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DEFI SUMMER 2025: ARE WE BACK?? 🏖 The Aggregated Ep. 114
Recorded: May 23, 2025 Duration: 3:45:04Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. you Polygon pump it up, Polygon pump it up Pump it, pump it, you gotta pump it
Pump it, pump it, you gotta pump it
ZKEVM is Ethereum
ZKEVM is Ethereum
ZKEVM is Ethereum ZKEVM is Ethereum ebn is ethereum z k ebn is ethereum z k ebn is ethereum
You gotta pump it, pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it, pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it, pump it, pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it.
Yeah. Let's go.
Let's go.
All right, is the song off? All right, is the song off?
All right, is the song off?
No, you're good.
I'm trying to pick it up.
I won't connect.
Are people echoing for others?
Yeah, I'm echoing.
Then we are.
There.
GM Shemok.
Hmm. you
are Is Aztec cutting out? Yeah.
Aztec, you're chopping pretty hard.
I think we're getting about 3% of what you're saying.
You're really cutting out.
This is the Aztec remix.
Jim, Edith, and BT. GM, how's everyone doing today?
Hello, hello. All right defi
defi summer
are we back
are we going to have a defi
summer
will it be as epic as the last
will it be more epic
oh yeah
defi summer
defi fall defi, you call it.
DeFi World.
All right.
Let's see.
I think Aztec was going to start us off, but why don't we do some introductions here?
Let's start with Kurt, and everybody will just do quick 20-second introductions,
and then we'll get into all the stuff each of us are building throughout the show.
Go ahead, Kurt.
What's up, Brock? Good to see everybody. I'm Kurt.
I've been a Bitcoiner since 2012.
I'm an executive in the mining space. I run a small pool called Gorilla Pool. I also run pretty
large hashing operations for anybody that wants hosted ASICs. Sorry, throat's a little
sore today. I do lots of things in the space. I consult. I've worked in tokens,
primarily in Bitcoin and Bitcoin forks. So I'm a big fan of ordinals, S-Script, smart contracts,
that kind of thing. I spend a lot of time teaching people that basically Bitcoin and Bitcoin style
blockchains are as good or better for DeFi and token applications.
A lot of people love the Ethereum and EVM style stuff.
And for good reason, I don't dislike them,
but Bitcoin-based stuff is ultimately a lot more scalable.
And I'm a big believer that we need to get everybody into a system that works.
And I think that at scale, that probably has to be on a Bitcoin-style network.
So that's my take.
I'm looking forward to the talk.
Welcome back, Kurt.
We're happy to have you here.
Hey, Aztec.
Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, I think you're better now.
Okay. So what was going on?
I told you they were rugged.
People were talking because I got booted
off the stage
you were it was your connection
we were getting like 3% of what
you were saying it was Aztec remix
still right now
no you're good now
alright
we're just doing introductions.
Good morning, Aztec.
Actually, you want to introduce yourself, Aztec?
Sure.
We never focus on ourselves on this show, but I guess let's do it.
Let's do it.
Maztech CSO at Lunar Digital Assets, Fullstack Blockchain Venture Studio, and founder of Tesseract.
Aztec, CSO at Lunar Digital Assets.
It's an accelerator that for season one focused on Polygon grantees, helping accelerate them
and integrate them into the Polygon grantees, helping accelerate them and integrate them into the Polygon
ecosystem.
And clicking on a lot of other
things, stuff that we'll mention
very soon that I'm very excited
about.
that's me, guys.
We should leak what you're
talking about today.
I know Aztec You should leak what you're talking about today. Not a leak.
I know Aztec won't want us to leak.
No, no.
We can't leak, man.
Let's take the next week at least to drop a little bit more alpha.
All right.
Good stuff, guys.
We've only introduced Kurt.
Yep.
Cool.
Um, let's go ahead and, uh, Mike on over to gridlock.
What's up guys?
You guys can, uh, gun scene.
Excited to see you guys here today.tec by the way your your connection is
a little choppy still now it's like we're getting like 85 of what you're saying
but yeah go ahead gridlock hey guys it's derek here with gridlock
um yeah really happy to be here uh gridlock is super easy, super safe distributed storage. So this is self custody. It's open source technology. You can go to the GitHub repo right now, run it yourself. We have an app in the app store. So this is something that your parents can use and store crypto in a way that isn't confusing, doesn't use weird things like seed phrases.
And yeah, we're really happy to kind of make crypto what it should be,
which is self-custody decentralized.
And that's what we're doing.
We're working on the storage side of things.
All right.
Two Cent Timmy, what's up?
GM, GM.
It is totally DeFi summer. No no so i am two cent timmy i work on the marketing team at polygon um i am like honestly i've been very busy with all of the
defy stuff that has been happening on polygon i mean i'm sure we'll get into a whole bunch of that i uh i love that quick
swap just had like massive massive stable coin farming um which is really fun so um like between
a usd and usdc so like yeah i i'm a huge d5 fan and i can't wait to talk about like all the exciting things that's happening and being built.
Oh, yeah. And we got Tam from QAC, Quadratic Accelerator. How are you doing?
Hey, I'm great. I'm so happy to be on this panel with everyone else. Great, great assemblage here.
My name is Tamara and I'm the founder, co-founder of a DeFi Native protocol called Quadratic Accelerator. And it's a reinvention of Fairlaunch. It's exclusively
on Polygon and it's built by builders for builders. We're very grateful for the support
from Tesseract this season. They did a lot to help us get reach
and promotion and we work with quick swap all of our tokens are launched on quick swap we're in
season two now we had a really great first season with eight projects we're in season two with four
more projects quick swap is one of the projects in our cohorts this season along with to the moon
web 3 packs and how to dow And the tokens are all getting listed
on QuickSwap. And I just want to say maybe, you know, why do we reinvent FairLaunch?
You know, with all of the meme coins and other kinds of tokens that don't have real value,
we really want real founders building real products for real users. We want to give them a
shot to be able to launch their token early too.
And for the public not to be treated as exit capital of a token launch,
but to get in early.
Early isn't a privilege.
It's a protocol.
And it's the QF protocol.
All right.
Excited for all the stuff you guys are doing with QAC.
And Ada.
GMGM.
What's the vibe?
I guess.
It's quite positive, I assume.
So super nice to meet all of you and honored to be here.
and honored to be here.
Very excited for our conversation today.
Very excited for our conversation today.
So AIDA is an AI-powered trading terminal
that connects multiple DEXs and LaunchPacks
for the best trading experience.
And someone was mentioning this before
that their parents can use from data perspective.
I mean, think of us as the platform, trading platform,
and the creation of wallet
uh being enabled for your grandparents as well it's very easy to use one click for everything
including launch zones trading terminal building wallet ai power token launch and and and beyond so
uh yeah i mean uh by the way my name is called yuki i am the ceo at aida, my name is Koyuuki. I am the CEO at AIDA. My background is in AI ML. I've been doing this for some time.
You know, used to be part of some of the incumbents in Silicon Valley building, you know, AI pipelines, platforms,
and got into Web3 fairly early through some of the projects such as Avalub, such as BitTensor.
So I would say I am one of the AI and web3 OGs in a space and then uh uh I mean obviously
DeFi summer is happening DeFi is happening DeFi winter is happening uh let's go DeFi forever
let's go
great to have you back on the show Aidaida. Can you guys hear me this time, or am I still choppy? Much better.
You're good.
Okay.
I switch entire internet services, so let's see if this works.
Nice. You called.
They came.
They installed the router.
You got a whole new internet service.
service awesome yeah just like that i snapped my fingers now it's just uh it's just a hot spot that
Awesome.
Yeah, just like that.
I snapped my fingers.
i got just in case uh weird things like this happen dedication love it all right we got a
couple more uh i don't know if you know who we went with so i'll just continue on uh kanish hello hello thank you for having me here
everybody my name is kanish i am a dev rel at uma and across um my background has been in software
engineering and community building you'll find me at hackathons being sleepless and helping
developers you'll also find me with like startup founders trying to find pmf and telling them not to dge before they find the pmf um but yeah jokes aside um i focus on making sure that um anybody wants
to build with across add a bridge to their application or anybody wants to build with
umma and add an optimistic oracle to their application have all the support and resources
they need and i i genuinely think DeFi summer is back.
I mean, didn't Bitcoin hit the all-time high like yesterday?
Maybe that was a day ago.
But we're definitely back and I'm bullish.
So yeah, thank you for having me
and I look forward to the conversation.
Back to you, Aztec.
I'm bullish too, bro.
I'm bullish too.
I think we just need some Bitcoin dominance to drop off and then the alts will really start running again. I think people are looking for that confidence again, but the confidence in the market is here.
Avalanche Summit this week, the buy was surreal.
Everybody was just so bullish on what's to come in terms of old season, etc.
So we're definitely back.
We're so back.
Nice.
I love to hear that from the ground because that's the real alpha.
From the ground, how are people?
Because I've been to conferences where everyone's bummed out you can tell like
they're trying to be optimistic but they're bummed out and you know it because you're in the
in the bearish you know kind of winter season and it's fine it's builder season but if if you're
if you saw it from the ground that people are bullish then you know that's a really great headwind um how big was the
the summit there at uh avalanches was is a pretty big summit or it's huge by the way every year
um you know we do this type of summits where avalanche has this type of summit and i always
go and then this year's exceptionally huge uh it was hosted in l, a very nice venue. There are about, you know,
I would say 1500 people, guests, as well as a lot of, you know, speakers, very, very, you know,
prominent figures in a space. And Scaramucci was there as well. You know, some big players and speakers there.
I just feel like that the sparkle is so back.
And this reminded me of the previous cycle
when DeFi summer was just to the moon, essentially.
So that was like the vibe that I got.
And then just talking to folks and people are like,
oh, I'm building this, I'm doing this.
And then, you know, what about that?
It's just like these very proactive
and positive conversations happening everywhere.
And then that really made me more bullish than ever, right?
Even compared to the previous DeFi summer
or the DeFi cycle that we had.
Yeah, I mean, I think that more to come for sure.
That's beautiful.
Music to my ears.
I have disconnected like several times
since the beginning of the show.
So, Rock, who else do we need to introduce?
Because I actually wanted a double click
on what Aida is saying about DeFi summer.
I mean, this is DeFi summer 2025.
Are we back episode, you know, 114.
I want to double click on this.
I also want to talk a bit about the initial DeFi summer.
What were the kind of like catalysts that really kicked things off?
But before we do that, obviously, I want to make sure everyone's introduced.
So thankful for everyone here that's taking the time out of their day to share alpha and knowledge. We need a BTC Penguin OX. Yo, hey guys, excited to be here today.
I'm BTC Penguin. I used to do consensus and robot research for Ethereum Foundation.
I'm BTC Penguin, I used to do consensus and robot research for Ethereum Foundation.
But today I'm here on behalf of Optopia.
We're a new gaming platform on base where every game is a coin.
Optopia is the web-free gaming expansion effort by OneSop Studio, one of the largest studios
in Southeast Asia with more than 3 billion installs worldwide.
Anyways, we're in early access right now.
We're incubated by Corviz Ventures.
Would greatly appreciate it if you guys could come give us
a follow and check out Octopia.
All in all, I can definitely feel DeFi is heating up again,
but in a whole different way this time.
And I can't wait to chat with every time here.
Back to you, Azte you as tech yeah much love you know that's and so after we kind of talk about you know what were the early
catalysts by summer because i want to know you know are we going are these going to be the same
ones and what do you guys think is going to kick off and continue to kick off you know the defy
summer of this year i i do want to also get into you know what's the next iteration
of d5 you know is that chain abstraction is that ai you know all those kind of things but we'll
talk about that maybe a little bit later in the show um so definitely excited to kind of get into that. Miracle, have we introduced you today?
No, not yet.
Glad to be here, everyone.
So I'm Batiste, head of sales and one of the Miracle founders.
So Miracle, we're a SaaS that enable protocols to very easily
incentivize any type of assets.
Super happy to be here because one of the reasons miracle exists is actually thanks
to quick swap who was literally like one of the very first protocols to trust us uh and for two
years later we've grown a lot um and yeah so like in short uh our goal is if your grandma has a bit
of usdc laying around she could incentivize a quick swap pool in a few clicks and if you're
an advanced builder looking to set up some very large incentive
programs, you could use it too.
We used to only support concentrated liquidity,
but now we literally support anything.
And yeah, that's about it.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, you know,
some of the stuff that you guys originally built, I know Alexi from our team had a lot of insight for you guys and helped guide some of the early product stuff that has led to, I think, a lot of your success now.
And so it's been a really good partnership working with you guys.
How many protocols are using Merkle now?
So, yeah, most definitely.
Alexei helped us a lot.
You also introduced us to a lot of chains.
So very thankful for this.
Thankful for this.
We work with, I think, like more than 200 protocols use Merkle to incentivize different protocols.
And we support, like the thing is now,
like the Merkle support is very broad
because anything that's based on an ERC-20 token,
we support.
So like what I like to tell people
is like 95% of DeFi, we actually support.
And then the very custom protocols
like Morpho, for example,
we support them as well.
So unless you're ERC-based, we support them as well. So unless you're NFT-based, we support you, basically.
Yeah, it's pretty incredible.
I mean, I think when we first started working with you guys,
that number was not very high at all.
And now to see, I mean, I think, you know,
maybe do you want to name some of the protocols that work with you guys?
Because, like, it's a huge amount of protocols now.
Yeah.
I mean, so who do we work with?
So Uniswap does all their incentives with us on Unichain.
Euler, too.
I have some pretty good news about about more food coming up pretty soon
but we're really gonna work a lot with them as well um a lot of chains as well um users um
yeah it's it's pretty incredible i mean this is one of those things i guess i guess i'll take a
moment to kind of uh throwSwap some flowers here.
So I am a co-founder of QuickSwap.
But there are a lot of things out there in the DeFi world
that QuickSwap either invented, helped popularize,
partnered with really incredible teams,
and then now those things are used across
the entire industry. So there's a bunch of different standards that QuickSwap, if QuickSwap
didn't use them, you know, may not be here today. And it's really cool to see when Uniswap starts
using the stuff we use because, you know, QuickSwap was born from Uniswap. They're basically our parent, right? Quickswap started as a fork of
Uniswap, but with a bunch of kind of improvements for transaction speed and gas costs,
you know, thanks to Polygon. I mean, that was the whole thesis of Quickswop originally was imagine uniswap but you know fast and with you know cheap gas fees
and so um yeah merkle is one of the things that we uh you know partnered with you guys helped
popularize and got the world to trust you guys you know quickswap had a big name you guys were
doing cool stuff but at the time your name wasn't very big. And when your name's not big, it's hard to get people to trust, you know, integrating you into their DeFi suite, because if they do, you,
you know, and you're not good or things go wrong, you know, you could have like a, what happened
yesterday to the decks on Sui, you know, $200 million lost or $260 million or whatever. So Merkle's one of those examples that is being
used by like a good majority of DeFi in the industry now for distributing rewards.
We call this actually the quick swap effect. We have a name for this. Another one was algebra. So when V3 came out, Uniswap licensed V3. So no one could use it, no one could fork it.
So a team called algebra built a similar concept to to uni V3 concentrated liquidity with a bunch
of changes that made it actually better, like dynamic fees
and some other stuff. The dynamic fees is now being used by Uniswap, but in a different way
through hooks in their V4, but we actually had this in V3. And so Algebra, the team had invented that. And we found them and they were a DEX at the time with only about a million in TVL.
We saw, we recognized that they had something really cool.
We were talking to them for like, this took many months for us to trust them and for us to get, you know, get audits and meet them in Dubai
and, um, and things to, to know that we could really trust this team and trust the product.
And so we integrated that, uh, into quick swap. We use that as our V3. And now since then,
I don't even know how many, it might be a hundred DEXs use the algebra technology now.
They've built, you know, they were some of the first to build a Uniswap style V4
after Uniswap. Actually, their V4 came out before Uniswap's V4. And yeah, now hundreds of projects are using them.
They've gotten, you know, hundreds of million in TVL.
And so another one is Gamma.
So when V3s came out, one of the problems with V3s,
and this is still kind of a problem today in DeFi,
but when V3s came out, it became hard for regular people,
all the people that were providing the liquidity to V2s to provide liquidity because you had to
manage your ranges and you had to move your ranges if stuff got out of range. You had to decide,
are you going 50-50 buy- sell? Are you going 25% buy,
75% sell? Are you going only buy or only sell? There's all these different parameters, which make
these things much more capitally efficient. That was one of the big innovations that,
you know, Uniswap came up with, which was incredible. And the world should thank them for their work on this stuff.
I didn't like that they licensed it, but that's another story.
But Uniswap has brought a lot of really cool stuff to the world.
We should all appreciate them for that.
They've been a big part of what created DeFi in the first place,
like actually mainstream ready DeFi.
And so it was hard to manage your positions
though. So regular people were not able to manage positions. I mean, you could, but are you going to
sit there and keep rebalancing every few days? No, people want to put liquidity and they want
to go AFK for six months, you know? Um, and so, um, what happened, uh, was we found Gamma,
and we saw what they were building with these automated liquidity managers,
and they, very similar to Algebra, only had about a million,
maybe two million in TVL in total.
And so we decided, same thing, we would integrate them directly into our front end.
And we worked with them on the product.
There was another product at the time called Arrakis doing the same thing that had gotten
billions of TVL on Uniswap.
They actually were part of the Uniswap launch on Polygon.
You know, like millions in rewards went through them. But the thing was,
and that helped Uniswap bootstrap. But the problem was that if everybody saw there were articles
about, you know, 53% of Uniswap pools were liquidity providers were in the negative,
were liquidity providers were in the negative.
They were losing money.
And that was largely because Arrakis,
the parameters on them, on Arrakis,
when they started trying to do
this automated liquidity management,
they were the first generation
of this automated liquidity management.
They were making the spreads,
they were making the ranges way too tight,
which makes a lot more volume,
but then
exposes you, it multiplies your volume and revenue, but it multiplies in permanent loss.
And so in times of volatility, you can lose money. And so we worked with Gamma and we told them we
want something more safe. We want to have like more loose ranges.
And we used a bunch of tools and simulations to optimize and find the best possible ranges.
And, you know, got more audits and then finally felt comfortable, decided to build them into our front end.
And once we built them into our front end, I think within a few months, we were up to like 50 million TVL. And, uh, you know, we've
probably done, I don't know, 20 billion in volume, uh, through them or something crazy, probably at
least 10 billion over time. Um, but with us using gamma now, everybody uses Gamma and now there's a bunch more
Ichi, Steer
I think DeFi Edge
and these are all ones that we also
popularized so we brought them on to
compete now with Gamma
yeah the quick swap effect
is real so there's a lot of these token standards
that are used across the entire industry
Merkle Gamma Quick swap effect is real. So there's a lot of these token standards that are used across the entire industry.
Merkle, Gamma, the algebra stuff, a ton of stuff that we've built.
There's a, well, I'll finish with Gamma.
But we got to get everyone introduced also.
So just throwing that out there.
We still got to introduce everyone.
But yeah, we want to hear the quick swap event.
Yeah. So Gamma now is being used again. we still got to introduce everyone but yeah we want to hear the quick soft event yeah so gamma
uh now is being used again i don't even know how many dexes are using it maybe a hundred um
across probably 20 30 chains uh and what's really cool is when these come full circle and the same
thing as now uniswap using merkle uniswap actually wrote a couple grants to Gamma, one for I think a million on Optimism and another for two million on Arbitrum to build exactly what they built with us now for Uniswap.
So it comes full circle.
It's really nice when we were originally a copy of Uniswap, but now Uniswap is copying us.
It's pretty cool. There were originally a copy of Uniswap, but now Uniswap is copying us. It's pretty cool.
There's a bunch of other stuff, a liquidity hub that we built
and a bunch of other things.
But yeah, the quick swap effect is real.
I'm proud.
I don't even know if I've ever told this whole story on a Spaces.
But yeah, it is something I'm proud of.
Quick Swap has continued to innovate
and uh and we're continuing to innovate we have some crazy stuff coming actually
uh but yeah we can uh get back to well good to see you merkel first off and then we could get
back to i think we're almost done with introductions let's do uh adam uh adam it's only Adam. We don't have to worry.
Did we introduce two cent Timmy and Tam?
Yep.
Okay, beautiful.
Two cent Timmy.
I definitely know that gentleman.
He's a good guy.
He's a good guy.
He's a great guy.
I like him.
I appreciate you guys.
He actually goes by 20 cent Tim me when he's wearing the mutant yeah that's an investment right there uh guys nice being on here this is going to be my
first time being on on the ama um i'm the head of bd over at ApeBond. We were originally ApeSwap back in the day, but we migrated into a bonding protocol,
mainly for just liquidity efficiency
and trying to hammer home protocol-owned liquidity.
Love being on the space, love QuickSwap.
We've been a partner with QuickSwap for over,
God, I think it's two and a half years now.
They were the first ones to basically do
our white label bond solution on their front end.
We implemented new art for the NFT.
So just having quick swap bonds available,
which really kind of propelled us into kind of a new stratosphere
of getting new projects, new users, other white label partners.
But quick swap was always there from the beginning.
They kind of held, just supported us through the kind of initial offering that we were going
through. It's always difficult with new products to get new partners on board, but they saw the
value in protocol and liquidity, building up TVL for projects through bonds,
which is basically just more of like an OTC marketplace.
It's a way for users to go and find new projects to invest in,
easy access to an entry point where you're actually purchasing these tokens
with a bonus, basically.
You as a user are purchasing tokens getting an extra
bonus in these tokens to then set it on a vesting schedule for about you know seven to 30 days that's
linearly vested so you're not locked in it you can still have access to the tokens to interact
with the protocol but what you're doing is that you're investing in a project that is mindful of liquidity, is trying to provide exit liquidity in a structure so that it matches their circulating supply, their market cap.
And it's just a good way to identify projects that are looking to build more while still raising funds, but being mindful of that liquidity pool which is so crucial
in these types of environment but i'll yield back that's that's kind of what we do
we love quick swap and working with them for a while um but yeah a little comment on the
d5 summer thing i feel like this is this is like a blockchain summer that we're seeing right now it's
just every blockchain in the world could be popping up right now for some reason.
And it's definitely a different vibe than DeFi summer, but hopefully we have round two coming up.
Man, that's pretty funny that I'm talking about the quick swap effect and some of the protocols that we've helped get traction.
And I actually didn't even know it was you uh you adam from ape bond uh i didn't
even see you so that's it's pretty funny yeah yeah we um i i think we were yeah one of the first
if not the first uh to go big with you guys and uh and support you guys and now a lot of people
are using you guys actually i think uh well sushi was supposed to be using you guys and Actually, I think, well, Sushi was supposed to be using you guys, and then I think
they ended up instead sniping a bunch of your team members and stealing the product. But,
you know, we'll leave that alone for now. Yeah, that was a fun time. But, you know,
it's funny. It's a small world here, man. There's a couple other chains that are popping up that
will be working with them again.
So we'll see how that goes.
We're trying to have a short memory with stuff like this, but things happen.
Yeah.
I know.
It's been great.
Yeah.
Cheers, man.
It's been a great relationship.
Cheers, Adam.
Well, let's dive into the meat then, guys. It's really great to
introduce everyone and have all of you on the panel today. And I'd like to start by getting
right back into where everything started. So DeFi summer 2020, 2021, you know, what were the catalysts that you guys saw that really kicked off DeFi summer, the original DeFi summer?
And do you think that those are also going to be catalysts now and, you know, throughout this bull run? Or do you think that, you know, there's, there's a new kind of defy, uh, catalysts
that are going to be coming.
So if you guys are new to the show, you don't have to raise your hand.
You just jump in whenever you, whenever you can, if you need to raise your hand, you can't
find edgewise.
Um, uh, my recommendation is just throw an elbow in, if you don't want to please feel free to raise
your hand and we'll try to get you in but it's like we're a bunch of friends sitting around a
table just talking and uh we've we've uh learned that uh everyone likes kind of the free-flowing
dynamic uh of conversation you know the first uh filter. So let's go guys.
Who wants to jump in?
I can jump in, man.
I hope it's not the same old shit repeated.
I think that, you know,
there's been some incredible innovations in DeFi,
like the things that you can't do in traditional finance,
like flash loans.
And I want to see more things like that,
that actually come in. I feel like there's a lot
of opportunity with bonding curves there's a lot of opportunity with just different you know new
mechanisms that people are playing with and uh in crypto there's a lot of space for experimentation
and so i you know if i hope it's not the same old stuff, you know, remittances and all these other things there.
Like, those are great solutions.
And, you know, like Aave is incredible.
And obviously, QuickSwap and everything that is there in DeFi now.
These are great.
But what I want to see is something new, you know.
I'm excited to see the new things that people are playing with that uh are barely
in the space especially now that we have ai uh i think that you know d5 plus ai is bound to bring
some really cool innovations wait griff we didn't introduce you and i just noticed recognizing your
voice this is uh this is the griff that i know? Who, I was supposed to go scuba diving?
Yeah, for sure.
The legendary grift.
Hey, what's up, man?
We almost went scuba diving.
I know, I'm so sad, man.
Yeah, it's good to see you guys.
I saw the photos, man.
It looked incredible.
I mean, it was epic.
It was epic.
We had a blast.
I run, I do a lot of side events. Okay, so I'll introduce myself real quick. My name is Griff Green. I've been in the space for a long time. My first project was the DAO. like cycles on crypto right now because of the sui censorship the dow did not do any censoring
of transactions just to make that clear uh did not happen uh we did a hard fork it's very different
very very much more decentralized uh than sui anyway uh i also run a bunch of events in i i
founded a bunch of projects most notably giveth and dapnode
infrastructure projects that support donations and decentralized hardware
really close with Jordi Bellina co-founder of Polygon also my co-founder on giveth and dapnode
so obviously I'm a big fan of the Polygon space. And I was there when he was,
I kind of helped start in three
and what became Hermes and Polygon Hermes
and then eventually Polygon ZKVM.
So I was there at the very beginnings of those projects.
And now I just also am running some really cool things
on Polygon right now,
specifically QAC.
We just launched a token today, 2DMoon, which is a super cool token.
And really, the QAC launch process, I think, is pretty damn innovative as well.
It's probably not going to make big DeFi waves
because it's really targeted at small businesses and small token launches to help the little guys, the legit builders in the space that
need a token for their protocol.
But, you know, they're not going to get like crazy VC money to launch at a, you know, half
a billion dollar market cap and dump on everyone.
Instead, they actually want to build community the right way and start small
and work their way up.
And so that's, uh, that's what we launched with QAC and that's what, uh, that's
what I hope we can talk a little bit more about today too.
Definitely.
So, so grip, just to clarify, I had, uh, some messages that, that were sent
to me in the backend end but did you say
that you guys launched your guys's token so we didn't launch qx token actually in in the space
i believe ellie is in here somewhere and the two to moon team but we launched uh so qwack is actually
a grant ga a grant allocator in the in the polygon space but instead of
allocating grants like just giving teams money we launch tokens for them so we actually launched
really cool micro cap tokens that uh you know under one million dollar market cap tokens with
bonding curves kind of like pump fun, but in, but except without the
gambling and the scams, we actually find legit builders that have really cool products like to
the moon, uh, and gridlock. I see gridlock up here. Uh, we launched them on a Wednesday.
So, uh, we find these really cool teams with really legit projects that are often just asking for grants and trying to get funding.
But then if they have a really clear use case for a token and they want a token to help to make their product better, then we launch the token for them sponsored by Polygon.
So it's a really cool process.
it's a really cool process. Polygon gives, you know, we're a grant allocator. So Polygon gives
us a grant and then we give the teams the grant to launch a bonding curve and where with $50,000,
but the team gets all of that funding, right? And then we do two fair launches. So the first fair
launch is for locked tokens.
So unlike PumpFun where it's like,
hey, I launched on PumpFun, everyone, PVP, good luck.
It's like, okay, we have a two-week period
where people who really believe in the project
can buy the tokens all at the same price.
So for instance, for To The Moon,
everyone paid about .4 pull per token.
But they got locked tokens.
So the tokens are locked for six months and then streamed for six months.
So they have to be really true believers of the project.
But then, today for Tudamun, you know, so all those funds went into the bonding curve
that people bought and minted tokens for people.
Also, the team gets a cut.
They get about 8% of every buy and sell
into the bonding curve.
And then we had a matching pool,
also sponsored by Polygon,
and that matching pool actually creates liquidity on a DEX.
And we make it so that it's super deep liquidity. Like right now, it's got like 135k liquidity. You
can buy over $3,000 worth of these tokens with less than 1% slippage, which is pretty incredible,
I have to say. Pretty rare for a sub one mil market cap token. But anyway, in the process,
so the first fair launch is for locked tokens. Today for To The Moon, we did a fair launch,
but for liquid tokens. So now we can have the pump fun PVP pump and dump on top of each other,
games, because the price can't go down. There's no liquid tokens in the market.
because the price can't go down.
There's no liquid tokens in the market.
No one can sell.
The team's tokens are locked for a year
and then streamed for a year.
The QAC tokens are locked for six months
and then streamed for six months.
So we have six here
where the only way to get tokens
is on Quickswap.
Which, thank you, Quickswap,
for being such a great host
in all the ways.
And now you can get the cheapest tokens possible at least liquid uh that you can get and you get that same
crazy dynamic where people are buying and selling and they're they're you know they can make you can
make money because the price will never be cheaper than this especially for a great project like to
the moon so yeah and maybe i could even especially for a great project like To The Moon.
So, yeah, and maybe I can even just say a little bit about To The Moon.
So they're like a totally AI-generated TV show.
It's pretty funny.
Actually, you should really check it out.
It's hilarious.
Very relatable to people in this Twitter space, I promise.
The storyline is like there's six or seven characters
that are kind of like, almost like,
oh, what was that tech show?
It's like Office Space.
Silicon Valley?
Yes, yes, exactly.
Office Space meets Silicon Valley.
And the seven characters are on a team
trying to launch an L2 that nobody asked for.
So, and it's a, it's a, it's a,
exactly. It's, it's very relatable, I think to everyone in this space. And so, but,
but the cool thing is the script is completely generated by AI and the token is,
is there. So you can actually bet on what the
characters are going to do and the ai is generating the script and eventually they're going to make it
so that with this token you can even influence the script writing and you can tell the ai to
make characters do these things and that will influence the AI to do those things.
So it's kind of like a prediction market meets AI generated TV.
Super cool project.
That sounds really cool.
If you have anything that's been recently released
that you want to share in the Jumbotron,
that would be awesome.
And I really do love the QAC meta.
I think it enables anyone to be a vc
like a their own or like a mini vc and get in on fair launches which which is really cool and you
guys do a fair amount of dd you know for each of the projects that are coming through so you know, for each of the projects that are coming through. So, you know, everyone has a,
um, a good chance of getting in and something truly innovative or, you know, hot. So I think,
uh, you know, being able to get in really early, being like a mini VC and, uh, yeah, you are the
mini VC. Um, and basically kind of jumping in early and buying like tokens that you know million dollar
market cap i mean that's that's uh way better than in my opinion way better than the casino
uh kind of process and like and way reduced risk way reduced risk because there's a bonding curve
like every token.
But most of the times when people sell tokens, those tokens can go to zero.
Like how many tokens do you have in your wallet that went to zero?
Like so many.
But we keep, unlike PumpFun, we actually keep the bonding curve open until they reach about an $8 million market cap. So if they don't reach that,
your tokens will always be able to be sold
for the underlying collateral.
They can't go to zero.
They can be burned for money,
which is pretty rare in this field.
Definitely.
Yeah, if you have anything that you want to share,
even QAC news news please drop it in
the the jumbotron i i do want to kind of uh go back to just like the overall like early defy
summer though and you know any catalyst so i i like that we're already looking at
new catalysts um but what i'll jump in here just very quickly because it's not often I have thoughts at all never mind eloquent thoughts
Yeah, usually you're just abusing people and in your HR
You're HR, bro. You're not supposed to be using people on the team.
But I genuinely don't...
He makes sexual comments to me, and I don't know what to do
because I want to go to HR, but he's HR.
Yeah.
Let's talk about this offline, Rob.
I'm joking.
We're on the doll.
We're on the panda.
But yeah, I genuinely don't think we'll see a d5 season
as nuts as 2021 because basically what happened was everyone got locked in their houses
and then sent money those are fighting they got they got sent money hold me back aztec hold me
back and then not to leave the house like it was like the perfect catalyst at the perfect time.
They were printing money.
They were sending it to you.
Well, all you could do was stockpile toilet paper.
Like, I think we'll see, like, obviously,
we see the institutional adoption and stuff.
I don't think we'll see that sort of crazy,
complete degeneracy of, like, 2021 in May again.
That blow off top was nuts coupled that with the even the the uniswap v2 version where um you obviously x things y equals k apples and
oranges that version is notorious for blow off tops so obviously the more tokens you're talking
about the food the food tokens Or is this something else?
The food token meta?
Basically, obviously,
it's like apples and oranges.
If you've got 10 apples in a pool, 10 oranges in a pool,
someone takes two apples out,
they have to put two oranges back in.
So now eight apples is worth 12 oranges.
And then that sort of just compounds
the more apples get taken out.
And then that's how you get
all those crazy sort of j-curve charts um and then and that's basically what happened oh the
sort of somewhat lack of liquidity was just getting piled into um all the meme coins all
the other stuff just had massive crazy spikes and then uh yeah i mean that's that's like it was concentrated liquidity someone helps that because you don't have the crazy sort of
price uh appreciation but with the liquidity flowing in
yeah i i think we can still have i think we can have something crazier than 2021 man like i know
everything was building up from 2020 to 2021
but we're headed into the golden age and there's a whole new amount of liquidity that's going to
pile in sure there's the institutional side but also i think defy is going to be made easier and
if it's made easier that means more people will use it and that means more liquidity
comes in and things are there's more liquidity for everything to go up uh that's just my thoughts bro
um but i i can hear your voice i she wants to jump in i wanted to jump i haven't i haven't said
anything in about 40 minutes i just wanted to say like i i think it's it's totally cool but i i
wanted to say i think
one of the one of the things that's kind of being pointed out here and actually you know a lot of
the products that are even uh mentioned in the call so far the talk so far are are about sort
of smoothing things out making things work better and a lot of the the fun part of defy is the is the nonsense that's created by a bunch
of people you know aping into some low liquidity thing and then you know holy crap a bunch of
people got rich really quickly and like that's fun like that's what makes for you know that's
why it's defy summer right like that's where that meme came from is like holy crap we got rich really
fast here but the the point is that as there's more liquidity
and as there's more sophistication
and as there's more sophistication across things
like liquidity management and bonding curves
and all these other things,
that sophistication is going to flatten out
the peaks and valleys, which is good.
That is a fundamentally good thing, but it is also,
it's going to make it quite a bit less fun for the people who are like, man, I did the first
run of this and it was absolutely bonkers. And it reminds me, I made a post about a week ago about
Bitcoin, that if you got into Bitcoin casually in 2012 and then just completely got out in 2017,
even the most conservative estimate of how much money you made on whatever you bought in 2012, you made about 1500 times
your money.
Now, in order to do that, so I was just doing a little bit of napkin math that in order
to get a 10x out of Bitcoin again, you need to come up with about $15 trillion in new liquidity.
And that's to make a 10x. And for the record, 15 trillion is about the total market cap of gold
right now. And so we're talking about like, as liquidity comes in and volume comes in,
everybody gets more sophisticated, more people are using it. It's, you know, who in the world,
you know, in the modern world, anyways, hasn't heard of Bitcoin at this point point or have, you know, the ability to get some kind of simple exposure to it.
Now, things like Polygon and all these other, you know, like there's there's quite a bit less knowledge and exposure to those things.
There's still quite a bit more opportunity. liquidity goes up as volumes go up as knowledge goes up and then as sophistication goes up the
extreme excitement volatility the upwards momentum that opportunity to make just
bonkers money that goes down too and that's a good thing but i just want everybody to be prepared
you know when i've heard a couple of people say no i think it's going to be bigger this time around
it's like yeah it'll be bigger in total numbers for everybody, but because there's more people, it'll be less.
Oh, I think we lost it.
I want to respond to him real quick, Aida, and I do apologize.
And then jump in after me, like just elbow everybody.
But, um, like to respond to, to, uh, Darren and Kurt here.
Okay.
Here's my thoughts on what Kurt said.
The thing is, is that we're only like the, the percentage of people around the world
that we're currently looking at that have used DeFi that are now more sophisticated and
all of that is still very, very small. You know, there's only so many percentage of people that
are actually in blockchain, but I think blockchain web three is going to be just like how people
think of the internet. Like it's going to be in everything in the future and everyone will use it.
So we have the whole rest of the a hundred percent of people around the world to adopt and bring in.
And those people, um, you know, I don't, I don't mean to be crass or anything, but you know, they're not going to have the same level of sophistication.
level of sophistication and so i still think that there will be a lot of fun crazy degen uh solutions
maybe newer ones but but you know high aprs and some of the same catalysts will still kick off
and because of the volume of people that are coming in because the quality uh, quality of the, you know, the UI UX, uh, so the user experience and the, uh,
the overall, uh, just ease and, uh, user, uh, what am I trying to say?
The, uh, basically just everything's easier to use.
Um, will actually mean that those same callus can still kick off and be huge.
But I also just think there's just a whole lot more money that's coming.
Aida, what's your thoughts?
I mean, 100%.
If you look at some solid stats right now, as of now, the total DeFi TVL is about $100, $115 billion.
If you're looking at end-to-money supply, that is $110 trillion.
Total global wealth is $ ish trillion I mean we're talking about
we're only scratching the surface it's like 0.1 percent of the total m2 and 0.0 maybe 2-3 percent
of the total global wealth right now is sitting inside the defFi TVL. So we are going a lot higher is my take.
And I think that, you know, to me, the major differentiation, you know, from this cycle to
the previous one is like, we're almost entering this age of abundance. So it's not like winner
takes all. It's not like, you know, the few big players will
take all the upside is infinite, we shouldn't be thinking about in the old way of having this
defined, you know, prefix pie that everybody is trying to, to, to, to compete against. Why is that
right? I think that the specific catalyst that we're talking about, obviously, I mean, this is near and dear to my heart, is the AI part is something that we cannot omit.
The combination of what through AI, more specifically, on-chain agents plus autonomous AI, I mean, this is where AIDA, by the way, a quick plug, is where AIDA is
working on. So, I mean, it's where I think that with all these AI agents, autonomous workflows,
you know, we're talking about MCPA2A, sky's limit, right? With the on-chain infrastructure is,
you know, obviously very fast and cheap and all this added technology. I don't want to get into all the techs.
I mean, ZKEVM is great.
L2OV is great.
But with the LLMs, custom AI stack, on top of those things, can really now plug into the real world and real-time use cases.
And then to facilitate that, one of the i you know think is going to be the biggest
catalyst is stable coin adoption it's already happening right obviously we know this is what
happening circle is the the the hot thing that everybody wants right now uh you know
coinbase wants it and then you know uh um you know uh xrp wants it right so uh can you repeat because i might i got choppy for a second
what what is going to be the the uh big part of oh stable coin adoption stable point this i believe
is going to make this season very strong meaning the normies we call the normies the newcomers
right they will get the first case of how powerful stable coins are i know we're not talking just about one maybe circle
is obviously the one and tether and then there are a few more right i do think that um that's where
um you know on top of all these like on-chain agents autonomous workflows plus the stable
coins think about this right the agents the? The agents, these different nodes in the
network, they wouldn't have bank accounts. They're AI agents. So how do they transact? How do they
exchange money? It has to be stablecoins. So I think the combination of the two, I mean,
the biggest two catalysts I can think of, obviously, there are a few other, you know, things that I, you know, we can catch on. But I mean, it's going to really drive this
thing a lot higher. And then just think about this again, right, just to double click on the numbers,
we only have right now 0.1% DeFi TVL as percentage of M2 right now is about 0.1%.
right now is about 0.1 percent defi tvl as percentage of global wealth is 0.023 percent
very low we have a lot to go is my point i'll stop i i agree but i gotta double click on something
uh oh kurt are you back brother because we lost you for a second are you back
you back brother because we lost you for a second are you back
kurt am i am i rugging or is kurt talking yeah i think he uh he he's not here
uh so also i'm probably rugged like one of the things I would say is I think what was the catalyst of
DeFi summer last time,
a big part of it was all the speculation on altcoins, right?
A lot of that,
that volume was coming from new tokens,
launching new yield farms from new token inflation.
And all the buying of the tokens was fueling the power,
the ability to actually inflate and give such high
rewards. And so I think a lot of it, DeFi, if we're going to have another DeFi summer,
a lot of it is dependent on, are we going to have an alt season? And so I think if we have a big
alt season, yeah, we will have a DeFi summer. summer i mean look at memes were not an alt season they
were i mean they were a type of alt season happening like mostly on solana and what do you
know all the defy on solana grew a lot when memes were really popping off right the defy on solana
grew by probably 100x in that time um and now i think that wasn't a super healthy thing for the industry to have
DeFi being fueled by gambling, by pure gambling. It's all like all of finance in a way is gambling,
right? But, you know, at least like I, I say when in 2021, you know, Polygon helped kick off.
Polygon was one of the main chains DeFi Summer kicked off on.
And at least at that time.
Quickswap helped kick that off.
I would say Quickswap was a big part of kicking off DeFi Summer
because we were the first app on Polygon to a million in TBL.
And then we were the first app on Polygon to a billion a day in volume.
And that really kicked, you know, a lot of things off.
We were the highest volume decks in the world at one point, actually. But anyways,
well, I lost my train there. But yeah, I guess the main point is if we have an alt season,
then DeFi will kick off and DeFi is much better now i i think you know to kurt's point yes things
are more efficient and that'll smooth some of the roughness out and maybe you know things will be
i guess less volatile in some ways and so there'll be like less you know peak upside but you know
less downside kind of is i think what your point was a bit there. And you could jump in in a sec.
But I think also, though, the efficiency of DeFi now with things like V3,
the concentrated liquidity hooks, which, you know, QuidSwap is doing now.
And a lot of this stuff, I think it actually, there's a lot of positives to upside on tokens.
So I don't know that it'll be...
Like, I guess going to the main question,
are we going to have DeFi summer or alt season as big as last time?
I think it's very possible that it'll absolutely destroy last time.
Like, we might get 10 times the overall size.
And I think there will be many coins who will perform just as well.
But I guess, you know, Kurt's point is interesting that, you know,
and I don't know if he said this,
but maybe he's thinking there won't be as many like, you know,
a hundred X, thousand Xers like quantity wise. But I don't know, Kurt,
you want to jump in there and say exactly how you think that will work?
Yeah, that was essentially my point is that I think total ROI will probably be bigger,
but the per capita ROI, by any metric, if you look at it at ROI by individual coin or individual
token or individual, you know, investor or whatever, I think that will probably be a little flatter. But that's just like, that's the nature of all
markets, right? Like, you know, when something's $100 million, and you get into it, and it goes to
10 billion, like, that's a huge move. But it's very different, like, you know, trying to get
into like the S&P 500 now or something, you know, it's like there's just how much more money can spill into a thing in order to make like huge life changing money very
quickly. It's just like that's that's the nature of it. That's why people got into Bitcoin, you
know, largely in the first place. And then it's why they continue to cycle into, OK, what is new
thing? What is new thing? Because people want that thousand X and you can find it in the new thing. But once there's a hundred billion dollars or whatever floating around
in an economy, you're not going to be able to create those thousand X opportunities
as frequently or as easily. So that's my only point. But the broader point about that is that
that's essentially a good thing.
That means that more people are benefiting in ways that are actually more safe.
And now people being able to earn something like 50% year over year is amazing compared
to your 3% to 5% year over year that you would typically make over the last generation of
being in,
you know, the S&P 500 or whatever else. And so these are amazing things and they're big
opportunities. But I just, I just wanted to make the point that the individual ROI on these things
is probably not going to be like, holy cow, I accidentally made a thousand X on my money.
Like a lot of people did on the last cycle. I mean, also coupling that with the fact that
like on a random Saturday, like two or three months ago,
more tokens launched on pump fun
than launched between like 20 2009 and 2024.
Like more tokens launched in a single day on pump fun
than launched within like a 12 year time span.
Bonkers.
A lot of people
so that's only like really an issue though because liquidity is is lower right now but but also
you a lot of people kind of subtract the casino from you know everything else that's going on
uh like in their in their napkin
mouth, like it's a factor, but it's not as big of a factor.
Um, because they're like, I, in my opinion, I think the casino only attracts like a certain
amount of people.
Um, and, um, so it's, it's, it's not going to be weighted as high, I think, when you have just more liquidity overall coming in.
Right.
And I also want to weigh in on something else, which was the yield back in DeFi summer.
So a lot of these, it's kind of like an experimental period in the first DeFi summer where projects launched with very high inflation.
And then they tried to get people to stake
and the idea was that the stake in, aside from governance,
would also remove some sell pressure so they could afford to be more inflationary
with the tokenomics and this led to lots of high yield
liquidity pools but those high yield and liquidity pools were also high
permanent loss and actually low to negative real return if he was providing liquidity to them for a long time.
Towards the end of that period, towards the end of the last ballroom, a lot of people got burned
because they were providing liquidity, getting these great yields, and then as everything crashed like 99%,
they didn't do very well.
And I think one thing that has happened in the last few years
is the yield space has matured quite a lot.
So we have now people looking at yield
that's slightly higher than the traditional finance market,
but is not like crazy high.
And that yield is real yield that's derived from
transaction fees and so on um and so it's sustainable infinitely so like for example
you know with d5 strategies and so on you could get like 10 percent ish on stable coins which is
great and that's you know almost entirely sourced from fees and the natural rate for borrowing and so on um and then so you know
this gives people the opportunity to to have that yield but without looking at crazy impermanent loss
or you know any like inflationary ponzi style tokenomics and i think that's one thing that's
changed a lot is just people's attitude to that kind of stuff you know like the the method back
in the day was like you would launch something with you know low flow high fdv and then you'd inflate very fast a lot of people would do
tokenomics like that but i think people that the the kind of class of 2021 let's say that
the web through that cycle and defy summer have matured now and um i'm not really interested in
that type of thing now i'm more focused on yield. It's better to consistently get like 10% roughly
rather than getting the promise of 200%
by actually getting zero or even negative in some cases.
So I think that's a big part of DeFi summer.
I think there's been a lot of education.
A lot of people have learned from the last DeFi summer.
They know kind of what to stay away from what's realistic, what's not
I still think a lot of the
Ponzinomics so to speak
of the last EFI summer will still carry over
but I do
think most retail users
are educated now and they kind of
know to do a little bit more homework
Absolutely
I think probably the tooling's got a lot better as well um there's so many analytical tools and stuff now
that just weren't around back then that make i agree make understanding this stuff easier sorry
i was took good no no i i just wanted to shout you guys out uh welcome to the show jack hey guys
yeah i'd love for you guys to introduce yourself properly as well and also laura welcome to the show jack hey guys and elect uh yeah i'd love for you guys to introduce yourself
properly as well and also laura welcome to the show i think i announced everyone that has recently
joined uh but yeah jack and alexia you guys are building some really killer uh d5 stuff right now
that that you guys should just talk about it for at least 30 seconds let me let me Let me do like a little Bruce Buffer and in this corner. So it's funny, earlier,
I went on a rant early on about, and I think it might've been the first time for the new people,
first time we've discussed the quick swap effect in detail on this show. And so, you know, when we
talked about a lot of these standards that
were invented, these teams we worked with, that we partnered with, all these different products
that we built, one of the big brains behind that was Alexi, who's right here now. That's who was
just speaking. So Alexi has been one of my secret weapons at quick swap for the last few years.
Uh, he's our, uh, head of BD and our product lead, uh, and in his fucking amazing and is
now actually building, uh, another product, which will be, uh, heavily integrated into
quick swap.
You know, in the past with that quick swap effect, we built up other teams, like I mentioned, Gamma, and Merkle, and Orbs, and Algebra, and ApeSwap that we mentioned, ApeBond that we mentioned here that we were talking to.
So a lot of these things, we were building up other teams, and that's really cool. And some of these teams now are making, you know, millions, tens of millions of dollars, you know, from the great work we've done together.
And we're really happy.
And we are making money, too, from these things, of course, on our side.
But now they're on, you know, 50 chains and 50 DEXs or whatever.
So we had this, Alexi actually had this brilliant idea.
And we were like, okay, do we build this ourselves? Do we partner with a dev team to have it built?
Do we make it part of quick swap? Do we make it like a subsidiary of quick swap?
Do we have quick swap invest in it, et cetera, et cetera. And so, um, yeah,
we, we decided to make it separate from quick swap,
but we'll be a heavy part of quick swap and quick swap Dow actually just
invested uh 200
000 we did a community vote and invested in the product called stratx and so i'll let uh jack and
alexi introduce here and uh maybe tell us a little bit about stratus because this is going to be a
big part of quick swaps future proofing strategy actually and it's the next big thing we are hoping to have the QuickSwap effect with.
Go ahead.
Always speaking too early on me.
I'll live up to that.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, so Alexi here,
lead BD over at QuickSwap
and also founding now,
StratX as well.
And I'm a co-founder here, Jack too.
Awesome.
Hey, guys.
So, yeah, leading Bd over at stratix uh as one of the co-founders
and i'll briefly explain what stratix is because rock's giving us a pretty high accolade there
um so i just want to explain um so stratix is essentially like the base layer is a
a yield strategy marketplace so in in DeFi summer you
know people's approach to yield was fairly simple they provide liquidity to
an LP or it's taken to a protocol and they get some simple yield over the over
the years since then some smart folks worked out that you could do a few of
these actions together including borrowing assets from lending and borrowing platforms and providing liquidity uh to multiple different places um you can fund the different
farming rates between perps exchanges you could use hooks to capture out of range liquidity on
dexes and so on and you can build a strategy here that will yield um higher than just staking or
providing liquidity and you can do it in such a way that's delta neutral.
So the big brains in the space develop these strategies
and we're using them on their own.
And then they started a few years ago,
there started to be some strategies that were available to the public.
So Alexei had this idea, which is, why don't we bring them all together in a marketplace and allow anybody to build strategies that people can stake into?
And so we can spread out that ability to provide liquidity to strategies to the users on QuickSwap and other DEXs.
So that's how it started. And then what we do with the best performing strategies
is they get indexed into aggregated vaults.
And so if you take like the main blue chip asset types,
for example, BTC, ETH, and USD,
and we index the top 10 strategies for each of those.
And so now instead of providing liquidity to a strategy,
now you provide liquidity to 10 strategies
just with single-sided liquidity.
So you add your stablecoins and that nets you 10 different of the best performing strategies for those assets.
And then what we do is we tokenize those vaults and we allow those yield-bearing assets to then trade on the secondary market.
So now you can have a yield-bearing version of a stablecoin that can be traded on a centralized exchange or a DEX.
Also a yield-bearing version of ETH and BTC.
And in some cases, for example, on Polygon, we're going to do a yield-bearing version of PolToken that can be traded on the centralized market.
And the yield just comes from the underlying fees in the ecosystem.
So this isn't yield that's going to go away in a month or two months as new users come in
this is just naturally occurring yield from fees and staking and so you know in theory what we like
to say is that the yield that you get going in will be the yield that you'll that you can expect
for for many months if you stay with us during that time it's not gonna it's not gonna fluctuate
too wildly and if we are mega successful
and lots of people provide lots of liquidity,
then the marketplace will naturally see that
and build more strategies
because this marketplace is maintained
by independent strategies
that all have their own incentives
aligned with the platform
and all get a fee share for doing those activities.
And so if their strategies are very popular,
they'll build more.
And so the yield will naturally stay around
a really solid above market rate.
So this is not a product for somebody
that's looking for crazy yield.
If you're looking for 500% APR, this is not for you.
This is a platform for mature people
that want to take delta neutral yield
and want to do that over a long time
horizon now the the platform itself there's no time periods you're not going to be like
there's no lock-in basically you can withdraw assets whatever you want but the reason why i
say long long time period is just because if you're getting 10 yield or apr and you pull that
out after a month and you you've got like you know one one percent
or something which isn't that great um so it's a mature platform for people that have been around
the last defy summer and i don't want to play all the games that went along with that um so yeah
uh great to be here thank you for having us yeah really good too
sorry i'll just add to that as well.
It's going to be a far safer source of yield
than chasing those crazy APRs, 100% APRs and stuff as well.
We'll also have an insurance option as well.
It's an optional insurance.
So if you do want to just give up a bit of the yield,
but you've got insurance in case anything goes wrong,
that's also available for you guys too.
And one of the main purposes of this platform too
is it was built out to just simply make it a one-click,
set it and forget it.
I don't know about anybody on this call,
but I remember back in the last DeFi summer,
I was spending 20 hours in front of the computer screen
managing all my different positions, LPs on one deck,
farming funding rates between potential exchanges on another.
It's very time consuming.
It makes you want to pull out your hairs.
In this method, it's essentially,
the curators will take care of that for you.
One click, set it and forget it.
I absolutely love it.
So towards the beginning of this show,
we were talking about the next leg for DeFi, DeFi summer.
And Stratix is definitely one of those solutions that I think of when I think of better user experience or more easily used DeFi, essentially.
And I don't think that it's just for like, you know, uh, institutions,
you know, I think there's going to be a lot of like, like Jack saying, uh,
maybe more mature type, uh, defy users that have specific types of strategies
that they want to pull up and they're going to go to products like stratix.
So, so this this is this is exactly
what i'm talking about the game has changed defy and like you were talking to aida about how defy
uh ai agents are coming and and when you when you put all this together and also the the fact that
um all the chains liquidity are is starting to be. So, you know, interoperability and composability is now here.
I mean, this wasn't really here back in 2020 and 2021.
So I think this is, we're primed for something really exciting.
So if you want to make sure.
The space has really matured in a lot of different ways.
Yes. exciting so if you'll allow me to space is really matured in a lot of different ways yes i i have a question for aida jack um but let uh so you know just just hold for a second because i'm uh jack to uh say what you want to say but i want to ask you to something sure yeah if i if
you if you'd allow me to just uh give you a little bit more information on something that you might
may be excited about because you mentioned um define. So okay so I mentioned that the base layer is a DeFi strategy
marketplace where there's different builders that will build strategies independent teams and so on
but the end state of this platform so what's going to happen is we're allowing teams to utilize AI
to build strategies and we know that AI is more
competitive than human builders so initially it'll be humans using AI tools to build strategies
but the end state of this marketplace is an autonomous platform that scans every single
pool on DeFi Llama constantly looking for anomalous sources of yield and then compile
strategies to extract that
and allow you to uh you know stake into a vault with single side of liquidity that gives you the
best possible risk adjusted return not just the best that the human strategists have found like
literally the best possible available return in the market and i think that's really interesting
and this is where we're putting a lot of focus in our strikes is basically encouraging our
strategies to utilize AI.
And then eventually we know that the AI will outcompete the human
strategies in the marketplace.
So it's kind of,
it's a really interesting game theory at the moment.
It's like how,
how long will it take us to get to that state where the strategies
autonomously are compiled
yeah that's huge i got a question for you something i wanted to double click on for like
30 minutes now but like i wanted to make sure we could uh come back to this now you said earlier
you were talking about stable coins and um i do see that stablecoins are going to be really important in payments and,
you know, DeFi, we're talking DeFi today. And that these DeFi agents are going to select
stables. But why not, like, because some people say DeFi AI agents are going to
like, because some people say DeFi AI agents are going to gravitate towards Bitcoin. And so,
like, do you have any thoughts on that? Like, you know, like, would DeFi AI agents,
you know, gravitate more towards stables? Or, you know, will they go more towards hard money?
you know, will they go more towards hard money?
You know, like Bitcoin, Litecoin,
and what's the reasons?
And also before I pass the mic to you,
I just wanted to shout out these stats.
I was, while everyone's talking,
I'm listening here to everyone,
but I'm also looking up data.
And I noticed, so this is just a quick Google search,
you know, so might be plus or minus these numbers, but currently today, 68.7% of the world's population uses
the internet.
So I think, I think like, I kind of differentiate the internet from web three.
And so I think there's, there's a, you know, probably another 60% of the world that hasn't really jumped into web through that, that there's a, there's a potential for, you know, for that increase to happen.
Everyone's talking about here today, DeFi AI agents and better DeFi.
And something I want to talk to Kurt about later is like DeFi on Bitcoin, DeFi on, you know, other UTXO type chains and how that might increase yields for hard money and things like that, how that changes.
But before we go there, you know, what's your thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, why not Bitcoin or why stable coins are better for agents that's a question right so
i mean i think that the first thing obviously is price stability uh more predictable behavior
uh obviously bitcoin just broke all-time high which is very exciting but when it goes down i
guess right now it's sitting around 108, right?
When it goes down, it can be brutal.
So I think from that perspective, just from the stability alone, right,
it is more – uh-oh, did I lose you?
Oh, no, no, I'm still here.
No, I can hear you.
Right.
It is just more predictable.
It's just more predictable.
You know, it is.
I do think that agents are designed to, you know, operate autonomously.
They need predictability, not speculation is kind of what I think.
And that's one factor.
I think the second point I can think of really is stables are natively DeFi compatible.
So when you think about most DeFi ecosystem, including Uniswap and ABE, QuickSwap as well,
Linea based, all rely on stablecoin pairs for like lending, borrowing,
dah, dah, dah, right?
Provision, like the liquidity provision, payment, routing,
dah, dah, dah.
So from that perspective, I think that, I mean, Bitcoin
obviously has this wrapped version for that.
But I just think that it's just almost like stablecoins
are like the language of DeFi, right?
And Bitcoin is like the asset.
But stables are the money, I guess, the new form of money.
Yeah.
I mean, they're certainly acting more as a medium of exchange than Bitcoin is at this moment.
Medium, medium, exactly.
And then I think, obviously, like other things like you know agents, AI agents
need some sort of you know spendable composable assets. But hey that said I really think that
Bitcoin agents could emerge, well will emerge right. So you know I would not say no to that
but I think the first thing you kind of have to like crawl before you walk and and then you you run right so i think it's just like it takes some
some some steps and processes uh for us to get there um i totally get what you're saying those
are actually really good points and especially um you know when you're clarifying that you know the
whole crawl before you walk and and bitcoin could get there kind of thing because like i could see bitcoin as it increases over time and gets to a market cap that's you know a lot higher and
fluctuates a lot less because it's a way more mature asset that it's a lot easier also to your
second point uh for these like proof of work type assets that don't really, you know, they're not touring complete. They don't have programmability.
You know, that whole kind of experience is still being fleshed out.
I think over time, as that gets better, AI agents will be more, will be able to access that liquidity.
I think that's another really extremely exciting thing for DeFi
because that's untapped liquidity. But yeah, I get your points. Those are really good points.
Can I throw in one of my thoughts here? So my thesis long-term is that,
Thesis long term is that, and let's put in my bias here.
I am a Bitcoiner.
I love Bitcoin.
I love all the other stuff, not all of it, but I love lots of other things too.
I coined the phrase like seven, eight years ago, Bitcoin maximal-ish.
I think Bitcoin's the king, but I think there's a lot of amazing other stuff in the world that we should build and learn from and that even Bitcoin can
can learn from. With that being said, I think Bitcoin is the end game stable coin. I think
Bitcoin is the ultimate stable coin in the end. But that I don't know when that will be right.
That could be 20 years from now. That could be 40 years from now. It could be five years from now,
if the dollar crashes or something. But for now, I think stablecoins are going to be
a big part of the mix. I don't know that it'll be USDC, USDT style coins in perpetuity on even
the stablecoin side because there's a bunch of issues with them. I mean, they are backed by
dollars and they're pegged to dollars. So they do experience inflation.
So in all these inflation events, stable coins have the same weakness the dollar has.
In addition to that weakness, depending on how you hold your dollars, cash or in a bank or whatever, stable coins are freezable and censorable.
And that's like one of the main reasons we created this whole industry was to get away from censorship and to get away from confiscatability. And so stable coins,
they don't do that. Maybe a little bit, they can do that. Like if you bridge them to another chain
where it's not native and easily controlled by the issuers. And then again, there's also benefits to these stable coins over dollars.
You can get a yield on them. If you hold USDC on Coinbase, it's like a 4.1% yield right now.
And that's a way easier way to access bonds than most retail people know about.
So yeah, for now, I think stable coins will keep growing. I think they're actually going
to bail the entire US out on the bond problems we're having. Countries are dumping bonds all
across the world. We're finding less and less buyers for bonds. Bonds are like, I don't think
their rating has gone down, but in a lot of people's minds, their rating has gone down.
They are not the risk-free asset.
We saw many banks collapse because of bonds.
That's all they were holding was bonds and they collapsed.
Silvergate and Silicon Valley were both, I think, victims of this.
They were holding some longer, not that long dated, but long enough that they weren't immediately liquid.
And because the U.S. raised the interest rates so fast, the bonds that they weren't immediately liquid. And because the U S raised the interest rates so fast, um,
though the bonds that they were holding at a lower rate, you know, at like 0.5, 1, 2%,
those now had, uh, you know, uh, they were marked down. And so when there was a run on the bank and
people, uh, wanted to get their money, but all the money was locked in bonds, they were forced
to sell bonds at, you know, a discount because they were a low rate and people, why would someone buy a low
rate bond when they could go out and buy a bond on the open market right now at like
four, four and a half, 5%.
And so that, that was that whole phenomenon.
Um, but anyways, yeah, I think ultimately once Bitcoin gets strong enough and stable
enough and loses all the volatility, because it's just like this massive, massive asset, I think it'll be as big as global bonds or bigger, possibly over time.
But over time, as it stabilizes, you won't need to use these dollar wrapped coins for stability.
Bitcoin will be the stable thing.
That's a really interesting thought experiment because it really will change many strategies
as that takes place.
But real quick, I want to introduce,
I want to shout out some people
that have joined us here.
So we have Lingo Rewards Platform.
We have Dustin.
Valora hasn't jumped in yet, but we want you to jump in. Ruck, is it a good time to ask a new
question? And then I'd like to pitch it to one of the new people that haven't spoken yet. So,
but do you want to finish your thought or like tap more into what you're talking about before I do that?
I guess I'll just say on the A, just last thing on the AI agent using stable coins or Bitcoin or ETH.
I think they'll use ETH a lot.
It'll depend.
They're going to be similar to humans.
We use the best tool for the job. And for some jobs, ETH is the best. For some jobs, Bitcoin's the best. For some jobs, stablecoin's the best. For some jobs, pull is the best. But I think a lot of it will be stable coins. That's what we see right now. A lot of traders trade with stable coins, right?
As the thing they're pairing with whatever they're actually trading.
It used to be that Bitcoin was the thing that you paired everything with.
It wasn't done on DEXs, but when you bought something, you would buy it with Bitcoin.
Through ICOs or OTC or, you know, different
stuff before we had DeFi. Then it was ETH that everything was paired with and all the ICOs were
in ETH. And now a lot of the stuff is done in stable coins. So yeah, we'll see.
That's a really good point. Really good point um so i'll go ahead and ask the
the next question i have then um i'm kind of torn between diving more into like
hard money like bitcoin litecoin you know uh cardano defy uh and and how that changes the game,
but also just the new technologies that are coming.
I think we're gonna go the new technologies
that are coming.
So let's see, we have Dustin,
also Hummingbird here, Valora,
whoever wants to answer this question,
throw up your hand first and I'll,
and you'll be able to take this next question.
The question is, where is DeFi going?
We've kind of lightly touched on some of these points
like DeFi AI agents and better you know, better user experience.
But is there a new, so Hummingbird, you threw up your hand first, so please take this.
But what else is around the corner for DeFi?
Like, what are we looking forward to now?
Not just in 2025, but in the next couple of years. What's your thoughts?
Yeah. Thanks for having us up here. Super, super fun topic for us.
DeFi is a big part of the backend of what Hummingbird does. I think one of the big
things is efficiency of capital. We went from the AMM style where you were just full range on everything.
So now we've done the concentrated liquidity pools where you're focusing the capital.
But I think the next thing is how do we make that capital work even more efficiently?
I think maybe something like how the insurance world does reinsurance.
So, you know, in an insurance company, they write the
policies and everything, but then they de-risk and become more efficient by selling that risk
to someone else. And there's a spread on that. And I'm wondering, and I've seen some platforms
kind of talk about this by using leveraged liquidity. And I think if there's a thing where,
you know, big institutions that maybe don't want
to manage, you know, all the, you know, the ranges of concentrated liquidity and stuff like that,
but if they're willing to say, hey, we'll put up X amount of funds at this rate, and then
liquidity providers, you know, go and borrow that and then do the concentrated liquidity,
it can really magnify how much the actual DeFi users
or the liquidity priders have to put up,
but could add a substantial amount of liquidity to the ecosystem.
Because I think one thing we look at with DeFi is,
you know, all that TVL is sitting there.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's just sitting there.
Like, yes, it's functioning of the trading,
but like when you go on at work or whatever and or quick swap, whatever, and you see all the TVL, like there's a lot of money sitting there kind of not doing something.
And how do we tap in to all leveraging investors that are willing to take a much
lower rate of return and then using that to add more liquidity that's kind of like
on-demand liquidity and ready for when it needs to be there, but not tying up so much capital so
that we can go buy new tokens or provide liquidity other places places so i think that's some tech that will really
uh you know bring d5 forward by allowing capital to be used even more efficiently
i i haven't even thought of something like that before and that's like a really that's
really interesting i mean it's there um do you have a eli five way of explaining that because
i what i'm trying to do is under,
like, I fully understand what you're saying, but I want to better understand it. Like,
yeah. So, so pretend I'm doing a, you know and I just do a lot on, you know, say I'm doing like
a BTC USD pool. Right. So I pick a range and I'm saying, I'm going to provide liquidity in this range
and you tie up your capital to provide liquidity in that range. So that's an efficient use of capital, but I'm still
tying up all that capital. But what if there was a way where I could say I'm going to provide
liquidity in this range, but instead of let's say I'm going to provide $10,000 a width of liquidity,
say I borrow $9,000 of that from a hedge fund or whatever that's willing to just make a
stable like 11% a year, but my concentrated position looks like it might pay out about 60%
a year. So there could be this way where big money that'll accept lower returns, but have
kind of more of a wider range of where that capital can be used with less losses and less risk is then utilized by liquidity providers to kind of shore up those positions or expand it when that capital is needed.
So it's almost like liquidity on demand from bigger institutional players. And I could just tell you for certain that that is like
the TradFi,
like the whole TradFi sphere is
looking at like models exactly like that.
Just being in Dubai, having a lot of
conversations with liquidity providers in the
last month for a token
the amount of money that's
on the table from
big hedge funds that want to get
involved with defy but don't want to first of all they're scared of the risk and then secondly they
want they basically don't want to have to uh either build strategies themselves or they don't
have to manage it in a very intricate way that's time intensive um it's like it's crazy like uh
you know just just to give you an idea of the flavor
of these conversations we sat down with one guy he's managing a huge hedge hedge fund uh multiple
billion dollar fund and basically says he's got 200 million to put into defy um and he's going to
be you know he wants to deploy it basically in the near future they're the types of conversations
that are being had at the moment on the TradFi side.
And it's all, like you say, they basically want a reasonable rate of return.
So they basically want to just be above market average for TradFi.
So they're in that like kind of 10%, 15% area.
That's what they want.
They want it low risk.
So they want it either delta neutral or they want it insured.
And they basically want to not have to worry about it, essentially.
But, yeah, there's an absolutely huge appetite for DeFi-style yield from TradFi currently.
Absolutely massive.
Yeah, so think about this.
Yeah, so think about, like, that person that's doing 200 million or has all that to want to put in and they want, you know, risk neutral strategies.
And now you start combining liquidity pools with perps for insurance.
Think about think about perp, you know, trading as as similar to options markets, actually, in TradFi.
in TradFi. So, you know, let's say you did a big, you know, let's say you did a big,
big position in DeFi, but because you're, you know, long that token on one side and
maybe you have a stable or maybe you have a quote token on the other side,
well, then you could also go use, you know, 10, 20, 30 X leverage per positions on tail ends to,
you know, market dips a lot on the, on the token while you had a short PERP on that
at the same time to mitigate that risk. So yeah, I think there's going to be a huge,
huge opportunity, but we don't want them to come in yet because 200 million of additional liquidity
on some of these platforms would make all of our yields go down. So let's not give them the opportunity until our volumes are about 5x from here.
But yeah, it could be some cool stuff.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And that's why the Stratix approach is kind of, we build the strategies
and then we essentially will be onboarding capital
that can fit those strategies
and then hopefully more will be built. I'd love to get
Alexi's input on
some of the stuff he was just discussing then regarding
positions and capital efficiency
because Alexi's like the big brain
DeFi person
so yeah, it'll be interesting to get his opinion on that.
In regards to using LP positions in other protocols as well.
So being able, as an example, to take your QuickSwap or Uni
or whichever decks you're using LP position,
use that as collateral on a lending market like Aave,
borrow against it, and essentially leverage up your position.
I mean, I never even thought about that,
but I think we were asking more about like, you know,
using kind of like big capital to be kind of like the overflow
or the excess capital that needs to
be used when the markets need more liquidity, but you can, you know, when not as much liquidity is
needed, you know, it doesn't tie up as much capital. But I love the idea you just said,
because yeah, how awesome would it be to take all these LP positions and go use them as collateral
for stuff.
I think that's amazing too.
Yeah, I definitely want to, well,
have started to look a lot more into that.
That would unlock so much more additional liquidity and capital into space.
I mean, you know,
you could be farming with your LP position on a certain decks,
take that,
pause that into that RV or against it and do some leverage farming,
pay a bill and still have access to your yield.
Whatever it is that you want to do with it, that would be an absolute milestone in the space.
I know quite a few protocols have attempted doing something like that.
And there's always been an issue with the oracle pricing as to how do you price the LP?
can it easily be manipulated so it has been a bit risky at the moment
Can it easily be manipulated?
So it has been a bit risky at the moment.
but with that said i mean the entire space has matured so much uh not just from the
infra level of things but even as we're mentioning before the education of users
the expanse of you know the reach of the web3 just keeps growing by the day it's absolutely incredible
this is fascinating i i hear you guys talk i'm i'm pretty well versed in d5 but you know some of the
stuff you guys are talking about is i have to sit there for at least 10 seconds before i get it
and i know that there's probably so many people in the audience that are like man i can't wait for
you know something like stratix to be available so you know just click a once click strategy that's vetted um i also think like
a yuda talking about d5 ai agents it's like you know there's probably so many people are like you
know what i i'm never going to understand everything that alexi just said um you know
like can uh i can't wait to you know use a d5 ai agent that's that's uh you know can fully kind of
you know, use a DeFi AI agent that's, that's, you know, can fully kind of take on these strategies
for me. And this is really exciting stuff. I mean, like leveraging investors that want to take on a
low risk, leveraging these pools of capital. I mean, all this is are really really interesting i can't
i can't wait to see these things and and and also just become a lot easier to use but um what what
other things do you guys see that's coming for defy what what uh what else is exciting um dustin
i see your hand up guys if you're new to the show Dustin's not he's an OG of the show
But if you are new to the show
Just know you don't have to raise your hand
Just jump in wherever you want
Wherever you can
So I guess
Jump on the bandwagon
For like aggregated liquidity
I mean that's like one big thing
I've always wanted like a better
you know more uh streamlined kind of access to like lp across multiple you know chains and this
like kind of aggregated you know aspect of you know polygon and other you know other conglomerates
i guess they're building each other up you know across, across the ecosystems. But yeah, I think like RWA in general for me
has been like the big ticket, you know,
bringing that, you know, like T-bills or like commodities.
You know, a lot of the retail coming over the space.
Institutional interests, of course,
is kind of like the, you know, major play at this point,
but having that ability for like retail to access,
you know, Trad, trad fight,
in that sense,
on chain,
which is,
I feel like that's going to be like a big,
you know,
push for,
you know,
that kind of 2.5 kind of dynamic that we've all,
I guess,
kind of seen,
but like wanted to see it,
you know,
I I've seen some of it,
but like lithium, I think I've seen some of it, but like lithium,
I think I've seen lithium on chain as well.
That was kind of an interesting play.
Uh, but what is lithium?
I'm not familiar.
No, no, no, no, no.
Let me go back.
Uranium.
Oh, you're talking about commodities on chain.
I thought it was the name of a project.
Yeah.
There is a project.
And it's a Nirvana song or a nirvana album back to 1990.
no i'm trying to throw it back no uh there is a product actually that's based on energy dollars
called lithium but i wasn't getting into that which is like an energy-based algorithmic stable
coin which is a flat coin similar to the ust but but not like UST in that sense but that's
different you know but that's kind of more of like a stable coin that's like I would say similar to
what Bitcoin is going to be you know more like long-term vision like rock was saying about being
like a you know instead of dollars being back to be like Bitcoin the sats. So I think that to me is like long-term vision
But yeah going back to our WS to me. That's like a huge play
and then yeah, just
aggregated liquidity for me is
These are definitely two things like you just touched on two things that I'm extremely bullish on
two things like you just touched on two things that I'm extremely bullish on.
I have not talked about RWAs for a while, but this is something that I've been
thinking about for a long time. I remember even last year sitting down with Mark Byron,
the CEO of Polygon at lunch and talking deeply about RWAs in the future uh of how how rwas are going to uh play
out in web3 and and you bring up such a great point dustin because right now like on this show
we've we've talked uh about i think a lot of traditional things traditional type DeFi components, stablecoins, ETH. But we haven't even touched on how RWAs
are going to enter the DeFi sphere. There's going to be commodity slash Bitcoin strategies. There's going to be, you know, real estate is going to play
probably a big part in liquidity, you know, being able to leverage real estate in a certain way.
And I actually, there's something I'm building that Rock was hinting at that we should drop
today, but I'm not going to do that. But, but I do, I do believe that
that technology will be the underlining technology that, that fuels and gets institutions to develop
RWAs and feel more comfortable bringing these RWA assets on chain. And then once they're on chain to your second point, Dustin, with, you know,
everything being aggregated in the future, you're going to have, you know,
everything interoperable and composable.
You're going to be able to bring these real world assets into the fold.
And then there's going to be composable like, um, like multi-chain type strategies uh d5 strategies that are going to be able to
uh take place so like the future is crazy and and we really are going to need defy ai agents for
for a lot of this stuff um for sure yeah no i yeah i'm in that position because we're like transitioning ourselves
because i'm in the gold and silver industry so i'm like focusing on precious metals and distribution
but like right now it's like who's going to be the one that receives the licensing
and it's based on jurisdiction it's based on geographical location um and those people are
going to be the biggest ticket to you know being
able to access that you know ability to bring it on chain and then people having the capital
to distribute it to those you know and then the people that create the standards so there's like
layers to this like rwas and like who has attestation to to have that ability you know who
is the the you know publisher in the sense like
you know who are we trusting these entities to do so yeah i just wanted to point out i've got a
little bit of experience in that regard like we uh built out a product it it hasn't ended up
launching yet because for exactly this reason but it's the attestations are really really hard
because you know it's like, okay, who's,
who's holding the gold or the silver or whatever the asset is. Right.
And you know, for this client,
you're great at, I know you're making a point.
I hope I don't like Matt, uh, like throw you off, but you're,
you're really great at breaking down complex, uh, ideas.
Can you kind of do for the audience to describe attestation and and that uh what
basically that uh issue a little bit more sure so so with digital assets like the you know the
assets on chain people can just see that it exists and that it's you know real or synthetic or you
know whatever else like you can see it very simply. There are protocols that exist in the
blockchain space that allow you to see that an asset is real and that whoever is selling it
has the ability to sell it or has the rights to sell it. When you bring in real world assets,
as when an RWA is a real world asset. So we're talking about, let's say a bar of gold, right?
So a single bar of gold can be, you know, right now it's whatever it is, you know, $3,000 an ounce or something like that.
Gold is really expensive.
It's really heavy.
It's pretty difficult to secure.
And the companies that secure it are often very sort of old world and they have very old world ways of dealing with things.
So you're talking about companies like Brinks or Stonex or Lloyd's.
Like these are these are very old, like literally 500 plus year old companies that do this stuff.
And they kind of don't care about our business.
But what they what they do is they would say, OK, look, we have this massive reputation of never being robbed and never be, you know, like we pass all of our
audits for the last 300 years and this kind of thing, and they can give a legal attestation.
So it's essentially like a really big promise, but that promise is wrapped in a bunch of other
legal jargon that lets people know like, okay, if Brinks says there's 50 pounds of gold here that's in circulation
for us to trade, then it's really there. So that's the nature of attestation. But the problem
when it comes down to trading real world assets is it's like, okay, well, what if I want to trade
gold versus crude oil? Well, those are different attestation agents that would be attesting to the
existence of both of those things. So now you don't just need Brinks or Stonex. Now you also
need whoever is doing the attestation of the oil and they need to have like an open API that you
can hit and guarantee that, okay, the oil actually exists. And then for real estate, that's another totally
different set of, of a tester. So you start to get, um, kind of a big data problem. Uh, and this
ended up, uh, being the issue with our client. Our client was like, well, you know, we can use
gold as money. He is, is a gold miner. He's, you know, has operations in Africa. He imports into
Dubai. He's doing business in London and And, you know, he's got all
of that stuff figured out. But when it came time to figure out, like, what do you use it against?
How do you use it as money? How could you use it in a point of sale situation? That it came down
to there was a pretty big problem with getting all those attestations to work in a way that was both economically feasible,
meaning like API calls are really expensive because the companies that provide them,
you know, they're used to maybe attesting to something once a day.
But if you had a thousand people trying to make trades and all the time, like we'd be talking
about hundreds of thousands of API calls a day and they were just like, why the hell would we do
this for you? Like what's our benefit? Like this kind of thing so um if we can figure out that part of it kind of bridging
the old world attestations and big data problem um this could be a really explosive market but
until we do there's an inherent trust problem of who's actually got the gold who's actually got the
oil who's actually got the real estate who's actually like it's compounding yeah go ahead yeah it will it be
um do you think that zk can play uh you know zero knowledge type technologies can play a part in
helping fix the attestation issue um and i i think, I think of, uh, a partner of ours, which I, which I, uh, like,
I so badly want to fully explain some of like, what, uh, what I, uh, what I'm
working on, but we can't yet.
Uh, so they, they have, um, they just released charms and, uh, I think, I think
this could actually fix, but yeah.
What's your thoughts just generally on
zk and how that might fix this particular situation so yeah i mean zk zk is an extreme
efficiency uh product so you're using cryptography to take big data and you you distill it down into
a really small piece of data that works as that attestation. It's like your digital promise. The problem with it is like,
that's essentially a solved problem on our side of the coin. The problem is the other side of the
coin. Like somebody's actually got to have the pile of gold and bridging that pile of gold into
digital tokens is the hard part. I think once it's done and once you've achieved a certain
amount of trust uh you know
this is kind of like what we've done with like fort knox for example but you know people debate
like i don't know is there any gold in fort knox it hasn't been audited in 120 years and so but we
all just keep i think everybody's scared to open the damn door because it's like well if we open
the door and there is no gold in there like what does that mean how do like that's a so she's hard drive is
in there by the way it's now satoshi's hard drive is in fort knox if anybody was wondering and so
so it's it's one of those things where like okay if we're all trading for years and years and and
we get to the point where kind of nobody cares it's a little bit how the world works with silver
right now like there is some absurd multiple more paper silver than
there is physical silver in the entire world but nobody cares everybody's just like yeah no we know
but we're just like this is the spot price of silver and we're just going to keep trading paper
silver because i don't know if we stop it collapses or something like so we get into these situations
where kind of people don't even know the macroeconomic implications of whatever nonsense that we're doing. So to answer your question, I think at some point, yes, like a simple ZK proof
and everybody's like, you know what, whatever, there's a trillion dollars worth of gold in this
system, according to this thing. And we're all just going to say we agree that it is,
and that'll probably be fine until some, you know debbie do-gooder or whatever decides
like oh we're really gonna audit it and if that audit comes back as like hey none of you guys
actually own any money like that's you know that's a big problem but um but that's not a problem in
defy exclusively either like i said we have yeah i mean that's that's one of the big things that's one of the
big things this whole industry solves i mean i love gold i'm wearing a gold ring i own a lot of
physical gold um i've been an investor in gold for a very long time um but gold the biggest problem
with gold is no matter what you use zk proofss, voids of London, whatever it is, you always have to trust that someone has the gold.
And throughout history, gold has been rugged many times.
I'll give you some examples.
The United States rugged its citizens of their gold and said, hey, turn in your gold or we will arrest you.
And we're going to give you
the price we think it's worth. And that wasn't a fair market value necessarily. It was the price
they said. And then after they got the gold and they remarked it at a higher price once they took
it, then in 71, or well, let's go to World War II, the Nazis were taking everyone's gold as they swept through countries.
And so countries were like, oh, shoot, I better send my gold somewhere safe.
Let's send it to the US.
At least it'll be safe there.
And so we held everyone's gold.
And after Bretton Woods, we gave them dollars in exchange for their gold.
And we were backed by gold.
And then over time, everyone trusted us.
And then, you know, it took a long time, almost a whole generation,
before we screwed everyone over.
But we said, hey, we're not...
Basically, France came with arguably a warship and said,
give us our gold, here's your dollars.
And so we gave it to them. Then the UK
came and we said, no, we're not going to do that. And that's the time when Nixon said, hey,
there are speculators and traders that are trying to hurt us, the US. And so they're trying to
us, the US, and so they're trying to, you know, attack our dollar. So we are going to temporarily
close the gold window and we are not going to have convertibility between dollars and gold
anymore. Temporarily, of course. Whenever the government says temporarily, always know that
is for sure permanent, right? Yeah, it's been 70 years now. Yeah, it was permanent, clearly.
They definitely don't have the gold to give
people gold for their uh dollars and especially at the rate it's they have it pegged at like 38 or
43 dollars or something ridiculous anyways so that's the problem with gold um this happened
more recently when russia invaded ukraine look probably not a good thing that they do that but
whether we agree or disagree there uh that any country wants to know if they own assets on behalf of their citizens, that no matter what
they do, that some other country that may be right or may be wrong, depending on who you agree or
disagree, you know, there's lots of very questionable things that happen around the world.
And there's always a two sides of the story. But anyways, basically, the US froze their bonds. The UK froze their gold. And it's Switzerland, who's been historically
neutral for 100, 150 years, became not neutral for the first time, and took all of their oligarchs
money and yachts and property, whatever, all this stuff, and probably some gold in there too.
So the point is, all of these things, we have to trust people and that's what our industry is here
to solve. Um, and so gold on the blockchain, I think is really cool. It unlocks a lot of things
for gold. I think it'll be very successful. I think it'll be way more successful than gold ETFs.
Um, but I think, uh, it doesn't solve the problem of someone still has to hold that gold.
And at some point, you think you own that gold and you might not. And they might take it from
you, whether it's a government, a company goes under and they fudge their records or whatever
the hell it is, right? And Bitcoin and Web3 can solve that. Good points. I would, yeah, I mean, blockchain could represent it, but you would still, because it's not
a digital asset, you would always need someone to hold it.
And I think, you know, that's why Bitcoin is becoming, you know, such a popular store
of value because you don't have that problem, right?
Self-custody is so easy with Bitcoin, right?
But with gold, even if you put the representation of it online, while you guys were on the blockchain, I was just thinking while you guys were talking,
like, couldn't Lloyd's have a smart contract where they're the ones that, like, issue an NFT that states this is how much gold we have,
and then the contract essentially allows that amount of trading against
it. And the interesting thing about commodities too, is sometimes you need delivery, right?
No one ever needs to take delivery of a Bitcoin or really any digital asset to go do something
with it. But like oil, like oil doesn't just trade and sit there like gold does, like, you know,
the oil trades and then somebody takes delivery of it to turn it into something to use as a product.
So I think, but those things that the access to it on the blockchain could allow more people
to trade it and make the market more efficient.
And then it could also, like you said, it could verify that those, you know, items are
really there.
If an oil company essentially issues NFTs or tokens
as they put barrels of oil onto the market,
it could help alleviate the problem.
You'd still have a trust problem because, I mean,
you'd still have a trust issue because you would still have to trust
that Exxon put the correct amount of barrels in that,
you know, represented by tokens or that NFT.
But then I think on another space I was on a couple of weeks ago, now you would have these audit firms.
Like you would basically have like audit firms that would say, OK, Exxon, we're going to come watch you for a day.
And we're going to watch as you take your oil barrels and, you know, use the blockchain and and represent those.
And then that would how you would be audits.
So yeah, I think there's going to be
some really cool opportunities
to allow a lot of different people
to be in on that game.
So I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
These markets will develop
and they will be strong.
There will be oil contracts essentially on blockchain.
There will be BRICS is, I think, pretty likely going to release their new digital asset, which will be a basket of commodities.
They're saying wheat, oil, gold, etc.
These things will happen and they will have a lot of success.
The problem is some of them will collapse at times or will be confiscated at times. So,
like, it doesn't matter if Lloyd's of London insures something, if the UK, like dollar is
collapsing, and I don't know how Lloyd's is structured. Maybe it's, you know, maybe they
have backups for this, like maybe they're in multiple countries and yada, yada. But there
will be times where, you know, someone audits something, someone insures
something, whatever. And some country says, hey, we just had a, we're having a global collapse of
our currency. Maybe it's a COVID emergency. Maybe it's World War III. Maybe it's, you know, they
just ran out of money because they printed too much money. That's a pretty common thing these
days. And this happens around the world. Banks collapse,
countries' currencies collapse. It is actually more common than not. Countries' currencies
collapsing is something that happens, I would guess, a country's currency collapses on average
probably every five years or less. It might even be every one year. I don't even know. It might be
something ridiculous because there's 300 countries, right?
Anyways, so that will happen.
And your gold, insured, audited, whatever, on a blockchain, ZK proofs, it doesn't matter.
Someone's going to take that money.
Look at Cyprus.
That was actually one of the big things that made Bitcoin.
This is a perfect example of why Bitcoin got success was Bitcoin was trading around, I think, $40.
example of why bitcoin got success was bitcoin was trading around i think 40 and when the cyprus
um uh bank um i think they were called bail-ins basically um others might know this uh better but
basically a bail-in they they took they took a proportional chunk of everybody's bank accounts
in order to uh write some big government, but they called it a bail-in
because it was taken from internal bank accounts rather than a bail-out, which would be money from
outside the system coming in. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, thanks, Kurt. So yeah, and there's different
estimates on what they took, and it depended on how much wealth you had. I think it was that if
you were not as wealthy, then it was a lower number. Like
they took like 10 or 20% of all your money. And if you had more money, I think it was like up to
like 50% they took of your money or something like that. I don't remember the details. The point is
that was a country, right? Cyprus. And at that time, the Cyprus people started buying Bitcoin
and Bitcoin was $40. And with that buying and other speculation around
that, Bitcoin went from $40 to $250 in a short period of time. I don't remember the period of
time. I think it was just months. But anyways, that's because Bitcoin solves this. Countries
being irresponsible, printing too much money, bad good regimes whatever um crypto bitcoin are here
to solve this we're here to save the day and over time as every time a currency collapses
uh if there's a chance it comes to bitcoin later um or crypto in general or backs their things by
crypto um like el salvador was a pretty cool example of this.
Now, most countries won't come to Bitcoin too strongly because they are afraid that
if they start adopting Bitcoin, it weakens their currency, right?
If they give a life raft, people might use it.
And so what you kind of need, it seems like the playbook for Bitcoin to get on countries to become a currency for countries, legal tender, and for crypto in general to do that, is the country needs to first break its own currency.
That's what happened with El Salvador.
So they dollarized.
They started using the U.S. dollar.
So what that means is they do not have a money printer anymore because they're using the US dollar.
They just decided having a money printer wasn't worth the benefits of it.
We're not worth the fact that our currency keeps collapsing and our people keep, you know, getting destroyed.
Basically, our whole economy collapses because every the government cannot help but print money.
And it's just also people don't have faith in small economies, currencies. And a big part of it is because they do print money. So the playbook is
they stop using their own dollar. Argentina is talking about this. Milay is talking about
dollarizing. That means they would ditch their currency. So he just got a $20 billion loan from
the IMF. They are trying to shore up their currency.
They released the black market and open government market.
I forget, they call it maybe blue market or something.
They released their peg where they were trying,
or their controls, their capital controls.
And now because they got this loan,
and so they've made some steps towards this direction
of shoring up the inflation in their currency.
They dropped it from like 250% down to like 40% now.
They've gotten rid of the capital controls.
And one of their next steps may be what he ran on was dollarizing.
And he's a big bitcoiner.
He's a big Bitcoiner. So it seems natural. You dollarize, you break your own money printer.
So it seems natural.
You dollarize.
You break your own money printer.
And then because you don't have that incentive to protect your money printer anymore,
why not use something like Bitcoin? That's what I think the natural playbook will be for countries
around the world. And if everybody does this, it's almost like in DeFi where you have multipliers,
right? Like, oh, stake for a day, you get no multiplier.
Stake for a month, you get a five.
Stake for a year, you get a 10.
If everybody stakes for a year, there really is no multiplier, right?
Because everybody's getting the same multiplier.
So my thought is, is like, why can't all these countries just avoid breaking things?
And just if everybody moves kind of at the same time.
Because, Matt, let me ask you.
And good to have you here, by the way.
I love the stuff you guys are building.
Are you guys building with Quickswap or Stratix?
I know we've talked a lot in the past about building stuff together.
Are we building anything?
Are you building anything with any of our teams or our portfolio?
We should probably look into doing some stuff together.
So I'll probably hit you up on the side and we can. Are you going to btc vegas by chance at all i'll be out there we can yeah
we'll be hosting a bunch of events well i would love to see you we'll be uh hosting tokenized
conference and bid angels at the mike tyson mansion uh with michael turpin and that whole crew
i'll be speaking there and moderating some things and
judging on the pitches and uh then let's see there's a there's a bitcoin startup labs event
across the street at the david copperfield mansion um we work a lot with them bitcoin ai startup labs
uh we'll be supporting there um unfortunately dna house yep yeah i'll be there very close to them um we do stuff with them at
all like a bunch of countries dubai was huge they did a bunch of cool stuff there us and them and
cj and mario's company we did a bunch of stuff there um i'm supposed to speak at bitcoin startup
labs but i got a conflict because we'll be actually announcing something and asex is going
to yell at me if i say too much so i won't but we're'll be actually announcing something and Assec's going to yell
at me if I say too much, so I won't, but we're going to be announcing something at Litecoin
Summit on stage with Litecoin Foundation. It's going to be huge, really big. But yeah,
so I'll be on stage at that time. So I can't speak at the Bitcoin startup labs.
And then what else? We have a couple other events., events. Uh, I don't remember. I don't
do the scheduling, but, um, Oh yeah. Actually, if anybody, uh, we have like, I think one or two,
one more day or two more days before we close applications, bit angels. Um, so, uh, I'll just
like, so I'm LA city leader for bit angels and I do a lot of the global stuff for them. It's a
pitch network. Uh, I live in Puerto Rico now, but I was in LA when, when I became city leader for BitAngels and I do a lot of the global stuff for them. It's a pitch network. I live in Puerto Rico now, but I was in LA when I became city leader there.
But anyways, BitAngels is a pitch network.
Michael Turpin started it.
They ran, I wasn't there yet, but they ran the first ICO ever, MasterCoin.
They invested in Ethereum ICO, seven figures, and they did the PR for Ethereum ICO, and they did the PR for Tether launch and et cetera.
So it's a pitch network.
We bring a bunch of big investors, angel investors and funds that come watch, and we have projects pitch.
So if you are a project that is raising right now right now, go to bidangels.network
and go to, I think presenters or pitchers at the top of the website and choose Las Vegas
in the dropdown and apply.
We are still taking applications for, I think one or two more days and put my name on it.
So we make sure we take a look.
If you guys forget all that, if you can at least remember,
just DM me and I'll get you connected.
I'll probably connect you to Richard.
But if you're in the audience and you're interested in what Rock just said,
just DM me.
You can see I'm the purple PFP right here, Aztec,
and I'll get you guys connected to that it's a it's a really great
opportunity for anyone looking for uh investment and it's at mike tyson's mansion actually michael
turpin owns it now i think he owns two of mike tyson's old mansions uh but it's actually the
tiger mansion this is the actual mansion that was in the hangover so really cool there's still a
tiger den there.
You do have to pitch in person.
That's really important to know.
You can't do like a Zoom in pitch.
But there's many different BitAngels events across the year
in different locations all around the world.
And even if you can't make it to Vegas,
coming up at the end of this month uh there
will be other opportunities so new york is happening what i don't remember which event it is
but new york's happening like now or next week i think does anyone know what's what's happening in
new york i forget too many conferences too much going on i don't know um so yeah you could apply
for new york and there's,
there's events all around the world. So there's probably like a couple events a month cause we
have 30 cities around the world. So we just did one in Dubai. Uh, we do them in Puerto Rico. We
do them wherever DevCon is, uh, Denver every year, um, Nashville, um, all the major cities, Bangkok,
um, a ton of cities around the world.
So always keep an eye out for that if you're pitching.
If you want to know about that and you're not going to Vegas or New York,
yeah, you can message Aztec here or Darren behind the quick swap handle
and we can find you an event where you could come pitch potentially.
It's not like we don't let anyone pitch.
It's, you know, usually it's 50 to a hundred people apply and we take around 10 to 15.
So you gotta be a good project, but yeah. Welcome to apply.
Yeah. Heck yeah. Uh, all right, guys,
I want to ask everyone another defy question here. Um,
and I think it's a good, a good segue. Uh,
and also want to welcome King Dan Kushush to the panel wait wait one more
thing on that aztec uh we're doing a giveaway for litecoin summit we're going to be giving away
coming up on monday yeah we're going to be giving away some tickets to litecoin summit charlie lee
will be there uh the foundation will be there and we are announcing something seriously big you're
going to hear about what we're announcing in the industry. You will hear about it.
The media will cover it big time.
And some of the biggest people in the industry are going to be covering it.
But it's a big thing for the industry.
But yeah, if you want tickets, watch for that giveaway.
Or if you're like a friend of Aztecs, he could probably get you a ticket maybe.
Yeah.
If you're in the audience and you're going to
Bitcoin Vegas and haven't thought about going to Litecoin summit, which is directly right after
the next, the following two days, then you might as well stay in town. And if you, if you can and
hit up the Litecoin summit, it's going to be a... We're...
LDA, Lunar Digital Assets,
our venture studio,
is incubating something
that's going to be announced
at Litecoin Summit.
It's going to be huge.
So we'd love for any people
in the audience
to come hang out with us
and celebrate the announcement.
But yeah, definitely keep an eye out
on my account
on Monday.
I will also be retweeting
if you want a free ticket
to get to Lightcoin Summit.
LDA is incubating that.
We're incubating Stratix that was on earlier.
I think they're going to come back in a bit.
We incubated Polygon. We incubated're going to come back in a bit. Uh, we incubated polygon.
We incubated quick swap,
a bunch of others.
so yeah,
keep an eye out for it.
Yep.
But here all,
are we good to shift here to another question?
All right.
Yeah.
So it'd be awesome to hang out with you guys.
yeah.
Aztec will be there.
I'll be there.
bunch of,
bunch of us will be there yeah it's
gonna be a good time can't wait um all right guys so my my question I know we have a lot of people
that are you know building in DeFi uh just fully locked in into the space where is the institutions
Where is the institutions and TradFi from your guys' perspective with DeFi?
Now, just to add a little to that question, I've seen over the last couple of years,
some rather large and notable institutions already experimenting with building out all kinds of different uh technologies from like platforms
or experimenting with ave you know lending and borrowing and and it seems like there's a lot of
stealth building right now but in your guys perspective where are they are they sold on the
idea are they moving into blockchain? Is it happening quickly?
Is it about to happen?
Are we primed essentially?
Or what's your guys' thoughts on this?
Anyone can jump in here.
I'll jump in.
I actually got to run.
It's time for me to start making Friday dinner for the fam. But I think per usual, it's time for me to uh start making friday dinner for the fam but um i think i you know per
usual it's a it's a mixed bag um there's institutions that tend to be run by younger
people trying to make a name for themselves or or whatever um i i think there's lots lots that
want to come toward the defy concept i think a lot of people, we've seen a lot of blowback
from people about Michael Saylor and Jack Maulers
and these guys that are talking about
just locking up money in all these vehicles
of like, hey man, buy our stock
and then we'll buy Bitcoin with it
and then it all kind of go up together.
You'll get better yield
and some of these other things.
And I've seen a lot, just in the last two months, a lot of people starting to question the like, hey, man, does any of that Bitcoin actually exist?
It's a cool idea and I'm a master investor or whatever. But do I actually want to be
in the situation where I can't audit what is going up and what's being
held and all these other things? And I think that then begs the question on people who are excited
about the concept, but then start to ask these questions about like, wait, what happens if the
price trends down for 18 months? You start getting a lot of these what ifs and reading very long prospectuses for investors and these kind of things when in reality, like DeFi actually solves a lot of these problems in a much simpler way.
And so I think a lot of these people that are running family offices or running some of these smaller hedge funds or these different investment groups are saying, you know what, I think there is actually a better option.
And I think that'll bring more people into DeFi. I can't name any names, but I do
some consult. I'm not a big consultant in the space by any means, but I've seen a genuine
uptick in people that are asking about diversification into stuff like that. And for
those specific reasons that, you know, hey, they were pretty excited
about like the BlackRock ETF or what's going on with strategy or whatever else, but they want to
have something that's got more transparency, more obvious, like built-in policies, essentially
smart contracts. And so I think just like everything else, it'll start with your smaller and mid-sized institutions.
And in a decade, you know, guys like Jamie Dimon will be retiring from places like JP Morgan.
And the guy that replaces him is going to be younger and have had his fingers in this stuff for, you know, in ways that is not just like, hey, man, I never had to.
just like, hey, man, I never had to. I was a billionaire anyways. But the kind of people that
I was a billionaire anyways.
are going to be in the next generation of CEOs of major institutions, they're our age, essentially.
These are guys that are in their 30s and 40s now, get into these C-level roles and ride them out
for the next 20 years. And I think those guys are going to be very much interested in a much more technological posture on this stuff. So yeah,
I think basically buckle up, make sure your stuff is ready to go. Keep iterating, keep improving.
And yeah, like that's, that's it. I love that you brought up the questioning of sailor and
strategy. I I've literally been asking everybody I know in this space. I know wealth advisors in the Tradfire world. I'm like, why are people giving another person money to just go do what they can do themselves, either through the ETFs, either through, you know, you know, centralized exchanges to start to buy your... I have to disagree there. I don't think any of us are capable.
And I'm pretty, you know, savvy investor, build DeFi products, manage a lot of funds,
and have a lot of like swing in the industry.
And I can't do what Michael Saylor does.
I mean, what he's doing is actually pretty remarkable.
No, no, no.
I mean, I'm not saying we do what he does.
I'm saying why are people giving them his money or why are people giving them their money when they already have $10 million, $20, $30 million?
Why are they going and buying the strategy, you know, convertible debt when they can just go buy the Bitcoin themselves?
I know they're doing it for the house.
Because they believe.
The stock. But there's no reason. That's why Bitcoin exists. Like there's no reason to go give your
money to someone else to go buy Bitcoin for you. Yeah. I'm not suggesting that people do buy
MicroStrategy. I bought a little just because I want to support the man. That's usually how I,
most things I buy are more like about supporting than making money. But, uh, so like, I just am an activist with my wallet kind of, I vote with my wallet, but,
uh, I don't recommend people buy micro strategy. I think it's kind of risky. I think all the other
ones that are building and the end that they're like, basically it's leverage on Bitcoin. Now
it's leverage done in a very creative and sophisticated way. And like, he has the swing with his like, well,
it started with his business revenue, his business revenue allowed him, he was leveraging the revenue
of the company, which at, you know, is like, I don't know, only it's like 100 million or less,
which at the time, you know, when the company was only worth 800 million, he could leverage that and
buy Bitcoin with it and then take loans against the stock and then issue shares when he thought the stock was becoming
too heated and too overvalued and buy more Bitcoin and da, da, da. Now, he's doing this in some kind
of crazy, sophisticated way that I don't fully understand. I don't think most people do. I think
there's a lot of hype behind it that people are buying into. There's also speculation. People just think, hey, even if
his strategy is risky or even if it's not kosher, if people are trading on it and it goes up faster
than Bitcoin, then I'll take that risk. People like to gamble. But somehow or another, through
these different means, he has been able to take a company that was worth 800
million and had 500 million in cash. So the business was not valued very much. The cash was,
you know, valued at cash or less at a discount, even because it was deflating each year or
inflating, sorry. Uh, and so he was somehow able to take that company, take that 500 million in
cash, buy out his old shareholders and then start buying.
So he bought out old shareholders when he told them, hey, we're going to start buying Bitcoin.
If you don't like it, let us know.
We'll buy your shares.
Don't sell them on the open market.
We'll buy them.
Just get out because we're becoming a Bitcoin company now.
And some people left, but most stayed.
He bought the people out that left at even a slight premium, like a little thank you for their service or something. I don't know. And then he went on
this journey of doing sophisticated strategies on leveraging Bitcoin. And he was able to survive
the downturn down to 16K. I think he first started buying around 10K maybe or like 14K or something,
but then he wrote it up, wrote it down.
People were talking about he could get liquidated.
But most of this stuff he did would be like a loan, I believe, denominated in dollars at low interest rates in the last cycle, like the last interest rate cycle.
So he was getting loans around like I think some of them were 0% or very close because he was putting his company up as collateral.
So he would have these convertible bonds and these different financial products that he was offering that said, hey, look, if my plan works, you'll be able to convert the debt to shares of the company.
So it's a call option.
So it's kind of like a cheap call option. You lend
them money and you get call options on his company and stuff like that. And over time,
he was able to do that. And I think he'll may go down as one of the biggest financial,
like engineering geniuses of our generation. And again, I'm not saying you buy micro strategy.
I'm just telling you the story and the facts. He was able to go from having $500 million in cash and turn that $500 million in cash
and the business that was only generating $100 million a year to he now has $50 billion in Bitcoin.
And the company is now valued at $100 and something billion.
So he took a company from $800 million to $100 and something billion,
one of the top countries in America now, top 100 i think maybe or something like that uh and he was able to do
that in like five years and survive a downturn the big downturn in crypto and bitcoin so there's
something there that's why people are buying it that makes sense but to play devil's advocate here, I mean, wouldn't it make sense to still just recommend all these investors that are investing in him to just go buy the Bitcoin? you explained how he has structured things over, over the years. It is pretty sophisticated,
but a lot of people think that it's also pretty risky and will unwind at some
point. And it could potentially be, you know, part of,
and this is total speculation, you know, I, I'm not saying I believe this,
but I'm saying people do believe this, that it could be part of,
that unwind could be part of a major bear market
in the future.
So for sure, that's absolutely a risk.
He is playing with leverage and there's always a risk of liquidation.
That's the point that I was more getting at is not how smart he is, but the people that
are investing in him, not buying just strategy shares on the
open market, but all the people he's doing the institutional level deals with, like, why are,
like, why are they? A lot of them don't want Bitcoin. These people are lending. So there's
a bunch of parties involved in this. There's all kinds of different parties involved in this. It
is a massive ecosystem. He has all kinds of derivative shares. There's companies building
micro strategy on top of micro strategy. I met a young gentleman in, um, Bangkok that was doing
this and I thought he's a fucking nut job. He was pitching this to bid angels. It was the most,
uh, animated pitch I've ever seen. Uh, but, and I thought he was, it was a joke because he was
like saying he's going to like, you know, a hundred X micro strategy, something ridiculous.
It sounds so stupid. And then I sat with this young gentleman.
He's actually the guy who does all the memes for Michael Saylor.
But anyways, I sat with this kid, and I thought he was fucking nuts.
And I thought it was a joke.
I actually thought the pitch was a joke.
And we were thinking about having him at other places to pitch as a joke just for fun because it hyped up the audience so much.
I wish i could
replicate it it was like the funniest most crazy pitch i've ever seen but i talked with this kid
for like an hour after and i was like holy shit this actually the way they're structuring this
could kind of work uh but anyways so there's the whole ecosystem around this so you're asking like
as an example why would someone lend him money money when they could just go buy Bitcoin?
Because they're not looking to buy Bitcoin.
If they were looking to buy Bitcoin, they would probably buy Bitcoin or buy MicroStrategy stock themselves as exposure.
But no, they are lending money.
So they have money.
They want to lend it.
It's denominator in dollars.
And they get free call options on some company that they don't give a shit about.
They don't have to give a shit about the company. They just have to think, if this company succeeds, I have a good call option.
I make money. I now convert the loan to shares and the shares went
up. So I make money. If the, if he fails and the shares start to go down, then I just take,
then I convert to his shares. I believe I convert to his shares before liquidation
and just sell them on the open market. So it's like, it's just like a low risk
financial engineering thing for them.
They don't want Bitcoin.
And then just really quick,
the people now asking,
why would people buy MicroStrategy instead of Bitcoin?
It's because it's outperforming Bitcoin
and it's leverage on Bitcoin.
So it's basically a sophisticated
and safer kind of form of leverage
than just going on Binance
and leverage longing Bitcoin yourself.
Well, and a lot of people too, they don't want to deal with, you know, we were on a self custody
space yesterday where we were talking about like people losing money with wallets and like some
people are just like, you know what, the Bitcoin part of this is over my head and I don't want to
have to trust a CTO to help me do X, Y, and Z. And if I can just buy micro strategy, I'm done. Right. And so like
there is going to always be a subset of investors that that's their, that's their basic values in
the, in the situation. They would only want Bitcoin in order to make dollars off of it anyways.
And so this is, this is an opportunity to do that without any of the other, like I have to be 0%
cypherpunk to participate in the upside of bitcoin and you know that should be expected michael is serving that niche he's
serving it really well uh and then because he's serving it well he's gonna get competitors which
are you know popping up very quickly uh now just even in the last three months it's like it's
accelerating too so um but i wonder if do you think he sees
those as competitors or do you because the crazy this is the craziest thing about this whole
fucking thing about the whole industry about bitcoin uh well more bitcoin than the other
stuff in the industry but the crazy thing about all this is when when companies are like or uh
investors are looking at like i want to invest in in, you know, Microsoft or, you know, Apple.
They are looking at hard numbers of fundamentals.
They are looking at price PE ratio, price earning PE ratios.
They're looking at, you know, cashflow.
They're looking at these things and you can only go now the market because of S&P 500
becoming monetized and stocks, the U S stock market becoming monetized instrument for people,
countries around the world, investor around the world, we've gotten away from the like proper PE
ratio. So like, you know, these companies are trading at, you know, S and P is trading at,
I don't know, 25 times, um, you know, earnings or something. So it would take 25 years for you to
make your money back as an investor. If you, if you invested in this company, whereas like,
if you invest in a non S andP 500, just a regular company,
you're only paying,
if you were to buy a company,
you would only buy the company
if you can make your money back
in like three to five years.
But S&P 500 trades at 25 times
and it's gotten higher.
The ratio has gotten higher over time.
It's not like too, too insanely growing,
but it is growing enough
that I'm actually scared
of an S&P 500 bubble someday.
But anyways,
so the crazy thing
about Bitcoin though is, is it doesn't have those fundamentals. There are no fundamentals.
Like there are some, you can argue like users, wallets, you know, amount transacted, how much
is being served. But the main value people are looking at is how much money is being held in it.
how much money is being held in it. And so this is a rare case where the higher, so the higher
Apple stock goes, the less people want to buy it because it's deviating from its, you know,
from its cashflow and its profit and stuff. And so over time, it's like, okay, that's, it's over,
it's overbought. I don't want to buy this. Bitcoin, the higher it gets and the more people
use it, the more valuable
it gets because now it has Lindy effect and trust and battle testing. And so there's almost no
gravity for what Bitcoin can become. If it gets to, you know, it's at 2 trillion. If it gets to
10 trillion, it starts being compared to gold and people start questioning whether they want to hold
gold or bonds or other things. If it gets to 50 trillion, now countries can start holding it
and they can start,
it's so liquid that anyone can kind of hold it.
If it gets to 100 trillion,
it's like world reserve asset now.
Now that we should put more money,
put all of our, you know,
I'm exaggerating,
but you get what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting.
I think you're right about that point
as it pertains to Bitcoin.
I think the first question you started to ask though
is does MicroStrategy or Strategy B,
do they see 21 and some of these other companies
that are popular, do they see them as competitors?
And I actually kind of don't know.
I don't know how much Saylor needs people
to continue to buy his assets
versus does it matter to him if they buy other assets
and the price of bitcoin
continues to go up i don't know the calculus on that well i think he's played his cards the best
flattery and if no one else is doing your business idea like it might not be that great of a business
idea right like he needs at least some somebody else to do it so he doesn't look completely insane.
And maybe he needs everyone to do it.
Actually, his whole thing, guys, think about this.
He's already told us his answer on this, I think.
Now, he wasn't pitching necessarily to microstructure.
Actually, he was.
He was going around.
He's had conferences about this.
Two or three years ago, he was hitting up like fortune 500 uh c-level guys
and having these closed door sessions yes why like apple and microsoft shouldn't be building
computers they should be putting money into into the asset well i don't know if he said they
shouldn't be building did he say that i mean he i think he was saying they should run it as their
treasury strategy what's gonna run the network if we have no computers anymore?
Right.
But I mean, that was the meme about it.
That's how he was trying to break the ice with these people and say, look, for every $100 million you put into this other thing, that's missed opportunity, actually, that your board of directors is going to be asking you in five years why you invested so much money in r&d versus you messed up your fiduciary responsibility so yeah yeah so like you know he didn't just do that behind closed doors he had conferences about
this big conferences with fortune 500 companies so he's been trying to get people to do this forever
and that's the beauty of it it's not a where like, there's a lot of things in the world where like you invest
in it and you don't want others to know about it, at least early on, right? You might want to
go long and then get loud. And after you invest, he's still buying. So you would think maybe he
wouldn't want people to buy because he's accumulating, but no, Bitcoin's not like that.
If everybody, if there are enough people doing what he's accumulating but no bitcoin's not like that if everybody
if there are enough people doing what he's doing including countries like you know one state was it
pennsylvania just passed that they are going to start accumulating bitcoin or that they or that
they legally can arizona or something az baby az is gonna do it yeah they were early they were early on um on paying your taxes in bitcoin um yeah yeah
so i got i gotta i gotta ask this because i got i've been wanting to to kind of like pick your
guys brains on this before so this is the power hour guys it's the third hour thank you to everyone
that's been rocking with us for three almost three hours now kurt uh you're a beast uh i think you rocked with us the
the entire show last time i know you got to go but this is really fascinating conversation
and before we we close i just want to kind of uh get a good picture on the the initial question i
was asking which is you know where are institutions where is trad fi on on blockchain on on crypto
and it sounds like to me and so tell me if you guys think this is wrong but it sounds like to me that they're definitely curious and the the
younger uh uh the younger uh institutional people that are just climbing into the the uh uh executive
positions are trying to make a name for themselves and they're experimenting
or they're trying to tip their toe into blockchain, but institutions aren't fully all in yet.
Is that the perspective of the panel?
I feel like from my research, the institutions are already here. They're
experimenting. They're just really quiet about it, even some of the
really big ones. But I do want to get your guys' perspective.
I think what Kurt said real quick, I'll go real quick, and Kurt, you're way more
fascinating to listen to, so I'm just going to say something real quick.
Institutions like Robin? Like Robinhood.
And again, I don't know all the names, but like Robinhood built that, bought that Canadian company
that's the, that's the crypto exchange and stuff. And I think what it goes down to is it's, they
probably don't want to be so loud about it because when they do want to go acquire companies,
they don't want those companies, you know, they don't want to have to pay 20x earnings for that company.
They probably want to pay 5x.
So institutions are probably figuring out who they want to buy to get exposure to the space.
And then the other thing is, you know, how do we make not just like dollars, but how do we make profit off this?
So in addition to, like you said earlier, the people that are buying the convertible debt from strategy, you know,
they care about at the end of the day,
did I make my $10 million of profit that year? If so,
I don't really care what the instrument was that did it.
So I think institutions are two things.
They're looking for who to acquire.
They maybe don't want to be too loud about it because then someone else does
or bids that price up. And then they're also exploring, how do we make,
how do we make money from this other than just exposure to the assets ourselves?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And this will be my closing thoughts.
I'm just going to hang up after I spit it out.
Thanks for having me again, everybody.
I'm going to say something right after you finish that's going to keep you on here.
that's going to keep you on here.
Please don't.
Please don't.
So with, you know, if you look at the company,
like pick the top five banks in New York,
I think it's probably JP Morgan,
Citi, Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon.
I'm missing one.
Goldman.
So if you look at them,
they are, they all have a blockchain module,
right? So if you talk to the guys that work in like the main investment banking section of that
company, you're going to get lots of gray hair guys and work in there since the 90s. They don't
give a shit what's going on in the Bitcoin space, or they think we're insane, you know, or whatever
else. And, you know, in some cases, they're right. And, you know, they take and and you know in in some cases they're right and you know they
take the the fud and and they live on it and whatever but there's the module at their own
company like goldman for example is like a major investor in circle and you know under underwriting
usdc and some of these things or uh you know jamie diamond's mr you know bitcoin's a giant scam and
whatever else but at the same time jp JP Morgan's investing in DeFi and stuff.
So it's like these companies are massive.
And there are the official comms of companies like that.
And then there's the groups that go out.
It's just like the big drug companies.
The big drug companies do the exact same thing.
They're like, well, officially, this is the company's policy.
But unofficially, we've got like 500 people whose job it is to go look at all these weird
little biotech startups and see if anybody's coming up with novel ways to cure cancer,
novel ways to cure diabetes, or novel ways to cure, you know, all these other things.
And if somebody's actually got something really interesting, they're immediately trying to say, Hey, you know, can we buy you out? Can we buy you out this and
that? Can we, Hey, we'll help you with your patent strategy, but you come under our umbrella.
And so there's always going to be these sort of skunk works modules at these companies where you
can point out and say, well, yeah, you know, be on why melon's definitely in the defy space,
but officially the company is definitely not in the, in the defy space, but officially the company is definitely
not in the, in the defy space. And I think that's going to be the case probably for the next five
years, maybe even more. And then all of a sudden there will just be like a rollout among them all
like, Hey, now we're all like, all of us are using the same intrabank stable coin, you know,
whatever. And it's like, well, how long have you guys been working on that?
And it'll be, oh, we're just all using circle pay.
Like Goldman did that.
Didn't like, didn't, you know,
like they'll act like you're the fool for,
for not knowing this was coming.
But I, I, I think that I want to ask you something, Kurt, man,
you got to go.
Two more minutes.
We're starving his kids here, Aztec.
Come on.
Oh, man.
But come on.
Everyone is going to want to know.
So then, because I hear what you're saying, but then what do you think about the Larry Finks that are talking about everything is going to be tokenized?
Is he just projecting?
He can see the data and he knows where it's going um or is he
already actively because you know uh black rocks invested in ondo for instance real world asset
i think like what what is that about yeah i think guys like fink you know it's funny because fink
was another like huge critic of bitcoin and now you know now he's mr. Like crypto guy. And it, you know, it's,
I think he's a really good example of that. Like if you look at Larry,
So is Michael Saylor and most, a lot of people, right. Michael Saylor tweeted 10 years ago,
Bitcoin is probably going to fail and go to zero or something.
Yep. For sure.
And then he came over.
2013. Yeah. There's a 2013 tweet from him saying essentially that like Bitcoin's a scam. It's
going to go away. Like, uh, I think he said like offshore gambling was uh the the quote but that's so funny yeah well which like
offshore gambling still exists too so that's also funny but um the funny thing is like larry fink is
is a really good uh uh analog of that like he's he's the guy i mean he's the biggest investor
essentially in the world, runs
the biggest portfolio and was this huge
critic and now
they're quietly investing in lots of little things.
They're investing in, hey, should
we be doing the entire stock market
on chain? Should we start running
the quote unquote real markets
the way that they run DEXs?
What can we learn from the AMM people?
All these things. I don't know ifM people? I mean, you know, all these things.
And so-
I don't know if you said, I was looking at something,
but like 24-7 trading.
They were just the old head of the CFTC
who just retired or not.
No, I don't know if she was a head.
She was maybe a board member or something.
I don't know.
But anyways, a couple people from the CFTC,
CFTC just dropped off.
That's an interesting thing.
But basically she was saying that's one of the big things they're looking at right now is like 24-7 trading. couple people from the CFTC CFTC just dropped off. That's an interesting thing. But, uh, basically
she was saying that's one of the big things they're looking at right now is like 24 seven
trading. And I think NASDAQ just approved this. These are things they learned from us for damn
sure. Right. Absolutely. No. So, I mean, it's, it's one of those things I've said for a lot of
years, it's, uh, it's slowly then suddenly. And if you've been paying attention and it's been the
slowly for a long time.
But then, you know, once these guys,
the kind of people that can write
a $10 billion check quickly,
that makes stuff happen very suddenly.
And yeah, it really could happen
kind of at any moment.
It's hard to know if it's next week
or next year or next decade,
but when it happens,
it happens hard and fast.
Yeah, I think, I know you have to go. I just have to say, next year or next decade, but when it happens, it happens hard and fast. Yeah.
I think, I know you have to go.
I just have to say, I really think we're actually right around the corner from it happening
hard and fast because the technology has got to a point to where these guys can actually
kind of do what they want.
The technology is like right around the corner, right? And like, honestly want it's it's the technology is like right right around
the corner right and like honestly it's like right around the corner um i mean i would say
it's already happening i mean it mainstream is around the corner we're in the the avalanche is
like visibly occurring it just hasn't crushed everyone yet yes yes all right i'm leaving goodbye everyone have a good weekend yeah yeah uh um yeah hummingbird do you have any thoughts on this
um what what what the what what part in specific just the institutions or
well so that but also you know like are we right on the precipice of, uh, you know, this happening hard and fast, you know, real world assets, uh, moving in to defy and, um, the tokenization of everything.
And, and, uh,
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, I, I think it's gonna, I think there's going to be some assets that it works really well for.
You know, again, it's about it's about finding a problem and solving it, not, you know, jamming something into something that kind of doesn't need it yet.
So I think there are some real world assets that would that would really benefit from blockchain because it would ease transfer and it would get rid of some of the fraud and it would
help with transparency. So like one I've really loved is royalties. Royalties are one of the most
amazing assets because you can buy them and sell them. There's, I don't want to say there's like
no regulation on them, but they've already been deemed that they're not securities because you're
getting paid right off the top on something and not after a business, you know, has financial implications and then you get a profit.
So royalties and everything from art to music to land to energy production,
I think those things coming online would be amazing.
That was what got Mark Cuban interested, you know.
He said that, you know, and he was actually early investor in QuickSwap and Polygon, by the way.
Oh, that's cool. Yeah. In my former life, I did high-end mortgages for hedge fund guys in New York and big oil tycoons and stuff.
And the amount of paperwork that we would have to collect to show the royalties they owned and how much was paid off and everything like that.
If all of that was on the blockchain and you could just like run it through something and be like, OK, here's the here's the value worth.
Here's how long they've owned them. Here's this.
I mean, it could make it could make even people that own royalties to be able to get financing to do other things.
It could it could untrap a lot of money.
So, yeah, I think we're right here.
Again, it's just you've got to balance regulations.
You know, you can't take some things and tokenize them and now just say all the rules of, like, what's a security and what's not a security go out the window.
And, again, a lot of that's to protect, you know, to protect the end person, right, to make it so that companies can't just
do stuff and then hide the results and all that kind of stuff. There has to be some sort of
framework to protect investors a little bit. But yeah, I think we're I think we're right on the
edge. I think it's it's already happening to a certain extent. And once we get some, you know,
even more legal clarity, it's just going to make things, you know, better
across the planet. Because I mean, why can't we, you know, why can't a group of investors, let's
say in a in a in a less developed country, you know, they can scale into things. That's the
biggest part about coming up in this world is that there's usually there's usually cliffs and
high watermarks like, oh, you got to have 500 grand to get in this.
You got to have this, you got this.
But what if like a community could put $80
into oil royalties or something like that?
So yeah, I think we're right on the edge
and I think the time is happening.
And again, it's just getting the parties
that kind of control a lot of this stuff
to see how it benefits them.
I kind of like the what's in it for them thing.
And I think they'll even see it too, because they'll be like, well, we'll have better
distribution of our product. We'll have better distribution of our ownership and exposure.
When you have that, you get rid of some of the centralized control. And I think a lot of markets
will behave better once you have that. And then the market really gets to decide it,
you know, like the PE on the S&P 500, he was saying earlier, you know, is going up and it is
getting a little bit concerning. But one of the big reasons for that is applications like Robinhood
made it easy for, you know, young people to just have an app on their phone, buy a couple shares
of what they like. And maybe we're never going to see PE ratios come back down, you know, to where people would like to see them, you know, 15 on the
S&P 500, stuff like that, because people are okay with lesser return than maybe people got in the
past because there's more exposure for it. And I think that's a good thing because then again,
that means more capital is moving around. It means more people have it. The I think that's a good thing, because then again, that means more capital is moving around,
it means more people have it, the more we bring up the bottom, I don't even like to say bottom,
but if we can raise the living standard and access to capital of everybody throughout the
world by this micro diversification and kind of breaking things down and decentralization,
then you just have a lot more
people coming up. And now a lot more people can buy goods and services. And it circles it back
around to then all the, you know, brick and mortar and companies that make clothes and food and all
that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think, I think we're already in it. One of the funniest things I
like to contribute, you like to say how I think the tide is shifting is when, you know, you have colleagues that are, you know, just, you know, corporate workers that never really had a need
for crypto and Bitcoin. You know, they live in a developed country, they make a lot of money,
they've got big 401k plans, so like that, when those people are now saying, hey, I got to have
exposure. That's how you know that we're right there. So yeah, now that I'm seeing a lot of
people, I know that even though money is not a problem
for them, security of their money is not a problem, when those people are now starting
to even see the use cases and how it would benefit, that to me is kind of the signal
that we're on the right trajectory.
I was throwing up a lot of hearts and clap emojis because I'm,
I'm right there with you on everything you were saying.
I love those thoughts.
I don't know if anyone else wants to piggyback off of what I mean,
bird just brought up, but I know we only have four minutes left in the show.
So rock,
I'm not sure if you want to steer us in a certain direction or if we can just
see if anyone else has any other thoughts.
Let's see.
We had Alexi came for a second.
Jax here.
I do want to talk a little more about what Stratix is doing because I think they are one of the most forward-looking things on where DeFi is going to go in the industry.
So I wanted to talk a little bit more about what they're doing.
Yeah, I'm happy to jump in there.
Yeah, and I mean, I am biased.
We are incubating them.
I've invested a lot of money into them.
LDA has.
Quickswap has invested in them as well.
But yeah, I mean, it's a pretty incredible team.
The team put together there is insane.
I mean, it's like the most brilliant DeFi person at QuickSwap.
And like for me, top two DeFi people I know in the world, and we work with a lot of people, is Alexi, who was on earlier.
And then Jack, you're absolutely incredible.
The CTO is, and the dev team,
I'll just run down the crazy stuff our dev team has built.
So our CTO was advisor to Chainlink
until he was replaced by Eric Schmidt,
the old Google CEO, for his position.
He and our dev team built things for,
let's see,
they managed a lot of governance stuff for balancer.
They built stuff for Ave.
They're under contract.
Our dev team for StratX is under contract with ETH foundation.
They built stuff for ETH foundation for years.
they are,
our CTO, uh MakerDAO managing the Dye Peg and doing the risk management of the Dye Peg for years until he and his colleagues were able to decentralize that for MakerDAO.
He, oh, this one I'll say, I guess slightly.
Yeah.
Hayden Adams, uh, he doesn't like when we say it like this, but it's what it was, but
he's like a, you know, cypherpunk kind of coder guy.
So he doesn't really like when we use it, these words.
And he says, no, no, you know, no coder works for someone, you know, we all code together,
but Hayden Adams, the creator of Uniswap
used to code for him or used to, he was 60% of the commits on, uh, on our CTOs, uh, project in
2016. Hayden was in high school, uh, coding for our guy and brought the idea for Uniswap to him,
uh, actually originally. Um, so yeah, we, that the dev team oh they're they're um they're safe guardians
so they gnosis safe they've contributed to helped invent token standards for gnosis safe and are the
main partner that launches gnosis safe on new chains if i could just zoom in on that yeah
specific yeah gnosis is a lot of the underlying architecture for stratix so essentially um the way to think
about it is um obviously the d5 strategy marketplace um and then the vaults which feed
into which the strategies feed into uh you know a gnosis safe vaults with tokenizable modules
so you know you essentially have like um a token a vault tokenizer standard, which is ERC 4626.
And then that creates the yield bearing tokens that can be traded on the secondary market.
So it's really interesting, like the customization that you can do with Gnosis.
And also because Gnosis has this ironclad reputation and safeguards billions of dollars in TVL.
Gnosis has this ironclad reputation and safeguards billions of dollars in TVL.
It's also a great choice for institutional liquidity providers who need that top-tier security.
If you're going to put $100 million or a large amount of capital into something,
then you have to be very, very security conscious.
And so it was a great choice for us.
And Protofire actually built the Gy safe tokenizer um a long time ago um but they didn't really have a way to to use it in the way to go to market with
it they just it was a cool piece of tech and then um alexi who was on the space earlier he had the
idea for um the these tokenizable strategies and vaults and so that idea just came together with some great tech
that uh some friends of ours has already built um so it just made sense yeah so it's pretty cool
and in relation to what um what you were saying earlier about rwas one area that's really
interesting as the big institutions bring uh real world assets on chain is the the potential for blended strategies so we can take
a strategy like that's related to you know that has bitcoin at its core so a bitcoin d5 strategy
and you can blend that with gold and create like a blended bcc gold strap for some of the old school
people that love gold but want to dip their toes in the water bitcoin so that would be aimed at
maybe like a family office that's a little more conservative but you can also do things like pair
you know an mstr strategy with with uh bitcoin with with a bitcoin strategy and put that in a
vault and so we're working with um we've been in some discussions to work with a quant fund
that does a lot in trad fi and the idea is that we
can help them tokenize rwa strategies and blend them with some of the strategies and vaults that
we already have now this is like not going to be in the mvp which is in a couple of weeks but
this is something we're working on as well to really um really kind of juice this up a little
bit to have blended trad fi and d5 strats and this is going to be more and more
possible the more rwas come on chain and so i think you know over the next well i think what
we're witnessing actually is the fusion of trad fi and d5 over the next few years and those two
things are going to fuse and the whole thing is going to be powered by ai so if you want my you know you mentioned
aztec i think you asked in the last hour like what's what's next for defy and i think that's
it i think the fusion uh this kind of uh the coming together of tradfi and defy is one major
trend and all that is going to be powered and helped along by ai just getting better and better
and so you'll end up with this like you know crazy
synergistic relationship where the big money comes from tradfi and the innovation comes from d5
and the ai makes it all super efficient um so you know one thing that we've noticed whenever we
incorporate ai into strats is just the efficiency as much i mean the strategies themselves help d5
platforms become more efficient but then ai help DeFi platforms become more efficient,
but then AI can make the strategies become more efficient.
And so you have like this, you know, super efficiency
and the synergy of those two worlds.
And I think that's probably the biggest trend
that we're going to see over the next year or two.
I mean, yeah, and what Stratix does is it basically makes it
so all the people who want yield, we all want yield and we're all chasing it.
Yeah. My phone is like right about to die. It's already like dim.
And so I just want to say bye. And I hope everyone has a great weekend because I'm going to be I'm going to stay on as long as I can.
But it's right about to die. Yeah. Much love, guys. And I'm super bullish on Stratix.
guys and I'm super bullish on Stratix
of course, QuickSwap, Polygon
much love
Hummingbird for hanging out with us and
all the great takes and
I think we lost
we love you Aztec
if you hear the recording later
yeah shout out to Aztec
it's one of the hidden hands behind the DeFi world.
So it's great to talk with you.
By the way, I really like some of the ideas you were sharing earlier.
I've given you a follow.
It'd be great to catch up at some point next week.
Yeah, definitely.
I'm KO.
The person behind the mic today is KO underscore market. So that's Kevin Okuson. I'm the CEO. Titles be damned or whatever, but we just had to pick someone.
community building and define the background with organized efforts in marketing. So yeah,
it'd be great to catch up. I followed a lot of all the audio you guys too. And yeah,
it would just be good to talk shop over some stuff and then I'll be at,
I'll be at Bitcoin Vegas staying at the Venetian. So yeah,
if anybody wants to get drinks or hit the pool or whatever, you know, just hit me up.
I don't know if we'll have time for a pool or drinks.
It'll be busy out there, but yeah, let's meet up.
That doesn't sound like our usual conference experience, Rock.
Maybe we're doing it wrong.
I know, man.
Yeah, you should come to the BitAngels event for sure, man,
and maybe the Litecoin Summit if you're interested in that too.
There was something out for like
18 hours and didn't get a chance to eat so yeah what day is the bid angels event
i think 29th 30th and 31st 29th is just a cocktail thing at night. 30th is like a more traditional conference panels,
speakers and stuff.
Be some big speakers there.
And then 31st, I believe,
is going to be the BitAngels portion.
So there'll be some panels also.
I'll be speaking.
Others will have some big,
usually some big speakers.
Like we've had Tim Draper and Brock Pierce
and Michael Turpin and Dan Moorhead, the CEO of Pantera.
Chris Maglino, the CEO of DNA Fund.
Sandeep just spoke in Dubai.
We had Jamie, the founder of Wall Street Bets, spoke at the event we were hosting in Dubai.
We had Mayor Eric Adams came and spoke at our Puerto Rico event.
That was cool to meet the
mayor of New York yeah it's a really like high it's very small it's only like 250
300 people they cap how many tickets they sell accredited investors get in for
free but it's mainly like high-end investors and like really industry like
kind of big people Vitalik has has come. Yeah, et cetera.
Cool. Check it out for sure. Yeah, actually, Michael Turpin, the creator of BitAngels,
I was at a jazz club with him and he told me that Vitalik in like 2013 asked Michael Turpin
to speak at his university about Bitcoin. So Vitalik was asking him to come talk about Bitcoin
back before Vitalik created Ethereum.
Pretty crazy.
Like these are super OGs in the space.
In 2013, you used to not seem so long ago
when I first got into crypto, which was like 15, 16.
Now it seems like forever ago.
It's crazy that this industry now seems like it has a forever ago, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, I was in 2015, man. And, uh, it does feel like forever ago. It's so fun though to see, like for anyone who was here early, you know, all the stuff we've been telling everyone for so long about this industry and all the, like people don't really laugh at you so much anymore.
but like people don't really laugh at you so much anymore.
But people used to really laugh.
They're so envious now.
And it's kind of funny because I was such a hater.
2013 to 2015, I wasn't a hater.
I don't usually hate on things, but probably like Sailor,
I was kind of like, I don't really see the use case here.
But then like, I just started looking into it and like researching.
And I was like, I just started looking into it and like researching and I was
like, well, if enough people believe that something is a good store of value, it can be it,
right? Like, I mean, still there's people that hate gold, right? Like a lot of investors hate
gold because they're like, it's just trap money. Like it doesn't build anything. It doesn't grow.
It doesn't compound. But still it's a $21 trillion asset. And so that's how I started buying it.
I was just like, I could be really wrong about this
and a lot of other people could be really right.
So I'm just going to start buying.
And yeah, it went pretty well.
Why do you think, you know, like one of the famous examples
of someone who says, oh, there's no dividend,
there's no cash flow, you know, is Warren Buffett on gold, right?
And he says the same thing about Bitcoin.
I wonder why
even for good investors
there's always a reason to have gold in your portfolio.
Everyone should have gold in their portfolio.
If not for anything
as just an insurance or
hedge.
Why is Warren
Buffett not holding
gold right now?
He has 500.
Is it billions?
I think he just does the math, and he looks at what it does over a 20, 30, 40-year time period.
And maybe this last couple of years is a lot different, but it's the same reason why he didn't do tech stocks for a long time.
Because he thought tech was too up and down, too volatile. And he thought over a 20 year time period, it's not a
stable of cash flows, which those cash flows let him go buy other businesses like that. But then
Apple became his biggest position because he learned that tech can be as stable, like because
our world is based so much on tech now that a company making phones is as
stable as um a company making chocolates or razors or something like that he's not holding apple
stock as his monetary instrument he's holding cash and cash is losing value rapidly so i just
don't see i just don't really see why he's holding direct cash and not gold obviously he doesn't like
bitcoin but at some point he'll hold bitcoin is that but there's just so many things you know why would you hold with it he doesn't want to
mine in stocks at all do we know that because you can so another way to hold gold or have
exposure to gold is by profit stocks at low p ratio yeah then you can then you can still get
the cash flow but when you still get the exposure to gold if gold goes into a crazy ball run you get like
the multiplier but he's still but those stocks are super volatile he's looking
for a cash instrument right that's why yeah he's looking for stuff that
generates cash flow because then he can take that cash and then he has his
genius team to you know deploy that deploy that cash and into the other things.
So for him, it's always how does this give me cash each month?
And and with Bitcoin, maybe his team will come up with the fact of like, hey, maybe we can do some crazy engineering on this.
If we have a big pile of it, we can do DeFi with it and it can provide cash and then we can go buy, you know, the type of companies that, you know, kind of provide all the goods and services to the world.
So that's what I do kind of love about Buffett is that, you know, even though he's not kind of caught up yet, I think that might be one reason why he's retiring.
Right. He's kind of like this, this industry, this new way the world is turning.
I mean, and he said he just feels old, but like this new whole industry, right? He's like 90 now. What is 95?
Oh my God. What is this guy doing, man? I have a lot of respect for the hustle.
It would take him years to understand and probably know how exactly he would turn Bitcoin into cash
on a sustainable basis.
And so, you know, but there's probably people within his organization, like we've said on
this space that are looking into that.
And so, yeah, I think it's just I think that's where DeFi is going to come in huge is, you
know, how do we take Bitcoin that we're just holding?
And because it doesn't have a product, it doesn't have a dividend, it does have the
utility of store value. But sometimes that value is just locked and people don't want things that you
can't turn around and hypothecate into something else. And so like I come from the mortgage
industry and like I can't wait till you just are on your mortgage application and you're just like,
okay, I want to buy this property and I'm also going to put up three Bitcoin with it.
I want to buy this property and I'm also going to put up three Bitcoin with it.
And it makes the collateral way easier, the qualifying easier, the properties on the blockchain too.
And people are going to be able to use Bitcoin to do everything from buying properties or starting up new businesses that provide necessary goods and services. So yeah, I think once that really starts to become easier
for bigger investors,
I don't even want to know what the price is going to go to
because it'll just become extremely useful
once you can do a lot more with it.
Yeah, win Berkshire Bitcoin.
That's going to be a fun announcement, right?
It's not going to be the day he retires. I mean, the day he steps away, the new guys are's going to be a fun announcement. It's going to be the day he retires.
I mean, the day he steps away, the new guys are probably going to be like, you know, we had to arm wrestle him for five years, but he eventually let us take 1%.
You know, they technically have exposure already, by the way.
It's kind of like what Jack was saying about the mining stocks.
Okay, maybe they don't want to hold gold, but they want mining stocks.
I mean, mining stocks are questionable because they're just, they're really volatile and stuff.
But anyways, with like if they are, so they are holding, I'm assuming they hold some S&P 500 and
I'm assuming they hold some Tesla and I'm assuming they hold other companies that have Bitcoin on
their balance sheet. So they may already be holding Bitcoin. Yep. And they hold banks. And I mean,
banks are getting into it through their brokerage services and, you know,
stuff like that. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's,
it's kind of crazy how all that kind of seeps in. And then he,
he runs a report probably someday and he's like, all right,
how much of my cashflow is coming from the companies that do this and this?
And he's like, damn,
like 7% of my cash flow is coming from Bitcoin now.
All right.
You know, this is cool.
I mean, the big day for us will be when, you know, things like when MicroStrategy gets into S&P 500.
Because MicroStrategy is already, so S&P 500, top 500 companies, right?
MicroStrategy is already like top 200, I think, or top 100 maybe.
And so if it goes into, and I think I was looking up the ratio of like how many new shares do companies typically,
because these index funds and all the companies that hold S and P 500, there's
a lot of automation here.
40% of all stocks held in the stock market are done through passive investing.
They're not like people picking stocks.
So that 40% is S and P 500.
It is also people who hold S and P 500, you know, like, uh, Vanguard, I think, or Fidelity.
I forget, you know, they all have stuff like this, but it's like, they're all in one funds or they're, you think, or Fidelity, I forget. They all have stuff like this, but it's like they're
all-in-one funds or they're whatever. It's easy stuff that people could put in their pension fund
that's considered by Vanguard or Fidelity as safe. And so one of those, I forget which one,
someone maybe could look it up, but they have three tiers. They have a conservative,
a medium tier, and a more aggressive one.
And those hold Bitcoin now.
So one of them holds 1% of the portfolio in Bitcoin.
And it's not a Bitcoin fund.
It's an all-in-one.
So it holds money market stuff, bonds, probably some real estate, stocks, whatever.
I don't know.
It holds a lot of stuff, maybe gold.
It's an all-in-one.
It's just like access to a lot of things.
I used to work at Vanguard. They were called the star funds. And yeah, they were great for
investors to just one click and you've got exposure to 10 different asset classes.
Yeah, pretty cool. And so one of the, I forget who it is, but one of the funds holds 1% Bitcoin,
one holds 2% Bitcoin, and one holds 3% Bitcoin.
And so when these are passively investing in Bitcoin,
people don't even know that they now have Bitcoin in their pension funds, right?
And the same thing is happening,
is going to happen once MicroStrategy goes into the S&P 500.
Automatically, I think it's like a 20% or 30% of your shares get bought up just because they, by law or by, you know, regulation are required to,
to have, you know, rebalance. So automatically everyone who holds S&P 500 in the world will be
holding Bitcoin. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty crazy. Sometimes I wish like the bottom, if you,
if, if you're the CEO of one of the bottom 500 in the S&P 500, I think they just get a free ride a
lot of the times. I think that's why some
people like don't hate that kind of like don't like that strategy, but exactly right. The whole
point is get into that index or, you know, get into the NASDAQ 100. I think strategy trades on
the NASDAQ. So it could get both into the NASDAQ 100, which has the QQQs. So tons of tracking
indexes on it. Same thing with the S&P. And then both the S&P and
the NASDAQ 100 then feed into tons of pension funds and stuff like that. So probably unbeknownst
to most people, they're getting a boost from the benefit of Bitcoin. And yeah, so it's just,
it's cool to see how it just slowly trickles in. And then all of a sudden, you know, it just becomes
like gold, right? People are just like, well, I don't even know if I really like it. I don't know if
I'd ever need it, but I got to have like three to 5% of my portfolio in it just because it helps
with my overall returns over 10, 20 years. I mean, in some ways, U.S. bonds and dollars are backed
by gold. Not really like so much, but they are like the U S part of our reserves are
gold. And so that's why people have the faith and trust in the dollar and in, in bonds. And it's
also our military. So in a weird way, we're kind of all, if you're in America or if actually the
whole world's exposed to America. So everyone kind of has like a weird exposure to gold, right? Like
if for example, and I just saw a headline on on this i kind of hope it's not true but
i kind of hope it is but that some scientists just turned lead into gold at a really small scale i
believe and maybe that's it's kind of like it is practically irrelevant though because it was to do
with like um i think it was at the lhc the Hadron Collider, and it was like such a tiny, tiny fraction.
Yeah.
I mean, yes, technically they did turn that into gold,
but like, you know, it's like a fraction of a fraction of a grain of sand.
It was $100 billion, you know.
It took them $100 billion of tech and energy to make, you know,
one-tenth of an ounce of gold.
Not everything that's possible physically is like viable, but maybe in the future.
Yeah, but the point is they did it, and that's pretty crazy.
I mean, it's like nuclear fission or quantum computing or AI.
At first, it's incredibly expensive.
Silicone chips were incredibly expensive, but over time we figured out how to make it cheap.
So there is the possibility,
there's a non-zero chance that eventually we can make gold at scale
to where it becomes a way to mine gold.
Or, you know, we just start harvesting asteroids and things.
Yeah, we can probably get to asteroid mining before materializing gold.
Or we just find deep caches in the ocean, right?
And we know they exist.
In these Mariana Trench and these crazy depths of the ocean,
we know there's huge pockets of gold.
It's just really hard to mine.
But who knows?
Through automation, robotics, whatever, maybe we find ways to mine it easier.
We already are starting, but it's expensive. But anyways, yeah, Bitcoin is the thing that can't do that, whatever. Maybe we find ways to mine it easier. We already are starting, but it's, it's expensive. But, uh, anyways, yeah, Bitcoin is the thing that can't do that though.
You can't, you cannot, you know, make more Bitcoin. It doesn't matter how, uh, much
technology you figure out. Right. Even quantum computing, uh, I don't think, uh, we'll be able
to like make more Bitcoin. Quantum computing will be able to potentially steal your Bitcoin
by reverse engineering your public address to a private address,
but we can just build quantum-resistant stuff.
Actually, I need to get on a call with someone today,
someone that's legendary in the industry,
who wants me to help him with a quantum resistant thing for.
So, yeah, I can't say much, but I mean, people are already building this stuff.
So, but you can't build quantum resistant, you know, you can't stop that for gold.
It's going to happen someday.
And that'll be more of a time for Bitcoin to shine.
We'll all be long gone, though.
You know, we'll be long gone.
There'll be aliens. There'll be all this crazy though. You know, we'll be long gone. There'll be aliens.
There'll be all this crazy stuff.
And I hope my great, great grandchildren.
You think mining asteroids will be gone?
I don't know, man.
I don't think I'll see it.
I mean, it might be like where, you know,
they send a random, you know,
little drone up to it or unmanned thing
and it pulls off like a little bit.
But I mean, where we have whole fleets mining asteroids.
I mean, I know what's going to happen someday um but if i i just take my cues from the back to the future
2 movie um i was promised flying cars by now i was promised a hoverboard like shit like that
just doesn't happen that fast so yeah i'm you know i'm just moving dude i don't know elon brought
elon brought the cost of launching rockets this was years ago
i bet it's even better now but he brought the cost of launching rockets and and moving like
you know weight payloads uh down by like over 90 percent and still scaling so i don't know man
i wouldn't be surprised i would be probably more surprised than not if we didn't have I
think we will have mining of asteroids and the moon in our lifetime actually I
would think we'll probably start having some trials in the next 10 years and
you're probably not even factoring in the exponential curve that can be
supported by AI driven developments like I think you know you mentioned like he
was promised hoverboards and flying cars and stuff
well like we're getting there we're gonna get to that hockey stick moment in the next five years
because ai is advancing so fast and a lot of the like yes ai right now basically just generates
the next token in a string of tokens i mean we have hoverboards and flying cards now
we by the way yeah there are you've on YouTube, right? There's whole companies built
around flying cars now and they're getting pretty slick. Yeah, no, I mean, I've seen them. I even
invested in a SPAC in one five years ago and again, just did it to support them. But yeah,
but you know what I mean, right? I'm talking about the average person goes out, goes into
their garage, turns their car on, levitates, comes out, and you fly away.
I mean, that is just, if anybody thinks that's, you know, soon.
I think even cooler is self-driving cars.
And I gave my Tesla to my parents, but I'm here visiting them.
My mom just had surgery, so I came to be with her while she's recovering.
But so I'm back in L.A., not Puerto Rico right now.
And I was driving,
uh, the Tesla I gave them and using the self-driving and I was like, Holy shit,
they made a long, a lot of progress since I was driving this thing. Uh, they're really moving
fast. I mean, Elon says they're going to launch their robo taxi pilot in, uh, Texas in June,
which is next month. Um, that's insane insane waymo is already doing this and i can't
wait for that because like i mean i think most drivers shouldn't be on the road most drivers
can't drive their cars really well so i'm including me i'm a dangerous driver get me off the road
you get you have a driver's license and you can have a self-driving car because you're not a good driver.
Or then now it'll become a privilege to actually be able to control your car.
But yeah, self-driving would be really cool.
You know, my two-hour snowboard trips to just be able to relax for that two hours and then hit the mountain refreshed.
Hell yeah.
That would be pretty sweet.
Take a nap.
Yeah, cook breakfast. take a nap. Yeah.
Take a nap in the car,
right?
Do some trading,
you know,
true.
Just trade,
just trade the way up and back.
Get a little brekkie.
Yeah.
And cars will be like,
there will be no steering wheel.
It'll be all like,
it'll probably be like an open.
You won't need to face forward.
Cause you're not driving.
So yeah,
seats may like face inward.
So you can just talk to your friends.
There'll be a little coffee table inside of it.
They'll have the robo vans.
It's going to be awesome, man.
I'm so excited for the future.
Just everything.
So much cool shit happening.
Yeah, it's going to be pretty sweet.
All right, guys.
King Dink, you haven't talked much, man.
What's going on?
We're a half hour overtime. We've been here three and a half hours, but what's up, man? How you doing?
I'm good. Yeah, no, I've been just chilling, listening in. I've been working on some LDA stuff.
You sound like your name right now. you smoke a little bit i'm just kidding
king dink because you sound a little tired i'm just kind of like scatterbrained a little bit
this morning no worries man going on good to have you bro uh all right guys uh i think we
can probably call it there and darren man what's going on halfway through the show i realized why
is darren not talking you're one of the smartest people in Darren, man, what's going on? Halfway through the show, I realized, why is Darren not talking?
You're one of the smartest people in DeFi I know.
What's going on, man?
You should have been throwing all kinds of stuff in today.
Give us your quick take on DeFi before we log off.
What's going on, man?
Is it coming back?
Any cool stuff happening?
Any cool stuff happening?
I mean, a lot of it is UX.
I mean, a lot of it is UX.
Again, at the start, I don't think we're going to have a crazy bull run sort of DeFi thing like we had in 2021 just because of those reasons.
But we will see more overall growth, but just nothing that's like 100x massive explosive sort of returns.
I mean, I definitely more more of it will
be institutional led um i mean even even a couple things that kurt said um i pieced them together
i actually looked into lloyd's as well and like even in the uk so a bank in the uk like obviously
you talked about silver and how there's much more paper silver than there is everywhere else.
But a bank in the UK only needs to hold, they don't actually have a minimum.
So if you deposit like 100 billion or something, they don't have like a minimum that they need to hold.
they just need to have like adjusted per risk and so for example Lloyd's we were
They just need to have like adjusted per risk.
talking about them earlier they've got 450 billion in customer deposits they
actually only need to retain five or six percent of that inside the actual bank
they can have the rest of it being loaned out invested working for the
bank so like they've got like 400 and odd billion just rehypothecated just through a
sort of different investment um so if we can wait are you saying voids is rehypothecating gold
no no just the customer deposits oh okay yeah well yeah that's typical with cash and stuff but
they only need to hold like five or five or
six percent of the same in the us the bigger banks have to hold i think like 10 percent in the smaller
banks it's like seven or eight percent or something in the uk they don't actually have a number it
just depends on the risk of the where they're actually depositing that money um so yeah i mean
like if we can get all of that into
d5 then i mean hopefully the yields will remain stable like things like strat x are going to be
the future because you just want to deposit one asset and earn more of that asset um like a lot
of people are obviously scared of standard liquidity provision there's some permanent laws
all of that stuff so if we can alleviate all
that for the end user and just be like okay go deposit this you're going to earn this yield on
it 10 apy twice as much as your usual bank that that's what people will eventually go for
sounds like stratix it was that a show for stratix man well i mean that that's where it
is going like if you if i try to get like i usually just get my sister to do this she's
she's got um some crypto but like i usually have to tell her how to deposit money into coinbase
and then get that into a wallet so she's like that level like she can use something like stride
she just goes okay i'm gonna buy usd so goes, okay, I'm going to buy USDC,
deposit that there,
I'm going to earn yield on it,
that's twice as good as my bank.
If I try to get her to LP on QuickSwap,
I'm going to have to basically just take her phone off her
and then do it for her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
All right,
guys,
it's been great.
Thanks everyone for being here. you can read the comments today there's at least one or two funny ones
you want to read some go ahead no you're best shouting out your own comments
okay let's see confirmed alexi atlas is bald due to pulling his hair while chasing yield in 2021.
He is balding. I think all of us are in some way at our age, I think.
He just went for the shaved head look, you know, just to own it, I guess.
Okay. Justice. Good friend Justice from Quadratic Accelerator, previously Polygon team member.
Justice, good friend, Justice from quadratic accelerator, previously polygon team member.
He says food defy bull run can never be repeated because COVID had everyone starved for stimulation during that time.
Great insight from the Panda.
I don't know the food thing guys, the food, like, you know, sushi swap, burger swap, you know, whatever, all these things, a pancake swap and all the other stuff.
Um, I think that's what you're referencing.
I mean, are, were meme coins not like way worse than that? pancakes up and all the other stuff um i think that's what you're referencing i mean are were
meme coins not like way worse than that and like so i don't know if i agree and and by the way
it's just good overall people had lots of money like i personally just saved a lot of money during
that time because i wasn't allowed to leave the house um like the usa was literally sending
stimmy checks to the entire populace everyone had excess
money during that time because they couldn't i left the house i didn't listen they would pull me over
screw them and i didn't get vaccinated either in general like most places were closed like the
cinemas were closed like any amenities were just closed like truly you can even yeah you couldn't even get
mcdonald's most of the time um so there you had extra money because you weren't wasting it like
takeaways were closed that's probably like 90 of where people spend their money in scotland
um you had everyone had more money than normal so they had it wasn't just simi checks it was
unemployment so i knew people who were getting more from unemployment than they would get from their regular job.
I mean, what kind of incentive is that?
Total.
I'm not going to use the R word.
Total, totally retardio.
I'll go there.
Yeah, it was such a weird thing.
And yeah, but okay.
Yeah. Going back to what you said earlier, you said you don't think we'll see that kind of liquidity or whatever. yeah, it was such a weird thing. And yeah, but okay, yeah.
Going back to what you said earlier,
you said you don't think we'll see
that kind of liquidity or whatever.
Again, I disagree.
I mean-
No, I think we'll see that liquidity.
I don't think we'll see those APYs
and the crazy sort of yield farming nonsense
that like there's a million percent APY here
on this token here.
I think it will be more stable,
but gradual growth. So there'll be more
overall growth. But as Kurt said
again, just after me,
the amount of liquidity that it's going to
take to move a lot of the assets
now, like a 10x, 100x,
is just probably
too much
to do that within six
months or a little go-run or something like that.
I think you're probably right but i it would not surprise me if we if this just gets bonkers and like you
don't like okay imagine this imagine you know multiple countries start adopting bitcoin imagine
bitcoin goes to 500k um i mean do we not think so i mean in a situation like that i think we could start seeing
thousand xers again by the way quick swap did 16 or 2000x uh polygon did 350x um uh persistence
another company we incubated did uh like 75x um a lot of most of the stuff we incubated did crazy x's uh it was a
wild time um yeah i mean we'll definitely get those i just don't think it'll be like the the
liquidity was much more concentrated because of the lack of things like pump fun as well so that
there was less things to ape into which meant most of them got like the the
mind sure that they deserved whereas just now like you you can either buy this serious project
over here or you can go buy fart coin and most people with this sorry i don't know why i laugh
why do i still laugh when i hear fart coin they really did it right with that one yeah but like again like even if i told my assistant i'm like i can teach her about chain
link and like how it works uh or i can tell her that fart coin exists and there's a good chance
she's gonna go for fart coin nice you've trained you've taught her well i suppose
yeah i mean she just copy trades me
and that's what you're buying you're buying fart coin darren
no i don't actually hold any fart king you've done pretty good you've done some crazy trades
man there was that ai thing before ai kicked off you bought an ai thing and i don't know could i
say what you did with the money publicly
i don't think you'll care yeah you you bought some a decent amount of supply of some early early ai
coin and it went up so much you paid off your house and that's that i think that was around
the time you came to work for quicksop full-time you're like all right i'm good now i can take the
risk of crypto going down i paid my house off i'm
coming full-time at quick swap yeah i mean it was probably a story that i was trying to get you to
come full-time for like a solid year or more before that yeah i mean it's probably a story that only i
could embody because it was in like 2022 like late 2022 and everyone like everything was dead like
no one was really
doing anything and um there was like a bot in a telegram group that people were using to generate
hyper realistic penises um and yeah that would be something that you would have latched on to very
early and then like like i was i actually suggested I was like you should like tokenize this make it like an AI thing and then like they they assembled a
team in front of me it was funny like they had a dev oh it was your idea yeah
yeah so and then the pre-sale in that group so I just bought some of the
pre-sales I got like 1% of the supply like I think it was like 600 bucks and
then like it done like a 1500x or something within three
months and then 600 bucks yeah oh those were good times yeah now people now people are struggling
I mean I just had a call with uh one of the biggest investors in the industry yesterday
and man you know we were sharing stories about investors right now and kind of inside info we know about the biggest investors and, you know, do they have
any dry powder? What's their liquidity look like right now? And I'm not going to name them here
publicly, but I'm going to tell you guys the biggest names, the biggest funds in crypto are
having, I don't want to call them liquidity problems, but they are basically out of money
right now. Um, because all of us LDA, we deployed millions into a lot of projects and, um, and we
thought we would have TGEs on these by now. We thought we'd have more investment in them for
runway. Um, everybody thought there would be, you know, there's been no TGEs for a while. We've
told all the projects that we're, we're under our portfolio companies. We've told them all
don't TGE right now. It's, it's too dangerous. Now we're going to break that. We're going to,
we're going to TGE something very soon. That's what we're announcing at Litecoin Summit.
But, um, that's only because that thing is just such a big thing that I think it can break the trend and maybe even kick off, uh,
like, uh, like a token launching trend. Uh, cause we have another project, uh, Bitcoin OS,
uh, that we want to launch, um, that might either follow that launch or go first. And they've got a
ton of hype. And so, um, and support from Cardano and now going to be Litecoin with this other thing
we're building. I'm glad Aztec's not here. He'd be yelling at me for kind of teasing some stuff. But
anyways, I think we could break the trend. But the point is, all these funds, they're tapped
out, guys. If you're raising and you're wondering why you're not getting checks,
even though you're a good project, because I'm seeing some incredible projects. I know there's a new stable coin, for example, uh, that they it's the, um, old founder, I think it's CEO of tether.
And he's building a new stable coin that has like, uh, interest rate yield stuff built into it.
And he was only able to raise 3 million at 30 mil Val. So evaluation. So that's pretty wild.
Um, and, and he didn't raise it.
It didn't sell out right away.
It took a little time for him to raise it.
So this is what we're seeing around the industry right now.
It is dry as like, I'm not going to use a vulgar analogy.
It's very dry.
It's a very dry thing.
It's a dry, it's a very dry thing.
By the way, guys, I have to go right now.
So I just wanted to say thank you for hosting.
We'll be probably joining you guys in the future next week or whatever.
I love these spaces.
I really enjoyed throwback to like three, four weeks ago when we did the UFO space.
That was like.
That was fun.
Yeah.
All right, guys.
Have a good evening.
Bye.
Cheers, man.
Good to see you, Jack.
Jack is also a beast in the space.
Really, really awesome.
Okay. Yeah.
The point is, don't be sad if you're not able to raise right now.
It's really hard, guys.
I think the liquidity will unlock soon.
It's not just a crypto thing either.
This is also fintech.
There's not a lot of investment happening.
There's starting to be some merger acquisition talk in fintech,
mostly just because, what is it, Lena Khan is out and she was blocking a lot of M&A stuff.
But yeah, investment is dry around the world because interest rates are high. There's been
a lot of quantitative tightening happening. It's just a macro thing. And Trump just is getting
this big, beautiful bill, which is doing the opposite of what he said it would do, by the way.
He said they were going to cut spending.
They are ramping up spending again.
It just goes to show if anyone was going to cut spending, it was like Elon and Trump, maybe.
But if they're not going to cut spending and they're just going to ramp it up overall.
And there's just like even with all that political will and having House and Senate and Supreme Court, et cetera,
having Elon and Doge, richest man in the world,
if they can't cut spending with that,
you know, putting together all that,
we are never going to cut spending
and we are just going to keep printing.
And I think that's bad for America
and I think it's bad for the world,
but I think it's good for crypto
and good for investable assets. It's bad for the little guy, but it's going to happen. Money printer is going to turn
on. They're going to probably start lowering rates. They're going to, and basically what
Trump's doing is because Jerome Powell won't lower rates. Trump is just like, okay, we're just going
to spend money. And it's another way to quantitatively ease indirectly. They have all
kinds of ways now with repo markets and all these things of easing,
purchasing assets off the open market. There's all kinds of ways you could do quantitative easing or
get the equivalent of lowering rates without actually lowering rates. So that's what they're
going to do, it seems like. And that's going to be rocket fuel for our industry. So I think
liquidity is going to start unlocking. I think retail will come in once they see some good TGEs
and then the investors will start writing checks again. The main problem will come in once they see some good TGEs and then the investors will
start writing checks again. The main problem with the investors is they wrote all these checks
thinking they were going to have TGs and all their money's tied up in safes and safes now,
which are basically contracts for equity or tokens. And they haven't had any liquidity events,
meaning they haven't been able to get exits. Investors want to invest.
And then in our industry, they have a pretty quick turnaround. They want to get a return within like a year or less, sometimes longer, but they want at least like, you know, part of
their money back so they could redeploy into other projects, but there has been no liquidity events.
So everyone's dry, but it'll unlock soon. Actually, I think. So, all right, guys, that's it for me.
All right, anyone else have anything?
Oh, were we going to read any comments?
Let's see.
We'll go quick, guys.
I just want to respect the audience who took the time to comment.
ApeBond says, DeFi Summer 2025 heating up, and we're back, baby.
Caruso says,
we're back and running.
Glad I'm here.
Goose says,
join the Polygon Snaps community.
What's that?
Is that like Metamask Snaps?
What is that?
Goose said that.
I'll have to look into that.
Does anyone know what that is, Darren?
BossFam says,
good afternoon, Legends.
Daniel says, guess we're back i'm in callisto says gm
um block box ai trading assistant is shilling um you could check out whatever their shillings
some ai agent stuff volt is uh in the audience good to see you bolt we like you guys uh posting
gifs please tell me about yf. I coin. I don't know.
Volt in the audience again.
Dami says GM legends.
EA C says,
never stop pushing positivity.
Polygon purple aliens.
Nice.
I like that.
Queen girl says,
GM guys going to be here.
hold says cool.
is cool.
still around.
I haven't heard about cool in a long time.
Very righteous,
says, uh, yield Very Righteous says,
Yield Lowell.
Chain Pilot says,
Please let's connect.
Engage with this chat, please, and I'll follow you.
I don't know who that is,
but if anyone wants to engage with him, he'll follow you.
Crypto Fan says,
So why is USDC APR at the level of Ethereum at $1,400?
I don't know what that means.
I don't know what that means.
Nimbus says,
Nimbus says, Ada App, Ada PPcom is here.
Bullish on you, Ada.
I don't know what that means.
Lo-Fi Gain says, hello, everyone.
Nice to see you all.
At Attention Token, another shill.
Got a lot of shills here today, guys.
Vinny says, BTC going to the moon.
DeFi going to the moon.
I agree.
I think Bitcoin's going to take off pretty hard here soon.
Okay, enough comments.
Shouting out audience members real quick.
Thanks for coming, Kat Fu.
Alista, Marilda.
Zen requested.
I'm going to let you up.
I don't know who you are.
If you have something to say quickly, you could say something.
Anna J in the audience.
KBot, good to see you.
KBot, always good to see you. Boss Fam from Volt in the audience. K-Bot, good to see you. K-Bot, always good to see you.
Boss Fam from Volt in the audience.
Victor Browns in the audience.
Panda, who's on the QuickSop account, in the audience.
HHMC, Toppy Eden, Dr. Ash,
Mightiest Prophet of the Lord, David Owen,
something, something, it's too long, I can't see it.
Ethanos plays.
Oh, that's funny it's like
thanos but eth um and he's purple so i'm guessing it's some polygon thing too eac
khalid trader nerd head and nerdette club uh satuku in the audience. Zoo, Inspirati Loose, Optimus5, Cyberspace OG, which is a dog smoking a joint.
CryptoFan, BuyBTCCoin.com.
I've been seeing you in the audience, I think, lately.
Okay, guys, that's enough.
It was a great one.
Had a good time.
Have a good weekend, guys.
I hope you all had a good Bitcoin pizza day. It
was kind of a legendary one since Bitcoin hit all-time highs the same day. And yeah,
see you guys soon. Zen, did you have something to say real quick? You got like 10 seconds.
Because I keep lying and saying we're leaving.
Okay, nope, he's just giving hearts.
All right, Zen, I gave you a follow.
I don't know who you are, but I gave you a follow for shooting your shot.
All right, love you guys.
Cheers.
Bye-bye.
