for cash. Interestingly, I think Athena have, so Athena have the USDE, but they've
also got USDTB, which I think is done via securitize and that's supposed to be treasury
bills. I need to check how, like whether that's the yield, whether you actually get that yield
in a liquid way or whether, I don't know know you redeem it some other time but i think that product basically exists so
that's something to double click on i think um funky welcome to the stage my friend what's your
take here on the stablecoin act and what is going on as we kind of move towards adoption there? GM, hopefully you guys can hear me okay.
Beautifully.
I'm coming.
Perfect.
I'm coming fresh with the alpha
from this week's Blockchain Association
monthly member meeting.
Leak the signal chats.
Leak the signal chats.
Everyone else is.
Yeah, we probably had like a good 20 minutes on this.
So a couple of things that people should be aware of.
First and foremost, the White House is effectively calling the BA offices nearly every single day. They're getting messages and phone calls about this legislation that's moving through. So the members of the BA are going to have significant impact on what this is actually going to the full outcome of this particular bill. Now, in the case of the Stable Act, yes, I think it's the one that prohibits Algo stablecoins.
But if I'm not mistaken, the Genius Act does not have a take on that at all.
And that's the Senate companion bill.
The next, I think April 2nd, they are going to have a Financial Services Committee markup,
and they are already
fielding comments from blockchain association members. So there are dedicated member working
groups who is one specifically on Staplecoins with some very, very big names who take part in
these member working groups. They will have the first take at the bill language and be able to
offer comments and suggestions for those markups. The one concern
that a lot of people are expressing right now, especially on the Senate side with the Genius Act,
is because, of course, everybody's favorite, Senator Elizabeth Warren, is one of the minority
ranking members on that committee in the Senate version, and they're worried about sort of AML
overreach when it comes to stable coins.
So there's a lot of moving pieces right now that are happening behind the scenes.
However, because to your point about this really is all about continuing the hegemony
of the US dollar and proliferating it throughout the world on different rails, they are very
motivated to get this done before they go to the first recession in
August. So they think it's very, very doable that we're going to see these bills, both the
Genius and Stable Act, move quickly through both chambers, then get to the point where they will
have some sort of reconciliation. And before they take their leave for the summer in August,
that we will have stablecoin legislation in the United States.
So that's kind of the current alpha
and everything that's been happening behind the scenes
is just adding a little bit more context to the conversation.
Love it, man.
I appreciate the additional context.
I think as you maybe alluded to,
it does sound like the administration is trying to move.
The word I keep remembering is just at tech speed. That's what sax has been saying a lot in a variety of
contexts uh brett did you want to come in there yeah i just want to say because like a lot of
this i was talking about like the actual model of these civil coin stuff i i want to call out
the thing that i'm hearing is the incentives fucking suck and i'm afraid that we're going
to have a gajillion stable coins from a gajillion issuers and recreate the same fractured state we're in today with all of these blockchains.
The incentive are for, oh, well, if we can create our own coin, as long as we do our own thing, we'll capture our own value and make our own whatever.
And then you end up with a world of 200 stable coins where you walk up to a coffee shop and go, oh, do you accept JP Morgan stable coin?
No, sorry, we only accept arkansas stable coin usdc oh okay well what about a bank
of america usdc yeah sure okay well let me transfer that for you fuck that i got like yeah that's gonna
suck and imagine so look when you're in wisconsin who have issued their own stable coin they're not
going to want you to use other stable coins right you're going to have to go to wisconsin and use their stop at the border scan the qr code instantly
swap in from from wyoming usdc into to arkansas usdt zero having one us dollar you've got one for
every single state um interesting very very interesting and then you have the solana solana
minded stable coin come to world's right gonna be tether tether just come back nodded we got you
we're illegal just do what we just come to us we're one big stable coin and then we're gonna
make even more money interesting yeah maybe this stuff's good just gonna have to get abstracted
away in the background i suspect um interesting stuff um right that that's that we've got one
final headline before we get into our interview with serpent from ethos looking forward to that
conversation in just a moment brad give us the quick hit on what on earth is going on at say
a pretty interesting headline here on the dsci universe yeah it's it's more i would say it's
more flashy than anything,
but I'll give you guys a TLDR. So there's two parties involved here. One is 23andMe.
If you're American, I don't know if it was international, but if you're American,
you might remember this. Um, it was a company that went public back in 2021. Uh, they announced,
uh, Sunday this month, March 23rd, that they're actually filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Again, 23andMe is like a, uh, DNA, uh, company, company right you would send in some samples and they would go oh
bro you're from the southern part of the sub-saharan whatever oh you got a little bit of like
fucking dachshund in you whatever like that's it would break down your DNA right so they got a lot
of of human data uh from from I think it's mostly Americans uh and then there's say say blockchain
is a layer one blockchain in the cosmos ecosystem EVM all that shit super fast that's it's that's it's um tldr uh well
anyways say our 23andme filed for bankruptcy on the 23rd um and say put in a bid for them and said
hey like they announced that they're putting in a bid for them to acquire them. Now, some of the numbers for this are pretty interesting. 23andMe has to collect at least 214 million to pay back to its creditors. That's how
much money it actually owes to a lot of people. And then before it'd be able to pay out to shareholders.
And then there's the SAFE Foundation launched by Saving Capital. They have a $65 million venture
fund to back up specifically
de-sized startups on the blockchain. So they've actually pivoted to this or tried to empower this
specific sector as like a pinnacle of their ecosystem. On the news that they put in the bid
for that, the stock for 23andMe actually went up 45% and the token went up 1% to just over 2 billion.
for 23andMe actually went up 45% and the token went up 1% to just over 2 billion.
Now, I'm actually in this.
I've done 23andMe, so my DNA is in jeopardy here.
If, say, was able to acquire 23andMe, what they said they would do is they would try
to put the DNA on chain potentially and then have some privacy-preserving ways where if
it was utilized, say, for training or for some other needs, it would be privacy preserving.
I would get, you know, or someone, if you had your DNA that was accessed, would get a portion of the proceeds,
you know, kind of like this whole IP story that we're hearing with like the story protocol.
So, yeah, that's the TLDR.
I think a lot of people saw it as just like a marketing thing.
I know one person in particular, Tang Yan, who's like really big and like he stepped in the ai stuff just said like it's it's all marketing right this is like the biggest cope
thing that they've ever seen um but that's the tldr i hope they i again at my dna's in this shit i
didn't really think about it i was like whoever buys this fucking company gets my my blood so that's cool um it's valuable we'll see we'll see how that goes interesting um okay so
i i guess yeah the kind of full details for how they execute all this is kind of up for grabs and
we'd need to consider that a bit more but as you say pretty bold uh pretty bold going on chain with
this data uh pretty exciting david just a final thought as you kind
of roll out before we hit in the interview you were chuckling there what are your what are your
thoughts yeah I have multiple thoughts on like these sort of strategies DeSci as a whole
it's like it's it's good to kind of see these worlds merging in a way whether it's a good
acquisition for the safe foundation
yet to be seen but i like their thinking right like they're trying to preserve the data they're
trying to put it on chain it's a nice thought um but yeah like dc as a whole i think is a very
tricky space like the rewards are huge um but they're very low probability, which doesn't really sue a lot of crypto people.
Big swings, right?
Big swings in a, yeah, you know, very, yeah, hard to hit home run, I think,
but I guess they're trying.
All right.
Interesting stuff.
Guys, as you said, David, thanks so much for joining us today.
You're going to be cycling out.
You'll be back with us in a couple of weeks. Serpin, let's welcome Serpin to the stage, founder of Ethos Network.
Very excited to have this conversation on the reputation of Web3. Serpin, welcome to the stage with us. How are you doing, my man? Thanks. Doing great. It's a little early, but we're hanging in
there. So I'm kind of worried about my DNA now.
Listening to Brett guy talk about 23.
I didn't know any of these things were happening,
and I also sent my DNA to 23andMe,
so we're in it together now.
I remember the app being great.
It was cool.
I was like, okay, cool.
I'm kind of French, kind of Irish, I think.
Done.
Now everyone can just do whatever they want with my shit.
Yeah, because that was years ago, too, too that i did it probably almost a decade to your point like with my legal hat on i would have
thought there must be something in that like when you wrote your disclosures when you wrote your
thing obviously that data is as sensitive now as it would have been back then like the concept of
this data being sensitive is not something new um there must have been things in that initial agreement which said like people can't necessarily just go and put it on the
blockchain if um if that wasn't agreed to you at that time and if they were going to do that i
would have thought they would need to let you know that that is their intention before they go and do
something that was not in the original agreement so i don't know that's me being a lawyer but
you know it's not even it's not even just the breakdown
of like oh cool this dude's kind of french like that's like that's not even like it knows my
entire family right like that like if someone were to be malicious right towards me acquire the data
they could then say like oh well bread guy uh you know let's say they know my real name like oh
i want to get to him like you know see all this stuff happens in europe they're like okay well
now i know his mom.
I know his sister.
I know his biological dad.
I know his cousin.
I can see that they chatted
because you can actually link up on the actual sites.
All that shit is pretty sensitive.
It doesn't sound like it's for the blockchain necessarily.
Let's make it public.
Right.
Let's make it public.
Okay.
Yeah. Interesting. i'm just letting
you know you've got a maybe you've got a legal pushback if you if you need me to push back for
you um right let's get into the serpent welcome to the show i'm just going to introduce you
probably so that everyone knows i'm sure people do uh but serpent is the founder behind ethos
network a decentralized trust and reputation
protocol designed to bring credibility to the on-chain economy. Ethos raised a $1.7 million
pre-seed round, I think it was in July 2024, from Angel Investors, making a point to only raise from
the community without a lead. He also runs a liquid hedge fund called OX5F Capital. Curious to hear
his thoughts maybe a bit more generally on the market as well
than later.
And in this conversation, we'll dive into the vision for Ethos, the challenges
of building a protocol for trust in Web3 and Serpin's plan to optimize the
protocol moving forward and how to make it a profitable business.
Serpin, welcome.
Tell us a little bit about you, maybe your history for people who don't know
you before Ethos. I know there's a lot of friend tech history with you and bread i think that's
how you guys connected maybe initially what got you interested in this like reputation layer here
yeah i mean it's kind of awesome that breads here because that was a lot of the inspiration
originally like uh i don't i how i don't know what the chances are of brett actually being on
this space at the same time,
but it ended up working out perfectly because, yeah, if you go back to look at what we were
doing on Frentech, I feel like Frentech was a really interesting early insight into this idea
that we could potentially measure reputation and instrument it on chain. And what I mean by that is in the Frontech days, and bread was a big part
of this, like, there were dashboards where you could say, okay, this person did or didn't sell
like their keys, they sold out of the like, three, three, they defected from their three, three.
And you needed those dashboards, because you were trying to farm Frontech, and you need to know who
to trust and who you couldn't trust. And because in Front Tech you actually tied your identity on Twitter to this wallet,
you could actually for the first time see like, hey, this is what someone said on Twitter,
and then this is what someone did on Front Tech. And that wasn't what Front Tech was trying to
solve for. It wasn't like they were like, oh, we're going to like, you know, solve the world of credibility.
They were just, you know, it was just an app.
But we made like this own game almost on top of Frontech in a way.
And it gave me the first insight of like, wait a second.
What if we could help, like use a lot of the stuff from Frontech and help prove who is credible by having stuff tied to your identity in Twitter and then put on chain?
And how could we extend it? What would you improve about it? How would you like,
you know, make it even better than that? And so that was a lot of the original inspo. And yeah,
I mean, like, there's a pretty funny story behind it of like, was a guy that brad and i went on a space with
that convinced us he like 100 understood and believed in frantech and that it was actually
like the proof of credibility the thing that like we were trying i'm trying to build now
and he like got everyone to like pump up his key we all bought it afterward i'm like yeah this guy
totally gets it like i'm gonna go buy his key
and stuff and then like a couple days later he just like dumped his key on our face and we like
what the hell man and he this was someone who had credibility before supposedly and he just ruined
it and you're like wait a second i can point to where he ruined it on chain like that's actually
really cool that's a really big insight and like it sucks for him but, that's actually really cool. That's a really big insight. And like,
it sucks for him. But like, that was one of the things that like led us to, to building ethos was
this idea that like, hey, this point in time where he screwed a bunch of people over,
and his identity are now tied together on chain. And so we basically took that and ran with it.
That's super interesting. So what was the first way that you thought then to try to capture that moment?
Because it sounds like there's a moment where people change, where people's, it's like that
thing that people say about people's reputation, right?
It can take you a long time to build up, but you can lose it in an instant.
So what was your first thought of like how to try to capture that?
Because what you've, what you've built is ultimately very different to Prantake in like a number of ways,
even though that was inspired from that.
So what was your first thinking of like how to unpick those problems to build something that captured that?
Yeah, I mean, so one of the things that this is why it's so funny that Brett and I are up together.
It's like Brett had this dashboard called like,
Brett built a product even on top of the data.
He's got dashboards on all of us.
He's got like all kinds of data sitting around there.
But the dashboard was really helpful, right?
It was a way like when you're trying to understand
who you could trust and who you couldn't trust.
Yeah, like there was actually the first like iteration
of a credibility score
is this dashboard here. If you go up a little bit, there is like the line items and in the line
items, one of the columns is like score. I think it's all the way to the right and quality. Yeah.
And so that was the inspiration of like, oh, what if you could have a credibility score
and it's based on all of these inputs? Yeah. So just for the people oh, what if you could have a credibility score? And it's based on all of these inputs.
Yeah, so just for the people who,
so if you're watching in,
you'll be able to see this dashboard on the screen.
If you're just listening in,
Serp, could you just take us through like,
finally, we have a score here.
How was the score comprised?
What were the maybe the key line items
that added up to your score that people thought,
well, this is what creates a trustworthy person?
Yeah, and just to be clear, this is bread that's what the cool the cool thing is is like
uh yeah like back then though how was it being yeah yeah yeah it so it had to do with uh
basically everyone started creating this game of three three on top of front tech where you buy my
key i buy your key and uh three three is like the prisoner's dilemma it's the ultimate like if you
trust me and I trust you,
then, like, we get something out of this.
But if I screw you over, then I win more.
But if we both screw each other over, then we really get screwed.
And so there's, like, defection rate,
which is, like, people who exited a 3-3.
There's 3-3 bonds, which is, like, people who actually, like,
you know, bought each other's keys effectively.
And then you had all of these different inputs of, like,, really like defections was the main thing I would say,
like people who exited the three, three relationship. And yeah, like, and the data is
like totally screwed now because everyone exited three, three relationships. But like, yeah, that
was what originally went into it. And again, like, yeah, you're right. Like ethos now is totally
different. Like there are things that we took from that actually like the original part of ethos like
i tweeted this i retweeted this the other day it was like october of 23 and i was like we need to
trust pilot on top of frantech data and which sounded weird at the time like or now because
like we definitely did not build on top of frante. But like at the time, it made sense because we needed a way to trust each other.
We didn't know how we could trust other people.
And it was like, we need a way to record this.
It seems so easy to just like put a cliff note on chain and say, this guy's not trustworthy.
And so that was really the inspiration. I was like, okay, what if we took the best things from Frontech where like 3.3, you know,
was arguably good, arguably bad on Frontech.
Like, you know, it ended up being net bad, but it still taught us something, you know,
buying a key and seeing who had the highest key price taught us something.
And then, but I felt like it still needed that like the quality element the qualitative like
i need to review someone i need to put some words against someone's name got it um i think that
makes sense go on bread i've got one but yeah i think i was just gonna say like like i think what
he's highlighting a lot of the stuff we're like yeah we were trying to approximate a lot of this
shit but there's so much there's so much nuance to all of it. Right. Cause like, he's right.
We would look at that and it's like, okay, cool.
We have like bonds and like, well, I sold my keys.
Like, oh fuck, I can't like, that's not like you're, you're my homies.
Like, dude, I needed to sell it because like the market, not because I hate you.
Right.
Like I just needed to make an adjustment or like, okay, well, what if I sell a bunch
of shit rapidly?
Like, okay, there's a little bit of velocity there.
And it shows that like, oh, I'm dumping it.
Right.
It's like, if I'm dumping all my entire portfolio that's probably indicative of
like someone that's trying to like get the fuck out before like um anyone else can notice and dump
my key kind of thing right like there's a lot of like user nuances that you couldn't actually
uh easily quantify with that and we were using this stuff to inform our buys and it was like
oh this person seems trustworthy they're a smaller account but they're 100 locked in they're they're holding their keys like they're trustworthy in that sense
so it's like okay i want to i want to highlight uh people who are showing this and then i can maybe
not a traditionally known name or something so we were using it to inform our own decisions for
some of the profit making right with key buying or whatever and then like now in ethos
servants implemented a lot of those learnings with like oh i can i can unstake or i can like break a
bond but like i can do it like without uh it's having a negative effect on someone right like
i can actually indicate that on the platform so i was trying to patch a lot of the holes that we
had that was again frantic was an imperfect product we were hoping it would eventually
move towards us as like we kept talking about it to try to like hey racer you have potential here
hey racer there's something here that you can actually like leverage and then he just like went and did his own thing and schizo posted but
you know there was potential there for sure so we're gonna maybe dive into more on the product
side in a moment but the thing that i'm taking away from both the things that you said for now
is this connection between money and trust um and I wanted to ask maybe a more personal question for you,
how you think about the connection between money and trust,
even for example, in some of the assets that we display, right?
So for example, you have a hoodie punk, which is a grail asset.
Lots of people in our industry will go around
actually aspiring to have some of those assets and
actually i read a tweet this morning from someone who recently bought a crypto punk just like
detailing the way that people perceive him differently now since he's made that change so
i think this relationship between trust and money is super super strong here how do you think about
that and what are some of the challenges with that
or do you just lean into that because look for whatever reason that seems to be such a strong
reality i mean it's a tough one because it's human nature when you scroll on instagram and you see
the guy that's talking about his ferraris and his lambos and stuff like it the content usually pulls
you in why because it's like oh this guy was successful
i could be successful too like it's a natural thing that happens like um it's an inherent not
not quite inherent but like it's a thing that creates credibility off off the basis of like
most people don't have ferraris right um and so you take something like a punk and if you think about in the last nft cycle one of
the things that was really common is people would really judge credibility based on what profile
picture they were using there would be people that'd be like oh punks are posting about this
or ah like the spirit azuki is talking about this today and that was a way to build credibility and
talking about this today and that was a way to build credibility and it was actually one of our
only ways to build credibility as someone that's totally anonymous was like hey i'm like pocket
watching even though you're displaying it to everyone but like i can see more about who you are
and if you have a fifty thousand dollar nft it speaks more than the random bot who is, you know, rocking a $4 NFT. Like,
it doesn't mean that someone's perfectly credible, but like our human nature says that person is more
successful or has had enough success where like, I am going to listen to what they say because of
it. And like credibility is the foundation of how we interact with each other anyways and and so like
that was the starting point um the like rep the the and yeah i mean it's a really good point of
like when you think about having a hoodie punk or a punk in general like what doors is it open
and you sometimes they're obvious and other times they're not obvious and it's just that like people
look at your like they look at
your tweets differently or they think about what you say differently and like it does it helps with
credibility people were tying like oh like you know the past few products have all been punks
between jeff on hyper liquid and um and the guy from kaido like they're a bunch of punks that are
doing it now and then they started associating of punks that are doing it now. And then they started
associating those things. And it's just it's human nature. And so when it comes to ethos,
go ahead.
No, go for it. Go for it.
I was gonna say when it comes to ethos, like, that was something I remember originally thinking,
like, if you like spoof your NFT, should that count against your credibility? Like, probably,
right? You're like, it's the people, it's the Instagram guys that are like renting a Ferrari for a day and then recording 40 videos and being like, you want to be successful like me.
And people did that.
People did that all the time.
And so like when I think about ethos and how it relates is like, you know, like reputation scales infinitely.
you know, we, it, like reputation scales infinitely. It sounds weird, but like,
like people that are in the top 0.01% of the world of reputation, like put a president up there or
like Barack Obama or president Trump. God, I'm getting myself into a bad spot. Let me go back
towards like Vitalik or something, right? Vitalik has an incredible amount of reputation compared to
even anyone else in the space. And measuring that
is really difficult. But like, when you think of Vitalik's name, you kind of can put him in there
in that category. Well, the way we've tried to do it is say like, hey, you become exemplary,
you get to a stage in ethos where you have that green border, and that becomes that simple mental
check. It doesn't scale infinitely, but it does help in terms of like
kind of getting an idea of like who's the most reputable and who's not.
And the last point I would make on that is you had originally asked like,
okay, well, how does money really come into the trust equation?
And it's like, it does.
Like trust is driven by money in a lot of cases.
And, you know, we have this vouching system where you
can stake your ETH against someone. It becomes this way to say, oh, I measurably... People have
taken money out of their bank account, put it against my name, and that means something.
If it's $20 versus $250,000, it doesn't actually change that much in ethos, but it's shown there.
And it could mean something else to someone.
And so anyways, that's how I think about it.
Like they are tightly intertwined.
And I think you have to lean into that.
The last caveat, I know I've been talking for a while.
The last caveat is like you still need people to be able to earn reputation without having access to that money.
And I feel like that's something we've done well so far through just reviews that are free.
Compress.
Yes, I just view it as like different levels, right?
Like, and I think that's kind of how you've articulated an actual product itself, right?
Like, it's like, oh, I can do some social signaling.
And like, you know, I actually had some like very direct conversations around this during
early product, right?
It's like, okay, controversial figure, kook, right?
Kook is someone that is like very controversial in the timeline.
I'm like, man, uh, would you, would I stake money in kook?
Ah, probably not because he's so volatile.
Like that's like, that's a lot bigger commitment from my side.
Would I vouch for him, which I have on, on ethos?
I would, cause I know him personally, like I, you know,
I know the character that he plays on the timeline.
Like I know, so like, I like there's that he plays on the timeline.
There's degrees of commitment that I'm willing to make to a certain profile based on stuff. If there's someone like a legendary B-check, you Serpent, I would throw money into your stuff because you're both stable and universally appreciated, liked, trusted, whatever.
That's a safe, stable investment for me.
I wouldn't say investment, but a place to hold my money versus other personalities so like it's just like a spectrum
that that you've enabled with with staking or vouching
absolutely um right do you want to just take it there into the some of the more product specific
product specific questions if we're kind of going into vouching and some of the other mechanisms that
questions if we're kind of going into vouching and some of the other mechanisms that they've uh
they've uh the ethos have started to implement yeah yeah i guess for people who don't actually
understand like ethos the product or like what it is right so it's it's just uh you've described it
a little bit here right it's ability for us to have a platform on chain and off chain actually
most of it's on chain to socially signal and sometimes monetarily signal
for certain other players that we appreciate them or don't appreciate them, don't trust them,
don't trust them or don't trust them. Now, the actual product itself is made up of two components,
right? The one that's just like the pure reputation layer, which would be like ethos
network, right? So I go on there, I can write a review for you, I can vouch money in you, your profile specifically, I know right now,
it's based on just x profiles. So like I come in, I sign up, it's my x profile, be bread guy tied
into my account, I have an on chain address on the back end, or I can sign in and tie an address to
it, right. And I go from there, people can can do thumbs up thumbs down all that stuff and I can review
not only people but like brands companies you know whatever you know I then you can slash people
right so you can have the attempt to go after someone and say hey this person's reputational
score is actually out of line with what I believe their reputation should be relative to everyone
else and I can deduct I can risk my own to deduct other people's and then there's a second component
which is called uh ethos markets
right and that's actually something that you guys just opened up recently uh so that it's
permissionlessly market creating i guess is the way weird way you would say that um and it's like
i can i can almost have a poly market for the trust score of my uh of myself my profile right
so like i can go and say market starts starts at 50, 50, 50% trust
or 50% distrust. And, uh, you can go and actually like buy shares or, or, um, yeah, shares of either
side of that to drive the price in the, in that direction. Right. So if I buy a bunch of, I trust
this person, my trust percentage would go up. Uh then it would go from 50 cents on the dollar to
60 cents on the dollar for what I put into that thing. And you have the opportunity to make money.
So there's the lizard brain, monkey brain, whatever you want to call it. I can make some
money on this because I think the market is mispricing someone's trust score in a market.
And then there's just the actual socialout um brain side of the world which is
like okay i have the vanity stuff i have the actual uh reviews reputations whatever which
is a good way to articulate your product is there anything i'm missing there um which of those two
uh i know you and i i thought the lizard brain thing was what was going to like send you guys
right i was a little skeptical that people just wanted to do the vanity stuff for
the vanities for the sake of vanity,
but people have actually grabbed onto that pretty damn hard.
I think cause it exposes,
a little more,
right.
There's more information there.
And like you,
by writing a review,
it's a little more controversial.
It's shareable.
It's all this stuff.
but yeah,
how would you,
how would you like the reception?
Talk about it?
I mean that,
that was perfect.
I think, you know, ethos markets is one of those things that we don't the reception talk about it no i mean that that was perfect i think
you know ethos markets is one of those things that we don't get to talk about a lot because
like ethos network consumes most of the content now and i think i actually think it has a lot to
do with again more human nature like people care about what they say what is said about them they
care they understand the value of social reputation and the ability to flex that or have someone observe that is really powerful.
And then I think also a little bit of the vindication side
of like, oh yeah, I did not like that guy
or I hated that guy.
Now I have like a chance to go be a small account
and call someone out and have a voice in the equation
even though I don't have the 100,000 views on my tweets.
I also thought ethos markets was going to be the lizard brain thing that drove ethos. And
the number of conversations I had with like, very smart people that are like,
well positioned in the space that were like, ethos markets, it that's you solved the problem.
This is how you solve reputation and they're like
this is amazing this is 100 how you solve i am people yeah there you go yeah bread guy is one of
the people and like everyone was like yeah this is amazing this is it and and then like it just
didn't get as much traction like people aren't as interested and i think it's not as obvious how to
make money and it's on a bonding curve so you can't really play order book stuff like it's a little bit harder to squeeze out a profit there um but i think ethos markets is kind of early i think it's
hard to wrap it's just hard to wrap your brain around what it is right now um we'll get to a
point where i think get it i think upon reflection right i think the reason why it's it is the reverse
is because everyone was optimizing for
like, you thought, Oh, you need the money making aspect in order to begin the flywheel. And in
thinking of that, I was thinking like, like the, the flywheel was a monetary flywheel and there
frankly are just better options. There, there were better options like meme coins, right? Like
I'm going to go play that casino. I'm not going to play some weird trust score casino that I have
to relearn or whatever. So upon reflection, I think the flywheel is the reputational score flywheel, right?
It's like people want to show how reputable they are.
And like, that's the, that's the dopamine thing.
And there is no alternative to that in the ecosystem.
So that's why they gravitated to that side of the house, because there was no replacement.
There was no meme coins of reputation that I could go and just like instantly get a thousand X on my reputation
outside of like the timeline
and like likes and like whatever.
So like you can get kind of that.
But yeah, upon reflection,
I think that's really what it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Do you intend for those two layers,
the ethos network and the markets
to be stronger connected in the future?
So that maybe if there's like a disconnect between
your reputational score, which could be very high, but people are distrusting you on the market side
that this has an impact on your scoring in the future? Yeah, I mean, this is a great question.
That is how I think about it. It doesn't impact your score right now. The way that it works is
like Ethos is a protocol. Ethos Network sits on top of that protocol and it's kind of like a block explorer.
And then Ethos markets like to the side and it kind of like observes other data and shows
Ethos data there, but it's not necessarily driving any information back to Ethos.
And the way that I think about it.
You don't highlight a mispricing?
No, we do.
Yeah, that's the one thing that we do.
Yeah.
So like if like if you pull up Bread's profile right now and ethos, what you would see is you would see bread score, which is probably like super high reputable.
If you actually go to his market first and then in the top in the top right quadrant, there's like ethos profile. It says 828 reputable or 1928 if you click that profile now um what it will show is it'll show
bread's ethos network profile and it's like okay cool yeah he's reputable 1928 and then underneath
that you can see hey there's this like this difference between his market and his score
and so what we've been trying to do is say, hey, the score is actually more of like a
ground truth. It's the like ideological proof that like he is reputable given consensus of,
you know, hundreds of other people, vouched money, stuff like that. And the market is more
of the speculation. And so in theory, it's kind of trying to highlight that difference.
And so in theory, it's kind of trying to highlight that difference. And right now there's like, there's no benefit to playing that difference. Like if, if there is a difference, you don't get anything by being other than like potentially arbitraging reputation, you don't really get anything.
network, then you could offer something like perps on ethos market. And you could use that
ground truth as your funding rate. And you could say like, hey, like bread guy is like, he's super
reputable, but he's not reputable enough on the market. And so you could say, hey, we're going to
basically incentivize people to long bread, and like, make it super expensive to short bread.
And that would get us that like that, that would basically
be the purpose model that most people use that would get us to a little bit closer point of like,
okay, maybe these two things can stay in sync. All right, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna flip the
script a little bit. I want to throw some challenging questions that you I know you
have like a FUD space that you do occasionally. I was actually I know you came to me originally as
like, you asked most of the front tech people like, Hey, original investments, like you want an angel and this stuff.
I was, I wasn't positioned to be able to do that, but I was also like generally just a
little skeptical.
I was like, okay, I don't know how much, how much money people are willing to be, to put
into just like doing reputation.
Right.
And like, even now I'm still a little skeptical of like the vouching aspect of this, right?
Because as a purely analytical person, I go, I have ETH.
Why would I, why would I put that ETH in a, like to show that someone is reputable when
I can go and deposit it into a vault and get another 10% or 15% or whatever, you know,
I would have possession of it at least, right?
I think even having possession of it is a little more than putting it in someone else in a protocol.
I think even having possession of it is a little more than putting it in someone else
in a protocol.
What do you see as the potential risks for Ethos, something to continue to grow?
And how do you anticipate making it profitable as a product, man?
Yeah, I mean, good question.
I would say the biggest thing that we've been focused on right now is solving a core customer problem. And the problem is, there's a lot of fraud, there's a lot of scams, and it's really difficult to know who to trust in the space and who not to trust. And I look at that as a foundation to the rest of the future business.
If we look at ethos.network and the protocol itself, what it is creating is the equivalent of a FICO credit score, but a social credibility score.
And what you can do once you have something like that really opens up the door to possibility in Web3.
We are not able to do things like have clean and easy over-the-counter deals with each other unless we know each other.
We are not able to offer each other competitive lending rates unless you know anything about the
other person. We are not able to even identify well who should get access to these tokens or
this airdrop or this allocation for an angel check,
it's really difficult to understand those things.
And the way that I see our business evolving is we view ethos,
the protocol as a future public good.
Like it's a public good that other people can observe and understand and
interpret.
And we want to build things on top of that public
good as ethos, the company. And what we intend to do with that are things like, again, the biggest
problem spaces of trust. Hey, this is a new project that's launching. Like, who is behind it?
Why are these people behind it? What do they, do they put any skin in the game when they decide that they're going to back this new thing that's launching? Hey, I want to do an over the counter deal with someone I want to pre sell by X, Y, or Z. Or hey, I want to go offer someone this competitive lending rate. There are a lot of places in web three that get better with trust. And we could say say as a company we're going to go integrate with
those things and we'll have other people go build it and they'll just use the ethos score but my
opinion is we can make a just kind of like think about going from craigslist to ebay craigslist
itself and this is just like kind of one vertical craigslist was the wild west right uh and ebay in
the early 90s before it had feedback or anything was
the wild west too you were just buying anon from random people um when you go to a trusted marketplace
that's when you can actually create a business around it when you can go to trusted uh just
interactions everything that we do is financialized everything needs to be trusted then you can offer
we do is financialized, everything needs to be trusted, then you can offer, you know, better
credit rates, like, there's so many things that we can unlock. The difficult thing is, we really
need to be solid and believe in the public good that we are producing, right? The score needs to
be solid. Yeah, that public good aspect is definitely the way that I started to think about
you guys. I think for the people that might be
skeptical I think there's probably two things that seems to be happening at the moment and I know
you're super transparent about this and they're kind of figuring out how to address these things
but wanted to give you a chance to speak to it I think firstly there's definitely some like gaming
of the scoring and to be clear these are things that happen in crypto a lot anyway, with like airdrop farming and just creating data, spinning up data out of nowhere. And that actually happens in the
world, right? People are always trying to figure out ways to game any system. So I think there's
a little bit of that going on. And you did this post a couple of days ago, I think, talking about
the leaderboard specifically. So I think obviously you've got the individual profiles that generate
an individual score. But then when you put it on the leaderboard, people were kind of looking at the
leaderboard, just kind of saying, well, I'm sure these people are nice people and some of them
really are, but is that necessarily reflective of maybe the general web three community that
you're trying to capture or has it been either gamed in some way, or maybe some people haven't
been participating in the exact way to create like a holistic snapshot that is helpful to people.
So how are you thinking about those issues and how are you thinking about tackling them
so that that kind of snapshot data, when you look at the leaderboard can be better and
those numbers can be more solid, as you just described?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, two things to unpack there.
The leaderboard itself as a ranking algorithm is kind of misleading.
Because if I think about what my intent is with ethos, it is not to say like this person is absolutely more credible than that person.
It is more relative speaking. These groups of people that have these traits and characteristics and this type of consensus tend to be more reputable
than those people. And when you look at it like a ranking algorithm, which is what a leaderboard is,
it kind of misconstrues the concept that it's like a zero-sum game, that only one person can be number
one and only one person can be number two. And so it is also helpful, though, because a leaderboard
does kind of create competition and people will care about their scores more.
So as a builder, like I want people to care about this, but I want them to be competitive
about it.
So one of the things that you'll see a ship soon is like a different leaderboard, more
of a set of leaderboards.
A general leaderboard of everyone and hey, these people are the most reputable, doesn't
actually help you that much.
You need more localization.
And so you think about categories of things like, hey, who is the most reputable VC in
the space?
Or who is the most reputable NFT upcoming project?
Those are the kinds of things that I think about right now in terms of like making that
leaderboard doesn't it so it doesn't feel as much as a ranking algorithm of like a bunch of stuff pulled into the same bucket when they shouldn't be um the second thing is like uh
well now i forgot it we're talking about the leaderboard but i forgot there was another
point that you made about uh oh gamification yeah yeah just like people generally trying to
game the system get a higher school i mean come on we're in crypto
right like the like i think about bitcoin mining right bitcoin mining was all about gaming the
system it was like how did you optimize your hash rate like that this is proof this is what proof
of work is good at is getting people to optimize their hash rate and figure out how to solve the
algorithm crack code and what i would say about gamification first off is like you're never going
to solve 100 of fraud you're only going to solve 99 of it or 99.9 of it and i don't even consider
it fraud it's just people who have figured out how to gamify it better than others and um i think
that the game right now is shallow to be honest, whenever there are ways that the guys at the top of the
leaderboard, to be fair, they have a lot of popularity, they're leaders of groups, and they
have a bunch of people that follow them. It's kind of popularity, popularity and reputation do go
hand in hand a lot, you don't really hear people that aren't popular that have a significant amount
of reputation. And so I think in the data, you look at those guys and you're like, that actually reflects in theory, what should be true. 155 reviews, 55 vouches for $20,000. Like that,
that sounds reputable. Right. But they have gamed it for the most part, not, not explicitly,
but like they're, they are, they are intentionally trying to increase their score. right? Versus someone like Bread Guy,
who I doubt has ever like went out and asked someone like, go write me a review or go vouch
for me. And Bread Guy might be just as or more reputable than those people. And so I think that's
where it's difficult. But again, I say it's kind of shallow, because we haven't really gone super
deep on the algorithm yet. I mean, it is very complex
already, but there are things that we can do. Like, well, what is like, like the, the quote that I,
the, the post that I retweeted actually went into this idea of like, what if you could add a like
anti-gamification score to it? Yeah. If you click into that and what it does is it like adjusts
everyone's score for
like if it looks like they tried to gamify the system or not and so like bread guy wouldn't
have reviewed someone back within 24 hours or sent out a ton of reviews and not had a lot of reviews
for himself like there are things you could look at the other thing i think about a lot is distance
on a network graph like if bread guy and I are probably actually pretty close on the like overall ethos social
graph, but like me and someone I've never met before, probably pretty far.
If I've never met them before like that, and I write some content and that content is upvoted
by a bunch of other people, then that actually is a really solid indicator of trust versus
hey, Bread Guy and I like wrote each other reviews within five minutes and both upvoted the same thing.
And the appearance of gamification was strong.
So we're never going to solve fraud.
Again, I say fraud.
Gamification, whatever.
You're never going to solve that 100%.
So our goal is to prevent that from happening
and ensure that you get the best score,
you have integrity in the system,
and you'll see us continue to ship updates
to ensure that that's true.
I think this is one of the most...
Going down a rabbit hole on this.
Sorry, yeah, I finished up Legendary Act,
but I have a point on Extend.
Yeah, I think this is one of the most fascinating things
because in theory, as you said, you don't need the points. It's not about the question is Sanjay more reputable than Pigs. It's the question, are they generally reputable? And is there the resilience score with CNET, for example?
and basically leading up to that,
there was some negative review bombing
and it did not impact her score too much.
She lost 2% of the negative review bombing,
which was great to see
because that gang mentality
that mobbing up and trying to attack one person
did not work out,
which is good because that should not be the case.
So in theory, it would be just enough to see,
oh, okay, Brett guy is green,
this person is blue,
this person is questionable,
this person is deep, deep red but then again the fun is to actually have a score that kind of shows
you know legendary is less reputable than zeneca or whatever the the outcome is which doesn't
it's not necessary for that to exist for the platform to work but it's exactly what
then users and dgents kind of find fun and make them want to come back
and use the platform.
And by doing that, actually, they make it more reputable
because there's just more data flowing into that.
And I feel like this is one of the biggest challenges
you have balancing between the fun,
which kind of also incentivized the gamification of that,
and then the measurable quality
of what Ether's network is actually intended to do and
which i think it already does pretty pretty well yeah let me let me answer some of those things
real quick because i do think that uh the gamification is important right otherwise no
one would use it and the biggest thing right now is like we're coming up on 50 000 reviews
which is insane. Like literally
going to blow my mind. Like I can't even believe there's that many reviews out there. And I think
there's close to 10,000 vouchers. And from my fundamentals perspective, I don't give a shit
if you wrote two letters in a review. You still wrote the review. Now we can go take that data
and analyze it more, right? Like we are very,
again, very shallow in how we judge that information and look at that information.
Now we can go back and say like, all right, cool. Open AI, here's like 100 reviews for this person.
What are the five categories that you would describe this person as? They can come from
these 25 different categories. Like is it trader? Is it a DGEN? Is it a founder? And I think the other thing that we think about is, like, the quality of it.
We could judge quality.
Look at all of the data using AI and say, like, what sticks out as quality?
What doesn't stick out as quality?
What sticks out as unique versus slop?
And I think that's where the true power comes in.
And that's why I'm like, I would rather have all of the data and have everyone say who they trust and who they don't trust, even if it was crap, because it still helps us create this like
untapped market of information that we've never had before.
This place loves relative value. Like we're always going to, we're always going to do their
relative value thing, peg it to something else. Something that actually you got my mind going on
a little bit ago, and I started looking uh noticing the adoption and actually two things so one you talked about the 50 000 reviews i
remember early on you were generating like uh or you had prepared like bots to like actually go and
do reviews for you probably because you had a concern that people weren't going to fill out
that actual like totally the graph itself right but like i i don't know if they're still going or
i'm not i'm not sending them anymore no yeah yeah it was like yeah yeah yeah you need it in place and they were actually pretty good
they're based on like actual information it wasn't just like reviews for review's sake it was
based on like twitter data whatever um but then the other thing is you know you're talking about
like social graphs now uh and and value like how you value these people it starts to make me think
of how kaido has taken some of this and turned it into an actual
profitable business, mostly from a product, like an external product or utilization standpoint,
right?
Like mega ETH as a ecosystem, right?
We have a Kaido dashboard because it's useful to identify a social graph.
It's useful to identify people who are actually valued by the ecosystem, right?
And then that gets me back to thinking about the polka dot fiasco of them paying a bunch of KOLs
to go and do stuff.
And then I go and I look through
like the review scores
of a lot of the old heads
who you would presume are like very big,
very dominant players in the ecosystem.
The Gainesies of the world, El Capo, right?
These people that actually were paid
a shit ton of money.
Gainesie wasn't, but El Capo was
like shit ton of money
to like promote projects.
The review is nothing.
And like, that's not to say that like i think their ethos scores are both gray just like
1200 middling whatever for a massive massive account and it shows me that tells me that either
not that they're not trusting but just that in the current cohort of active participants in the
ecosystem they are not in the the thought right they? They're just, they're not present in the mindshare of people
to like go and actually even give a shit enough
to give a review on them.
I don't think about Gainsey,
which is like kind of indicative of like the power
that they might have in a situation
where I as a product want to come
and actually pay them money to promote something for me.
It's like, oh, capo, whatever.
So then you have this world where like, and i was like on the fly thinking of it is like how do you have teams that can leverage
this stuff to then like cross-reference or uh maybe sponsor something to drive like revenue for
ethos as a product to facilitate information gathering um for them because that is valuable
just it's it's about quantifying
it and packaging it up into a service totally yeah i mean this is where like oh yeah i spent a
decade in b2b sass i should probably be thinking about how we can take this data and sell it to
someone that makes sense like businesses would die for this data this is the ultimate sales
qualification tool it's the ultimate marketing qualification tool. It's the ultimate marketing qualification tool.
And it's very similar to Kaido in that sense of like people with Kaido want to know like,
like MegaEath might care who has the most attention when it comes to tweeting MegaEath content.
Where are they getting that attention from? I mean, I'm sure, I don't know if you guys use the like real Kaido dashboard bread, but like as a business, it's so powerful. It's like,
like uh kaido dashboard bread but like as a business it's so powerful it's like i got mentioned
in this random twitter space that i have no idea who these people are like i'll go give that guy a
follow or whatever like kaido itself as a tool for product teams or marketing teams or sales
teams crazy powerful and i like to think of it as we are instrumenting and measuring a different
data set than kaido is. Still relevant, still
important, extremely complementary to what Kaido is doing. They are measuring more about, in my
opinion, attention and where that attention comes from and being able to highlight that to different
teams, which becomes really valuable with launching products again, or with the like,
hey, I'm a marketing team and how do I like qualify this lead? I think we can do
something really similar to that. I think our data set is a little bit different, because it shows
the reputation side, where maybe it's not that this person has a bunch of influence publicly,
because they have the ability to drive that attention. But rather, they have a bunch of
influence because of their reputation, and they never tweet, they never talk about things publicly they're just well connected and know people um or this influencer uh you know has a yellow uh circle around their name because
they actually do have a bunch of influence like think of like andrew tate this example
he has an incredible reach and ability to drive attention although most people would argue that
his reputation is really poor and so i think of it as kind of like you know, additional data point that I think will be really helpful for businesses.
And yeah, you could build an entire business,
just selling that data to someone.
Like even if it's the same data that's on chain, you're like, well,
we backed it up and it's an API and it's really easy for you to use now.
So, or data visualization, like,
like what Kaido does is like they have crazy dashboards that you can build
that analyze things across all kinds of different spaces.
And so that's the other opportunity for us too.
But again, it's kind of, it's a very, it's a stark contrast from the like, I'm building a public good that like, it's like, then I'm also building a B2B SaaS product.
Like they're very different.
I think it's just a backend thing.
Like as I think about that further, like, that further, Kaido has the multifaceted one
where it's like the front end is like,
yeah, cool, you can go look at stuff for you.
That's the review and seeing the high-level scores,
whatever, but all of the data visualization
and maybe some of the nuanced stuff,
maybe references on the back end.
If you could package that up as just a monthly sub
or something for people to be able to see,
I think maybe there's an opportunity there.
Totally.
I think you mentioned a couple of interesting things,
and I have a couple of questions picking back on that.
But going to Kaido, I'm a subscriber to Kaido,
and this is how I like to use it,
is exactly to look at people who I think are interesting
and see whom they are following to discover maybe there's
a round going on where I want to invest in about a project I wasn't aware of. And I do the same thing,
honestly, on Ethos as well. I go specifically to your profile because we don't have the biggest
overlap on people who we are following. And I'm looking, who are you giving a good review? Because
those might be interesting people for me to discover. But then you also made this interesting
point. You're building the public good, but you also see there is an opportunity for there to be a B2B SaaS business. So maybe going exactly into that money layer on the platform, is it important for Ethos at some point to be a profitable business? Do you even want it to be a profitable business as a public good platform or layer that you're building?
profitable business as a public good platform or layer that you're building? Yeah, I mean,
this is a really good question. The way that I look at it is a public good is more of a like
foundation type business. It's like, you have something that you publish, a labs group works
on whatever the foundation decides. And, you know, I don't, I don't imagine it this way. But like,
there's a DAO that kind of determines or a committee that determines the direction
that the entire protocol works and I I think I see ethos there's a part of
ethos that just does that to be clear like just focuses on pushing the
protocol for it just focuses on ensuring that it is a public good that other
people can use other people can extend to,
and can be steered in the right direction. The way that I view the business on top of that,
again, it goes back to like, well, it could be B2B SaaS. It could be that we build over-the-counter
trading, which is something that we're thinking about working on right now. Or it could be that,
you know, like Ethos Markets is a speculative product, you can go trade on and it makes a bunch of money. I don't know that like my most important goal right now is to ensure that the foundation
is solid. If we can't set the foundation correctly, like not like the actual foundation,
the theoretical foundation like that that lies underneath it in the protocol that needs to be
solid. And that's what we're focused on right now.
The businesses that exist on top of it don't have to be incredibly successful for the protocol to be very successful. I think one of the biggest weird things that I've learned about Web3
that is totally different from Web2 is you could, it's the app store play. In Web2, there's the app
store play, which is like I build an ecosystem
and then I enable businesses to exist on top of me.
And it happens in infrastructure land.
MegaEath has businesses that are building
on top of them right now, right?
It's really, really hard to pull that off.
It is like a totally different world.
It is challenging to convince people
to take a bet and swing on your infrastructure.
And it is really difficult to get people to commit to being on your infrastructure.
And the switching cost is usually not that high to get off of someone's infrastructure.
Like, it's a different world.
And so what I think about that is different about our strategy than if we were in Web2
is like, I want to be the one that builds a lot of this stuff because it is really difficult to convince people like hey this is
worth building on top of people are just gonna go decide to build their own thing right we could have
built this on top of friend tech data but we said no we're gonna go build our own thing and that's
what everyone with an L2 or an L1 is doing now like I'm not gonna build on top of that I'm gonna
go build my own thing right and so. It's difficult to depend on that.
This is a really backwards way of answering your question.
I do think that those businesses should be profitable for Ethos to be successful and
must exist for Ethos to be successful.
But none of those things happen if the foundation isn't set correctly.
That is really what our near-term focus is right now.
Gotcha. Look, we've been running this interview for quite a while, and we could go for so much
longer. But we are about to wrap up. I do have two more questions on that. So basically, because
I love this, this analogy, there is the app store, and you're also like happy to build once the
foundation on a technical layer is solid enough to build some of those apps yourself is this then how you envision
for the long-term funding for ethos on a on a foundational level to be secured by just having
some of the premier apps that are being built within your ecosystem yeah i would say like uh
100 like if you could build a trusted marketplace that like two people can trust each other. And whenever someone
defects on a trade or exits a presale of something, it actually impacts their credibility score,
then you could charge for that. And it would be pretty easy to build a business on top of that.
No one has really been able to do this outside of the like pure permissionless like a nft model
of like or uniswap model if like i'm buying this thing from another person and it's just through a
smart contract um so i i think that those businesses will be self-sustaining it's not
even businesses right it's just other products that are pretty lightweight like it's web3 it
doesn't take a lot to build things you could copy a lot and leverage a lot of other things in the space, build those things
on top of that foundation. And they do feed back into like what the foundation does. I think you're
kind of pushing out like, also like, yeah, like, how does ethos work as a foundation itself? Like,
you know, we're taking a fee on staked ETH at the protocol level,
there are other ways that we could monetize the protocol level that operate more like gas,
if that makes sense. And so like, right now, if you go look in a smart contract hard enough,
and I doubt anyone has, like, we could charge a dollar every time you write a review.
I don't think that's the right answer. But if we get spammed a lot, it could be. It's like postage, right? The way you solve the spam email problem
or the way you solve the spam mail, physical mail problem is you charge 65 cents or whatever to send
a piece of mail. So I think there are a lot of things that could happen at the protocol level
that the foundation could actually use and build on top of itself too and kind of leverage as revenue and so like you like there's there's a
one percent fee i'm staking right now it doesn't i mean there's like a million in tvl that means
we've made 10 grand on that that's not a business but like you know you there's only 2200 people on
the platform you start to scale that maybe vouching has more dynamic aspects to it. Like, there are
ways that we could enable it more at the protocol level to generate revenue to.
Yeah, there's, there's so much potential to go into depth with that, even if you were to combine
like, you know, free reviews, depending on the score, etc, etc. But like, one final thing that
I want to mention before I'm going to hand back to you, B-Check to maybe have a final question and then close us out is, basically you said that other L1s,
other L2s could say, no, I want to build my own reputational
layer. So at some point you're becoming very
similar in terms of how I think about social media platforms because you have all
the ex-competitors, but I'm reluctant to move over because there's nobody there.
So if you build this
critical mass of reviews and you have 50,000 of a couple thousand users, which is an insane amount,
you will probably get to some point if this continues where nobody wants to use another
reputation layer because there's nobody there reviewing people and you have built this stock
of users. Is this how you're thinking about the growth? Like very similar to social media.
Why do you think it's free?
Why do you think it's easy to do right now?
Like this is the Web2 growth play.
This is what my bread and butter is.
It's like you go give it away for free.
Like you have to build the network of Fed yourself, right?
You have to build the moat yourself.
Like why would we charge for any of this stuff right now
when that helps us,
and it's good for everyone, helps us get to a point where we have network effect and impact.
And, and like, I always think about, I mean, I don't know, maybe aging myself a little bit, but
like, I watched Google Plus come and try to compete with Facebook. It was a joke, right? Like,
I remember everyone being extremely hyped about Google Plus. you're like, this is a joke. What actually changed Facebook versus Instagram
was more Instagram was like a different medium, a different piece of content type. It became
a different way of sharing information and Facebook could not be competitive with it.
Instagram built up such a network effect that it became super competitive to Facebook, even though they were solving
different problems, it was taking the same attention that you had in terms of social
media. And people would come in and they'd try to replicate Facebook and it would just,
it wouldn't work. It wasn't ever going to work. The network effect became Facebook's mode really
early on. And so if we can have a similar thing, we're like, wow, we have a ton of reviews.
People already have their reputation there. Are people going to go ask the same people to review
them on another site? Are you going to go write another review for Breadguy on the other sites?
Like maybe, like if you think there's some sort of incentive there for doing so. But I think the
data and the people become the mode. And it's not an easy mode to build it's like really
it's actually really tough in web3 to build moats at all um because you could just rip off the smart
contract i'm just gonna fork this shit and take it somewhere else like users and data become the
mode and and so that's and people could do that with ours too they could actually fork our review
contract bring all the data with them and say, here's a better UI.
And like, yeah, like it's a debatable one if that's good or bad for us.
But like, I think that's how I think about our moat is network effect and the data that we are, we're building right now.
And that's why we give it away.
You're building up the switching costs, right?
Right, exactly.
And like, because most people's moat is like price or like uh speculation like
those things don't keep your attention for very long like i think one of the things i'm most proud
of right now is like our week eight retention rate is like 60 65 percent right now which is like
that is a really good product like you usually have like 10 retention after week eight and so
people are still staying in the loop and they're still writing reviews
after week eight. And like, they're still uploading content.
And like,
if you can keep people engaged like that over a period of time,
then we're doing something right.
It's a really interesting point because I think one of the things that people
may have thought initially was because you came so quickly after kaito and people's brains were
like okay well this is a social thing um you know you've got all of our profiles they've got a bunch
of data and like in a similar way you've got a bunch of profiles you've got all our data
people like maybe putting you up as competitors in some way but i guess what you're showing with
that web 2 analogy is like look one of them is one one thing we're like doing a different thing and it doesn't
make sense for us to be compared in that way necessarily because we're like we're building
up a different way to communicate that information in the same way that facebook communicated in one
way instagram was just a different thing and therefore built up his own network effect so i
think that's that's a really interesting way for people to frame, for people to understand just where you guys are thinking about framing it.
Yeah, Kaido is complementary to Ethos and 100%.
Like, it is additional data that we've never had before.
And that's why I think they work really well together.
Interesting, fascinating stuff.
But as you said, we have to round off pretty soon.
We've obviously gone through a bunch of stuff to do with product philosophy,
monetary stuff as well, how you're planning to monetize the future plans.
But is there anything else you'd like to share before we round off?
Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing for us is like we learn by shipping,
like our product we built, we put it out there.
I want people to attack it.
I want people to come it i want people to
come to the fun spaces on thursdays and say like this pisses me off this doesn't make sense i don't
understand why you're doing this and i think the the other flip side of that is like people tend
to think about things as very hype oriented with stuff like oh i'm super hyped for this thing and
then i stopped using it and you build up all this hype. But they're just like, no, no one cares anymore.
And we are not that at all.
And that means like we need your feedback
and be patient with it too.
Like we are going to build this alongside everyone.
The data isn't gonna be great or amazing to start.
This is something that we all have to build together.
And it is a very different thing
to like turn that upside down in crypto and be like no you got to think for the long term here like
this isn't about the next three three days this is about the next three ten years right and so
when you're thinking about ethos i would just encourage everyone to think about it that way
like bring your feedback to us and remember this is a long-term thing that only gets better with
time we just have to continue to improve it every day.
Excellent stuff.
So as you said, if you want to follow along, it's at ethos underscore network.
So thanks so much for joining us.
It's been a really, really interesting conversation.
I hope that's provided like a whole load of context
and answered a bunch of questions
that people are interested in.
And as you said, if you want to get involved, those FUD spaces on Thursdays, like a whole load of context and answered a bunch of questions that people are interested in and as
you said if you want to get involved uh those fud spaces on thursdays join and contribute and
participate i think that'd be super helpful um thanks so much for joining us up just a reminder
for people in the audience we do this every single day monday to friday at 7 a.m eastern time we're
live on xx video youtube spotify and apple podcast we'll be back on monday same
time same place have a wonderful weekend take care and goodbye
