We started right at the same time morning purple people are we doing another song or are we jumping right into it?
Getting speakers up we could probably do one more song
Sounds good. I'm just pinning things to the jumbotron above
One of our one of our intro songs
We need the polygon pump it up song
Does anyone have that handy? I'll try to find it. Well, we'll play the other the other intro song the I can get it to
And what I send it to tell that that last song I just played it was it was a cool song
But it was a little slow. We need to pump it up
And I want to welcome everyone today.
Thank you to QuickSwap, Polygon for all the great work that happens in the background.
So I think we could probably just kick this off, start introducing everyone.
So just like always, I go from left to right.
Let's do like a 20-second introduction and then we can jump into some of the questions that we have for today.
Thanks for having me back, guys.
I'm Brian, one of the co-founders of Webasi.
We are a safety layer for your wallet.
Think of us as the Norton for your crypto.
If you guys even remember that, if you're old enough.
But, yeah, we just figured there isn't like a central brand that keeps people safe while doing the things they do every day.
We're Polygon compatible, of course.
We have huge fans of the ecosystem and big supporters of QuickSwap and Rok and the rest of the team.
We'd love to have you here and we'd love to hear that you're a supporter and that you work with Polygon.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Tina.
Thank you for having me again.
I'm Tina, founder of Boomerang.
Boomerang is a protocol that enables you to reach out to any wallet that you like in the space through programmable tokens.
So you get to completely customize it and then reach out to whoever you like by just having the wallet address.
So I'm excited for this ETF talk, you guys.
And Boomerang is definitely a very interesting application and there's many different utilities.
So go ahead and click on her profile and check that out.
We also have Zara here today.
Let's go ahead and welcome back Zara.
Thank you for having me back.
I'm Zara, CEO and co-founder of Nyuki.
Nyuki is a decentralized matrix platform with multiple components of metaverse marketplace, gaming, gene, digital wardrobe, etc.
And it's focusing around democratizing the world of creativity and design and a lot around creator's economy.
I'm also founder of the Studio 651, which is a Vectry venture building studio based in Sweden.
It's great to have you here.
And let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Michael.
Thank you very much for having me again.
Best day of the week, honestly.
I'm Michael, former VP of Engineering, the operator right now.
I'm representing AutoTrading.vip.
We are automating crypto investments for trend trading for a long time.
And myself, I'm an engineer and I read a lot of news as well.
And so I have my opinions on topics, especially other topics that you have on the title today.
So I'm looking forward to add some fire, some alpha, and give maybe some trading signals if anybody needs some, especially on polygon.
So, yeah, looking forward.
Great to have you here, Michael.
Do your trade signals, do they factor in macro, or is it all the TA?
I tried, but it's better if you just ignore it.
So I'm more the technical analyst guy and put that into code and no emotions, you know?
So it works quite well in this way.
We always say we're going to dig into that more and that we never do, Michael.
So at some point, it would have to be cool to talk about the trading signals.
I think I'll motivate you.
50x on polygon with only 29% drawdown.
50x, okay, since whenever it started.
So no manual trading, just automation.
I think 50x is quite good for that.
So, yeah, if that motivates you to talk about it, hopefully.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Tyler.
Thanks so much for having me.
This is my first time on the show.
Really looking forward to it.
So I'm the founder, one of the founders of RWA World.
We are a tokenization and RWA intelligence platform and newsletter bringing transparency
and clarity to RWAs, which have quickly become my favorite subject in crypto.
On our website, rwa.world, we've indexed over 330 projects and fun fact of our database.
About 14% of them are building on Polygon.
I suspect that number is going to only increase.
Big fans of what Polygon is doing and just super stoked to be here, guys.
Oh, it sounds like a really cool platform.
If you have any threads or anything like that that goes along with whatever we're talking
about today, macro or whatever, that'd be awesome to have pinned up above.
And then people can also check out what you're doing.
Any one that has a thread or something they've recently posted that goes along with today,
And if you just want to put something about your project as well, that works as well.
By the way, I don't know if you saw me.
I was trying to coordinate my clap emojis to the music that was pumping at the beginning.
We were both pumping up the beat.
I was like clap, clap, boom, boom.
I put in the chat the gif of that cat that's bouncing his head.
Hey, by the way, guys, help us with a retweet, please.
Everyone in the audience, all the speakers, get this out to your audiences.
Share it in your communities.
Share it with your families.
And let's get the word out that the greatest Twitter space is on the planet is live now.
I mean, you're not exaggerating, dude.
I mean, we were voted by, I think, like at least four publications, the best crypto podcast of 2023.
So we've got to keep it up.
Let's go ahead and pass it on over to Tasty Crypto.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
And thank you very much for having us here on the space, our first time joining as well.
And if you're not familiar, we're a crypto arm of the retail brokerage, Tasty Trade.
We have a financial network called Tasty Live as well.
So we come from the retail trading side of things.
From a product perspective, we're building a self-custody wallet to provide access to a lot of what we think is really interesting in terms of trading
opportunities, more kind of speculative in DeFi.
And we're launching on Polygon within the next couple of weeks.
We're going through the final kind of testing stages now.
And we'll have Polygon as a third network with our wallet in addition to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Again, anything, any kind of launch threads or anything like that, it'd be great to see those on the Jumbotron.
Even for people that come to listen to this space later on, you know, they look through the Jumbotron to find the posts that they weren't able to capture
So, yeah, please add anything to the top there that's relevant.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Wooly.
Thank you so much for having us.
So we are Wooly, the mammoth of Matic.
And after being, you know, locked in the permafrost for millennia, we finally been released and we recently launched on Matic about two weeks ago.
We are a meme project and just really excited to be here today.
Thank you so much for having us.
It's great to have you here, Wooly.
I think it was in the All Roads into Polygon builders chat.
There was like there was some kind of like preserved Wooly in the ice recently.
And then, you know, I hear I don't know if this is true, but I hear some speculation about, I guess, acquiring DNA from from preserved.
Like Wooly mammoths and they're trying to like recreate Wooly mammoths.
So there was a very recent article that came out on Twitter.
It was actually in twenty twenty two.
But the post just came out the other day.
And like I said, it had like went viral over 15 million views.
But yes, there was a baby Wooly mammoth that was recently found that was literally encased in ice.
And, you know, speculative as far as if they're looking to clone or not.
But long story short, the mammoths are real.
We are here and we are now on Poly.
And Wooly is looking to find his way home to his long lost sibling, Ellie.
We are the older brother.
And once again, I was really excited to be on Poly and Matic and just, you know, have fun and bring memes to Polygon.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Kevin.
Kevin Corstor find a deep eye growth for API three.
For those who don't know, we're a decentralized Oracle network.
We're live on 16 different chains.
Polygon POS and ZKVM are two of our absolute favorites.
About a year ago, we pioneered a concept called the OEV, Oracle Extractable Value.
And we just released some details on that this week.
Basically what OEV is, is it's a subset of MEV that is able to be recaptured by Oracles and then delivered back to the apps from which the opportunities arose.
We just announced that we're going to be hosting our auctions to recapture this OEV on our OEV network, which is a Polygon CDK.
So a lot of good energy over here with you guys and glad to be here.
Sounds really interesting.
I haven't had time to dive into that.
I saw the OEV post and, you know, API three and all that.
But I guess in a nutshell, like what is the main application there for like dApps?
Like what are they using this for?
So basically like Aave is a good example.
So if there's a liquidation on Aave, there's an incentive paid out to perform that liquidation.
And right now, block producers are hosting those auctions and searchers are bidding up to 99% of whatever that liquidation incentive is to win the right to perform that liquidation and make 1% or whatever it is.
Basically what API three can do is we can host those auctions at the Oracle level.
And so searchers pay us to win the right to perform those liquidations.
And then we return those proceeds to the DAP.
So there's also other kinds of MEV that exist, front running, back running, arbitrage.
But liquidations are probably the biggest as far as what we'll be tackling here.
And yeah, I think just in January alone, Aave lost over $4 million of MEV was extracted from Aave.
And it's hundreds of millions of dollars of value over the last couple of years.
And this is just going to random third parties and is being extracted from dApps users or LPs.
And this is a huge thing that we're tapping into and want to give back to the dApps from which it came.
So it's been hard to work with this for a pretty long time.
And yeah, just released a little bit earlier this week and couldn't be more excited to release more and maybe keep coming on here and show you guys how it goes.
Well, that's definitely important and that can save people a lot of money there.
So yeah, welcome and thank you for the explanation.
I think it looks like the panel is switching around a bit.
We think someone dropped off recently and it looks like Polygon is reconnecting.
Darren, I'm not sure if you want to let them know they dropped off.
And I think we have crypto rain.
Hey, yeah, what's up, everyone?
Yeah, good morning, everyone.
My background prior to crypto was investing for 20 years.
When I found crypto, I saw a thing with a relatively short cycle with massive volatility in the technology that is absolutely going to change the Internet and had my full and undivided attention for the last seven years.
Really excited about Polygon.
You know, I was an investor in Polygon back when they were matic.
It's done incredible things.
And one of my biggest favorite narratives is blockchain gaming and Polygon has positioned itself exceptionally well to do well as blockchain gaming takes off.
So most of my focus is crypto and this technology is the best chance for massive gains if done right.
And unfortunately, most people don't do it right.
But if done right to change your finances in what is normally a short period, about four to eight years.
And normally other investment vehicles like real estate and stuff, that's more of a 15 to 45 year journey and crypto can do it much quicker.
It seems slower than everyone wants because we all want to go to ten million dollars in six months.
It doesn't happen that way, but it can over five to eight years.
Well, looks like we'll be picking your brain here today with all this macro kind of conversation and news things that are coming up.
So, yeah, welcome aboard and welcome to everyone else that's in the audience.
We have a bunch of great people here in the audience that I know very well.
There's Patrick and the Oki.
You got the Panda Doodleverse and Doge Ching, Crypto Vixen and Ethos and on and on and on.
There's so many great names here.
A bunch of great friends, Manny B Investing.
So shout out to all of you there.
And let's go ahead and kick this off.
I think we're ready, Rock.
You want to dive into these questions?
Yeah, I know we have a lot of requests, guys.
So we'll be bringing people up throughout the show.
If you're waiting to come up and speak, yeah, we'll bring people up as time goes on.
We'll drop some people, bring some people up.
And, yeah, we've actually got a few very, very large and very smart speakers who know a lot about this subject coming in a bit, too.
So we've got a few special guests that will be popping in.
But, yeah, let's get started, guys.
So just some quick housekeeping.
If you're new to the show, we just have everyone kind of jump in as you see fit.
You don't have to raise your hand.
Just go ahead and answer the question or jump in.
We just like a really easy-flowing kind of conversation.
You can agree or disagree.
We like the crypto banter.
So let's go ahead and jump into this.
I think the first question here, let's go ahead and start off with Bitcoin ETFs.
The reason why is because we covered Bitcoin ETFs way back when they went live.
But I think we have a different perspective now that they've been trading for a little bit.
And I'd like to kind of pick your guys' brain to see how you guys feel about them now.
So how do you foresee the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs impacting the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies?
And you can kind of take this different ways, either from a speculative price kind of standpoint
or even just more general like, do you think this brings more legitimacy, et cetera, et cetera?
Michael, you already have your hand up, bro.
Yes, because everyone will jump in.
Otherwise, everyone is like, I want to say something.
Listen, I think to keep it kind of shortish, the ETF is mega bullish.
I mean, I'm not telling you something new, but let me tell you why.
Because short term, there is selling going on and all these things.
But it's not selling because Bitcoin is bad or anything.
It's just because of GBTC and this stuff.
But there is no real negative news.
If you look at the numbers, you see that the inflows are actually positive.
Meanwhile, you see that GBTC sales have slowed down.
It doesn't mean that they will not sell anything.
But it drastically slowed down.
I have a graphic in front of me.
I might actually pin it up top later on.
And what you see is basically advertising now happening for the Bitcoin ETFs.
Now, you can advertise now finally on freaking Google ads for Bitcoin ETFs, which was actually banned
because when it tried to put such words into your copy, they would not allow you to save that ad.
So what is happening now is smart people that manage funds and they have clients,
they now suggest their customers to have a little bit of allocation into Bitcoin ETFs,
They're running around with such numbers.
Some people like Cathie Wood says you have to have what did you say yesterday?
I believe she said something about 15 percent, something like that.
So maybe that's too much for most people.
But with all of that, very bold of her.
I like that she's not scared to say it because we all like even myself,
I've caught myself telling like affluent investors that I know that are not in the crypto space,
you know, hold at least one to two percent of your portfolio in it.
And for me, that's my way of like trying to get them as a gateway drug to just try it.
But I like that she's she's got Cathie Wood's got some balls, some balls.
And so you're somewhere in between, right?
OK, honestly, like who would put less than one percent in Bitcoin?
So take that multiply numbers and it's super bullish.
Of course, short term, people lose money because they they go with the narrative.
And then, you know, as they ask you before, do you look at news?
No, I don't care about news because news are wrecking people.
You always come late when you go with the news unless you have some insider information.
So we had sell off when the ETF started because you could finally sell.
Nobody talked about that shit before. OK.
You're not going to know that anyway.
So I think if there is no black swan or some kind of mega negative event or, you know,
recession or whatever, then then Bitcoin should actually go up because of that.
And quick thing about recession, by the way, the narrative is and now not because crypto
bros are saying it, but because Larry Fink is saying it's that Bitcoin is digital gold.
If the narrative sticks and Bitcoin is digital gold, you also go up because that's what
So even if recession comes, you're expecting Bitcoin to go down.
Yeah, I'd like to speak on this if it's all right.
The Bitcoin ETF was one of the biggest foundational earthquakes that just happened.
And oftentimes as human beings, we overestimate what will happen in the short term and massively
underestimate what will happen over the long term, especially with the grayscale selling
that has been used to get people scared.
But the big smart players are buying massively.
They just don't tell you they're buying till later.
And if you look at the amount of Bitcoin being picked up by these ETFs, it is crazy.
And we're going to run into a supply crunch where there's not enough supply.
In fact, we're already hitting some of that because a lot of the people that we're selling
from grayscale have sold and there might be a little bit more selling, but we're going
to see massive pickups and the selling is going to stop in grayscale.
And I expect that we're going to have a bigger bull run, maybe December this year.
But with what I'm seeing that might accelerate, and I hope it doesn't accelerate, I would
love it to be December or later because we're still at a point that even though things have
gone up a little bit, everything is massively on sale.
And I think about the space as an investor and I like buying cheap.
I don't like buying high, hoping it goes higher.
And all the really big players are right now buying cheap and they know this is cheap.
They're just not saying it.
Jamie Dimon is saying the stuff he's saying.
Because he doesn't want to let on that him and his friends are picking up more Bitcoin
They'll later sing its praises as it goes high because then it will be selling point
And so the smart investors are picking up at these prices because they know what the
Gold doesn't truly go up in value.
It's relatively the same amount of gold that was used to buy a nice suit 2,000 years ago
So it doesn't really go up in value.
But then when they did a gold ETF, it went down for a while.
It went up leading up to it.
When it was actually approved for 10 months, it went down and sideways.
What's interesting is as gold's price goes up, more people mine it so the supply increases.
And so if gold 3xed, what Bitcoin is going to do is going to be crazy.
And Bitcoin is a driver for awareness.
What happens is people just kind of sit on the sidelines.
They don't think about crypto till all of a sudden Bitcoin hits prices that they never
They then get into research like what the hell?
Why is this not going up so much?
It shouldn't go up so much.
And then they start realizing, oh my gosh, there is this revolution going on with the
internet that I was completely unaware of.
I thought it was about whether Bitcoin would replace the US dollar.
I didn't realize these other things were happening.
First they buy in Bitcoin as a gateway drug.
And then they actually throw everything into crypto.
I'm talking about mostly Main Street.
Not just 1%, but sometimes 20%, 30%, 50%, 80% of all their assets into crypto.
And it causes a massive wave that happens every four years.
Now this one may even be bigger because of the ETFs and what that is going to cause
because for the first time we will have mass institutional adoption.
And it's starting, but I imagine institutions are going to have some FOMO too.
That some of them at first are going to put 1% exposure in.
But as it goes up, their investors are going to demand 5% exposure, maybe even 10% exposure.
And it could cause Bitcoin to hit prices that break the pattern that it's been trading in.
Because it should go anywhere from 90 to 180 or 200,000.
We might just have a super cycle because the convergence of a few different things.
Blockchain gaming, the Bitcoin ETF approvals, and the normal market that we were going to have already.
Plus the money printing that's going to happen this year.
Not just in the US, but in China and Europe.
You didn't even mention the Bitcoin halving.
Bitcoin halving and all that.
Well, yeah, the Bitcoin halving does tie into the four year cycle.
So I'm especially interested in the way Fink is talking about this, Larry Fink.
And you mentioned of the JPM guys and the TradFi folks.
They'll publicly praise this asset class as the point in which they're selling it.
So their activity doesn't surprise me.
But it's also cool to see how they'll turn their tune around like Larry Fink has done with the Bitcoin ETF.
And one thing I found really fascinating about his comments on CNBC was how he was talking about how this Bitcoin ETF is just the beginning.
And if we could take a step back and think about what the ETF did to innovate financial markets, it's pretty compelling because mutual funds were previously the only other vehicle you would choose if you wanted a diversified asset that would trade with one share.
But the challenge with them is that they don't have this intraday liquidity.
And so ETFs came along and essentially democratized access to investments in a way that previously hadn't been done.
And Larry Fink, when he was in that interview, he said, let me be clear.
I think ETFs are just the first step of the technological revolution of financial markets.
And so he was talking about how ETFs have transformed every asset class.
You know, like you want to get gold exposure, you get the ETF like you had just mentioned.
But then he's like, to me, this is just the beginning to the tokenization of every financial asset.
And that's one thing that we're really focused on at RWA World is why are people so excited about tokenization?
And for Larry Fink, the words he used were that tokenization can eliminate all corruption.
People are spooked by the compliance aspect.
I posted it in the chat here.
I don't know if somebody can put it on the jumbotron, but his exact quote was insane.
Like I'm going to read it to you word for word because it was so massively bullish.
And it got a couple of headlines, but I don't know if people are talking better enough.
So in talking about the Bitcoin ETF, he's like, these are just stepping stones towards tokenization.
And I really do believe this is where we're going to be going.
If you had a tokenized security and you have tokenized identity, the moment you buy or sell an instrument, it's known.
It's on a general ledger that is all created together.
You want to talk about issues around money laundering and all that.
And here's the best part of his quote.
He says, this eliminates all corruption by having a tokenized system.
And so we know that BlackRock, JP Morgan and all these guys are doing these tokenization, private blockchain experiments.
You know, they've been doing them on different chains and things.
Onyx is one of them they're talking about.
This is what they're talking about.
It's the ability to deterministically understand if the buyer or seller is in compliance with that particular token using whatever particular ledger and standard they have.
And so there's a ton of fascinating investment going on behind the scenes while people like Jamie Dimon are saying, hey, Satoshi is going to come and make all the Bitcoin disappear.
Well, meanwhile, they're doing their their tokenization innovation lab.
Right. So it's important to I love what the last speaker of crypto reign had mentioned, like, look at how they're talking, but also understand their actions and see what they're doing behind the scene, because not only just is this bullish on Bitcoin.
This is bullish on the concept of tokenization itself.
And of course, Polygon will be a massive beneficiary of that.
Did you are you saying that Jamie Dimon were you saying Jamie Dimon was talking negative, but Larry Fink was being positive?
Are you saying, oh, yeah, sorry, Jamie Dimon was being negative.
But his company is his company.
Yeah. Let me make it. I'll make it clear because I wasn't very clear on that.
So Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO, super bullish on Bitcoin.
He's come around to the concept of digital gold like crypto reign had mentioned.
And BlackRock is involved in some of these tokenization initiatives.
Now, Jamie Dimon is a little bit of an interesting case.
He's a little bit different.
He publicly is, you know, against Bitcoin and recently had some quotes where he was just talking to CNBC and saying, oh, yeah, like, I don't believe that he said Bitcoin no value.
Yeah. He's very good at shitting on it and then doing everything on the back end to gain from it.
Bingo. And that was the point I was making.
So JPM and BlackRock both might have different language, but behind the scenes, they're both working together on the project onyx tokenization platform.
Wait, they're working together on this onyx thing?
Yeah. JPM has the platform onyx.
And then one of their clients is BlackRock. And it's not. It's not.
It's a JPM and BlackRock working together on a private ledger.
I'll see if I can find a I'll see if I can find a tweet for you on that.
It's on their website, too, if you look it up to the ledger, though.
What does that mean exactly how private?
Well, like everybody has to be KYC to get onto it.
Right. So they're not building on Ethereum.
They're not building on Avalanche.
They're not building on Polygon.
They're building in their own closed loop environment.
And they're making a ton of hires in this space.
Like if you Google Project Onyx, O N Y X and JPM, you'll find a bunch of really interesting stuff.
My LinkedIn is blowing up with people who are like, oh, I'm joining Project Onyx and I'm working on a private private ledger tokenization.
And it's really cool. Like we're all fans of tokenization.
But it's totally the case that the Bitcoin ETF, I think, was the Trojan horse of tokenization.
I'm not a fan of these permissions networks, but I suppose it's still a positive in some ways.
They're using it to settle transactions instantly rather than the two, the two plus one.
Yeah. T plus two or T plus two.
So I mean, they certainly do the T plus two because of the law.
But I think doing it instantly internally is a good experiment.
They call it a tokenized collateral network.
So I think there's there's a piece to that, too.
And you're right. It's not it's it's private.
And it's it's not exactly something that we can all benefit from.
But my thinking is like they can't ignore the public liquidity of public blockchains forever.
Right. So I feel like at some point there's going to be some bridging happening.
They'll have a portion of it go on to the public blockchains. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like you have a private Internet and then the public Internet.
I think I just want something that probably I'm the most excited, by the way, guys, for the institutions to allocate retirement funds for one case, et cetera, et cetera, to this.
And I think it might create more stability in in some of the less less volatile moving or trading because people are just holding onto this for like hopefully decades because of that dynamic.
So I'm waiting to see the shoe come down on people approving those decisions.
I don't think they ETF gets approved and then instantly endowments are like, let's buy.
You know, it'll it'll take some time.
But I want to see what that looks like.
I'm going to see real quick. Zara, say something.
And tell us if you can hear her.
I just wanted something here that can't hear her.
Yeah. She was speaking and you started speaking over.
But let's so pause for a second.
We'll let Zara say something and then we'll come back to you.
If you want, you know, why don't you just drop down and come back?
It's probably exactly that's the way to reset it.
She has had her hand up for a while as well.
Everybody's putting their hands up.
But you got to throw your shoulder in.
You got to throw your shoulder into the crowd.
Just push some push the next guy out of the way to throw your shoulder.
Yeah, it literally feels like one of those raves are going to exactly
at least nobody's sweating.
It's a good kind of chilly here this morning.
But anyways, I just wanted to, you know, prevent my thoughts on the ETF.
Zara was trying to speak now.
No, I mean, I have a lot of points now.
So that's all great speakers giving the comments on the ETF.
I think I definitely think the Bitcoin ETF is going to accelerate
institutional adoption of the cryptocurrency in general.
And, you know, just because I think it will eventually lead to a greater
liquidity and more legitimacy for crypto for the traditional investors,
basically. But then as a side note, some of you already know in the room,
I have a PhD in blockchain adoption and I have done a quite long research in
adoption of blockchain technology.
And the funny thing is that, you know, of about 400 plus companies that were
part of my research as one of my last basically
foundings that I added when it came to adoption of blockchain was that majority
of these companies thought and that goes back to 2021, 2022, that, you know,
these if there would one day be a crypto bounded investment vehicle
introduced within the boundaries of regulated markets, the institutions
would come in and that would really push the mass adoption.
And that's exactly what we see with ETF, Bitcoin ETFs, right?
So in that sense, I think that's a great although, although, you know,
if you go back to those of us who are probably in the space for a long time,
I've been in crypto space since 2012. And at the beginning, you know,
for the first few few years in this space, I don't know if you were all like me.
We were like, oh, no governments to get rid of them.
We want your decentralization, no house of control, right?
We were all like a pro pro that and then eventually we learned that, oh, well,
you know, we need to we need to get along and we need to work together.
And, you know, that that will eventually happen.
And then we have to have progressive decentralization.
So in that sense, I want to relate that to private and public chains and
and have probably a different opinion of from from many of the blockchain experts.
I'm more of a technical person. I'm a blockchain solution architect.
My experts have been building a lot of blockchain solutions, both enterprise and
public, a lot in gaming on permissionless chains,
but also a lot of enterprise solutions in health care, supply chain and, you know,
tokenization of solar energy, et cetera. And I think I don't see any problem with
actually private chains. And I think the core concept of blockchain is bringing,
you know, transparency and, you know, minimize corruption and, you know,
having decentralized to be a connection. And that can be of any size of community
that can be to public, but also also within an institution to use it internally.
That's also amazing. Right. For your own purposes, that's also amazing.
That's like how, for example, UNICEF is using private ledgers for
democratizing their own financial system internally.
So for building hybrid systems, that's something, for example,
I did with the government of Mexico a few years ago,
building a hybrid system for health care and telemedicine to provide access to
most remote rural areas for users.
But then also it had to be a hybrid because it was dealing,
we were dealing with highly sensitive health care data.
So I'm actually pro both. So I'm not totally against private ledgers.
And I think we definitely need the Muslim.
And they will definitely also push institutional adoption and mass adoption for sure.
My concern with private ledgers, maybe there is some place for them.
I've always been pretty against these like permissioned private ledgers.
The first one that I was like even relatively okay with was base.
And that's because the permissioning is happening at the builder level
to try to prevent like rugs and things.
But you don't need KYC to be on the chain.
And you can withdraw to Ethereum, which is very important.
So that's why base I'm more open to.
But when you have things like Hedera and some others that are trying to make these
closed like walled gardens, I'm just not as interested in those.
Maybe for like some kind of military things or maybe there are some things
that will be interesting for. But I don't think it's generally interesting
for the general public, the world because like we saw this as someone mentioned
I think Tyler maybe mentioned earlier with the early intranets.
And there were some people betting that intranets was the way the internet would go.
These private like closed systems. And there are still some in existence.
We still use them to some extent.
Like maybe a company that has highly sensitive information.
Military. I'm not sure if these are intranets.
But I know my marine buddy was telling me he was IT guy.
He was telling me about how they don't allow outside internet.
When he was in Afghanistan and Iraq he would run the internet for the base.
It wasn't allowed to touch outside world unless someone gave him a favor
then he would let them use outside internet.
But anyways, so there are some niche cases but that's not where the internet went.
So I think the people who bet on these internal walled gardens
because they thought the internet was just going to be too much chaos
and not controlled and there would be child porn and terrorism
and drug selling and all these crazy things.
You can't have an open internet. It was a big narrative for a long time. I remember it.
It's so true. And I feel like web 2 has unfortunately gone more in that closed direction though
where you look at the value accrual for a lot of the apps that people know and love.
Facebook or Spotify or Google, if you look at the fat protocol thesis
if anyone's ever read it or seen it, it's this idea that the value for the current version of the internet
accrues to these sort of closed networks.
So Instagram is controlled by Instagram. It's not decentralized.
And Facebook is controlled by Facebook.
You're on there and it's a closed system where you don't own a lot of your data.
You kind of mentioned, Rock, the difference between closed and open source.
We like to think that open source wins out, but in the example of the internet
these protocols, TCIP and HTTPS, Facebook benefits from that
but the value doesn't accrue to HTTP. It accrues to Facebook.
And so the idea of building stuff on public permissionless blockchains
like Polygon and others where you can actually accrue value to the actual networks themselves
and anybody can participate in the networks,
that's really cool about this concept of Web3 and owning the rails.
And I think your point is solid that like long term
because we're sort of building this new financial system and this new value system
value will accrue to the more public and more liquid chains.
But I do think you can still see examples where you may want a private chain
to manage some trade finance or your own, like Zara mentioned,
highly sensitive health data.
And so I think the option to opt in and out of these systems
is what's so important. What we really must fight
is this idea that there's going to be some KYC chain
that all of us must participate in and must put our highly sensitive information into.
That is the system that we should fight.
We should have the ability to choose between these different areas.
Like you can choose to drive on a toll road, a private toll road
when you're driving to the concert.
But if you want to go on the back roads or you want to go on the public highway,
you should also have that choice.
That's where my word comes in.
Yeah, even it's safe to say that basically if blockchain,
you know, Web 3 follows the Web 2 path,
that there's going to be a little of everything
and there's no way to really stop it.
Just in the same way that there's intranets, there's the internet,
And, you know, I guess there's certain ways to stop certain things,
but, like, for the most part, this experimentation just keeps going and going.
So I think we worry about certain chains,
but I think at the end of the day, with the internet,
the market and the people kind of choose on some level, at least.
For sure. And you know me, Aztec, a lot of things we talk about,
I'm all about giving people optionality.
It's one of the reasons I think that ETFs, you know,
the Bitcoin ETF, some hardcore Bitcoin maxis,
will say that, you know, it's a bad thing because it's now to do it.
One, you need to be KYC to hold it.
It's institutions getting power in Bitcoin and all this stuff.
And I think it's fine because it's optionality.
If you want cold storage, you want self-custody.
If you want to use Bitcoin in the traditional way, that's fine.
But some people don't and some people can't, including like, you know,
businesses with prospectuses that say, hey, like you can only hold, you know,
XYZ assets and ETFs is one of them.
So optionality is a great thing.
But we have to be careful with these permissioned blockchains
and with KYC blockchains because what happens is it becomes this slippery slope
where as that becomes, if they could normalize that,
then they start pushing it to other areas of crypto.
If they start saying, oh, well, you need a KYC for this, well, then maybe next they say,
well, you also need a, if you're, you know, Uniswap and you're hosting a front-end,
If you're Aave, you need a KYC people.
So I think we need to try to, it's important that we do try to resist some of these things
because if we don't, before we know it, Web 3 can have taken the path of Web 2,
which is Web 2 became really, it's a glorious and beautiful thing
and it's been one of the most incredible things for humanity ever.
Like, hands-fucking-down, the internet has been one of the greatest things
that humans have ever had.
People, you can be educated.
I mean, you could get, like, better than a PhD, like, degree on YouTube.
And I know people might laugh at that, but if you're on the right areas of YouTube,
you can get some great information.
And then there's, of course, 100,000 other platforms you can use
that are more specialized for certain things.
But if we don't keep pushing for, like, privacy-type things, decentralization,
if we don't fight for those things, they'll slip away.
And I think that happened with the internet.
It really got centralized around a bunch of large companies,
and we've lost a lot of the magic of the internet over time.
It's still an incredible tool, the best tool on the planet.
Really, I would say it's the best tool on the planet.
That's why we have to be better about communicating our values.
Like, we could lose them. You're so right.
Like, what if we just didn't teach people about the values of decentralization
and Web 3 goes the path of Web 2, like you said.
Like, that means it's up to us, the people on the stage.
But do people care, you guys?
Like, I feel like with the internet, what Rock was saying, you know,
what happened was people just didn't care.
They didn't want to deal with it. They didn't want to learn.
They didn't want to – if it was too complicated,
they just didn't want to deal with it.
So they kind of just gave up power and control just so if anybody can do it,
you know, as long as you can get it done for me, then I don't mind.
And I think that's why we gave up all of our data,
all of our power that came with the internet.
So with Web 3, I mean, I know that we're all advocates of decentralization
and everything, but I also understand that, you know,
mainstream really does not care about that kind of stuff.
So I think, you know, I kind of agree with Sarita.
I think education. I think people – I mean, people talked about, you know,
there being a privacy-type class in elementary school like sex ed.
Like, I think people just need to know that that is something that is being exchanged.
And the same for Web 3 is if people are educated, they can make that choice.
I'm going to take a sterile version of this asset through an ETF
and not deal with all the other stuff.
Or I can actually buy Bitcoin myself and, you know, store it in my ledger, right?
So I just think we have to educate. And I'm worried – I mean, there's two things.
The ETF, I'm concerned, it does sterilize it a bit, obviously.
But for those who are buying it, at least there's now liquidity.
But I'm hoping there's enough education that people – it's like a gateway drug.
Oh, I'm very curious about this asset class. What else can I do here?
And then, of course, then you dive into everything else. So –
You know, it brings up a really good point, in my opinion.
You know, like, do people care?
And I think to a large degree, people don't care nowadays.
But the thing is, is I think if – like, at the surface level, but they do –
you know, at the deepest level, people do care about privacy.
People do care about, you know, losing, you know, fundamental rights, et cetera, et cetera,
when they really have to think about it.
But I also agree – I think it was Weber, so you were talking about, you know, education.
I think that we need more education around these things.
I totally agree. But I think it needs to be a little bit different
than maybe some of the education we've received so far.
Like, we need – we need to start from, you know, maybe like the children
and move up kind of thing, like where you maybe start like an animated series,
you know, about new centralization.
And you start, like, kind of bringing it to people in a very, like, a digestible way,
a friendly, a fun way, maybe not so technical.
So we need more of that as well.
And then I think people will – it will open their minds.
They'll just hear a story, because storytelling goes a long way.
They'll hear a story of something.
We need, like, a Smokey the Bear.
My brain is running wild with, like, ideas.
Because I – you know what?
I don't see any cartoons that talk about, like, our fundamental rights.
Yeah, we need the NFT community to do a lot of it.
What was that bill that was, like, walking around on the Capitol Hill?
A lot of it, our rights slipped away.
Almost like the boiling frog analogy with Web 2.
I think even myself, I wasn't aware how much data was being collected on me.
And then when they started screening people off social media platforms,
I was very concerned, even though, like, the one person they really started the chain with.
The government was then, because so much power went in the hands of so few with social media,
they were then able to chokepoint those specific platforms
and decide who would get to speak and who wouldn't.
So you're very right, like, Rock is very on top of and aware of, like, the problems with more centralization.
And there are those who will push for complete KYC, complete centralization,
because once the government gets certain powers, they do not easily let go of it.
And they want control. Why?
Because they don't want to have to win an argument.
They don't even want to have to have the argument.
And so blockchain, like, does increase transparency.
It also increases, especially public blockchains, things that, like, allow people to speak their mind.
Do you notice that the SEC went after a little company?
Like, one of their first targets was this little company called Library Credits.
Its market cap was maybe four million or less at the time, and yet they attacked them first.
Why? They're a competitor to YouTube.
And so they don't want free and open, unfettered free speech.
They don't want complete permissionless societies.
They have, especially since the anti-terrorism laws, they've been able to KYC everybody in control and lock down.
And they're trying to, certain ones, take away your ability to spend.
And so they're the ones that are fighting blockchain.
They're the ones fighting this permissionless system.
And so far, they're really losing.
And hopefully they lose the greater battle, but there are a lot of people just unaware that this battle is going on because it hasn't impacted them yet.
When they saw things happen with that truckers rally in Canada, whether I agreed with truckers blocking off some of the exits or not to, you know, with their rally,
I didn't agree with that necessarily, but I especially didn't agree with the government freezing their bank accounts.
And so crypto takes away that power from them and they don't like it because once they get something like that, they don't want to give it up.
Now, there is a place for permission blockchains.
Like I work very closely with a project I'm heavily invested in.
It's called Devio, and they can do eight million transactions per second.
And they are a private blockchain or a permission blockchain because health care will require something like that.
Like even in the U.S., you can only store health care information for a person in the state that they're in per loss.
So they can't be on polygon.
So there will be certain use cases for permission blockchains.
Can I take off permissionless?
That genie is out of the bottle and we should never let it get put in because we need permissionless.
And polygon is really doing a great job leading that.
I'm a little bit concerned with some of the directions.
I have not seen polygon go those directions and I'm very pleased about that.
I actually would disagree.
I see what you're saying about the privacy of health care data.
You know, this is clearly a requirement for many areas of the world.
But there are ways to do that without a without a permissioned or private blockchain itself.
There are zero knowledge technologies that can be used on public blockchains just fine.
Right. We saw tornado cash.
They got shut down because the government didn't like that.
But there are plenty of others.
Secret Network, Manta, which everyone's hearing about right now, a polygon chain.
They are focused on privacy applications.
So what you can do is you can actually put that private data on a blockchain.
But just put a face mask over it, a zero knowledge face mask over it.
And then you can selectively access that data if you have the permission to do so or that data can be selectively exposed if you choose to give it out.
We don't disagree on this.
We just need to get the politicians to change the laws because you're right on the direction it should go.
The question is, is that the direction the politicians will let it go in the short term?
No, it won't be the direction.
It's not the direction the politicians will let it go.
And if you look at the EU now digital ID, that is going to be a compulsory thing for all EU citizens.
That's exactly what some of us mentioned here, that if we are forced to be on a KYC chain, that's exactly where this whole technology is being abused basically.
That's the direction we don't want it to go.
And no one is even really talking about this.
I am myself an adviser to EU and I have been raising this concern multiple times.
But I don't hear anyone talking about it.
No one really cares about that.
And then we go back to the question of, do really people care about that?
And the fact that we are all sitting here, including myself, saying, for example,
Bitcoin ETF is a great means for mass adoption or institutional adoption, et cetera.
But if I want to be brutally honest, I don't usually say this everywhere, but here I trust the room.
I can be brutally honest.
Deep inside, I wasn't really happy about Bitcoin ETF.
I was not happy because I thought, you know, well, this is not what we wanted with Bitcoin.
This is not what we wanted with cryptocurrencies.
This is wrapping cryptocurrencies and decentralization, wrapping it up with centralization again, right?
This is bringing it back to regulate the centralized markets.
But now then we just convince ourselves, make ourselves happy that, well, this is going to help institutional adoption.
But we should have probably fought much harder to make regulators regulate our own decentralized concept,
not to have a totally conflicting solution, wrap up Bitcoin with ETF in the centralized stock markets.
So I think there is a lot of, of course, the core ideas of decentralization and also crypto that we really see conflicting things happening.
But also I personally believe I don't believe in pure decentralization and I don't believe in, of course, centralization at all.
I think finding that perfect balance is the right direction to go.
But finding that perfect balance is so difficult, is so, so complex and complicated that, of course,
the more I prefer to lean towards more decentralization here to actually wanting to say that I want the perfect balance.
But deep inside the perfect balance would be the right way, because pure decentralization, if you look at humanity and history of human being,
we were all living in a pure decentralized fashion before Agrigarian era that we started having societies, et cetera.
And then we came back to centralization.
That is failing for sure now as well.
So we need to find that balance.
But then we just sit here and we really don't care.
All of us here also don't really care much about, for example, our data being gone away to all decentralized platforms.
We are still using them with the exchange of our data.
And I recently actually did a quick calculation and released an article on this.
We, every one of us, annually basically generate thousands of data types and only on 30 of them, 30 of them,
the most common data types like traveling, food, transportation, things that we all do,
we could generate around 3000 to 3500 dollars a year.
And that would eliminate poverty in 48 countries.
And that's exactly why you should not own your data, because if you start owning your data,
you will start wanting more or you will start wanting to monetize it in a different way.
And that's exactly them losing control.
Yeah, Zara, I want to introduce, we want to introduce Adrian here.
But just to comment on that, I'm not sure if I agree with your assessment that because your data,
you know, maybe worth 3000 to 3500 dollars a year, that it could get rid of poverty in a bunch of countries,
because I'm assuming their data is not worth that.
If you're in one of the lowest poverty countries, your data is worth much less than if you're a United States person, right?
Because you're just not buying as much stuff.
I also like the threshold of poverty is about 200 dollars.
So even if it's less, it will reduce poverty tremendously.
Yeah, I like the point that Zara made about finding a balance.
And it's hard, but I think that that balance is important to try to always strive for.
Like even in the body, your body is always fighting for homeostasis to kind of quote a medical kind of term.
And I think that's the kind of thing that we have to do in crypto is always be fighting for a balance.
Before we introduce Adrian and also David here that joined us on the panel.
Let's just go to Tina because she's been trying to throw her shoulder in and people just like that just lined up.
It's like a brick wall for Tina today.
I hate to brick wall her, but just just to be Adrian doesn't have very long.
So, yeah, Tina, we can come back to all these topics, but do want to introduce Adrian soon.
But yeah, go ahead for now, Tina.
If you guys want to go to Adrian, I'll be here.
Are you sure guys about that?
Don't you want to let Tina speak?
Go ahead, Tina. Ladies first.
Ladies first. Adrian's being a gentleman.
So what I wanted to kind of touch on real quick was, first of all, Rock mentioned that we don't need permission blockchains to be able to, you know,
have kind of a transmit private information.
And that's something that we're actually working on with Boomerang through private IDMs and put data messages so that encryption and decryption through the user's private keys.
So you need your private keys to be able to basically open the message.
So that's something that we've already done, actually, and you don't need it.
But I do agree that maybe. Wow, that's really cool, actually.
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I'm super excited about that, because I think it will be used in many different ways, whether you want to store your information, you want to transmit, you know, high security, high private, high private information.
I think that's super useful.
But yeah, other than that, I wanted the difference there is between.
So for people who don't know, Tina works with Boomerang and they are doing on chain messaging.
So, you know, think email built into your your your your public account.
But what you're saying here is now typically those messages, like if you sent someone a message on Bitcoin or on previously previous iterations, people would the whole the whole world can see the message.
It's just like for the world to see.
But you're saying now you're making it so only the actual receiver can see it and they have to sign a transaction to to prove they're they're the owner of that address.
Exactly. Just as an option. So it's still our platform boomerang is still, you know, a platform less unrestricted.
So your end receiver does not need to be signed up on boomerang or anything. You just need to have their wallet address.
But yeah, so now before now, you would see the input data messages on chain like everything else on the block chain.
But now we have the option of making them private so that you can only check it with your private keys.
OK, Adrian. Yeah, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hello.
Everybody, I'm a little bit lost on the on the super interesting topics that you guys are discussing are probably too stupid to chip in on that.
So I can just ramble about the markets, which is what I do for a living. Yeah.
Yes. My name is Adriaz Duntryk. I am a CMT.
And I use for living. I lose money all the time and somehow managed to be profitable, which is which is quite difficult.
And I'm a trend follower. Trends are in frequent, but they are very rewarded, rewarding.
There might be some background noises. And as a matter of fact, you know, just I do enjoy every single space that I'm on, always from from Facebook.
And I see some friends from Polygon. I see a lot of good people up here. And thanks also to Tina for highlighting and spreading, you know, kind of like a couple of cool words for me to learn on.
I'm not a fundamental guy. I tried my best to keep the track of all the incredible technology and the development and the layers and the trends in those in those aspects.
However, I, you know, as an investor, as a trader, I do choose and I do have to buy the the principle that the market is a discounting mechanism.
Right. And then the market sort of like discounts most of the fundamental information, if not all, unless it's unavailable to the public, unless it's insider information, unless it's insider trading like most of the US Congress people do.
So I think another day, you know, whatever value is embodied in those fun, fantastic fundamental messages coming from Tina and coming from everybody else.
You know, I'm happy to comment on the market side of it and how market translate and spit out information. So I guess it's a good time.
I can ask another question.
The main topics, which was Evergrande and ATF and macro. But yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. So let me toss this question to you, Adrian.
You know, being profitable is a really big deal. And if you are someone that like considers macro, this might be your thing here.
So like in light of the Evergrande collapse and liquidation, how might traditional financial crisis is influence the stability of the crypto market?
And you could take this maybe a different route if you like. You know, for instance, this question is asking about how, you know, it it might increase the stability.
But but maybe you have a different opinion.
Thanks for the question. Very good. So it's it's a fresh one. Right. Every every single news that comes out unexpectedly causes certain market distortion, cause a certain amount of noise.
Right. And noise is something that is not retainable of a long term noise is this is random most of the time.
So what do you typically see in the in the times of like, you know, evergrande, the liquidation notes or ETFs, you know, approvals, these approvals, the holding and so on.
There's a lot of events in each and each and every single one of those events, you know, amplifies the amplitude of the market of the market fluctuations.
So it doesn't necessarily trigger direction, per se. Right. It does trigger much more volatility. Volatility is a measure of risk and finance.
So what it does, it is most of the time not directional. Right. It doesn't have any particular directional drift.
Instead, it chops around, gives us much closer look to the out to the random walk and creates this kind of like a 50 50 coin flip chop.
Right. And why it matters is it matters because if you are aware of it, you can have yourself, you can, you know, go on the S&P groups, you can go on the X papers, you know, and so on.
There is also a very, very cool solution from our partners. They didn't they didn't pay me to say that, though, feel free to check it out.
It's crypto volatility index. They come up. I just enjoyed it from the trading perspective.
Crypto volatility index is like a VIX, but for Bitcoin, for cryptos. And, you know, tracking those volatility indices is basically what translates to the amount of risk you might want to take more or less.
And that translates to the better profitability. Eventually, like I said, those news events, those those announcements, those ETFs, those evergrandes and so on, they are not desirable.
Desirable, desirable, desirable. Sorry, this is my first language.
This is not something that we necessarily want. Right. It just happened that happens on a stock market.
It can be under form of the financial statements, you know, during reports and so on.
Those are not directly fundamental things that change the trajectory of the market.
They are kind of like there to just give you chop of a wider range, chop you out, you know, lose you some money most of the time.
And proceed with the prior trend, which is why it does most of the time. And those trends are very well defined for cryptos right now most of the time.
And we're talking 60, 70 percent breadth conditions where there's 60, 70 percent of the market of the coins are above 200 day moving averages, which is if the 200 day average is rising for long term over the long term span, let's say weeks and months,
especially months, you know, this this comments, the market comments itself on it being a bull market, right?
If it persistently falls and moves down, it is a bear market. That's not the case in 2023 at least to most of the coins.
One of the coins that is different is Litecoin, which is something that is that is interesting.
I used to be a big fan of Litecoin. I used to be a big, what do you call it, like a big bet taker on Litecoin.
I was wrong so many times. I'm wrong 50 times a day, you know, so I lost some money there.
And finally enough, I'm bringing Litecoin because it's it's one of the very few top capitalization coins that is actually moving in its own bear market still.
So the whole market moved ahead, pushing to the upside very strongly.
Bitcoin kind of 60 percent up last year here. I'm almost 100.
And we're talking about good candidates overall from the seasonal perspective, from the long term perspective, for the strength to persist and to continue this year.
This is election year. We just went out of an exceptionally strong, powerful reelection year that was in line with the expectations.
50 percent on NASDAQ, 20, 22 percent, if I'm not mistaken, on S&P.
You know, very, very good numbers. And 20, 24 is the set up, also abnormally set, abnormally powerful set up for the extension of this last year's rally, rallies, even though it might not be necessarily immediate.
You know, the history speaking, since 1949, on an average annualized basis, people kind of returns 12.8 percent versus typical annualized return of 10 percent, approximately.
So we're talking about 20, 30 percent of performance. What is your candidate where the current president is running for reelection?
That puts us in the positive outlook, you know, positive outlook for the traditional market.
So the Chinese market, of course, I'm just taking a look at the Chinese market, but the shares is actually talking, you know, it's down to it's down to percent today for the FXY.
The average is all trading to the downside. The 200-day moving average is trading down, which tells me the Chinese market, Chinese large caps in the bear market.
50-day trend is to the downside even more aggressively, is drifting away from the 200-day falling anyway. And the 200 days is even lower.
So there is a very strongly well-defined bear market for the China that accelerates for the large caps.
However, the markets on the US side are not really taking much heat from it, it seems. S&P is about to break 5,000, the historical milestone, round number.
So bullish pre-election year turns into bullish election year extension. And again, 20, 30 percent outperformance versus typical average cyclical return annualized return of S&P.
S&P have had just something worth considering. Why for Bitcoin is worth considering, especially because Bitcoin has been getting more and more strongly attached in terms of the relationship to the traditional stock market.
You know, it's been becoming more and more blue to what NASDAQ does, even more so than what S&P does.
However, we are talking about the 4-500 percent of relationship growth strengthened by the means of correlation.
The correlation coefficient, which statistically counts and measures the covariance versus the product of standard deviations.
So in those terms, you know, it tells us how Bitcoin covariates with S&P, with how Bitcoin covariates with the NASDAQ.
And it's been covariating more and more and more basically over the last several years.
So Bitcoin is becoming this more volatile beta version of the NASDAQ.
And since NASDAQ is in its best-made months right now, you know, from the October lows, from the November bounce into the sell and make go away pattern a little bit extended in June, July.
This puts us in the very favorable conditions overall. So Bitcoin is in a bull market, which is a good thing because it attracts liquidity.
It is a risk bottom meter. So many institutions funds use it as a risk appetite bottom meter and kind of like a volatility index on its own.
This translates to a lot of risk appetite, a lot of investors.
If it grows more, more people jump on the bandwagon, more liquidity in the markets and more people get interested into altcoins.
All right. So eventually the hauling hype that is up there in about 75 days in mid April, you know, might be maybe interestingly bringing a lot of anticipation.
Now we have additional fundamental reasons to facilitate that from the ETF side.
The institutions are there. BlackRock is there. Vanguard, VanEck, all of those people, Vanguard, maybe not right.
But there'll be ARK investments, you know, all the big players are here and they are here on our side and they are playing in the same direction.
So, you know, there are a lot of good odds to consider for this year.
That translated to a very positive optimistic outlook for Bitcoin.
Just two facts for the hauling. Bitcoin never lost money in hauling and it always run very hard in hauling.
So I don't know about the future. I can comment on the facts and those other facts.
Adrian, can I ask a question?
So why do you think institutions are buying Bitcoin? Do you think they see it as digital gold or what kind of strategy do they have with it?
Because they don't believe in the same thing as we do, right?
They're not going to believe it's like decentralized money or something, right?
They have some other narrative. What is that? What do you think?
So they're buying money because their clients are asking for it, right?
They're businesses. They make money off of clients. They make money off services in order to be profitable.
They have to meet the market demand.
So they're answering the market demand and providing the supply to it.
The facility is pricing demand.
So it is a sign of time and it shows you rising demand in the first place.
On another note, I do not necessarily feel, you know, they would have, I might be wrong.
I would not necessarily bet that they have, like, you know, some special, special mission, you know, to heal the world and to save the world with Bitcoin.
You know, because for many different reasons, it's just an asset class to them, right?
The crypto class or just an asset class is like an extra stock.
The good thing is I can give you another example from the central banks, right?
So there is a Basel comedy as an official supervisory, kind of like a body for central banks globally, that in 2022, in December,
in 2022 December, they released an official recommendation paper for the central banks globally so that until January 2025, the first January 2025,
the official record and the official recommendation from this committee, Basel committee, is that the central banks should own
two or more percent of reserves in crypto assets, in tokens, in stable funds, right?
They are classified differently.
Eventually, they are to be measured, they are to be measured by the individual risk assessment, right?
How much they want, they may invest.
Otherwise, you know, the central banks on our site, central banks are officially recommended to hold two percent or more of the reserves in cryptos.
So it's, and the reason is for it, financial, right?
They don't, I don't think they care about saving the word with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin's sharp ratio is 1.65, right?
So Bitcoin is far better diversification tool than S&P, for instance, right?
The capital works per unit much better, generates more returns for the risk unit.
So the sharp ratio, so T&R ratio, T&R ratio, all are more positive for Bitcoin, even though it's more volatile than the annualized volatility for Bitcoin.
It's going to be like 55 percent.
The annualized gain is still going to be, you know, 100 percent, for instance, 75 percent, 100 percent, 130 percent.
Last year it was 160 percent.
What's with this digital gold narrative?
Does it have any merits, for example, for pension funds?
Pension funds, when they buy it, they don't buy it because their customers want it.
It's because they want to, you know, they want to accumulate funds so that they can actually pay pensions, right, for the people.
So is there any, is there any, does it stick?
Or is it a stupid narrative that Bitcoin is digital gold for anyone from the traditional finance universe?
I cannot, I cannot sadly see who's asking, is that Michael, who's asking the question?
Good to know. Thanks, Michael.
So digital gold, again, it's a little bit of a narrative.
It can help and it can not help, you know.
It's just a narrative is an opinion.
It doesn't really influence the facts, per se.
The good things and the bad things about opinions is that they are self-promoting and they are self-fulfilling at times.
Even though it doesn't necessarily have to be the digital gold, it may turn into a digital gold effectively because people want it.
It's just like what someone asked Jay Powell one day, why, why Fed would stick with a two percent inflation rate as the healthy one.
And then they said because of the anchoring effect, he literally said that admitted in front of the people is just because they tell people that it's two percent and the market, the whole economy adjusts to it.
So as a matter of fact, if we keep repeating that it is a digital gold, just maybe turn into a digital gold.
I think, you know, it serves the purpose of the fragmentalized digital gold to a larger extent.
You know, our W.A. stock.
And so W.A. is a very good concept that is part of this year.
You know, so it subscribes itself, you know, to this digital real world asset to some extent, real world commodity.
So long story short, you know, regardless of our beliefs, I mean, I do not necessarily love talking.
You know, it's in my case probably just a waste of time to kind of give you my opinions because I'm wrong too often.
However, however, you know, digital gold is a very fancy term that can take us far and beyond.
And in terms of if it is equal to digital gold, I would say no, because digital gold would mean that it's an exact gold, but digital.
In the first place, that would mean that the correlation is one is 100 percent.
That is one zero, which is not the case.
But in fact, quite often trades quite a positive lead to two to go.
So, you know, correlation is a constant fluctuation on its own.
Right. It's never stable.
There is not there's nothing there's not such a thing in a world like decoupling.
You know, it's all seasonal. Right.
For some time, Bitcoin may trade on the opposite to S&P 500.
Right. S&P just breaks the open highs.
Bitcoin went into a month correction.
And on another occasion, it may work perfectly in the same direction.
You know, the word is dynamic and the narratives change.
The facts don't, because the facts cannot be denied.
This is why I love going into the facts.
Thank you for the good question.
I think if it's gold in so far as it's seasonally trendy to try to have people bet with or against the markets if we're unbearable, then I think there's that hope.
Obviously, we saw with interest rates not truly driving price movement.
And of course, the markets doing it and not actually being a hundred percent correlated.
People have just still had questions.
But I think there's like the self-fulfilling privacy company.
It was awesome because a lot of these guys that run endowments of retirement funds, et cetera, they commiserate and hang out with each other and don't want to be the only one who isn't doing it.
So a lot of it's looking at parity of holdings and making it a commonplace to have that percent be in the Bitcoin ETF or crypto type asset or digital asset.
And so I'm hoping that becomes the quote unquote norm.
And then that becomes the commonplace for everyone to hold that percentage within the trad five fund management strategies.
And it all happens in conferences right now.
I mean, there's the VCPE conference bunch of people down there talking to each other about how funds do the thing.
I know it's very different, but it's like these guys all hang out and then they kind of just gossip with each other.
So so all last year we saw the narrative of various banks collapsing and then Bitcoin would just continue going up off the back of this seemingly bearish news.
So kind of like to the core of the question with Evergrande collapsing.
You know, I guess I wonder if if anyone here thinks that this is going to contribute to more people edging into Bitcoin or buying Bitcoin because they see the financial markets collapsing or various like financial infrastructure collapsing.
I'll just say quickly that I think the in the short term these events banks collapsing liquidity crunches 2008 liquidity like crisis events all of these different you know covid in these times kind of everything crunches oddly even gold which is just kind of very doesn't make sense.
Right. We you would think everybody would flee into gold during like a time of covid where businesses are collapsing or people are fearing businesses collapsing.
But but because of the way these markets are so intertwined and because asset managers have to you know liquidate in some case their most liquid assets like gold or Bitcoin to cover their you know their leverage positions that they need to close or whatever these kind of things you see everything retract in the short term.
So like you know banks collapsing crisis is they they might hurt Bitcoin short term because it's like risk off time.
But in the long term these things are great for Bitcoin.
The more uncertainty the more the less trust people have in banks governments and these these old institutions the more people start hedging with Bitcoin.
So I think that all of these kind of things while they may not make Bitcoin go up that day or that week or that month or that even that year these things are long term Bitcoin and crypto rocket.
The term I remember I was looking for is beta the if there's a universally accepted beta for Bitcoin right now which there isn't I think the uncertainty of the beta of Bitcoin is actually a good thing because that way it's not like guaranteed that when we're in bear Bitcoin will go up and when we're in bull Bitcoin should go down.
I think that's kind of in the grand scheme of things when people look at the capital asset pricing model.
This is what they're trying to use to predict.
And so I think that's kind of remains to be seen if there's a consistent beta.
But I think it's good that if there isn't one at least for the time being we're all going to have our own theses that lead to what the outcomes are is kind of what I've been seeing at least for the hardcore asset managers and how they look at it.
I feel like for sure human psychology plays into this too.
I mean yesterday we saw the market dump right after the FOMC meeting and even though they didn't have any significant thing that they did at the meeting just the way that Powell spoke about it the uncertainty and you know a lot of people were expecting rate cuts in March.
So I think that short term like Rock said it will affect it but long term it definitely is the definition of why Bitcoin is good.
But I look at the ETF as kind of like the before and after event in crypto.
And I think that will have a multiple effect which is kind of this theory that Bitcoin demand will just increase at a greater rate generally not just through the ETFs but because of the notoriety and the stamp of approval.
So what rocks at the trust you know now it just gives it that trust so advisors can push this now they can actually have their self interest or they will make money from it.
So they're actually pushing this and like Michael mentioned early on in the space you know we saw Google ads now.
So I feel like you know we're going to Bitcoin is just become going to become a household name and I feel like that's just crazy and good for the space but you know fidelity grayscale doing Google ads.
They're going to soon be on TV and companies like Invesco Galaxy Digital who are you know trying to get into the game.
Now imagine each of these companies will bring their own clients and funds into Bitcoin.
There's new money from all directions.
But I feel like in general Zara had brought up a point earlier on that I think obviously it seems like it's kind of like a good and a bad situation.
And especially I feel like now we're talking about Ethereum ETFs and I want to kind of I think we talked about Bitcoin ETF a lot and I kind of want to hear your guys's thoughts on the Ethereum ETF as well because from what we saw happen with the Bitcoin ETF.
You know 3 percent of all Bitcoin is not owned by all these ETFs and which is Bitcoin is actually you know built kind of in a more decentralized way than the way Ethereum functions.
So Ethereum being you know proof of stake with that because if an Ethereum ETF comes up and sucks up a huge percentage of supply how do you guys think about that.
Do you think that's negative for decentralization.
Do you think it would be better if it's delayed a little bit until maybe we can figure out how to proceed.
I'll just I'll just say thanks for thanks for letting me speak.
I'll have to run the very good questions.
Michael and everybody rock.
Can I jump in real quick.
I just want to give a little different perspective right being a meme coin and just kind of in the meme community or deejans as many like to call themselves.
So I had a couple key phrases that I think if no one knows better than a meme coin volatility.
If meme coins are not about volatility I don't know who does narrative.
I think that's one of the biggest things out there.
So we mentioned earlier you know to go you know Bitcoin gold.
Yeah I think we you know in general run with that narrative.
That's what we want to spread to the massive right.
Like this literally is the gold rush and you want to get there early.
I think pushing that out not just to obviously corporations and generally you know ETFs but also just mainstream America.
Also as far as trust and suspicion and privacy and security.
You know from DGN meme side of defense right.
Sometimes you know you see projects launch that initially look you know suspect right.
Sometimes those are actually like the best ones and on the flip side some of the ones that look you know look to be too good to be true.
Quite often are too good to be true.
I just want to just also touch base real quick on someone mentioned earlier kind of having that smoky the bear kind of you know spokesperson.
And I think that's so important.
Just once again to get that word out and really start spreading crypto to to the younger communities.
I've met so many people over the last you know a couple of years that are you know in college or in high school and really getting into it.
I think we want to just continue educating not just them but also you know the younger generation and having kind of that smoky the bear or mammoth of Matic kind of you know presence to help that outreach and build story lines and really simplify it can really just you know help grow.
Not just Matic but obviously just crypto in the future as we continue to grow and expand and that's just one thing that we're really looking to do is kind of help build that narrative and expand and really simplify it but make it fun as well.
That's great. I actually think that it almost makes sense either from the platform level for you know these platforms to either you know like polygon or any of the other big ecosystems to to build some kind of you know animated series or kind of educational content.
Like you're talking about or it's got to be the NFT and meme coins. It's like the NFT projects and meme coins have really great IP and you know some of that stuff is really friendly and kind of probably plays well into the you know the education side of things so I have to agree.
But back to back to or do you want to do you want to change the question or actually you know what have we introduced David yet.
David take 20 seconds to introduce yourself and then I'll ask a question for everyone here.
I hope everyone's doing okay. Happy Friday.
My name is David Korea. I'm a reporter for daily coin leading crypto media platform.
We focus on providing unique flip side insights to crypto news stories and just demystifying things and taking a really high from everything so that people can basically understand what's really happening.
I'm happy to be here. It's my first time here. I think I've learned a lot.
I've heard a lot from a lot of speakers. Yeah.
Although I do I do think that a lot of what has been said has sometimes seemed a bit maybe too idealistic.
But I think these ideas are first necessary then we can start breaking things down to actually achieve the goals that want to achieve in the crypto space.
So I think I would just rest there for now.
Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for your introduction there David. Welcome.
And then let's also introduce some of the new people that have come on to the panel.
So Fubar go ahead and take the mic.
Introduce yourself just 20 seconds.
Let everyone know what you're doing in space.
Hey there. Thanks for having me.
I'm Fubar, founder or founder of Clusters, which is new cross chain identity namespace platform we just launched yesterday.
So really excited to dive into that and share it.
Thank you for your introduction and welcome.
And also Jason, please take the mic.
I'm chief innovation officer here.
OKX is a crypto platform, including an exchange as well as a Web3 wallet.
Awesome. Really good to have you here.
Excited about everything that OKX is doing with Polygon as well.
You know, excited for X1, all that.
So we've been talking about a couple, you know, a bunch of different topics overall.
It's kind of macro stuff, you know, ETFs.
Also, we were just talking about Evergrande, you know, the collapse.
Also, you know, the banking issues that are going on around the world.
So that's kind of been the themes for anyone that has just joined this space.
But it's kind of stay in that vein.
I have another question for you guys.
And anyone can answer the question on this show.
You don't have to raise your hand.
Just jump in, answer how you like.
So the question is, how might global economic shifts impact the perception and adoption of DeFi?
Well, I'll just repeat what I said earlier and then I'll let others expand on this.
But to me, the biggest trend I see in the world right now is a lack of trust in governments and traditional institutions.
I think that people are people are really tired of being lied to.
They're tired of corruption.
They're tired of being taken advantage of.
They're tired of paying so much in taxes and not knowing where it goes or disagreeing with where it goes.
I think the world is at an end.
There's plenty of polls that back this is that the world is at an all time distrust in government and institutions.
And I think that's the perfect timing for something for what we're building here with Bitcoin and DeFi and the decentralization movement.
I just want I just want to add something to that.
And I totally, totally agree with what you said, Brock.
And, you know, I think we will definitely see more adoption of the device, especially in the regions and countries that they have more corruption.
They have people have less trust in governments.
And that's pretty much the trend that has been the trend, the trend with crypto as well.
If you look at, you know, the countries that have adopted crypto most, they are often the countries that have less trust in the government or their financial means or currencies are really volatile or, you know, they have a lot of political changes as well.
And the funniest thing is that because we are a Swedish based company, right, we had exact same discussion yesterday in an event with some Swedish friends.
And, you know, they have a different, totally different opinion because in Sweden that people have a total trust in the government.
And they thought they absolutely don't need, you know, some there were some people that they thought they absolutely don't need DeFi solutions or to use them because they thought the whole world really trust the governments.
And I had to really have a little bit of eye opening sessions for them to the rest of the world that, you know, Scandinavia and Sweden is probably a little bit different in that sense.
But I totally see DeFi mass adoption eventually getting better and better in that sense.
But I want to just take advantage of this time here.
Now, I have I have a question for Jason, actually, when I saw Jason coming out, OK, that's a good, good timing to ask a question from Jason.
I really want to hear Jason's point of view on Bitcoin ETF because you are representing a centralized crypto exchange.
Now, how do you feel Bitcoin being also traded on centralized stock markets?
What what do you see here? And do you think that that's that's something that is going to support your business as well?
Or do you think, you know, that that's against the whole decentralization concept?
Thanks, Sarah. Can you hear me OK, by the way? Yeah, OK. Thank you.
Thanks for calling me out also. But happy to share some thoughts.
I think no problem. Happy to. I think that's why we're all here.
I caught the tail end of some of the previous speakers talking about the Bitcoin ETF.
I think that's fascinating because from our perspective, it's probably a little bit different, right?
I can only speak to how are what we're seeing on our platform.
But generally, the Bitcoin ETF was extremely positive.
And I'll dive into a little bit more there. But if you look back historically, I mean, Bitcoin has been gradually being adopted.
And more products have been built around it.
I think the best example is probably the CME futures, the Bitcoin futures product years ago.
And even then, you could see that these these events only drive to increase acceptance and adoption, particularly from institutions.
But I think even now, with with more money flowing into these ETFs, you can kind of see the retail aspect just not on our platform,
but being affected on some of these brokerages and the ETF providers.
So what we've seen from institutions is that clients that we had been talking to that were not as active are now eagerly looking for places to hedge and perhaps source liquidity,
but also execute a wider variety of strategies that they couldn't do in the past.
So having all these different venues to trade Bitcoin across different audiences essentially brings the market,
allows sophisticated market participants to to really trade more, frankly.
And that's beneficial for all of us trading venues.
So one caveat is we don't provide or offer services in the U.S.
And so we don't directly work with any of these U.S. Bitcoin ETF providers.
But a lot of the market makers that do on a global scale, we do see them and we see their activity as a positive.
So you could look at these ETFs as this happens a lot with a lot of different products is where you can look at something as either a competitor or you could look at it as kind of a partner to lift the entire market.
And so you can say, well, will these ETFs kill OK X, you know, who Jason speaking for?
Will it kill their business model or will it take away from their business model or or will it help it in some way?
And I actually think with with many of these things, it's it goes against what you might your intuition.
And I think it actually helps.
Right. And you actually mentioned, Jason, that the market makers that are working on these different things.
So the way that these Bitcoin ETFs are like settled, they require I think they require basically market makers to settle with them.
Like a user or an institution can't go directly give Bitcoin to BlackRock and then they give them ETF shares.
They actually have to give them cash.
Then BlackRock has to source the Bitcoin somewhere through some kind of market makers or something, I think.
Right. And so those market makers, if they're bringing that Bitcoin to that ETF, they need to buy it somewhere and that they very well may buy it on OK X or Binance.
Hey, real quick, I know we're in this heated or this conversation and Michael's going to jump in right now.
I just want to shout out that Owens here.
We also have Ryder and Manam and Zodomo that all have joined us.
So just shout you guys out real quick and we'll just jump right back into the conversation.
Yeah, I just want to ask Jason a question because he's here and kind of follow up and some color to what Rock said.
So the thing the thing is with Europe.
OK, because I live here, right?
We are I don't want to say we because I don't agree with what Europe is doing, but Europe is it's kind of a bit of afraid of self custody of anything and especially of crypto.
So they are looking at, you know, limiting how much you can hold.
Now, if I buy crypto on OK X or Binance or whatever, then if I withdraw it, then I withdraw it in crypto.
Now, if I withdraw like 50K, I'm already I mean, it's not yet legal, but it will be illegal to hold so much money in self custody because Europe.
So, Jason, what do you think about this?
You maybe know even more than me about this development.
You know, I actually I think you certainly know more than me.
I would have to defer to some of my European colleagues specifically around regulations and upcoming regulations.
But I think broadly our approach is that we want to.
We want to make the market the users, but also all of our stakeholders aware of the benefits of self custody.
I don't think it's evil to hold your own assets in your own manner whatsoever.
And our stance is very much on a policy side and working the regulators to try to educate and convince them otherwise.
I think just just slightly back to the ETF.
I think one thing that was most interesting for us talking about self custody is that we saw what happened with FTX in 2022 and other platforms where these platforms are essentially asked to custody assets for users.
Right. And they did not uphold their end of the bargain.
And ironically, self custody is the solution to these issues where users are trusting centralized entities with assets.
And if you're preventing users from withdrawing crypto assets, I think that only furthers and concentrates some of this risk.
But yet, you know, we are doing things like proof of reserves where we can at least try to in a trust minimized way prove or at least and allow users to prove themselves that the entities are or at least us.
OK, as we have the assets that you have put with us.
I think that's very important.
And just this is the point I was making about the ETF is that it was fascinating to see it.
But why is also a tried by product reveal their Bitcoin address is not I guess I guess it could be kind of as a proof of reserves in a basic way.
But again, sort of completing full circle.
Now, you know, you have tried five products that also you can go check and see if they actually hold the Bitcoin that they claim to.
So, you know, you can there's not one perfect solution.
I hope European regulators listen to what users want and their citizens want and soft custody is permitted.
Yeah. If you don't mind if I jump in on that one as well.
So you can probably tell by my accent, I'm based in Europe.
I'm based in Ireland. And yet the recent regulations that are being pushed through, I would call them extremely anti-consumer.
They're nearly anti-person more than I want to say consumer. It's anti-person.
So my thing with ETF was that, you know, I was happy that it was seeing like this kind of legitimizes Bitcoin and allows people to, you know, who otherwise would never have exposure to Bitcoin to have it in, you know, their pensions and stuff like that.
That's great. But I think if you're actually interested in the space, I don't know anybody who wouldn't just go straight for self custody every time once they know what they're doing.
I mean, way back in the day in 2013, 2014, like so I've talked about rug pulls back in the day a couple of times, but I think the worst rug pull I was ever caught by was I was working with a guy who essentially raised a load of money to buy an exchange.
And then he got myself and, you know, a lot of other people from the early Dogecoin community to use that exchange.
He bought an exchange purely to rug pull the exchange. He fled to Japan and he got caught. He was deported, sent back.
So, you know, happy, happy ish ending at the bottom of it all. Granted, he went to prison, coins didn't come back because things were so new back then that judges didn't even know what they were, you know, dealing with.
But this is that was when I kind of said that, you know, self custody is the only game in town.
And when it comes to ETFs, I find that it's another case of not your keys, not your coins.
And like I'm happy that there's exposure available for pensions and stuff like that.
But I have always said, you know, even the exchanges I would hold in the highest regard with the highest amount of trust, I just use them for on ramp and off ramp.
Once I go on ramp, it's coming up to my own wallet. There's no way in hell I would let somebody else hold my crypto for me.
Now, what the EU has kind of run in with now with their new regulations where, you know, you essentially cannot self custody if you're over, you know, a certain level of liquidity or, you know, a certain level of market holdings, stuff like that.
It's unusually dangerous, especially when it comes to decide of like, you know, your uniswap markets.
No, not live yet. And it's in the works at the moment. Michael, you might correct me on it.
I know I was sent on documents only about a month ago, which were outlining basically the limits that are coming in around DeFi decentralization.
And essentially, you know, quick swap and other decentralized markets, they become nearly off limits for a lot of people in the EU, nearly dangerous.
If you jump on the quick swap, you know, you pick up a lower market cap coin, it shoots up in value and all of a sudden you have an illegal self custody wallet.
So yeah, exactly. They want to have it. The goal is to have it from 2025 to come into effect.
But let's see, right. But the fact that they're even thinking about this stupid stuff makes me quite uneasy because it's not really here for growth or for giving you freedom or something.
It's actually for maintaining status quo. And that's what is the reason behind.
And that was kind of my thing when it came to the EU and crypto in general, that I genuinely thought that, you know, Europe, like the EU in general, I think everybody can agree since 2008.
It never really made a full recovery. Like, you know, some countries in the EU did well, but overall, our overall production output, it's quite low.
You know, America recovered, shot up, did great out of it. We've got kind of, you know, the newer power blocks that are not so much new.
But, you know, China obviously did great through that period. And we saw Russia kind of come up and go back down in that time.
I always thought that for the EU, our future is likely going to be in crypto assets because famously the EU is a very, you know, very banking centric continent, especially with the UK.
And obviously Brexit has changed a couple of things with that now, too. And Germany, other countries as well, then we had, you know, very powerful banks.
They all got hit very hard in 2008. But my general thinking was as crypto assets come into form, I think that European regulators would likely be the most forward thinking.
And that that would be kind of, you know, the new status quo that would come from the EU and how essentially it was a return to relevance.
I thought it would all come from, you know, the modernization of crypto currencies. And then we just see it.
I mean, I would go as far to say that, like, there are some states in America that, you know, while still having some, you know, backwards policies are still more crypto friendly than what the EU is turning out to have overall,
especially when it comes to DeFi and, you know, DAO spaces and stuff like that. So I'm the founder of Nova DAO. And we're not registered in Europe.
We registered in Wyoming in the US because they have the most forward thinking laws that actually protect people.
Like, and that's true. That's surprising. I mean, it's I find that crazy that it's, you know, we have to register in Wyoming because there's nowhere in the EU that would allocate the same level of, I suppose, trust and security in the EU.
In the EU, it's more, I suppose, the protections in the EU are like, you know, just don't start anything ever. And that way, everything is safe.
That's pretty much the EU stance on us when it comes to crypto. And then you've got states like, you know, Wyoming, where they brought in very forward thinking, you know, DAO laws in particular, or DAO regulations rather, I should say, that, you know, our DAO, as it stands right now, we're able to enter legal contracts with, you know, brick and mortar businesses.
We can own property. I guess there's so much kind of available to it. And there's also, you know, that safety is also afforded that, you know, this is a decentralized organization.
And if somebody within the organization, say, if I turned around and obviously I wouldn't, but if I was the type of person to turn around and take funds out of the Treasury or excuse me, out of liquidity, you know, there is a legal precedent where I would be charged and I would be held accountable for that because we are registered.
So we have all the protections that we need. We have the ability to, you know, intermingle with real businesses, brick and mortar. We have the ability to purchase property if we wanted to, other assets as well.
And that came from needing to register in Wyoming. So why is the EU so far behind that we, I mean, I would call that nearly a pretty basic business setup in a modern age, except it's decentralized.
It's just protections are afforded to everybody where needed and we're allowed, you know, the same kind of rights that somebody operating as a business would have.
And I just thought the EU would be so far ahead on this stuff. And it honestly saddens me to kind of say out loud, as we really fell behind when it came to, you know, foundries, I thought that we would be essentially housing our own, you know, TSMC and stuff like that in Europe.
As you know, we have a lot of EU VL tech is developed here, but it never happened. And a lot of that came down to, again, there were, you know, the stringent regulations against starting up these types of businesses and look one side of it as well, is that there were zero tax benefits to doing it either.
So why would you set up an EU? And then when it comes to crypto, I'm just seeing us doing the same thing. With AI, we've already shot ourselves in the foot.
I mean, we're talking about banning chat GPT at times, which is just insanity. So, yeah, I think that the EU right now, quite frankly, is making me a bit sad and how we're approaching all of these kind of, you know, modern day fields.
And I think if something doesn't drastically change in the EU over the next five or 10 years, we're really going to find ourselves relegated.
I mean, yeah, we fell behind after 2008 financial crisis, but we're still relevant. But I think in another 10 years, if we are not making, you know, good strides in either cryptocurrency, AI or, you know, in foundries, as in chipset foundries, then where does that leave us? Are we just surviving?
At least crypto is paying for us moving to another country, okay? So get some Bitcoin and make some money to be able to move your family somewhere else.
Yeah. And man, that's what...
You know what, you got it? Like, it's almost like at this point, I think this will become a real thing, like digital nomads will become a thing where people just move. Hopefully not often, but as countries get tyrannical or socialist or, you know,
too high of taxes, people will just move to other countries. I, you know, I love America so much. And I really do want to, my kind of dream is to get into politics. So that's why I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
But every week I spend at least a few hours researching, moving out of the US or maybe like Puerto Rico or maybe renouncing citizenship. And it's just the, it's a combination of, you know, way too high taxes, way too high regulations.
The government putting us constantly in fear, working in this industry, trying to build great things for people, trying to help the world and still being in fear that we're not doing, you know, we're not following the rules because the rules aren't clear.
But I think, you know, jurisdiction arbitrage or jurisdiction shopping and moving to other countries or states is definitely, we're going to see it more and more as the world becomes more, less physical and more digital, as work becomes more remote, right?
Like 50 years ago, there was no remote work, like almost none. Now, you know, remote work, I don't know, what is it, probably 20, 30% of work is like, you know, I'm just making up numbers here.
But I think as we get more digital remote work, as we get more into digital economies and people have more alliances with like virtual communities than their own, you know, at home communities, I think, I think we'll see that more.
Yeah, 100%. And see, here's the really kind of, this is the real dystopian part about it. So to circle around on that, like, I'm actually, so I'm not going to be an Irish taxpayer this year, I'll be living over in the Emirates for, well, the six months that are required to essentially ensure that I'm able to work under, you know, the regulations and the tax rules that they have over there, as Irish tax law.
Wait, you're moving to Dubai?
Yeah, I got to be six months over there. And I'm going to be six months in Ireland.
Wow. I got to hear more. We'll talk offline about this. Yeah, certainly. I got to know, actually, tell just a little bit. Give me a little, give me a little taste. What's what's going on? Yeah, how does that?
No, it's, so I mean, I've been, you know, working in the space with a lot of people over the last year or two, and a lot of them have essentially been, you know, getting residents in Dubai. And a lot of it is due to fear of regulations that are starting to come in on top of it as well. Taxes are obviously a huge part of it as well as the Dubai tax laws are essentially 0% on capital gains, as compared to Ireland, where capital gains is 33%, which is one of the highest in the world.
I have, I have the bank wires that I have to put in revenue. 54%. And that's not including, like when I add up all the different taxes I pay, I think it's probably closer to 70 or 80% in California.
So, pure income tax, I'm at about, I think it's like 49 or 50%. But yeah, so that's shocking to begin with. But crypto, when that comes to target 3% of that, it's essentially working out as, you know, I'm paying a lot more than I would pay on income, that kind of thing, particularly with trading.
We also have some frightening laws around like perpetuals and futures, where that's counted as income. So if you do, you know, one good trade, and let's say you're up 10 grand, and it turns out, you know, you wreck yourself on the next trade.
There's no relief from that. You still owe the full income tax, like, you know, 49% of that 10 grand that you had already won.
This crushed people in 2021. And I and keep this in mind, guys, moving forward, because this literally, I mean, this for like lunar digital assets for my own personal and many of my friends.
And, you know, we talked to our CPAs about this, and it's like, so much of the industry was crushed by that fact. I think what you're talking about is the fact that if you receive it, okay, if you trade, and it's income, I'm assuming that I think that's what you're talking about.
But I'm talking about, if you receive any crypto assets as pay, those are seen as income. So now let's just say you receive a million dollars. Well, if you owe 50% in California, just a round number here.
So okay, you owe 500,000 in income tax, right on the million dollars. But then, you know, just like 2017, moving into 18. And just like 2021 moving into 2022, it happened the exact same way in the exact same months almost.
When the next year, things all crash, you just locked in those, you know, you had that income last year. But now those assets that million dollars you received might be worth 200,000.
But you still owe 500,000 on it as income, because capital losses do not cancel income. Capital losses only cancel capital gains. And so you're stuck, you now you have these capital losses stored up, I still have millions of dollars of capital losses that have been sitting for years that I don't get to use until we have a bull run, or until the markets, you know, stock markets and crypto markets get better.
But then you're stuck, you know, having paid, you know, two, three, four, 500% taxes for those years, and then you're forced to liquidate assets to pay those taxes. And you don't want to liquidate assets in a bear market.
Absolutely. And this thing as well, there's a lot of kind of gray area in it too. Like, let's say you get airdropped a bunch of tokens and turns out, you know, those tokens are worth 50 grand. They sit there for six months, you might not even know they're in your wallet.
But then it turns out it gets rug pulled. And now it's worth zero. Well, you received that as income. So it could be argued that, you know, this is something that airdrop is income. Yeah, airdrops are income. Wow. Yeah, it depends on the country. Yeah, it's country by country.
But NFTs are income as well. So here where I am, that's fine. Did you say Australia? No, Australia on Europe, Europe, Australia, Australia, there has pretty good rules about that as well, actually.
I know the product lead for QuickSwap, Alexei, he's in Australia, and he was saying that, like, for example, if you take, I think staking income, but also just like vesting tokens, if you receive vesting tokens, you don't pay tax on them until you sell them.
I think that probably goes the same for like equity. But in the US, it's not like that. In Europe, it is straight up, if you're staking, then that's income.
It's income unless you're staking to secure the network. So if you're staking properly, Ethereum, then it's not income.
Yes, it's country by country again. So I think in the UK, and I believe in Ireland, it is just income, as in like the minute that, so staking to secure the network, I'm not 100% sure on that one.
But a lot of the staking farms that you would use, say, at the top of a bull run, as in, you know, degen farms and stuff like that, it's just income.
And, you know, you could easily receive, you know, 20 times your initials within a day on one of those farms in the middle of a bull run. Unfortunately, it is worth zero the next day, and you didn't sell.
And you still owe income tax. Yeah. So like, for example, quick tokens that I received for working on the project, they were seen as income.
And now I never sold those, still haven't sold them, but I had to pay a shitload of taxes on that. And I never will sell those probably. I'm not saying promising, but I probably will never sell my quick tokens.
And I still had to pay a ton of taxes on those. On money I will never get, never receive, never see.
Yep. No, this is not to cut off of the tax stuff, but, you know, taxes is like state by state, by country by country, and it's kind of different for everyone.
So it's, and so just to let everyone know, you know, we're not giving any advice.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's what I was trying to do real quick. I'd like to shout out that NARB is here. And I think NARB is David 10X is also here.
So shout out to them. So we can go to another question.
Yo, yo, yo, what's up, guys?
Were you still wanting to do the, the, I think you have like a Roman Coliseum thing.
Really quick. I've got some rapid fire questions for you guys.
This sounds fun, man. Let's reset the room then. I think you have like polygon questions, right? Yeah. So what I've got lined up here is just some, it'll be really, really quick.
And I feel like Rock and Aztec are going to answer them right away, but it's just some rapid fire questions about polygons history.
So we'll see who, who knows the history of polygon and who are the true OGs here. So if you guys are ready, maybe Rock and Aztec should just kind of shut up for a minute.
Yeah, we'll turn our bikes off.
All right. So first question is what was the first scaling solution type that polygon worked on that at the time, many believed was sort of the holy grail of scaling.
What was the first type of scaling solution that polygon worked on?
You will absolutely hear me clicking on a keyboard if I try to invent the answer.
I'm going to jump on plasma. I always thought ZK like I remember hearing that polygon with ZK tech back in like 21 or 20 somewhere around then.
This was years before that.
Someone whispered it or said it.
Somebody answered, right? I don't know. I don't know who it was.
Someone said it quietly. They were.
That was producer Darren. I know his voice.
All right. Yeah, it was plasma. Okay. It was plasma. You're right. Okay. So plasma.
It was interesting. Maybe we could add a little flavor to that. So so that was originally what Matic Network was doing.
And that was going all the way back to I want to say first started the concept in like 2018.
And I think then they went with Alpha Mainnet in like 2000. Live went in 2019, I believe.
And fun fact, we we LDA actually made the the premiere video for that. But with custom like actual real music, not just like produced, but like real instruments.
It would be cool if we could find that video. It was a fun one.
But anyways, so yeah, Polygon went with plasma. And at the time, there were other people trying to do it. There was Omise Go was a big was like really the the crowd favorite, mainly because Vitalik had a sticker of theirs on his laptop.
And I don't know if he was officially advising them or what. I forget the exact details. But Polygon, complete Matic at the time, completely crushed Omise Go.
And Omise Go was like, I mean, it was probably I forget, but I think at one point, it was probably like a top 20 or something project or something crazy like that.
And Matic completely crushed it over time. But it was cool to see that team working on on plasma, but plasma kind of fell off.
And so Matic at the time went with a hybrid, actually a plasma and proof of stake. And you could actually bridge using either.
And I believe even still to this day, it still uses plasma for the Matic theory.
Yeah, meaning not. I was about to say plasma did happen. But yeah, it obviously it didn't solve the problems that were kind of more inherent to scaling and stuff like that.
But I it's it's felt like I know that there was plasma bridging and stuff like that available on Polygon or well, just on the Matic network back then.
But I do remember OMG making that their huge thing at the time. And, dude, OMG were actually they were huge back in the day.
Like, I remember they had a very minor resurgence. Yeah.
In like two thousand and what? Seventeen or something. Eighteen, seventeen, I think.
Yeah, man, like they made a little bit of a resurgence back in the twenty twenty one market.
But I think it was just, you know, blue market kind of resurgence and everything was going up.
But, yeah, people were going to actually ask a quick swap. They wanted us quick swap to launch on their OMG X chain.
We I guess at the time politely turned them down because we were just focused on Polygon.
But, yeah, I think maybe that's when their resurgence was.
Yeah. I mean, just thinking now, if they wanted to do a resurgence nowadays, I'd actually be interested again if they became one of the polygons.
That would be pretty cool. Let's make that happen.
Someone reach out. Darren, let's let's let's reach out to them. Actually, that would be sick.
So we were going to do like a rapid fire.
Actually, I know I like this a little bit better.
No, I'm just I'm just playing.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm just derailing. Yeah, sorry. Back over to you now. Go for it.
Make us all feel you know, the history.
As you guys can tell, yeah, Rock is he knows the stuff.
So he's probably going to explain, give a little background on every one of these questions.
But speaking of ZK that you brought up.
The question is how much money did Polygon dedicate to their ZK technology fund back in August 2021?
Yes, I remember this one because I made a deal out of it at the time.
I know it was over one billion.
I think did it go up towards something like three billion at the end or something like that?
It would be a good multiple.
So it's either it's either one billion, five hundred million, two billion or three billion.
I'll go for a straight one.
I'm going to lock in that tree because I remember talking about it at the time and just saying this is an astronomical amount of money to spend on something like that.
But I remember hearing one billion and then hearing it went up from that.
So yeah, I'm going to stick with three.
I thought the official that they allocated was was one billion and they actually spent four hundred million.
So what they actually spent directly on it and it's not including like paying all their internal team on this stuff.
We're talking about acquisitions.
So do you want to go ahead?
Yeah. So in total the fund was initially at least from like the the documentation at the time, it was one billion.
That's what they initially that's what they initially stated, at least.
But yeah, in terms of acquisitions, I think between the there was was there two or three acquisitions that happened because there were more than that, but three major ones.
The three major ones, I think you're right.
Some were around. I think I remember that number somewhere around four hundred million.
But yeah, the initial fund that they stated was one billion, which was it was pretty crazy at the time because zero knowledge was still like sort of fresh in twenty twenty one.
Right. And a lot of people at that time also thought that a full blown ZK EVM would be like five years away.
But Polygon ended up launching their ZK EVM in early twenty twenty three.
So things definitely started to ramp up quickly at that time in terms of zero knowledge technology, in terms of like the research and the development and all of that.
But at that time, really, Polygon sort of was, I would say, ahead of the game in terms of ZK tech.
And now I think today most people would agree that they have the best ZK tech and the best ZK teams.
And that was August twenty twenty one when they announced it.
Obviously, they were looking into zero knowledge technology way before they announced a billion dollar fund into it.
So yeah, Polygon was pretty early to that.
Yeah, it was. So they spent four hundred on MIR, acquiring MIR.
And MIR is they're the inventors and creators and now current maintainers through Polygon, the Plonky and Plonky 2 prover systems, which are like different.
That was my next question.
So, Rock, you're so good. You're so good that you can even answer the next question.
Well, then I'll just finish with the other parts, which was one hundred.
So four hundred million for MIR, one hundred and seventy five million for Hermes and seventy five million for Myden.
And then but that's not including all the internal.
You know, they have a team of, you know, I think it's currently like four to five hundred people.
I think 80 percent of those are engineers and they're all also, you know, working together with these teams to build all this this stuff out.
And that was the next question after that.
My next question was going to be who, you know, who was MIR before Polygon acquired them and like, you know, what do they work on now for Polygon?
But yeah, Rock pretty much just answered that.
The but the next question I have is a little bit different.
It's this is a very tough question and there's no way that we know.
My bad. Just who was MIR?
I like I actually don't know this.
This is so MIR is now like Rock said they were acquired from four hundred million, which, by the way, that's a huge number.
But they are now like the Polygon zero team and behind they're behind Plonky.
So there's there's Plonky two.
And for the most part, like every other ZK team like outside of Polygon uses the Plonky two technology.
So like a lot of a lot of other ZK teams have I guess I could use the word copied Polygon ZK tech.
Some some of them even didn't give Polygon credit, but we won't get into that.
But yeah, they're the team behind you and almost I believe Plonky three is coming out.
And just to jump on that one as well, just and this is more for everybody else in the audience when it's like, you know, that people, as you said, you know, borrowed some Polygon code as well.
But Polygon made a lot of this open source.
So I mean, it's probably the most altruistic like to all of us.
Yeah, it's literally the most altruistic thing you can do.
It is, as I said, the ZK ZK tech is kind of like having a nuclear engine in the time of steam and coal.
And this is essentially like somebody just invented the nuclear engine.
It's more like nuclear fusion engine back in these times and then just said, hey, this is going to make the space a million times better.
So here it is for all of you.
I mean, Plonky specifically, as the engine is like just this incredible technology that's like other people trying to do these proofs, which are to zoom out these mathematical proofs that basically you can take.
Let's just like hypothetically say and it's the technology is not done yet.
But the concept is you could take, you know, a ZK EBM or CDK chain like, you know, we had OK, Exxon earlier.
They have their X1 chain now that's I think live.
Their testnet is live and then they'll be launching the mainnet soon.
So they can now do, say, a million transactions on this L2 of E and then condense all of that, prove that it all happened mathematically, condense it all into a little 45 kilobit proof and stamp that to Ethereum.
That's that's the end game.
We're not fully there yet.
It is working, but it's not that small yet.
And there's a lot of ways we can get it smaller with, you know, better improvements.
Protodink sharding and the Lydiums or using data availability on like Celestia or near.
There's a bunch of different ways we could get those costs down.
But that's the concept you could do.
Say it kind of provides infinite scaling because each of these L2s can do millions, billions, trillions of transactions hypothetically over time and then just stamp them very small to Ethereum and have the same exact security like expectations as Ethereum itself, which is incredible and solves the scale.
And I bet you 45 kilobit was the next answer, wasn't it?
And one good little segue to throw in there as well is that the arguments are kicking off again of what's better optimistic or ZK.
And you'll never hear that argument from anybody who actually understands ZK and optimistic.
Like what optimistic is is in the actual name itself.
They are optimistic that you are not essentially lying to them when you're putting through anything on the network and they check it afterwards.
I mean, that's how it's so fast.
ZK is we know you're not lying because we have the proof and it's stamped onto the chain.
Like it's again, it's just nuclear in the time of steam and coal.
It's you're playing on a Game Boy and all of a sudden the PlayStation 5 has just been dropped on your lap.
It's like the tech is absolutely unbelievable.
And this is why so many networks are using it.
And it's why I think I'm so bullish on Matic.
Well, to be the Paul token in the future that this is all going to be used to secure so many of these ZK networks as well.
You've got like, you know, scroll and stuff like that as well.
And it's all coming under the polygon banner, which is.
Yeah, it just a really excited for the next two or three years.
Yeah, you know, maybe we touch on on that that token portion of because I think a lot of people get very confused by this and it's really not that confusing.
So the Matic there's Matic token and there's pull token and people like, oh, well, I don't know.
Like like what if one is going to be worth more than the other?
It's not actually how it works.
It's just a simple conversion to upgrade to a new technology.
And so the Matic token is just been upgraded to the pull token.
You can hold Matic, you can hold pull on different chains.
It's you can use either different ones and they convert automatically.
It doesn't change the supply.
So it's the same thing, just an upgraded technology because they had to upgrade the token to make it be able to power not just this one chain, but to be able to power an entire decentralized sequence or, you know, prover network that will that will do the mathematical proof.
Using plonky and things we've discussed, we'll do all that for hundreds or thousands of chains.
Like, OK, X is new blockchain, like mutables, new blockchain or millions of chains.
It could. Yeah, it very well could be millions of blockchains, especially when you start to get into app chains, which is chains that they just have one application on them.
They don't have 10 applications.
And that wouldn't normally make sense very much, except for that if you get composability, which is coming to means you'll be able to communicate with other other blockchains.
So you can maybe do you can have an aggregator on one chain.
You could have, say, Uniswap on one chain, Quickswap on one chain, and then the aggregator can do a swap using both Quickswap on one chain and Uniswap on another chain and sushi swap on another chain and give the trader, you know, the end result.
Without them all being on the same chain and it won't matter.
It won't be fragmented liquidity.
The trader will get the best possible price and experience and provide tons of, you know, tons of.
Well, so the reason an app might want to do this is because, like, let's look at right now, Quickswap or let's use let's use Uniswap on Ethereum.
Uniswap on Ethereum has paid millions, maybe probably hundreds of millions, maybe maybe billions.
I wouldn't be surprised in gas fees to it to Ethereum.
But what Uniswap could now do actually is Uniswap could have its own chain or Quickswap could have its own chain as this technology progresses.
And then what they will do is now instead of paying a chain for block space, they can charge their users, either either charge them less for gas and make give them a better experience.
Or they could charge them, say, the same or a little less.
And then they take those those mining transaction fees.
And then what they do is they batch it all together, put the proof onto onto Ethereum using Polygon CDK and polygons provers and clunky and all this.
They could batch it, pay, you know, a nominal little small fee to Ethereum and then they make the extra money.
So instead of so that you do take gas out of your business model, you don't have you're not you're not splitting the money with the miners, your your users, like what they're paying to do transactions, you're not splitting it with miners anymore.
You are. But it's just very, very small because it's such a small proof, especially after protodating charting comes soon.
The best thing about that as well, like this is a real simple breakdown of it.
If you're on a chain and this chain is dedicated, say, one gaming app or anything like that, which, you know, we've already seen in the past.
Let's say, you know, you're on that chain, you have a lot of tokens from that gaming app and you decide, hey, I actually want to swap this over to Ethereum now.
And then you get like 20 percent slippage because that chain had no Ethereum.
So, you know, this aggregation layer essentially means that you will still be connected to all the liquidity hubs.
So you want the theorem or you want Matic, you're going to go through, you know, quick swap for that or you'll go through, you know, any other decentralized exchange.
And this is one of the biggest things in it that if anybody remembers a phantom.
So remember, phantom is still around.
But if anybody remembers what happened with multichain, you know, a lot of people on phantom would have swapped for USDC, which was all provided through the multichain bridge back then.
And then the bridge was, you know, drained, essentially.
So your USDC now can no longer be converted to real USDC.
So this kind of eliminates all of that mess out of it as well, that when you want USDC, you get actual USDC.
It doesn't matter if you're on a chain that's essentially completely nearly like an island for just one app.
And this is essentially, I think, you know, Polygon's real killer app that's coming out of it all.
I mean, ZK is incredible for speed and security, but actually getting the liquidity of every chain through aggregation, you know, from Polygon POSC.