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Crypto PLUMMETING + TAXES w/ @AwakenTax
Recorded: April 7, 2025 Duration: 2:00:44Space Recording
Short Summary
Awaken Tax is making waves in the crypto space, having recently raised $1.5 million to enhance its tax software, which has already attracted over 20,000 users. The platform is focused on addressing the growing need for effective tax solutions as on-chain activity increases, while also navigating the complexities of airdrops and compliance.
Full Transcription
going uh all right it should be streaming to the right account now
it is yeah is it yeah we're live okay what's up twitter there we go
up zero views still so still alpha testing phase
okay uh let me just undo that repost quote tweet we are live
there we go all right now shared for my main account okay and we're also live on abstract yeah i'm like the crypto market we are live yeah right that's amazing uh okay all right and now we
just see what happens i guess question. Question. Are we also recording?
It records natively through Restricted.
Okay.
Now, is that stored in a cloud temporarily that we need to access on a time frame?
We have like two weeks to download it.
Okay.
But I'll download it basically immediately.
Sounds good.
Oh, this is nice.
It's like matcha with some honey in it but it's mushroom matcha
it's very nice how we doing lex good we vibing yeah i mean thankfully unlike last week i did
not have a trade open for this show so i i'm just a bystander for this one well actually lex i'm
curious i would like for you if you're down
uh to pull up to pull up your hyper liquid when you get when you get a second or like pull up
some kind of charting software um and i kind of want to go through some of the charts with you
i want some of your opinions on some of the like basically your holdings or non-holdings, let's say. Things you're looking at, like hype, like Bitcoin.
Obviously, we have to look at ETH, just because it's hilarious.
And so on.
So, yeah.
But I wanted to go through some of that.
I wanted to go through some of the stuff that's happening on the Twitter world.
We got about an hour before uh duca from duca from
awakened tax comes by um but before we get to that let's just say real quick uh hello everyone
welcome uh if this is your first time tuning in on this account this is you're watching the stream
from the overexposed show account like at overexposed show um, like at overexposed show, um, brand new account.
So I hope you guys like it.
please do me a favor and like give this account a follow.
It's very much appreciated.
In a literal sense.
We hope that you like it.
Yes.
Clicking the like button.
Yes.
Both literally and figuratively.
We are,
we are desperate for your algorithmic assistance.
Literally.
I don't have any results yet, but I guarantee whatever they are, we will want more.
Exactly.
Yes.
So here, I'm actually, I have to send this out to a bunch of chats.
So the S&P futures just opened and we're down under 5,000 now.
It's down? Yeah, well, of course it's down, but yeah. Wow're down under 5 000 now uh it's down yeah well of course it's
down but yeah down under 5 000 um to answer your question man i don't own any of that stuff that
you listed right now because it's a mess out there um so yeah like hype, hype is not doing so great today, down 15%. What, 15?
Yeah, 15 and a half at the moment.
To what?
$10.16.
Yeah, incidentally, the reason Eddie asked is because I mentioned hype as a trade to Eddie about a week ago.
And I believe got stopped out of that trade on the same day so yes yeah and and that
was at 12 something hold on i keep trying to fix my focus there we go okay um okay so let's see
do you want to pull that up and stream it to the screen? You can flick around.
Do you mind?
Yeah, sure.
Are you hyped specifically?
Whatever you want.
Let's take a look around.
But yes, again, if you guys don't mind, likes and retweets go a long way.
Dropping a file on this overexposed account.
This is the first time we've opened this account before.
And also, yeah, I see all you guys following it's very much appreciated genuinely thanks guys um but beyond
that so our goals for this um let me lower the music just a tiny bit because it's a little too
bumping um so our goals for this account um i am going to like we're going to build out the
the visuals um make this a lot more professionalized.
Like restream is nice.
It's actually not that bad,
but we're going to,
you know,
actually get a nice custom overlay.
We're going to,
you know,
actually put some effort into building out this account.
And over the course of the next,
let's say six months or so,
this is going to be a consistent stream.
We're going to try and do every Sunday,
8 p.m. to 10 p.m. ballpark.
May extend it a little bit beyond that
if we have a couple more guests
or if a guest conversation is going really well.
But generally speaking, that's what we're looking at.
And we're starting today.
Things are going to ramp up over time.
And I would say we got some cool stuff coming.
We're going to have, we're going to bring in guests every single week.
Today's guest is Duca from Awaken Tax because it's tax season.
And they did a great job actually of helping me with my own personal taxes.
Like, well done, great platform.
But beyond that, we have a bunch of other guys.
I said would tax again.
Would tax again. Yes. So we got that rolling. Although might not need it. Might not have any capital gains taxes for next year at this rate. If those red candles keep up.
If those red candles keep up.
So there's that.
And in the coming weeks, we've got a bunch of other people that we're talking with.
So we've got other guests that are lined up and going to be coming on.
Honestly, I might.
So hope you guys enjoy the show.
And once again, I'll just ask one more time before we hop into the actual show here.
If you guys would like and retweet this post, get it out, get some eyes on it.
If you guys want to hop in chat, we'd love
to see you guys in chat.
Twitter does have a chat.
We are going to be getting this on YouTube and Twitch and whatever.
All that. It just
wasn't ready today. That's okay.
We'll get it done for next week.
I know our many Twitch viewers are going to be very disappointed
tonight that they can't see us on their
new platform.
Unfortunate. They're going to miss off the grid stream later.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
We're going to,
we're going to live stream ourselves getting headshotted as strategic
investors.
Yes.
Yes.
And that's it.
So I hope you guys like it.
great.
All right,
Lex,
what are we looking at here?
this is just the S and P as you can see,
nice little gap here on the, this is, uh, what are we looking at here? This is just the S&P, as you can see. Nice little gap here on the...
This is a weekly candle chart, actually.
That's a weekly?
Yes, it would appear up here.
The W is telling me this is weekly.
So we are currently at the price we were last at in January of 2024.
at the price we were last at in January of 2024.
So we've teleported back 14 months in record pace.
And I will say it was impressive
that Bitcoin didn't dump immediately,
but it certainly is now.
You'll have to forgive my-
What are you drawing?
Here.
Yes, it's quite amusing actually.
I actually left it because I thought it was funny.
Each of the little circles was
an attempt to test this triangle.
It came out to
25 total.
15 up, 10 down.
As you can see here,
it has picked
its direction.
This is the daily candle.
Here we are back at the March 10 flows.
And honestly, it's hard to be bullish on anything that isn't specifically a hedge against bad economies with the tariff scheme as it currently stands. It's hard to overstate how ill-advised
such a large sudden tax
on your consumer base really is.
I mean,
you know, tariffs,
you know, we'll set aside...
Let's see who he taxed, by the way.
I'm going to pull this up in a second.
Oh, you want to see the chart?
No, no, I'm going to pull up the full list uh just give me a one moment you keep rolling for a second i'm
gonna i'm gonna find yeah i'll just say that the problem with the tariffs that they presented was
that they just took the amount of trade deficit we had with a country and divided it by two and
made that a tariff rate and and it wasn't as far as i'm aware it actually was not the like it wasn't it wasn't
their tariff rate necessarily no yeah it was just it was just our trade basically came out trump's
basic argument will give them benefit of the doubt and take him at his word the basic argument is
that we've been taken advantage of because these other countries have higher tariffs on us than we
have on them. And therefore
they're, you know, getting revenue or jobs or something from us. But in reality, all the like
largest tariff countries are countries where people are assembling shoes for 25 cents an hour,
and we don't want those jobs back. And like literally the, like a great example is Madagascar.
Okay. So he put tariffs on Madagascar who has one of the poorest, I think they have something like $200 a month per capita GDP, right?
And one of the largest things that we've purchased from them, I believe, is vanilla beans, right?
Because they are the right climate.
You need a certain tropical climate for vanilla beans.
So we have a trade imbalance with them because we buy a lot of vanilla beans from them to fill up all of our Starbucks.
And they can't buy much from us because they're extremely poor.
That doesn't like they're not taking advantage of us.
If anything, the reverse is true.
We're taking advantage of their cheap labor to get cheap vanilla beans.
And we're passing that savings on to Starbucks.
But Trump is interpreting that as us being taken advantage of and
putting a large tariff on that.
Now, now here's, here's the counter, right?
Um, so let's see, I'm gonna pull up my, I'm gonna pull up.
Let's see.
Chrome tab.
This one can't really bring the vanilla bean job economy back to the US
because there isn't much land here.
No, I know.
I know, but so,
so the argument there, I saw a counter argument, right. And, um, and the counter argument as
posited, I, I'm blanking by, by who, but it was someone in the, uh, in the Trump administration
that, okay. So you could see, you know, like China's at 34%, 20%, Chile down to 10%, right?
And so like it goes as far as I believe on this one or on one of these charts, they have
the Hurd and McDonald Islands, right?
Yes.
Right.
Which is inhabited by zero people.
Now, the argument that the Trump admin individual brought up was that
they wanted to ensure that there were no countries that anyone else could
possibly argue or ship theoretically through
a different country to circumvent those
tariffs. So, you know,
like, that's the argument. Uh, and, and, and the penguins do a lot
of drop shipping, I guess. Yeah, I guess a little bit. Um, but I don't know. I don't really know
if that's a valid argument, if that really works, but that's that, that was the concept.
Do you know if Russia was included on any of these? I'm not sure.
Russia, North Korea, and Cuba were not included.
And I think that might be because there are separate embargoes or tariffs there.
I don't exactly know why that is.
I hope it's not because those three countries were excluded on merit.
Well, it's definitely not on merit.
Well, I mean, anything's possible these days.
I don't think Trump is super close friends with the North Koreans.
But two out of three ain't bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
I will say, like, on a list like this, you're going to have some countries hit that deserve tariffs.
And I think that probably China was one of the, if you're going to make an argument for tariffs, China was probably one of
the countries where you could have made one of the best arguments for China. And that could have been
done, you know, along with some of our other trading partners in order to put more pressure
on China specifically. And that might've been like a good use of tariffs. But instead, you now actually have a situation where China,
South Korea, and Japan are all agreeing to form a trading block because they all disagree with
our tariffs. And, you know, I know our viewers might not be students of world history, but China,
Japan, South Korea, these are three entities that typically think of them as like a triangle where
none of the three
points ever agree with any of the other three points. And all three points believe that the
other two points are technically parts of their country, or at least should be. So for them to
all agree on something is probably not a good sign. But well, so what are you thinking? You
know, all that said, tariff opinions aside,
what do you think about the,
like, where do you think Bitcoin's rolling?
Where do you think the markets are heading right now?
What's your vibe?
It's really hard to argue that crypto for years hasn't traded like just a risk asset at this point.
You know, like if the stock market
and the NASDAQ does well, Bitcoin does well.
Crypto has never been the safety asset yet.
Right. It's not going up while the markets are crashing, generally speaking.
And I just I see very little optimism out there for any risk type asset as long as these tariffs are the regime.
You know, like a relief bounce would certainly make sense here at some point, but where's that going to come? Who knows? Just in reality, the tariffs are going
to significantly reduce consumption. Just as a for example, I saw that Germany was getting,
I think, a 20% to 25% tariff. I think it was 20.
And then in addition to that,
there was a 25% tariff on the EU, I think,
or cars from the EU.
The end result was that a new Porsche imported from Germany was going to have like a 54% tariff
when yesterday it had none.
So, I mean, if you're buying $150,000 Porsche Twin Turbo,
that overnight just became a $230,000 Porsche Twin Turbo.
So, I mean, look, rich people rich,
but $80,000 more on a Porsche,
that's a material amount, right?
So that's going to reduce consumption.
And it might help people that have used Porsches,
but I don't think
that you're not going to see Porsche do record sales this year right like unless they're moving
stock that's already not yeah unless they're moving tariff exempt stock because they already
imported it before the tariffs and you know to take a step back it doesn't have to be Porsche
right let's just you look at Honda, you look at Toyota,
their cars got significantly more expensive overnight, right? So, I mean, that's going to significantly affect
how they can compete with domestic cars.
The unfortunate situation is usually you just see
domestic manufacturers just jack up their prices
to whatever the new tariff price for imports is,
meaning that instead of there being a competitive advantage for Ford,
Ford will probably just raise their prices to Honda's new tariff.
And then the only thing that changes in the market is the consumer pays more.
But we'll have to see how it shakes out.
If they decide to remove tariffs, then you get the same effect you have whenever you remove bad news, right?
It's like, you know, like if you take a beach ball and you push it under the water at the beach,
the further you push it down, as soon as you remove the force holding it down, it like explodes out of the water, right?
So Trump could get on the air tomorrow and say like, you know what?
This isn't how much winning I wanted.
And I'm going to roll back a bunch of these tariffs.
And they might.
This is too much winning.
This is far too much winning.
Like the market would instantly rocket if he did that.
Because if you were paying close attention this week when you saw him go up to give his tariff speech, the market was pumping pretty hard right up until the moment where he got on stage with a giant poster board of tariffs.
So the market actually thought it was just going to be 10% and they were like, we're going to pump
it on 10%. So if tomorrow he's just like, you know what, let's stick to 10%, then I mean, hell,
for all we know, it could be up 10, 15%. But there's no way to predict what's going to happen in this market.
It's not even a good trader's market, even though it's volatile.
At this point, I'm just staying out of it.
Fascinating.
So you wouldn't take a position either way right now?
Our last few shows, I had a position open.
In fact, during our poker show, I think I lost a few thousand dollars on a position
that I was occasionally looking at and being annoyed by.
Demonstrating the poker skill of not being emotionally tilted when you lose money,
because I ignored it and probably nobody noticed.
But no, I don't have anything.
I had a long that I took at the bottom of that triangle.
I took a long literally right here and stop lost it $500 lower, just hoping that...
It wouldn't break?
Yeah, no.
Yeah, but no, it broke.
My stop loss was $81, 50, which was pretty much.
So then what is the,
what is the chart say now in your opinion?
Like what is the,
what is the potential low?
And also,
by the way,
if you guys are listening and want to join us in chat,
feel free.
I would love to see you guys in chat and also likes,
retweets,
comments,
they go a long way.
So thanks.
Anyway,
I don't know.
I mean, where usually think charts override news, but until news becomes, you know, a certain level of importance.
And this is large enough news to throw anything off.
So, like, looking at this, we're zoomed out, right, on the daily.
So, we're back at a price we saw last November.
You know, i'm not
going to short here this is this is shorting a range you know um but i'm not really going to buy
here either because that's who knows what's going to happen so i don't know what the chart is telling
us other than that this trend line is still holding up.
We're rejecting off of it very aggressively.
So you can see where the trend line goes.
Nowhere good.
I mean, if it held, it would put us at 65K in June 1st.
I don't think it will, but...
65K for June 1st, you said?
Yeah, not a prediction but this trend line that we have 15 times tried to break and rejected from that's just that's where it's going you know eventually
so i don't see anything to be excited about on this chart it looks better than this chart
honestly that actually unfortunately that makes sense with uh my personal
view on the mark like i i i was always i've always been scared of may and i told you this
and a dump in may could lead to 65 and that would be that would be well yes as i as i recall you
you were um quoting the the old trader's adage of the in Maine, go away. But as we can see here, that wouldn't have been too effective.
As it looks like May might end up being more of a bottom than a top.
But, you know, I mean, the four-year cycle puts us at a top in quarter four, October, November.
This might be the first time we fail to get there
if we keep going down here.
I mean, 21% so far on the S&P is bad,
but we're close to this average.
Again, it looks really grim, right?
But you wouldn't want a short here.
No, no, there's wouldn't want to short here. No.
No, there's a bad spot to short.
Yeah, because it's like markets love to catch people late,
late longers, late shorters, and whipsaw you.
I like that word, whipsaw.
Well, this market has been very whipsaw-y.
It has violently gone up and down.
Just leasing money you know i'm looking i'm looking at someone who uh who's commenting on your lines um they said i'm just gonna say quote um they screenshotted it and wrote
why like the letter y in the first message and the second message lolololololololol in the third
message whoever drew those lines is an idiot bro pray emoji pray emoji crying emoji fourth
fourth message bros think lines can forecast prices
what's yeah i don't really none of these are really forecasting lines but
you know unless you count
predicting both directions as
forecasting but fair enough
yeah I did
leave these on for comic relief
obviously this was an exercise
in counting the tests of these two trend
lines I took off of somebody else's chart
and there's really nothing more than that on here what about hype let's pull a pipe do you mind yeah we can
look at that i'll have to draw the uh the uh stupid trend lines live though that's okay
so oh wow this is the lowest it's been since basically inception.
Well, yes, assuming that this chart history goes back to day one.
When was this airdropped?
I don't know exactly when, but I do know that when it started, it was around $5.
Okay, so this chart is starting with it at about $10.
Okay.
So, you know, It's trading now.
What is its exact dollar now?
It's $9.85 now.
It's gone down since we...
Wow.
In the singles.
Let's get a little more resolution here.
In the sing-y digits.
Yeah, I mean, it was $11.50 earlier today.
Today, wow.
That's rough.
But, you know, I scoped out a bunch of other alts are down about 20% today as well.
So, you know, it checks out.
You know, there's...
Since there isn't a chart history that shows you the original price it's
whatever but you know this is a price discovery at this point um also one thing i've learned
as of late is that exchange tokens often do better than bitcoin in in bull runs but they do worse
than even a standard altcoin in bear runs.
It's because so much of their profit is tied to volume, right?
Bear runs don't have any volume.
So exchange tokens get marked down more harshly
if people are pricing in a bear market.
It's fascinating.
It's brutal to look at dude like this especially this token like you could see how many people there's probably um like an absurd amount of buy pressure and a lot of buying
and a lot of people probably holding in that let's say uh like18 to $27 range. You could see that accumulation period that built up there.
And it's just been completely smashed.
The entirety of that accumulation is just throttled to the ground.
Between, let's say, $18 to $25, $27.
Somewhere in that range.
Like exactly where you're at right now with your cursor.
Wait, I can't hear you.
What are you doing?
Oh, I wasn't saying anything.
I was just drawing a fractal off of it.
So you want to see what's actually holding up pretty well?
Oh my God.
That's funny.
Look at how, look at what, remember what Hype looked like?
Yeah.
Compared to this.
Yeah, well, that's not bad.
It's quite a different.
That is not bad.
So here's the fractal from Hype.
This is like the total price action of hype compared to...
Hmm.
Do you know for sure that that's like the same time frame and everything like that?
Well, it's the full chart. It's the full hype chart just using the Frackle Draw tool.
So, I mean, you can see.
That's fascinating.
Quite a different price trajectory, you know?
Yeah, wow.
Huh.
Anyway, I guess, I don't know. I don't know what to think right now. I mean, I'm pretty, I'm fairly stabled myself. Ethereum has also wildly
underperformed. Um, so, so has Solana. I believe Solana. I Solana who could have ever predicted that
that's disgusting
god this is
now we're looking at a daily on Ethereum
ok we're back to
October 2023
prices
it's a race
it is a race a year and a half of profitability
that's amazing dude i just don't know
i don't know here in february of 2021
oh my god Oh my God. I just don't understand,
you know,
like who's going to buy Ethereum now?
Like if you,
if you at any point in the next year want to buy Ethereum,
why would you?
Like for,
for,
for trading purposes,
obviously.
Look,
I mean,
you know,
if you may,
maybe you need gas for using the chain, sure.
Well, yeah, you don't need hardly any gas anymore.
That's one nice thing about the chain is that now gas...
I'm going to pull that up.
I'm going to pull that up.
Gas history.
Gas tracker.
Ether scan or Ethereum.
I want a historical Ethereum. Yeah, there it is. Y charts. I think this is it.
I think this is... Oh, that looks near perfect. Let's get the five-year on there.
Oh, fantastic. All right, let's do this. So if I share my screen...
All right, let's do this.
So if I share my screen.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is a brutal.
This is brutal.
So let's see.
2020, it was sitting in the 40s.
Spikes up to like 500 on certain days.
But normally around 80 to 150.
You know, even in the low, right, the June 2021 low, 20s, right,
and then spiked and kept going.
And we're talking about like 100 to 200 on the daily.
Oh, I don't know what I just did.
For some reason, it just cleared your data when you
clicked five year you didn't okay do anything wrong i just it just progressively lower as
ethereum usage drops more um but then you know it's still alive still kicking may 2023 i'm pretty
sure that this was a a bad a bad cell day or bad cell. So there's a lot of volume on chain.
Oh, that might be the day that Tether or USDC depay.
I believe so.
It was somewhere in there.
One of those days had crazy stablecoin volume.
Yeah, because it was SVB, Silicon Valley Bank.
The only time ETH gets a lot of action
is when everybody is panicking into stablecoins.
Yep.
And then, you know, some residual usage here.
But, like, even in the worst of it, it's still over 10.
And, you know, 50s, 70s.
And then just Solana takes off.
And we get our first single-digit days right here.
Can you click the three-month?
I want to just see, like, the last couple months because it's so zoom oh god we had a day in the 40s that was another panic day i'm sure yep and
then those were the days where we did the hardest winning probably and now it's just struggling to
get past three it's not it doesn't even it can't like it's there's not even a three day on there
for the last like two months.
This completely solves the problem of it being too expensive to add and remove liquidity on Ethereum chain.
And what is it right now?
Oh, it's usually around one or two.
If you just pick, I had to move some stuff on ETH yesterday and it was 0.46.
Jeez, man.
Oh man, that's's disgusting this is horrible imagine if you were like an eth miner right i know that's not a thing but like if you were if you had an eth validator
off operation and you operated off of the fees or however that works exactly right your profitability
has gone through the ground.
Which has happened to the miners of every coin other than Bitcoin at some point.
I remember when I had a friend back in the day.
God, this guy was such an interesting character
and he was a personality online as well.
But he got into crypto by buying a Dash node, right?
Do you know what Dash is, Eddie?
I've heard of it, yeah.
You've heard of it probably because I've mentioned it.
But Dash was a cryptocurrency in like the 2016 cycle.
And the way it worked was if you had a thousand Dash,
you could put them in a wallet and set up a node
and you would get more Dash every day
as long as you kept that node running.
It was like mining, but it was more like
staking because it wasn't proof of work it was proof of stake okay and so you know you would
get like one dash a day and originally dash was pretty cheap like um you know under a dollar
but it eventually ran to i think around 300. So a dash node was something like $300,000 at the top.
It was the third ranked crypto by market cap. Wow. Yeah. And people thought they were buying
their retirement. They're like, I'm going to buy a dash node for 200K, but dash is 200 bucks and
I'll get 200 bucks a day because I get one Dash every day.
Forever.
Yeah.
I mean, you still do.
Those guys are still getting one Dash a day.
Except Dash is now worth... I don't know.
I mean, let's see.
$0.16?
Oh, no.
It's $19.86.
This is a hell of a lot better than I expected.
19.86 times 365.
$7,200 a year.
Well, I don't know if my screen...
I'm still sharing, but I'm not sure if it's still highlighted in the stream.
It's not bad.
You know, over the course of 30 years,
that'll repay your investment.
Well, can you highlight my share again, Eddie?
I don't know if it's visible.
So the all-time high of Dash there was $1,200.
So if you paid $1,200 for a thousand Dash,
that was a $1.2 million node.
Getting $19.86 a day, that's pretty rough.
Let's do the calculation on that.
$1.2 million node divided by $19.86.
You'll pay off your investment in a mere 60,422 days.
Which is how many years?
It's a lot.
Let's find out.
165.5.
So that's your break even.
And then everything after that is just cream, right?
Exactly.
Years 166 on is all you, baby.
Oh, but wait a minute. Taxes.
Well, there's no taxes until you have games.
So that's a year 166 problem.
What do you think Dash price is going to be in 166 years?
I'm honestly impressed that Dash still has a price now.
I mean, it even did some volume in December going all the way down.
Still has a price.
$65 in December.
It's not bad.
It's not bad.
I mean, look, wow.
It did $1.5 million in 24-hour volume.
I mean, I'm kind of surprised
it's still alive, but
it's a zombie point.
It's alive. It's there.
It's there. it's alive it's there you know it's there that's hilarious
oh man well you know that's why um that's why you need to be stabled up you know well my friend, he sold his Dash node at $300, which was like this.
Oh, really?
Here.
He sold it at $300 for like 300K.
Then it crashed right here.
In fact, let's zoom in a bit.
We can go through his little roller coaster of emotions.
You know, I warned him.
I suggested that he'd be looking for a place to sell it
although i did not want to give you didn't you didn't want him to sell it immediately yes no
this is not this was not an asset that i understood beyond it being a ponzi scheme
right like that was clear and this was a time when i did a lot of you know ponzi scheme related uh
reporting activities so so yeah he ends up selling around $350 here.
And immediately it drops to $230,
and he feels like he really nailed it.
And then over the course of the next three months,
it goes from $350 to $1,200.
Yeah, that's rough.
But then almost as quickly,
it's back down to below where he's
at by march and just it never came back after that you know so timing the top on this type of thing is
near impossible impossible yeah he got in so much lower than this you know he got in a double
digit price so and by the, if you guys are still listening
in, do me a favor.
Likes and retweets go a long way, so thank you
if you choose to do so. I'm Eddie,
aka Dancing Eddie. We're hosting this from
the at Overexposed
Show Account account, so please
give the Overexposed Show Account a follow.
It's very appreciated. Lex and I,
this is at Lexiconical
Gap, are kind of just spinning this puppy up.
So this is like our first kind of official stream on the new account.
We've had 200 views so far, which is actually not bad, like not bad performance for first stream off a brand new account.
Pretty cool, to be honest. But, you know, would appreciate some
likes, would appreciate some follows. I'm just kind of begging at this point, but I do mean it.
That's fine. They say you need to do call to actions or whatever. So there's my call to action.
Other than that, all right.
On like the good news side of things, I guess you could say that.
Stablecoins are not securities.
You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for good news.
That's all we got.
Stablecoins are not securities.
Well, yeah.
How do you make money with them?
Well, covered stablecoins specifically are not securities well yeah how do you make money with them well covered stable coins
specifically are not securities according to the sec well i mean it's exciting right here i'll
find the tweet for you very exciting let me hold on let me pull this let me pull this puppy up
you're about i'm gonna knock your socks off with this one we liquidated all the
longs right that's good news i'm sure that'll that'll be good let's see where's the fear and
green ah 17 that's a new back to the into the extreme fear it's good stuff there how about
the fomo finder let's see where we're at. This has been more bullish lately, if it wants to load.
Okay, back to panic.
It was imbalanced.
Interesting.
Okay.
Oh, wait.
So we're panicking now?
According to this particular metric, it's just a different formula for the fear and greed.
And usually bottoms have a lot of this purple area that's what you're hoping for but
and here i'll show you this here watch this ready so here we have the the securities and exchange
commission has a statement on stable coins and you know read through all this but effectively
uh we refer to these types of stablecoins as comfort stablecoins,
and stablecoins are backed by assets held in a reserve
that are considered low risk and readily liquid
with a USD value that meets or exceeds the redemption value
of the stablecoins in circulation.
So like USDC, Tether.
Does Tether meet or exceed the redemption value though yes
that's that's apparently there's some debate about those audits but i don't really lose any sleep
over it yeah i believe that they're accurate um so yeah tether i mean like this is good so at
least we know for sure that stable coins are not securities it's pretty great it's a good start um
well everybody's talking about stable coins but i see a lot of people asking
how do i profit from stable coins
by actually the way you profit by using stable coins is by selling into them uh that way you
know you're you're set you're That way, you're holding a stable coin
instead of- Okay. So I had a not helpful answer as well. And my not helpful answer was you make
money from them by issuing them, especially if you have enough money to also buy a lot of Trump
token to get pardoned on any like, you know, questionable legal issues you might have separately.
So I hear that strategy is working well for Justin's son.
So he was with,
he was with speed this past week.
Do you see that?
Do you know who speed is?
I was not. Oh, come on. on that's unbelievable come on you you got you
got to keep up with the times here i'm gonna pull them up i'm gonna pull this up i can i cannot
believe you right now alex this is a number one uh this is this is our competition right here
all right look at this. I show speed.
I show.
Well,
okay.
You can be a little more specific for me.
Yes.
I'm aware of who he is,
which by the way,
this image first,
hold on.
I'm going to,
I'm going to open this image in a new tab.
I feel like he probably doesn't consider us as a topically competition,
but you know,
I mean this,
this image.
Yeah,
we're not,
but like this image is, is we're not. But, like, this image is
so funny
for so many reasons.
It's... They're both bringing
their own special form of awkwardness
to the table for this picture.
I don't know who to rip on
more.
It's like...
Justin Dunn looks like a little boy
marionette, or, like, little boy marionette or like
like he's got like you know russian matryoshka doll makeup on his face or something yes that's
the vibe i'm getting that is totally yeah i feel like if you popped open justin's son there would
be like another foot shorter justin's son inside of him and then
you could pop that one open and there would be like another one and then after you went through
four of them there would just be a big pile of like tron merchandise at the same
hats t-shirts like maybe some like plastic coins and who is this this guy's just like
standing there watching this image go down. He's just vibing.
He's just vibing.
That's the guy I really want to talk to.
I want to know who that was.
Oh, man.
Although, you know what's interesting about this whole thing?
And I'm curious.
We got another like 15 minutes or so before Duca comes in.
And we get to talk to him about taxes.
But one of the things that I thought was interesting, favorite topic.
I know, right? I don't know if you I don't know if you saw this, but there is this kind of like there's this conversation that showed up around the whole speed thing.
So do you know what he do you know what he's been up to the last few days, weeks?
So he has been on this world tour of China.
He's been going from city to city in China, talking to top kids at schools,
testing out top-end Chinese technologies, whether it's cars or laptops or phones, kind of just exploring,
getting a real genuine feel for the Chinese culture, the whole nine yards.
And there's actually been this kind of resounding opinion that's come out of this that like China is really not bad.
Like here, this is, this is, so this, this tweet went viral today.
China CCTV 13 aired an eight minute special today on speeds,
China tour,
praising his streams for breaking stereotypes in his own way and showing a
more multidimensional authentic China through his lens.
So he's, you know So he's been streaming for, I want to say a week, streaming for hours and hours and hours.
And the China that he's showcasing looks kind of phenomenal.
And so far as like, this is genuinely an eight minute special produced by the government
in China talking about speed and talking about his
stream that he's been, you know, blasting to the world. I think that this is kind of,
you know, I, maybe it's, maybe it just kind of, you know, goes by and no one really talks about
it in a few days, few weeks, few months, whatever. But I think that there's a genuine possibility here that what Speed has done here by, you know, through his interactions in China, that he
might have actually opened up China to the global audience in a way that's never been
done or believed before. It's almost like hard to, it feels like he's fought back against what may actually be global anti-china propaganda
in a sense you know like it's it's almost hard to believe china when china puts out positive stuff
because you're like okay that's just china being pro-china shocking but when speed does it
it seems genuine i don't know do you have an opinion on this i mean i have some
questions like your implication seemed to be that china wasn't cool well yeah there for example like
one thing that i was personally fed in terms of media wise surrounding China is that there's,
that there's this like constant smog problem where their main major cities are,
are just rife with smog and it's filthy. Um,
it's hard to breathe and a lot of people like,
it's just this over over abundance of people. It's like hard to live.
I think that's restricted to a few of the densest
like city centers though as it is in most countries i'm not sure probably but i but i've
definitely seen it be a little bit more generalist in the sense like it is more how do i say this
it is worse than it actually is like it's been played out to be worse than it actually
is um you know i think they have laxer environmental standards and more people but we have these type
of problems even in la here and when you have that much larger of a population you're simply going to
have these issues and honestly like the only thing that's really wrong with China, and it has been for some time, is they have a pretty authoritarian government that has some pretty obvious long-term nefarious plans.
But they don't often act on these.
And their society is pretty effective if you want to get down to brass tacks and numbers.
They've industrialized quickly.
I think they're raising the standard of living fairly quickly.
I'm biased towards liking China myself, personally, quite a bit. The only issue is just some of their more aggressive takes, such as they still consider Taiwan to literally be their property.
And they regularly have military exercises that they carry out practice to retake Taiwan.
At some point, they'll probably do that, right?
But they're patient.
So they'll wait until World War III, right?
When people are
distracted that's other other other concerns yeah um but in the meantime they have this floating
truck i mean dude do you see this thing do that if you do some research on things so even if you
just if you've been a buyer of cheap chinese products over the last 5 10 20 years you'll
have noticed that they've gotten
increasingly higher quality over time to the point where they're often comparable to Western products.
And if you look into a lot of specific products-
Dude, I would buy this truck in a heartbeat.
Well, another thing that they're killing it with is the electronic cars, right? They're EVs.
Yes. It's not so much that they're killing it with is the electronic cars, right? They're EVs. Yes.
It's not so much that they're drastically better than the Teslas.
It's that they deliver like the same thing as the Tesla or better for one third of the price, right?
So it's just, it's a matter of extreme efficiency.
And, you know, I think for most people where good enough is the name of the game like chinese
products are often great so yeah i'm disappointed that the chinese products are going to be hit with
so many tariffs because lord knows we like i buy them all the time so i'm sure it's going to be bad
for me this is fascinating i don't know I just, I just think this entire exercise has
been wildly fascinating because, and if you want to think about this, compare it culturally,
right? He did this world tour. Uh, I want to say like six months, maybe a year ago,
but he did it in Europe and we did it did it in Europe, kind of the resounding opinion
for a lot of people was like, Europe might suck.
It wasn't that spectacular.
He got mobbed hard a few times to the point where his safety
was jeopardized multiple times.
It was kind of, in a lot of ways, kind of a disaster.
Mobbed by who? Like fans? it was it was kind of in a lot of ways kind of a disaster like fans fans fans but to the point
where they got like it was he was in serious danger but and like it was cool and the cultures
were cool but it wasn't it wasn't like wow this is kind of shocking but now this was so over-the-top successful that it seems to have actually, I don't know.
I think that there is, let's say, a 5% chance that in 10 years, or maybe in five years, we look back and we're like,
this was the first big, big-time cross-cultural content experience where China was showcased to the world via an american
streamer in a way that's never been done before i mean look at this car dude this is a chinese car
this looks like that's pretty sick i don't know man i just think this i just think this whole thing
pretty sick this whole experience is pretty cool.
I don't know.
I didn't mean to diverge so strongly here.
This, to me, was fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not aware enough to know if this has been done before,
but China's been pretty open for a while.
So these things have been, if if not emphasized at least searchable
yeah for sure for sure like if you look into if you're if you're an enjoyer of you know short
reels that pop up on on you know youtube or tiktok or your chosen video content platform
things like engineering marvels you'll often see chinese stuff like i just the other day i saw a
cool short where um they were moving a bridge that i you could not believe the size of this
bridge piece that they were moving on a semi truck that it did not tip over the truck and
you know you're like how is this possible and then you know you see it's china so
yeah that it's it's there's a lot of impressive stuff going on over there for sure.
Also, this is an interesting exercise in the sense of, how do I explain this?
I think that on this show, we should talk about stuff like this.
I think that this should be one of the things that we talk about.
You know, like what's the state of culture in certain senses? like this. I think that this should be one of the things that we talk about. What's
the state of culture
in certain senses?
What's going on, of course, in crypto,
but generally what's going on
in the world?
So I think
this is cool.
I think this is a cool thing to talk about.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I'm trying to find...
Ah, I believe I found...
Okay, it wasn't a piece of a bridge.
It was a wind turbine.
Oh, do you want me to stream this?
I will throw it back up on my screen.
Well.
Yeah, right.
It's genuinely... Can you believe that that is on a truck and and doesn't tip the truck over plus they're driving it most americans could not even drive
a vehicle on this road normally but look what they managed to do that truck has to do a three-point turn. Holy crap.
I mean, look, we're not doing this in America.
I'm not saying we couldn't, but I don't think we are.
Not regularly.
And they did it in three hours.
If we did this in America, it would take three weeks,
and we would have to pay everyone overtime.
Well, we actually, this reminds me of when we brought the,
what was it, the space shuttle? Oh, look, it's, how brought the, what was it? The space shuttle.
Oh, look, it's, how are they going to get it?
That's unbelievable.
That is amazing.
But do you remember when we moved the space shuttle across, I want to say like however many miles it was?
Yeah, well, I grew up on the east coast of Florida, just an hour north of Cape Canaveral.
And I used to go to space camp.
So yeah, I would go and watch the uh the launches and yeah well the when they
drove it in they had to measure every single point along the route and just see what was the
clearance at every point along the route which i would assume that they probably did something to
that effect here but still the the point is oh yeah this was not done without careful measurement
but i mean that blade is four times the length of the truck imagine
having to calculate that it had clearance around every bit of these mountains it must have been
an intense getting it 90 of the way up there and then it doesn't clear some turn
like you're like i'm gonna lose my job yeah literally wow wow i mean they built a wall you know the greatest one they are known for that
arguably the great they would probably tell us that they don't want to be remembered for one of
the you know more simple things to design a wall they'd rather be remembered for i think this wind
turbine is more impressive than a wall.
The wind turbine is very impressive.
It is a very impressive wind turbine.
So what else is on your mind?
Anything particularly spectacular?
We've got five minutes left before we're joined by Duca.
I mean, not really.
I guess I got to do my taxes.
Not much to report there. A lot of convenient losses to take now, I suppose. I guess I got to do my taxes. Not much to report there.
A lot of convenient losses to take now, I suppose.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Exciting.
Oh, man.
Well, I mean, it's not it.
I think we'll survive.
We're going to survive some way, somehow.
But I don't really, you know, this market kind of sucks, candidly.
I don't know what to do.
It's just kind of like sit back and just wait and cry for the next few weeks, it seems.
I mean, if we don't see significant rollbacks in policy, then you're looking at a recession unless you have easing.
And that means literally we have to sit back and wait for some old guys at the FOMC to decide, you know, are they going to ease?
There's really nothing we can do.
Let me pull this up. Hold on.
U.S. recession in 2025.
2 million volumes. This is
actually a notable market.
66% chance.
And it just shot up
from where? Like
30? 40?
33 cents on March
28th at 8 a.m.
Pre-tariffs. I i mean that makes sense tariffs like that pretty much guarantee a recession without easing so this this market is essentially predicting a 33
chance of easing that happens fast enough to prevent a recession because i mean look a gdp is like a few percent right so you cannot take
10 plus percent average tariffs across all consumer goods and not expect like a recession
maybe even a depression i mean people should actually be worried like if you have a costco
membership you might as well go buy 200 of toilet paper if you have space for it like it's not going to get any cheaper i don't know i mean if you're if you're
lucky enough to have old people in your life they're probably already complaining to you about
being scared about their social security so that's a that's a fun little gift for all of us as well
a fun little gift for all of us as well.
Oh, and I believe
Duca has just
arrived. I'm going to bring him in right now.
Wow.
Hello.
What's up, big dog?
I don't think I've actually met either of you
in a video
face-to-face form, so nice to meet you,
Lex. Nice to meet you officially, Eddie.
Nice to meet you, man. Nice to meet you officially, Eddie. Nice to meet you, man.
Nice to meet you as well.
So Eddie has been calling you Duca.
My last name is Duca,
and everyone has always called me Duca
because my first name is super common.
So you guys can definitely just call me Duca.
Okay.
All right.
All right, let's roll with it.
By the way, Andrew, before Duca,
I'll go with andrew
and she's fine uh because i just see it on the screen it says it on the screen it's probably
clearer for anyone following along yeah so before i do this um or before we dive into things i do
kind of want to showcase awaken however um i don't know if i want to showcase it on my end
because i don't know so like or do you want to show exactly what you made your ankle you don't know if I want to showcase it on my end because I don't know. So like,
do you want to show them exactly what you made?
You don't want to show them all that?
Come on,
Eddie.
Preferably not.
So do you have like a, do you have something you could stream?
Yeah,
sure.
All right.
Let's rock and roll.
All right.
So let's do,
let's do this.
Cause we're about to be,
I assume that there's a good chance we're about to be joined by some new friends.
So, hello.
Hi, my name is Eddie, a.k.a. Dancing Eddie.
And I'm joined here with my co-host, Lex, at LexiconicalGap.
This is, I mean, kind of, it's not a new show, but it is kind of a new show,
because we're hosting it for the first time through the Overexposed account.
This is at Overexposed show.
We're going to be running this every Sunday at 8 p.m. to roughly 10 p.m. for the foreseeable future.
And we're going to turn this into a show.
We're going to turn this into a thing.
We're going to clip things up, post, et cetera.
So this is, you know, day one, kind of et cetera. So this is day one, kind of technically. So welcome. We're joined now
by Andrew, aka, hold on, I got to get your exact, it's Duka. What is it? What's your exact handle?
Sorry. Big underscore Duka. Big Duka. Yay, Big Duka. that's great um who's the creator and founder of uh
awaken tax which i actually used for my taxes um so all right andrew uh before and actually if you
guys are just tuning in now retweets posts what like anything any shares they go a long way thank
you if you guys have thoughts or questions in the chat,
feel free to hop in the chat.
Twitter does actually have a chat function,
which like no one uses, but it's there.
I promise you guys it is there.
All right.
Big Duca, what's the deal?
Yeah.
So, I mean, maybe I'll give a little bit about my background
and then I can showcase Awaken.
We can kind of talk about whatever.
But yeah, I'm Big Duca.
My name is Andrew and I'm the founder of Awaken, which I like to describe as a tax software that's actually built for crypto natives. I'm a crypto native myself. I started off, well, I've
had a long journey in crypto at this point, but I really started actually using blockchains in 2021
with Solana. And then when I had to do my taxes, all the softwares were so bad. And so that was
really the initial inspiration. And when you look at a lot of the competitors in the landscape,
a lot of them work okay for centralized exchanges. But then as soon as you go on chain and you're
trading, liquidity providing, staking, doing all the stuff I was doing in 2021, they just
completely break. And so I initially started Awaken to solve a problem that I personally had,
which is what I wanted to be able to do my crypto taxes without spending dozens and dozens of hours reconciling stuff. And so that was kind
of like the origin of Awaken. And we launched in 2023. And since then, we've grown a lot,
mostly from word of mouth. And so I try to be really founder led on Twitter. Like Eddie,
I think you're probably messaging me a day or two. And I'm like, oh, I'll look into that. It could be
60 minutes. I'll get on it right away. And I did that for, I guess, over two years now. And it kind of just like piles up and created a
lot of goodwill. And all of our users are basically word of mouth. We don't have a bunch
of fancy partnerships. We're much smaller than a lot of our competitors, but we really try to
give every single user a great experience. And then that kind of starts to compound over time.
Where the first year we grew to 2.5, users last year we grew to 8 000 now we just crossed
20 000 nice so we really just try to thank you we just try to like make so that everyone has a
great experience and then they share with their friends and all of our growth is primarily word
of mouth yeah candidly so i've tried a bunch of the other softwares um didn't really love them uh like generally it was
not a great time um it's actually why last year i did not feel confident enough to do my own taxes
just because i just didn't didn't like what i was using um and i didn't think i just didn't want to
be on the hook for the brutality that was those taxes. Um, this year,
like I gave it a, I gave it a shot. Uh, it was unbelievable. Like 95, I want to say 95% of my
transactions flawlessly handled. Um, you know, a bunch, a lot of things that it didn't handle so
well were things like weird, weird niche,
bizarro transactions that like,
you know,
frankly,
I shouldn't, I wouldn't expect anything to understand.
So I'm like,
all right,
that's fine.
Like even humans will barely understand it.
So I get it.
And that's,
that's fine.
tornado caches to the silk road,
essentially.
Worse than that.
Not worse,
but just more confusing than that.
Dark web purchases.
For legal reasons, none of that.
But no, but seriously.
Hey, look, sex work is work, Eddie.
It's fine.
And in this economy, we've got to do what we've got to do, guys.
God bless OnlyFans.
You know, recession-proof stuff.
Do you know that that is now the most common profession of united states women
it is more than a nurse nurse was the most common profession and now you are more likely
to meet an only fans model than a nurse and i think you are four times more likely to meet an only fans model than
a school teacher, which was, I think the third most popular profession for women. Yeah. Sorry,
just not on topic, but you know, factoid that will make you love our society.
That's not, that's, that's not good news. Okay.
That's not good news.
Okay.
It is if you can tap into the OnlyFans tax, you know, they got to pay taxes too, right?
That is true.
That is true.
So perhaps that's an expanding market that you could look into.
Perhaps.
Word of mouth through there could be very powerful if you'll forgive the pun but yeah so that said
uh that's what we're working with here um and genuinely i i invited you on because well first
off it is tax season like it is we're in crunch time we've got what nine days um actually more
like eight days to uh to send in your taxes with you know, unless you're getting an extension, which, all right, sure.
But all that said, like, you know, I think that you guys have the single best software for this.
And I wanted to talk to you just kind of like what this was like to build out this platform.
And then also, you know, kind of towards the end, if you've got some fun stories, I know mentioned uh you had a tweet this week where someone had sent you i think three million transactions on a single on
it for the tax year 2024 uh that's unbelievable i know we'll get to that unreal anyway so you
started this in what like 2022 yeah so like my, maybe I'll go like back really far. Cause like I, I love programming.
Like that's my thing. Like I'm wearing a eat, sleep code shirt right now.
I think one of my most like viral tweets, which I don't have that many followers,
but I got a hundred likes on one of my tweets that basically share that I write a thousand
lines of code, like literally every day for the past two years straight, which is why Awaken is
pretty good. Um, because I've been the solo developer and i'll talk about that a little bit uh for all this
at times so just like me against teams of like 20 or 40 people depending on the competitor that
we're talking about um and so i've i've always i've always loved to learn uh i've loved to code
since i was like pretty young uh in high school i actually built a product for my high school because
i think i'm breaking up a little bit.
You guys hear me? So you're good. You're good. You're good. Cool.
OK, so in high school, I was always annoyed about all those like inefficient things that my high school was doing.
And I picked up coding initially to solve those.
And so one of them was at lunch.
Everyone always made all the students stand in line to pay for prom tickets and clubs and cash.
And I was like, that's ridiculous. Like we have credit card processing online and my school wouldn't use
any of that because they needed to be paid a check at the very end. And so I actually built
like a mini version of Eventbrite for my high school. And then everyone was using it for prom,
all the events, the clubs. Yeah, it was kind of awesome. And that was like my first thing I built
where like all of my classmates were using it. And then I was charging them 10% commission on
everything. So then I got to go to every event for free. Uh, and so since then I was kind of hooked
on, on programming. Uh, and then I went to Brown university to study computer science.
Oh, you went to Brown. I did go to Brown. Uh, ended up dropping out after three semesters though.
So it was a short stint at Brown, um, startup and, uh, they were in the actually food order
headspace called snack
pass. Um, they had launched at Yale. Then they went to Brown and they went very viral on Brown's
campus, kind of doing the Facebook like playbook of go from each Ivy league to the next one.
Um, and then launching. And when I joined them, they're doing around a million dollars a year
food sales for like burritos and Boba and all that good stuff that college kids love to order.
Um, and then by the time I left, they were doing $150 million.
And so I was there for this crazy ramp up of a million to $150 million.
And one of the things I built for them, which I had no idea would come in handy,
was their accounting system.
So they needed a really robust double-edged tree ledger to be able to account everything
from sales tax to commission to discounts to credit cards, being able to reconcile these $100 million plus payments that they were paying out
to thousands of restaurants and collecting money from millions of consumers. And I built that
system there, did not think it would be useful for anything else I do in my career. And then in 2021,
I started getting really interested in crypto, mostly Solana because that was the only chain I could afford. I minted an NFT on Ethereum and paid $250 of gas. And I was like, this is crazy.
And so I ended up using Solana and downloading Phantom when they were less than a year old at
the time and falling in love with that chain. And I actually started off as a DeFi protocol
founder. So I was building a protocol. This was kind of in the copy pasta era of Solana, where it's like, let's take everything on ETH and just bring it to Solana. And so the
thing that we were trying to bring to Solana was Yearn. And so there were all these different yield
farms like Francium and Toolup and Solan and all the different places to give you API on your tokens.
And we had a protocol that you put tokens in, and then it would just put them in the protocol that gave you the highest yield.
And then tax easing came around, tax extensions, because I almost always file on extension, came around and I had to do my taxes.
And it was like so painful. I was like, okay, maybe this problem is actually more important to solve than building another DeFi protocol.
And so I actually started asking around, yeah, I started asking around friends and members of
different crypto communities. And before I wrote a single line of code for the product, we had people
prepaying us thousands of dollars just for the possibility of solving that problem. And at that
point I was like, okay, it seems like there could be product market fit for a product in this space.
And, um, I kind of bridged from them then to now. So this is like late 2022. Uh, when I first like
sat down, locked myself up in a room
for two months and just built the first version of Awaken. And it was way worse than the version
that you use, Eddie, but it got the job done. And then launched that early 2023,
grew to a few thousand users, mostly word of mouth, and then I've just kept in the game.
And I mean, I actually really love the product I'm building because I can see it in all the
people that use us. Like taxes is one of the most painful things.
And so when you solve that for someone, they're just immediately like, I love you. Like, it's
just like the emotion swing is crazy from like this crazy stress to I get emails all the time.
Like I actually tweeted one of them. This was like maybe a week ago now. And the first sentence
of the email was, bro, I freaking love you. And it's like, that's like the interesting thing about taxes.
Like they're so stressful that when you solve it, it's like it's truly a painkiller product.
When you solve it, people just immediately love you.
And also, if you don't solve it and the painkiller doesn't work, they also hate you.
Right. There's like two sides of that coin.
So, yeah, I mean, I love the product I'm building.
That's kind of like the story started as a DeFi founder, but really fell in love with this problem space because it was extremely painful.
And like the first year I did, I mean, I still do a lot of the customer service.
Like, Eddie, you messaged me.
I'm on it.
But the first year-
Which is crazy.
Like that is-
So candidly, okay, I had an issue this week where when I was generating one of the forms to then input
right into my tax software, it was misreading. It was basically like completely mislabeling
one of the transactions or at least several of the transactions. And the end result was I was like
in profit on certain things where I was definitely not in profit so my taxes
were gonna be completely wrong I was gonna pay a lot more I was like you know just checking in
it appears like there's something wrong with how this is being generated within an hour not only
had he responded we maybe not an hour but like close to it he had responded shipped a fix to the
code generated a new a new, and it worked flawlessly.
Completely solved everything.
Like this guy, to me, whiz kid.
Yeah, thank you for that.
I mean, like respectfully, I was very impressed.
It was the single best customer service I've ever gotten ever, period.
Full stop.
Glad to hear it.
Because, yeah, like the first year that we were in business, I mean, I did all of the customer support and people would write in, they'd have
issues. I mean, crypto tax software, we can talk about this more later, but it's very hard to build
because you're basically not shocked. Yeah, you're not shocked, but it's like you're trying to build
a product to understand all these blockchains and understand everyone else's products. And a lot of
those people building the other products, they don't actually care about taxes. So they don't even want to help you.
That's generally a problem with a lot of the DeFi protocols. It's not really a concern for them.
And so it's like, you kind of just have to figure out how do I actually support all of these,
like, you know, thousands of other protocols in my software when those teams don't even
necessarily want to work with you. So it's a challenge. And that first year, like I was doing
all the customer support. And so we had like, I think it was 600 customer support tickets.
And it was basically exactly what you had, the experience you had, Eddie.
Someone would write in with a problem.
I would immediately go and fix it, ship it, and respond back, say, oh, you know, an engineer just fixed your problem.
It was just me.
I just fixed their problem.
And I did that 600 times.
And that made the software really good, really fast.
And then people would just like love
it because like people are not used to having a customer support ticket. And like sometimes we'll
get like a, you know, half ass response, but they're not used to like having it actually
resolved within like an hour. And I generally did that. I still do that today, but I was really
doing it the first year. And that is how the product got really good, really fast. Because
ultimately like now, kind of like slight spoiler, I haven't announced it yet yet but we actually ended up raising a little bit of money so we just raised
a million and a half dollars which is awesome so we can actually hire out engineers so it's not
just me because right now it's me and 750,000 lines of code for all this stuff and so it's
pretty crazy so we'll have more engineers contributing but I really just like did that
for I mean basically two years straight anytime someone someone has a problem, they message in, fix it. And because of
that, the software gets really good at a really fast rate. And Awaken is one of the few players
that was founded in I think 2023. Most of the others are founded in 2017. Like our biggest
competitor at CoinTracker, they have 40 engineers, they've raised like $100 million. And I think our
pace of like our speed is much faster. And our product after two years is better than there
is after seven or eight. And I think it's just because I'm like so maniacal about helping people.
And then each of those people, I know that if I help them, it helps other people too. So
we take the customer support super seriously. Like if you message him,
now we have someone that helps with the support full-time named Alex, and he's actually been an
Awakened user for two years. So he knows the software in and out.
But oftentimes, I'll do the support directly, too, if someone has an issue, and we'll try to fix it as quickly as we can.
Generally, just try to make the product a little bit better every single day, because doing that for two years is why it got to the point it is right now, where it's pretty good, but still not perfect so i mean optimally you guys will get to a point where daps are reaching out to you guys
first and giving you and hooking into your their your product and providing the inputs you don't
have to do anything like optimally that that's the point that we'll get to um and that's uh do
you guys have biz dev like do you guys have a biz dev team no i mean it's me uh i mean i generally
know a lot of the protocol founders.
So sometimes I bug them and ask questions.
Like we're close to the Jupiter guys.
We ask them lots of questions.
But no, we do not.
It's just me right now.
How big is the team?
So for a while, it was me.
Now we have one full-time person on customer support.
His name is Alex. And then we just hired a founding engineer named Jessica.
And she actually starts full-time tomorrow, which is awesome. So we're a team of three. That's absurd.
That's a lean operation. Yeah. I mean, I do believe, I know this is not contrarian because
a lot of people say it on Twitter, but I think you're going to see lots of companies that do
tens of millions, a hundred million revenue with like sub 10 person teams. And I want to wake in to be one of those as well.
I think we can get easily get to 10 million plus in revenue with sub five
people.
And ideally we could get to,
you know,
a hundred million plus in revenue with sub,
you know,
maybe 10 people or something.
Right.
So I think that,
I mean,
all these AI tools are pretty maniac.
I am a maniac.
I mean,
it is just amazing though,
because like all these AI tools,
like my productivity for coding at least has gone up so much. Right. And it's like now with like a team of two developers, I have confidence we can outbuild what before would
have been like 50 developers. Right. And so I think that will continue to scale. And generally
the bottleneck for our business, there is definitely some biz dev stuff. Like I want to
hire for biz dev to make the team four. That's obviously like kind of a hard role to hire for.
So I've been having some conversations,
but would like to hire someone for biz dev.
But our main bottleneck is just like engineering
for the most part and in marketing.
And so for both of those,
I think because we're a consumer product,
most of our marketing is just word of mouth,
people telling each other.
And so it actually just goes back to engineering.
Like the better our product is,
the more people talk about us
and that helps us grow the product, right?
So we just need lots of really great engineers us grow the product. Right. Right.
So we just need lots of really great engineers to make the product really good.
And then people do share it.
We've seen.
So generally, I think we can go really far with a small team.
So Duke, if you don't mind, if you could bring up Awaken and start streaming it and
while you, while you like look to pull that up and all you have to do, by the way, is
just hit share screen and I'll bring it up.
But while you're working on that, Lex, do you, do you have any questions?
Cause I, so Lex, he hasn't said so yet, but he has a history in tax.
Okay.
Yeah.
Uh, yes.
I, well, I didn't have any specific questions as like when you work in taxes and law, you're working with, you know, atypical taxes and, you know, your product is designed, I'm sure, for like a typical user,
one that does not need to negotiate a lien with the IRS. Right. So, I mean, do you offer any kind
of like audit referral, audit protection? You know how your mainstream TradFi competitors like TurboTax
will, they'll upsell you a hundred bucks and they'll stand by you in an audit, which means
like send a few form letters or whatever. But is that something that you guys ever have to deal
with or? Yeah, great question. So thus far, no, like generally, like we, as you can tell,
I'm not a CPA, right? I don't even have a college degree, so I couldn't be a CPA if I wanted to.
But generally, like we work with multiple CPA firms that specifically are really good
with crypto.
And a lot of the crypto stuff is not actually defined yet.
So like, for example, when you wrap assets or bridge, there is not clear definitions
of the IRS.
Even like some people take a slight aggressive stance on things like airdrops, right?
Like some people for the hype airdrop want to claim that that's a $0 basis. Some people are taking it at
the $2, right? And so for a lot of this stuff, there is like this, like there is a bit of
interpretation that can happen with the tax law in particular. So for all that stuff, we generally
always take the most conservative approach. So we treat everything as taxable and we just put notes
in our UI. And so if you go on, for example, you've got a big airdrop, we put in a little note, and we actually link you out to
different tax advisory firms that are actually obviously certified to give advice on those
things. And so we really love like Darien Advisors, for instance, or Gordon Law LTD. We use both of
them, along with a few individual CPAs as well. And so we link out people if you want to get an
actual opinion from a certified person that can either defend you in the case of an audit, or if you want to
take a more aggressive tax stance can actually give you more information on like the risk that
you're taking there. Because generally Awaken is obviously built for like DIY, like you do it
yourself. And because of that, we take the most conservative approach for everything. And so
there definitely is some wiggle room there. And so we actually have a webpage. It's awaken.tax.cpas. And we have a bunch of CPAs that
specifically really know crypto. CPAs and also like bookkeeping professionals, depending on what
you need. If you need actual tax advice, or if you just need someone that knows crypto to help
you reconcile transactions. So we link out for that. And then generally we're just a software
and we basically just make you aware of all these different trade-offs that
we're making while you use us.
Gotcha.
I think there is actually,
I believe an established regulation for that,
that valuation of airdrop thing.
I believe when you receive an asset that is so volatile that the time of day
you value it makes a
substantial difference.
I believe you're supposed to take essentially the average price of the asset over the day's
trading range.
So if you can get like the nine to five average traded price for an asset, I think you're
supposed to use that.
But it's certainly enough of a gray area, I guess, or at least confusing for people.
And it's tough to even figure that out.
What exchange?
Which exchange is the correct 24-hour price range?
Yeah, especially if it's listed on multiple exchanges at the exact same time, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
And then for the record, that's what we do, by the way, when we do it in our system. Some people want to take more aggressive, like some people claim it's like a gift and other things like that. We don't do any of that because that's super aggressive. We generally use like closing day prices or for really volatile assets. Yeah, average throughout the day.
users and you know like i use your software and i get audited and i and i email you and i'm like
hey i got audited do you have any suggestions like is there a firm that you recommend or anything do
you is do you funnel me on to someone or do you just say like that's a bummer well first yeah i
don't say that's a bummer to anyone uh because i just try to be as helpful as we can because
you would be within your rights to say like you're not an audit defense service.
I'm not implying you should provide that service.
It just, it seems like a natural question you might get from clients.
Yeah, great question.
So in general, I'll say like one thing and then I'll answer your question.
I personally will just do whatever is best for like the user's interest.
So sometimes users separate from what you just said, they'll message us because they'll have
like all these different exchanges and we're not working well for them. They're formatting
their CSVs and it just doesn't work well. I actually will refer them to a competitor that
can help them better than we can. So like generally, I just try to do whatever is best for the user,
even if that means like not getting their business. In the case of an audit, we would send them
directly to a firm that can actually help defend them on that.
If they use Awaken, that's great because they have a lot of the stuff they'll need to defend their position.
They can pull closing date balances, obviously all the different reports.
And generally, people will add little notes.
So if you do take an aggressive stance on something in our UI, you'll add some notes kind of defending why you did that. It's like commenting lines of code, basically, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
It just helps you trigger why you did that. exactly exactly it just helps you like trigger
you know what why you did that um but we would just send you to a certified professional that
can help you and i would just refer you over to them and i'm sure they'd prioritize you if that
was to happen and interestingly enough that has not happened yet like no one has been on really
knowing me all frantically no um that's great yeah it's great so far we'll see obviously that
that will change at some point because like we're one small and we're still growing.
And we've also been only around for this third tax season.
And so my guess is some people will definitely get audited.
I mean, our users specifically are generally very high net worth.
I think we're a small company, but we help people track.
I think it's around $3 billion of assets.
That's unreal.
Wow.
Quite a lot.
And some of our users have $100 million plus in crypto. And those people are obviously like way in the crosshairs of getting audited
and we'll definitely refer them to someone who can actually help although i will i will just
share this because it feels uh it feels what else is happening this backs up something that look
eddie will absolutely back me up on this.
I've preached for many years that the specter of being audited by the IRS is in fact much greater
than the actual likelihood of them ever coming to bother you. I mean, probably in a factor of like
a hundred to one, people are afraid of the IRS much more. It's like the IRS is under your bed,
is the IRS in the room with you right now?
It's hearing that none of your users have reported an audit definitely makes me feel-
I mean, honestly, that's part of why I used Awaken is because I do recommend properly
performing and filing your taxes, which genuinely, Awaken was the closest I've
gotten to getting perfect crypto taxes, which is a near impossible task.
That's why I launder all my gains.
Same reason, different conclusion.
I recommend the tax software for most people personally.
That's funny. Yeah, it is interesting because I mean, there are users of ours who message in
and they want me to like look into something and these users, some of them have, you know,
pretty small accounts, like the risk of getting audited is obviously like not extremely high,
but they're obviously very worried because like they're scared that they're going to get audited
and so they want help. And like generally, like I, I'm not going to say like your risk is, you know,
low of getting audited. I'm just going to try toited and so they want help. And generally, I'm not going to say your risk is low of getting audited.
I'm just going to try to help you just understand what position you could take on something.
Also, because that would really suck for you if you said on paper.
Yeah, you don't want to make any statement.
Yeah, we don't.
We specifically say we are generally a software.
We were happy to refer you to a CPA.
They obviously charge you $300,000 an hour to give you advice on this stuff.
And I'm not going to be able to give you that type of advice.
And so.
Fair enough.
Duca, I'm telling you, you got to show us this.
Come on.
Okay.
Okay.
Let me, let me, I want to see this.
I want to see it.
I want to see the dev build.
All right.
Let's see.
The dev.
Oh, I'm just joking.
I've opened it right up my account.
Okay.
All right.
Fair enough.
Yeah. So Awaken is pretty easy to use generally like a lot of tax offers are like this, but
there's kind of like three steps to it.
The first is add all of your accounts.
Um, so you can see here, I have some Solana accounts.
I have my exchanges.
I have a couple of different, uh, EVM wallets.
Uh, I sweet here, although I'm not a super heavy sweet user to be honest.
Um, but for all of this
like we just generally ever like the first thing that we recommend people just like add all of your
wallets in here and then we'll start to like piece together kind of what happened so we like have a
lot of like smart automation so for example if you add your coinbase and you add your phantom
and you transferred between we obviously pick up all those transfers between accounts and we'll
like do things like move your cost basis over so if you buy it on Coinbase and you sell it on Phantom, we can track the cost basis
all the way through.
And so first step, pretty easy.
Add all of your wallets, your exchanges.
We don't have to like the caveat to Awaken is we support and I'll click into here.
So I'm not just showing the same screen, but we support a smaller set of chains and
exchanges. So if you use the main cryptocurrency exchanges in the US, like Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Binance US, there's probably another one, but maybe they're smaller.
If you use those and you use primarily EVM and Solana, and if you use like SWE or Bitcoin, that's all good too.
We're really great.
We spend a lot of time working on a small set of blockchains.
And that's kind of the tradeoff that we've taken. A lot of our competitors,
they support way more. They'll support like every single L2 under the sun that,
quite frankly, almost no one uses. They'll support like every exchange, including the
super long tail. And generally like our approach has been, we support way less,
but then we make sure our support for those is really good. And that's why like when you plug
in your Solana wallet, I'll open up some of my transactions.
But we generally are able to automate a lot of things.
So you can see here, like, I have Jupyter, Radium.
If I switch around here, I click around.
You can see, like, Jupyter DCA is automatically tagged.
So we generally, because we support a much smaller set of things, we just do a really good job.
So for Solana specifically, like, we support really well, most liquidity providing, if you do use any DeFi protocols
like Camino or Meteora, et cetera, we support all of that really well. Solana staking rewards,
if you do staking, even if you receive like Gito Mev, we have all of that kind of auto-categorized.
And so most of these words, like if you ask another crypto tax offer, they probably don't
even know what any of these are.
But because we are crypto native ourselves, we obviously spend a lot of time making sure all this is like automated from the get go.
And so this is generally like Awaken.
You add your accounts.
We import all of your transactions.
Like all this, like open up a Coinbase.
Recently, I've been not trading that much, by the way.
So you can see all these Coinbase stuff.
And you're like, this guy even used blockchains. But it's because I've been so focused on coding, I'm not really trading them actively. But you can see in here when I click to label,
we have a bunch of different labels. And if you look at other products, generally like our
competitors, they don't have as many labels as us because these are all the different things that
you do on chain. So we obviously have all these different like liquidity providing labels and
staking and airdrops and burns and just like almost everything you do on chain, we have supported
here. And even things that we don't have supported here, we have a lot of automation. So like if you
vote for DAOs, a lot of that stuff we automatically pick up. Like if you voted in the Jupe DAO,
all of that's auto categorized. So we have a support for a lot of different labels. So that
way, like all of your on chain activity, you can actually properly record.
And at the end of that, then we have your taxes.
So you can just click into here and we show you breakdown of your capital gains by month,
general income you've made from airdrops, and then you can pull a tax report pretty
easily.
We support all the major IRS ones like Schedule 1, Schedule D, 89, 49, TurboTax exports.
Like I'm a TurboTax user, so we export to TurboTax
and that's all of it.
And so it's pretty easy.
You add all your wallets, we import all the transactions.
We run a bunch of automation to automatically detect things,
to do things like carry your cost basis
between wallets, et cetera.
And at the very end, you can download a tax report.
And we also wanna build this product out
into a lot more than this.
Like you can imagine like year round checkups for like how much money you're actually making.
So you don't just get hit with a massive tax bill come the new year and things like portfolio tracking, et cetera.
We want to go into too.
But those are kind of the three main things for Awaken and how you go from adding an account to exporting tax report.
That's fantastic. And I loved you had a, so TurboTax is great, like a generally great all hand software or like overarching software. And you had like a whole very cute, but very solid video for exporting, for exporting the TurboTax stuff.
That's fantastic.
exporting the TurboTax stuff.
Like, that was great.
I was, when I saw it, I was like,
I'm not going to, I don't know what I'm going to do here.
And then I watched the video and I was like,
man, this is pretty sick.
Like, it was clean.
It's super easy.
Dude, I'm just telling you, like, I was so...
I didn't use this video, yeah.
Yeah.
And you know what's funny?
When you were saying it,
taxes are generally such a pain for so many people that when you solve it it like
lights people up that was the vibe that i got because like when between turbo tax plus awaken
um you know what i thought was going to be an absolute nightmare was actually pretty simple
um and i don't know i just i just kind of like made me happy when it was solved.
Nice.
Um, and I'm just, I, it, like, I'm actually kind of joyful finishing the taxes.
Like, it's just like a weird, a weird emotion to feel, but it's the emotion.
I don't know.
That's great.
Yeah.
I'm glad to hear that was your experience in general.
I think taxes, I mean, they're very stressful.
Um, and so we try to do a lot of things to make it less stressful. And so like I have
just throughout the UI in general, I have a lot of like little video walkthroughs that I just
recorded in my office to try to like, you know, walk you through a part that would otherwise
be stressful. It's like, oh, how do I do this? Because like once you get that export, it's like,
what do I actually have to do? And so we try to create lots of like walkthroughs, video stuff
that you can watch, follow along and make that experience obviously less stressful. Because with the tax
product, there's a lot of opportunity for like, I guess what you could call like product paper cuts,
where it's like something like you got all the way through, but you downloaded your report. And
now it's like a pain and stressful for how to actually do I upload this, et cetera. And there's
a lot of those types of things. For example, when you're even labeling transactions,
like you could be trying to label something
and the label's not available and you don't know why,
but it's because like the transaction,
although it looks like something
in terms of how it's treated tax-wise,
it's actually different.
So for example, there's multiple ways to provide liquidity
and you could provide liquidity by giving two tokens
and receiving a token back that represents your position.
You can also provide liquidity by taking tokens and depositing it into a pool.
That's like earning you fees and yield and then you withdraw.
And those two things are actually taxed very differently.
Because one is you're disposing two assets to get an asset in return that represents
your position.
And the other is it's almost basically like staking where you're staking your assets to
a pool that's then earning yield.
And then when you unstake, you're carrying your cost basis back.
And so there's all these like little confusing things that when you're like reconciling transactions, when you're trying to actually finish it up and put it in a TurboTax.
And we try to provide like videos and like helpful things.
And then if you message us, we're pretty responsive trying to help you actually walk through why or how you can actually handle all of this so that you can get your taxes done as quickly as possible so you can avoid the stress.
And so, yeah, we tried it.
I'm glad you like the videos because basically anytime someone asks a question pretty often, we try to
put together something. So either it's an FAQ or a video. I will literally often, if a customer has
a very specific question, I will literally record a video just for them and send it to them to help
them walk through something that would otherwise be very stressful for them. So we generally just
try to add all these things to make the product feel a lot better for people and take away this like major stress. And that's generally like one
of the reasons I really like working on this product because there aren't many times when
you can work on a product that is like so helpful to someone that when you solve it, like it's just
like they're obviously super happy about it. And that's what kind of keeps me going. Like there's
a lot of issues in building a software like this. There's a lot of edge cases and that's why there's a lot of issues in building a software like this. There's a lot of edge cases and that's why there's 750,000 lines of code and
we're still not perfect. And when we do, when we,
when we are able to get it right for someone that obviously makes them feel
very happy. And that, that kind of pushes me along to go through and,
you know, add another 50,000 lines of code to make the product better.
Cause I like, I like to help people with this. So.
Do you, do you, Do you go on vacation?
I don't believe in vacation.
I do sometimes.
I will say, I'll stop sharing my screen real quick
so I can look at you guys.
Can you see me?
Yes.
What's up?
Sometimes, but not really, to be honest.
I think the best founders are pretty obsessive
about their work.
And it's almost like I say this phrase, which people like think it's just so weird.
But to me, like sleep is almost an obstacle because it's like 3am and I want to keep working.
I actually like what I'm working on.
And I'm like, I should go to bed because if I don't, I'll have to wake up.
And then, you know, like pushing my sleep back.
It's going to be a problem in the morning, right?
Exactly.
Because like I genuinely like to work on what I'm working on.
I work a lot.
I work almost every day from like the moment I wake up to nighttime, except when I have to run errands sometimes.
Do you go to the gym?
I need to start, but no, I do not. Sometimes when I do a call, I'll go walk around while I'm doing the call. But I think I'm pretty obsessed about the problem solving.
And it's just kind of like, it's like never ending, really. there's always like a new issue. There's always like a new thing to support. And like,
I want to build Awaken into a massive company. And so I'm pretty motivated to work on it
constantly. Like I even tweeted, I actually did go on a trip with my girlfriend and her parents
to Japan. And a user was actually messaging me and having an issue with something. And we're
like walking down this like snowy sidewalk. And I just whipped out my computer. And while we were
walking down the snowy sidewalk, I was literally like this.
Yeah.
Just like holding it in my hand, like responding to something.
And it's like, it sounds a little bit weird, but that's also like why the product is pretty
good.
And like, for me, I genuinely like, like really helping people with this because I know it's
really stressful for them.
And I find it really fun to work on from a technical perspective because because it's very complicated software to build, even though it looks simple. In fact, a lot of
people on Twitter, when we don't work for them, I totally get it. We're not perfect for everyone.
But I've seen comments about people that were not satisfied with us and someone else messages
something and they're like, man, you should really build a crypto tax software because you'd become
so wealthy if you built it because everything sucks, including us, for them at least. And I'm like, I
mean, I hopefully more people want to build in this space, but it's very hard to build this,
build a product. And so because of that, there's like always something new to add to it, always
something new to fix about it. And so I work on it a lot. I'm pretty obsessed about working on it,
which I think not to keep rambling on, but I think gives me like a slight advantage because
the space we're in is generally taxes really boring, right?
Like not many smart people want to go work in this.
And this is like YC's term for like blindness, right?
It's like something that's like really boring.
A lot of us experience the problem, but we don't actually want to go and fix it because it's like insurance.
Exactly.
Like all these type of industries, right?
They're like generally boring.
You don't want to go in them.
But the fact is like the problem that we're solving, a lot of people have it, like most people in crypto have
this problem. All the products are generally not very good. And that's because, I mean, most of the
teams that want to build in this space are not like the best teams, because the best teams will go
work on something in AI, quite frankly, or like something else, right? Something that's more
exciting. And so I think because of that, I say this like analogy often, but like the best way to
win at poker is to just go to a,
and I didn't come up with this, someone else did, but the best way to win at poker is just to go to
a table where everyone else is really bad at poker. And I think the crypto tax market is like that.
We literally just did a poker stream last week.
There you go. Yeah. And it's like, I'm sitting down at the crypto tax poker table
and everyone sucks around me. And so it's like, I have an opportunity to like clean house for someone that's like smart and motivated
to build in that space. And so that's kind of how I do it.
Humble brag, humble brag, humble brag, humble brag.
Caught it, caught it.
You know, some of these teams are okay. They're okay too. I don't want to like be fully, you know,
saying that they're horrible, but like genuine, generally they're not that great. And so I really
want to go in here and not build a really good product. It feels like about time someone built the product that was focusing for on on
chain people specifically uh and so that's kind of what we're trying to do hell yeah lex you have
any thoughts there or should i i got a couple others but uh i mean yeah nothing off the top
of my head but i mean it it sounds good so i I'm curious. Okay.
I don't know, you know, obviously healthy helping of consumer privacy.
However, are there notable stories throughout this experience?
Like first off, like the story of you walking down a road,
a snowy road in Japan with a computer in your hand.
That's amazing.
But what have been some of the edge cases in building out this product that you've been like, that's crazy.
I didn't know that this was a problem that people had.
I didn't know that certain people experienced this type of thing.
What have you learned?
Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff.
I'll try to say some interesting
ones. But the first, I'm actually just going to give a warning to people. Because one that is
very common is a lot of people get airdrops in tokens that go down a lot in value. But they
claim the airdrop when that token is worth a lot, and they don't sell any of it. And I've seen lots,
this is like the most common like horror story I see is people got airdrops that were worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then that token went down a lot in value and then they sold it at a loss.
And the problem with that is like when you get an airdrop, it is generally classified as income.
And when you sell it at a loss, that's generally a capital loss. And those do not offset each other
perfectly. And so some people end up losing a lot of money on these tokens and they still have the
income liability there. And that is very, very common. Like,
it's like, I, it like hurts me every time I see it. Cause it's very often someone will message in and have this issue where they're like, my income is saying it's like, you know, 200 grand,
but I only have like 30 K in token. Cause it went down so much. And generally at that point,
I will refer them to an actual CPA that can maybe help them take some position here.
But that is generally one that I see a lot. And I want to say that one first,
so that anyone that's in that position, like if you claim a large airdrop and it is claimed as income,
like you should try to sell part of that so that at least way you can cover the taxes on it. If
you plan on staying compliant, because it's very common that those tokens will go down a lot in
value and you're still stuck with a big bill on the income tax side. And so that is one I want
to start off with because it's super common. And it hurts me every time i see it because not much that we can do after the fact on it which uh we were just looking at hype earlier um
and hype you know did a great job of appreciating but uh it is now on the downturn and if it goes
below let's say like three dollars um there are definitely going to be holders that have not had like that never
sold any of their hype.
Yeah.
And so those people, obviously like not tax advice, you can do what you want, but I would
seriously consider at least if you're planning on staying compliant, you know, selling a
portion that can cover the income because the income taxes, like it's decided that like
FMV of the time that you receive the token, there's different ways to do it. You were saying, Lex, you can do average on that day.
You can do closing day price. There's different ways to calculate it, but it is calculated in USD
as income at the time you receive it. You want to make sure that you're not going to be stuck
with a crazy tax bill later. Where does that come from, by the way?
The price?
No, just why was it decided that airdrops are income?
Like, do you know where that's written?
Do you know?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, generally, I think it's on the IRS's website somewhere.
It's been a while since I've looked at that portion.
And it's interesting because other countries, by the way, they don't have that same thing.
Like both Canada and Australia, they do not tax airdrops as income in the US.
So it is generally considered income.
Why it is that way, I don't know.
I mean, you can argue that.
So in Canada and Australia, the capital gains?
Yeah.
So in Canada and Australia, your basis for an airdrop asset is actually $0.
And then when you sell it for whatever price, there's capital gains on that.
Which makes way more sense.
Yeah, you would think. But I don't know why it is the way it is, but that's the way that it has
been defined so far. Okay. Well, what else? What else we got? What is the most transactions you've
ever seen on a single account?
Is it the 3 million from this last week?
So to be perfectly honest, when someone has that many transactions,
I just say we cannot help you right now because it is just too many.
Yeah, it's just too many.
We want to architect our system in a way that can handle that better for people.
But right now-
What's the hold there?
Because for the mind of someone like me,
I would think if a computer can do 1,000 calculations, like 10,000 is not that hard.
And my computer in the process of running the stream has done probably like a billion calculations in the last five seconds.
So why is three million transactions unusable?
Yeah.
So to caveat this, one day it will be usable right now.
It's not.
Um, and it is kind of like a couple of things like one, like we run these, um, we basically
will for, for every time that you click, we have this recalculate button and we actually
make you manually click it because that kicks off a really heavy compute job to like go
through all of your transactions.
We have to use a bunch of different data providers to pull in extra data.
So for example, like historical pricing for your coins, with the pulling like large mappings of historical
pricing for every token in your wallet when we're going through them and all this stuff.
And generally like when we pull in like 3 million transactions, it's kind of like a couple things
like one, the infrastructure we have deployed today, it just gets very slow on that. And so
we actually have anyone that's over like 100,000 transactions, we actually have run on separate
infrastructure from everyone else.
No way.
Yeah.
So we don't affect everyone else because we've noticed like the first year.
You'll put on like a hang for like 10 minutes type deal.
We actually, it's not even like a hang.
We just like have separate servers that run them so it doesn't affect everyone else.
So that way, like we keep everything somewhat performant because like this has been like
a big lesson for me and like basically distributed systems because like the way that we've had
to architect our system, it's to handle running like we run millions of jobs a month for importing and for recalculating, et cetera.
And we've had to like scale that out horizontally.
And then for us, like the reason why we don't handle these like really big accounts anymore, for the record, is like I actually tweeted this other day.
And it's kind of interesting because usually when you're a seed stage company, you don't have like a massive database.
But we already have a billion rows in our database. And we're like literally a seed stage
company with just me. It's a pretty large database and just getting larger, obviously every day. And
so with that, there's definitely been bottlenecks and I've actually hired out people that I've
worked with before that have helped resolve some of these in the past. And there's current ones
that are kind of happening that make it so that running these accounts is just extremely slow.
So it's mostly resource constraint on the database side when we're trying to run these accounts. Like
for example, an account with 3 million transactions, if we're building a ledger for that account,
because like our whole system underpinning it is a double entry ledger for all your transactions.
That's how we have it like be very robust and we can calculate anything and kind of trace down when
there's a problem. And a double entry ledger for something with 3 million trades is probably 10
million plus rows.
And so if we export a lot of these accounts,
like our database is getting bigger.
There's all just generally like a lot of constraints
that we're kind of like going up against
that right now we're actually working on improving.
That way, like when we actually want to start to scale
to larger accounts, it won't be insanely slow.
But the reason we don't run on 3 million transaction accounts
is right now just like the latency on our database
to run those type of operations that we need to, to run on that account would
take like 10 hours.
That is like how long it takes right now.
And so we actually have a change right now that's going to bring that down by like a
factor of five.
So it'll become a lot faster.
And then these are all things that we're going to build so that way we can get up to that
next level.
Because ultimately we want to help everyone with their taxes.
And generally it's
interesting because we basically started as a company getting the worst possible users that
a crypto tax software would want because those are the users that had a problem. So we had all
the people doing like crazy stuff on chain and like had so many transactions. They're doing like,
you know, 30,000 transactions a year on one wallet, like on Solana wallets. We have Solana wallets
imported into Awaken with like 150,000 transactions, and these wallets are like a year old.
So these people are obviously either using it programmatically or they're living on their
computer trading stuff, which is generally what we've seen. And so we have always gotten the type
of user since the beginning. Now we kind of get a more mix of users, but we've always gotten users
that basically couldn't use any other software, so they were willing to try ours uh and so because
of that we built up a lot of stuff to make the software really good for those people
but it's still not really great for really large accounts and as like a mini teaser we have a
couple big businesses that actually want to use awaken um i'll name one of them but it's like not
live but we're doing a potential pilot with Farcaster. And they're basically paying lots of little bits of ETH to help like instantiate users' accounts.
They're paying out rewards every single week to people that are posting on their network, etc.
And so they have millions of transactions that they need to reconcile.
And so this is a use case for businesses that operate on chain where they receive little bits
of revenue on lots of transactions and need to reconcile them. And so generally, we're trying
to build our infrastructure so we can get to that point. Because right now,
there's some different bottlenecks for that. That was a long answer for why we cannot operate on
those sides of accounts yet, but that's generally why. That's unreal. Wow. I don't know, man. That's
crazy. And then, I mean, obviously, I'm not going to ask you to disclose the identity of that, but
that sounds like, I feel like the only type of user that could hit 3 million trades would be a high frequency trading account.
Yes.
They're definitely, yeah, these are high frequency trading users.
That's unbelievable.
Yeah.
And they trade a lot and they generally don't have a solution that's good for them.
And we've actually had multiple of these type of users approach us in the past and we actually do want to have a solution for them.
Because also high frequency traders are also willing to spend a lot on tax
software that works so it's a great market for us um like they're not price sensitive at all like
most users and so uh something that we won't support but uh yeah understood high frequency
users for sure high frequency traders that's wild what what um have you tried, I'm curious, what's been the response whenever you go up to
a notable DEX, let's say? I know you said that you're close with the Jupiter guys,
and you could feel free to talk about that, but do you normally notice, at least culturally in crypto,
positive response whenever you're like, hey, we'll make this super easy? Or normally is it like,
we don't really want to talk with the tax software company.
Generally, it's the latter. I've generally a tax company. It is kind of this interesting thing.
And I actually tweeted about this too. I don't want, I don't mean to say like,
I keep mentioning different tweets I have. Like that's okay. No, I do the same. I do the same.
Yeah. I can take a catalog of thoughts basically.. Yeah, exactly. Because like as they come up, sometimes I'll tweet them. And one of the,
I mean, the things that like I've noticed is just like, yeah, the tax compliance rate for crypto is
very low. I don't know exactly what it is, but I would not be surprised if it's sub 5%.
It is very low for on-chain people specifically. If you use Coinbase, that compliance is a lot
higher because you think that they're reporting it to the government. And so you obviously want to make sure that you're accounting
for that. And the fact is like the IRS does not understand what's happening, a bunch of what's
happening on chain. Like maybe one day they do, but like right now they definitely don't. Like
we spent our whole day in this place and we don't even understand everything.
And they also have more pressing concerns. Like, will we be fired tomorrow?
Exactly. Right. So like there is definitely like, yeah, lots of stuff lots of stuff happening there that's you know they don't understand what's happening
on chain necessarily so compliance rates in crypto are generally really low and um
i have nothing against phantom like phantom is awesome i use phantom we're one of the tax
partners this year um and as part of that like multiple members of the phantom team they use
awaken and like i've helped them use awaken and they're great um and uh this year when we wanted
to do a partnership with them,
we actually wanted to do something within their application.
Like, hey, just click on the wallet.
Through the wallet.
Be like, hey, just easy taxes.
We'll make it.
We were going to make it 100% free, like no cost to it,
just as a way of getting mindshare for Awaken.
And generally, it totally makes sense,
but Phantom didn't want to do something like this
because they didn't want to be seen as a narc to their users,
which makes total sense. That's so real that that is so real right and so like you don't
want your wallet necessarily making it feel like they're reporting something to the irs and although
that's not what's happening like awaken reports nothing to the irs by the way we just help you
generate a form so you can self-report it like none of this is reported to the irs directly
um but generally in crypto like there is a lot of like people not paying their taxes on stuff and so there is a generally people don't want to necessarily associate with a tax
product and it has been a challenge because that means that like our for our distribution
we cannot get distribution through dexes although we support dexes really well we try to make it so
that like liquidity providing etc we try to support that really well but generally those companies
don't necessarily want to partner with a tax company because
they don't want to insinuate to their users that they have to pay tax.
And so most of them you'll see do not talk about tax at all.
Like there's nowhere mentioning on their website or anything about taxes, even though a lot
of people that are providing liquidity and trading serious volume are in the US.
And that is a thing that we have to do.
So generally it has not been, and I understand the dynamics.
That's why I'm not like throwing anyone under the bus because I get it.
Like if I was, you know, a wallet too, I probably wouldn't want my users to potentially see me as providing something to the IRS because that would piss a lot of people off.
So I understand the dynamics.
Obviously, yeah.
Yeah, 100%.
So I understand the dynamics behind it, but generally not very helpful in terms of like spreading the word about the support.
And so we've had to rely on, on word of mouth from our users,
the users that do pay tax.
And then they sometimes have friends that pay tax.
And then, you know, it's kind of just like, we spread that way.
Wild, wild.
Lex, what's on your mind?
You got any, you have any thoughts out there?
No, not really.
I mean, it sounds like a good business model getting all the price insensitive
consumers for sure. So what's, so yeah, like what's, what's the next, right? And it sounds like a good business model getting all the price insensitive consumers.
So what's,
so yeah, like what's,
what's the next,
right?
Like,
obviously you need to expand.
obviously you have like clear,
you know,
there's,
there's clear gaps in terms of,
you know,
being able to hit massive accounts and whatnot.
But,
generally for me,
the path was just like,
get really good at really niche taxes, um, and also expand. But like, for me, the path was just like get really good at really niche taxes and also expand.
But like what is expanding for you guys?
What's next?
Yeah, great question.
So like I generally view Awaken as like, I mean, there's kind of like two buckets of things that we spend time on.
And this is like a quote by the superhuman founder, actually, because he broke it into these buckets and it's helped me have clarity in how I think about things.
But there's like solution deepening and market widening.
And so we have things in each of these buckets.
So I'll talk about market widening.
Like we don't support most countries right now.
We don't support Canada and the UK.
And these are pretty big crypto markets, actually.
Oh, I get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we want to support those.
We have businesses coming to us that want us to be able to help them with their taxes because a lot of the founders of these businesses, they use Awaken. And so then when
they have to do something for their business, they're like, oh, it would be nice to be able
to use Awaken as well. And so we want to be able to support more countries. We want to be able to
support more types of customers and that includes high frequency traders, like liquid token funds,
et cetera. So we want to be able to support those types of customers to expand our market market but generally our main market is on-chain people and so really we want to just go a
lot deeper with those people so we want to add like a few more integrations like a lot of our
users they like perps and so they use bybit for example to trade perps and so there's a lot of
like perp stuff we want to get a lot better at a lot of on-chain stuff that we need to improve
like our jupiter dca support is good but there are certain edge cases where like we're not super great for right now. We want to include other
things like year-round stuff. So like, for example, giving you just like a quarterly update about like
how your taxes are doing for the year. So we can actually engage our users a couple of times
throughout the year. And so generally we want to, in that bucket of things, another one would be
like tax loss harvesting. So like really great features around being able to like, right now,
we're all sitting on all these losses. It'd be actually good to book some of the losses because like there's
no wash sale rule in crypto in the US. So you can just post a loss and then use that loss for later
if you have gains in the future. And so we want to build a lot more tools to provide value to our
current users that have crossed kind of those things, like build the product and make it a lot
deeper, make it a lot better what it currently is, and then open up a couple new markets and all of
those things. And like generally, like the bet that we're taking with Awaken is that more on-chain users will, one, pay taxes,
and then two, there will be more on-chain users.
And so we really focus on that.
And I think for us, I won't give all the numbers, but we're profitable.
And so we're generally growing a lot this year as well.
And so I have pretty good conviction that Awaken as a business for on-chain users can generate tens of millions of dollars of revenue a year um but we are taking a
bet where like we need more people to come on chain and actually find applications interesting enough
to come on chain which by the way is actually happening i mean you've seen the the big number
has been like um on-chain usage versus versus sex usage has drastically shot up in the last year and a half.
Yeah, which is awesome.
And we hope to, obviously, you can see that because the bet that we're making with Awaken
and the reason why people invested in us this past round is that that will continue to grow.
And if that grows, we want to be the place that is really good for that.
And we want to be the place that everyone wants to go to for that.
And as part of that, a lot of the big on-chain influencers that you see on Twitter, a lot of them are on our cap table now.
And we specifically wanted to get them invested.
So that way as on-chain grows, like we can have – I want a monopoly on on-chain.
Like I want everyone that's on-chain to be using Awaken.
And that's why I do things that are kind of crazy.
Like this year, we've given out over a million dollars of discounts and free stuff.
That's not like a public number, but I'm just like throwing free at everyone.
Like I don't know if I gave it to you free eddie but great uh awesome uh and generally
like i i will make discounts free i'll do whatever because like i'm in this for the long run and i
actually saw last year we did this like free promo where we made it free until march 1st and then
after that we charged money and this year within five weeks of taxes and we made more money than
all of last year and it's because a lot of those free people we see convert the second year.
And so taxes is a sticky product where when you can actually get someone to use you, they
use you a lot.
And we have so many people now that are literally three years in a row using us.
And so I know that we can do things kind of crazy to attract users because once we get
them, not only do they tell their friends about it that way, they're there and they're
kind of stuck.
And I don't know if you feel stuck, Eddie, but I would like you to feel stuck.
Yeah, no, I did message you. I said, this is how I'm going to do my taxes.
There we go.
Like there's no question.
Awesome. And like the one thing I will promise like our users is like a lot of these other
companies, they kind of got to where they were and they made a lot of users kind of feel stuck
and then they stopped shipping. And honestly, Coinly is one of these companies where Coinly
used to be so good. And then they got all these users and they stopped shipping. And honestly, Coinly is one of these companies where Coinly used to be so good. And then they got all these users
and they stopped shipping.
Like they have not improved their on-chain support at all.
And so a lot of people from Coinly,
they migrate to us constantly.
And like Awaken will not be like that.
Like we will keep staying on the forefront of Web3.
So like you're not going to want to switch,
but then generally we know that if we can get you to try us,
you'll stick with us
and hopefully share it with your friends.
And so like I'm playing the long game here
of like I want to acquire as many on-chain users as possible. Cause as on-chain usage grows,
I want everyone on chain to be using Awaken and then grow that to millions, you know,
millions of users and then be a hopefully billion dollar company one day. And so that's kind of the
plan. Hell yeah, dude. That's electric. So we're coming up on like the, we're coming up on the 10 out, 10, 10 o'clock mark. So I'm curious, you got any like last thoughts you have to get out there, things you really want to say? Because I mean, I found this to put this up as a caption.
But here, hold on.
But like, yeah, what's on your mind?
I mean, last thing I'll say is like, try out Awaken.
If you have a problem, DM me, because I'll probably respond.
Like if you DM me at 2 a.m., I'm in PST, I'm in California.
I'll probably be responding to you and help you look into it.
So like, if you want to give Awaken a try, definitely try it out.
It's Awaken.tax.
And if you have problems, we're very responsive.
And we want to build a product that you want to use this year and every year beyond that,
beyond this year.
And we'll keep making the product a lot better.
So give it a try.
If you have any problems, I'm very responsive on Twitter.
And I would love to hear your feedback.
Damn.
I don't know.
This has me gassed up.
Because it was just clearly, for me, you guys are building a product, you care about it,
and you're good at it.
And it's funny for me when I say you guys because it's only recently become you guys.
It's generally been you have built a product.
It's absurd.
That's wild.
Awesome. But also, thanks for inviting me on here
I don't really go on much speaking stuff in general
I spend most of my time just coding and so
I'm really happy that you guys invited me
I could talk about Awaken a little bit hopefully we get
some new users that want to give us
a try and like yeah Eddie if you have any problems
Lex if at some point you try Awaken
just let me know and we're always making the product
better you know what I would probably be using it this
year if I had any gains to record, but thankfully I'm not separated of all of my tax liabilities
for the year. And by the way, just so that you know, and this is kind of like as an aside,
but you know, also for the, it's kind of like speaking out loud. Um, I'm for this stream,
I think we're going to try probably try probably uh to clip it up as well
and see if we can make some clips and start rolling with that so uh expect to see some clips of
yourself talking about taxes nice i'll definitely be retweeting that but i don't have a big audience
yet but i'll retweet neither frankly neither doing. We're building it up. We'll all get there together. Hey, honestly, I'll just tell you this.
So metrics wise, the stream is actually pretty solid.
500 viewers is for, for this account, like really not bad at all,
especially talking about taxes. And since you came on, like you,
you brought on and this conversation was 300 of that 500 so okay yeah so not bad i i
was i've been watching pretty close so yeah actually pretty sweet pretty sweet and yeah
let's get that 500 to 500 000 at some point so yeah right hopefully hopefully all righty i think
we'll probably call it a rapski here um i think that's, I think that'll do it. Lex, you have any thoughts there before I, you know?
No, nothing to add, but thanks, Andrew. Appreciate you coming on.
Thank you, Andrew.
Relax. Nice chatting with you guys. Hope you have a good rest of your weekend.
Peace, man. And on our end, and you can just click tab out. That's good.
and you can just click tab out.
That's good.
And on our end,
I'm going to just wrap this puppy up
in the words of the not late,
but definitely great Jeremy Clarkson
on that bombshell.
Dude, one of the greatest lines.
I love that guy.
This has been overexposed.
Like technically episode one,
I guess of like the new account.
And if you guys are still watching, give this account a follow.
It's very much appreciated.
That's at overexposedshow.
We're going to be doing the show 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time going forward.
And expect to see more.
Expect to see some like, you know, some more production value, quality, whatever you want to call it.
We're getting to that.
That's our vibe.
Yeah, Alex, you got a closing
note or can I just pull this puppy
out? You're good, Eddie. Thanks for closing
us out. We'll see you all next week.
All right. I'm going to pull the plug.
Peace, guys.
