Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
FOMO HOUR: ZACHXBT, MARKETS AND LAYERZERO FOUNDER JOINS
Recorded: Feb. 26, 2026 Duration: 1:07:51Space Recording
Full Transcription
Music check check whoops check okay perfect perfect perfect perfect perfect all right let's get Thank you. 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 What up, what up, good morning, good morning, GM, GM.
Thursday. Thursday, yeah, Thursday, February 26th.
2026, another beautiful day to have a beautiful day.
Hello, my coach, the house. Tyler, good morning.
How are you doing today?
I'm good. I'm coming down a little bit from what was a euphoric Wednesday.
I'm coming down a little bit from what was a euphoric Wednesday.
Tyler D. House.
We had just the green candles across the board.
When we were over 69k Bitcoin, I was just in all my chats.
I'm like, holy shit, bears are fucked.
Just going off.
We've come back to earth a little bit.
But still feeling good.
And happy ZachXPT expose day to those who celebrate.
Yeah, happy ZachXPT expose day.
I mean, he kind of said it was going to end up being underwhelming.
Yeah, right?
Because he kind of said that to manage expectations.
But I think the three-day wait is what got this thing a little hyped AF.
I mean,
and $40 million of volume
on prediction markets
did not help the cost.
But we'll get there.
We'll get there in a minute.
Obviously, we have to talk about it.
That is kind of the bomb
that just dropped
on the timeline
this morning.
So we'll talk about the markets.
We'll go through topics.
Mando is off today and tomorrow.
A little trip to take.
But at the half hour mark,
so in about 25 minutes,
we will be joined by Brian Pellarino.
Primo's joining us.
Co-founder and CEO of Layer Zero.
Really excited about that.
He's a friend and also just overall
a really smart guy.
Excited to talk about what they launched with Zero
and, you know, it's a bear market.
So it's cool to get some people on,
tell what they're building
and get the people to hear all about it.
And then last but not least, we'll pick a winner to come on the show and make some money.
Thanks to Yeet.
Sign up using Yeet.com.
Use our code FOMOHOUR.
Make sure you use our code if you want to be selected once a day.
Actually, we pick a winner every day.
So five winners per week are selected at the end of the show.
And with that being said, Tyler, let's just jump right into it.
For daily NFT and crypto analysis.
Tyler, Tim, on FOMO, our cause, the kid can't miss.
Great to match the birds.
Folks, crypto majors are green this morning, though, down a little bit from where they were yesterday afternoon.
We've got Bitcoin up 1% of the day, 67,650.
Not bad.
It did touch 70K yesterday, though.
Big, big rebound rally yesterday.
ETH up 3% of the day at 2050.
Solana up 1.3% at 87.
Amidst all these green candles yesterday, we saw $400 million shorts.
I think the shorts were liquidated pretty heavily yesterday.
We also had circle shorts liquidated.
Oh, my.
Circle stock up 35% yesterday after their massive Q4 results and earnings call,
up another 8% today.
Circle stock not slowing down.
NVIDIA, kind of a tale of two markets here.
So they posted record revenue, incredible
guidance. They pumped after hours, but then the stock sold off today. So NVIDIA is actually down
3%, which I think is what's also perhaps tampering this crypto rally a bit. In more crypto headlines,
the Ethereum Foundation did publish their straw map. This is their public developer roadmap,
did publish their straw map.
This is their public developer roadmap,
targeting seven protocol forks through 2029.
Primary features are 10K TPS,
first class privacy, post-quantum cryptography.
So post-quantum private money.
How about that?
Like the direction for Ethereum.
The Dutch government is now planning to impose a 36% tax
on unrealized crypto gains.
Oh no.
So we'll see if that one goes through.
A UK committee is now proposing temporary ban on crypto donations crypto gains. Oh, no. So we'll see if that one goes through. A UK committee is now proposing
temporary ban on crypto donations
and politics,
citing foreign influence concerns.
Can't understand that one.
And Senator Richard Blumenthal
now opening a Senate inquiry
into Binance
over alleged $1.7 billion
in transfers to Iran-linked entities,
including the Houthis.
So that's going to be one to watch.
The Bitcoin ETFs, huge inflows, $507 million in inflows yesterday.
The ETH ETFs, $157 million.
So big day from the ETH ETFs.
Bad day for the DAVs.
Maybe good, depending on your outlook here.
ETH Zillow is giving up on its ETH model.
They're pivoting to foreign markets.
They're changing their ticker.
Reactors or something?
What did they buy?
And they're just totally ditching the Ethereum digital asset trade.
So probably a net positive for broader crypto.
In token airdrop and protocol news, this was a big one out of Tether.
Tether investing $200 million into online marketplace WAP at a $1.6 billion valuation.
into online marketplace WAP at a $1.6 billion valuation.
As a part of that, Tether's wallet will enable USDT payments
directly on their platform.
So that was a big one.
Another big one, Kalshi has now fined and suspended a Mr. Beast video editor
for inside trading on Mr. Beast YouTube streaming markets.
There's also a California political candidate who got fined and suspended as well.
So we need to talk about that. The Hyperliquid team shared that 173,000 hype will be given to
the team on March 6th for the March unlock. That's $4.9 million and also less than folks
had expected. So perhaps a bullish hasn't been there. And then Goldie, GLDY, launched on base
as a new institutional grade gold-backed token with yield.
Some more gold tokens hitting the markets.
For memes, round this out.
Memes were green in line with majors.
Gork was the top on-chain mover, but really not a whole lot of action on the day.
And NFTs are mostly flat.
And that's our roundup.
That's quite the roundup.
Those hyperliquid unlocks are like nothing now.
Like, $5.5 million of unlocks.
It's like more than a minute.
I had to do the math real quick.
I saw $173,000.
I'm like, oh, that's $5 million.
I'm like, okay, who cares?
Yeah.
That's like DOI is like half a billion dollars.
So that's really not much.
But anyways, let's go through the market a little bit.
You're right.
I mean, we did go all the way up to, yeah, it looks like 70.
Looks like $70,000 was hit yesterday.
When?
I think it was overnight.
I was just during the day, but that did not work out it didn't not the best outcome
in street back is that it they gave us one day rake
not what i wanted to see following up from this basically we just shot from the bottom of the
range to the top of the range and then bounced off the top of the range i think our female quant lh
said she sold in like the 68 range yesterday.
So she wasn't buying a breakout here. So it looks like we might just be back squarely in the range.
So not, not necessarily the best outcome for the bulls. Yeah, certainly the, the donkey on
Jane street. Now Jane street's gone. So there's no more 10 AM slam. We're just free to run
every day forever. We're going to hit 1 million. we're just free to run every day forever uh we're gonna hit
1 million if we just sue jane street every day one of my favorite posts but yeah it looks like
we're gonna need a little bit more uh to to actually break through this level but 67.5 better
than 62 i will say that yeah it's definitely uh it's i mean yeah it's definitely better.
I like that post you made.
I thought that one was hilarious.
Let me find it.
Our new quant, if we sue Jane Street every day.
Where's that post?
That was great, man.
Saying that Jane Nugget no longer.
That's our new quant.
If we sue Jane Street every single day, BTC will be at a
million dollars soon. What do you guys think, chat? I think that'd be great. Seemingly,
there was no 10 a.m. slam yesterday. I don't think there was one today. I'm not going to
lie. I think we got slammed a little before that, but it's always funny. The world hunger
is because of Jane Street and everybody out I'm out there trying to collect apologies it's still William's fault
though yeah I saw one or me it's a kind of victory lap in this one okay it's not
us but yeah we can it'd be nice if we kiss the 10 a.m. slams goodbye for a
while but I think we need we're gonna need some buyers to come in alongside
G streets exit not too many buyers out there so big ones about 67 five there's but I think we're going to need some buyers to come in alongside G Street's exit.
Not too many buyers out there.
So Bitcoin is about $6,75.
There's not much to report on that.
I mean, it's still better than waking up the way we were, I think, yesterday or the day before in the $6,263 range.
That's a good pump.
I think you kind of want to maintain above this, right?
That's $6,75 price.
I still kind of think we could push above $70s.
Looks like there's appetite in the market for it.
And you said the ETF numbers are pretty high.
So that's good.
The only thing where ETFs is it goes up and then.
I know it's hard to get too excited.
You want to see it for several days in a row.
Cause we had this ping pong in the ETFs now.
Like you'll get a big day and then the next day it'll be equally as bad.
It's like,
all right,
what are we,
what are we actually doing?
ETH actually had a pretty nice day.
So ETH outperforming on the day and the week.
Still underperforming on the month.
So it depends on how zoomed in you are.
They have had their roadmap updates.
And I guess I can just kind of go into it a bit.
So yesterday they published what they're calling the straw map,
which is effectively their,
their L one protocol ambitions,
their roadmap here through 2029,
seven hard forks are driving this,
that the primary North stars of this roadmap,
fast L one giga gas L one.
So that's where 10 K TPS transactions per second via ZK EVMs are coming in.
A tear gas L two post quantum L one, post-quantum L1,
arguably the biggest headline in this.
And then privacy, first-class privacy
via shielded ETH transfers.
So it's going to be faster.
It's going to be more private and post-quantum.
It's a pretty good story.
And I tweeted yesterday, just, you know,
private post-quantum money has a nice ring to it, right?
I think ETH has been struggling with this branding problem ever since the digital oil days.
But leaning into the post-quantum and privacy, I think, is a good direction for them.
And the other aspect of this, I'm not sure if people have been seeing it, but it's been a little bit buried in their updates.
They are talking about how they are leveraging AI
to effectively accelerate this development.
So I think where their roadmap updates
had taken years in the past,
I think they are accomplishing them much more quickly now,
and they plan to continue accomplishing them more quickly,
which is very interesting
as they'll be able to continue iterating through this.
And I think there's still like the quantum overhang.
I don't know if we know exactly how big that is.
Certainly a real narrative out there, you know,
saying you want to become post quantum and actually doing it are very different situations.
So if they're able to actually get there, like in the next year, year and a half,
I mean, that feels like a pretty big deal. And the roadmap is through 2029, but it does depend
on if they're able to accelerate. So that's going to be one I'm watching. And I hadn't actually
really thought about the connection. We talked about AI, AI agents and crypto, like the integration,
but we haven't really talked about how AI developments could accelerate blockchain development
and roadmap development. And I am curious what that means for some of the bigger
players. And actually, I want to talk to Brian about that as well to see
are they able to iterate on their plans faster now?
We know the Cloud team, AI is writing all their code
because that's something that translates to the crypto space.
So I think that that was a notable one.
But I like the E setup.
I really do like the E setup.
It's a great update.
I mean, narrative-wise, and, you know, price follows narrative.
Especially when the market gets going, it's a good one.
So they've got definitely, you know, Tom Lee's got some new speaking notes for his two next CNBC appearances, right?
I would love to see Tom lean into this and not just give price targets. And I know he
does talk about fundamentals. But yeah, let's talk post-quantum. Let's talk privacy.
Post-quantum and privacy, right? It's the most important narrative that, you know, we've
seen kind of hammer Bitcoin, but also been in space right now,
especially with the pump of Zek, XMR, et cetera. So that's been a good one. I like Heath. I mean,
look, I think, like I was thinking about it, in a few months from now, you're looking at
yourself for buying Bitcoin in like the $60, I don't know, $5K range. And Ethereum in like $1,900, $2,000 range.
And even Solana, which that was a big bounce yesterday, right? I think 20% of the lows.
They say by Solana sub like $80. Are you going to be mad at yourself looking back in six months
for that? Unless you're day trading, that's a different thing. But I don't think we have a lot
of day traders listening. I don't think that's something you regret. Even Hy trading, that's a different thing, but I don't think we have a lot of day traders listening.
I don't think that's something you regret.
Even hype, that went to like $26.
Arguably, that's going to be the biggest runner of the next cycle when that goes on.
So these are the best coins in the balance.
I mean, where's the hype at now?
I know we're kind of like selling off a little bit this morning.
Yeah, but it's 28.8.
She had a chance to buy it at 25.6 actually, it's 28.8. She had a chance to buy the 25.6 actually
two days ago.
Yeah,
I don't know
if folks are going to get
their magical entries.
It's always like that,
right?
The magical entries
get front run.
I think everybody
was calling for $18 last
and $21
was the bottom
and we ran it up
to what?
$38?
$38?
Not bad.
I have a feeling it's going to be the same thing right now.
Like everybody's begging for like a $21, $22 magical entry.
And then, you know, we went to $25.
Like, you know, how much slower do you want it to go?
And then we'll see.
But yeah, that was good to see.
Bounces across the board.
It appears that Jane Street is back in the order books, everyone.
10M Slam is alive, folks. books, everyone. To name Slam is a lie, folks.
Yeah, exactly.
So we'll have... I mean, our XMR yesterday, you know, we all traded it.
We were talking about it with Mando.
That was...
Sheesh.
That went up to what?
$3.52?
$3.52?
$3.51?
Overnight.
And obviously that's getting slammed with the rest of the market.
Yeah.
It's back.
Yeah.
But I don't know.
I don't know if there's,
I don't think you should get too bullish,
but I also don't think you can get too bearish.
Like we're already solo,
right?
So it's kind of a weird,
like from a very zoomed in.
And I totally agree on your zoomed out comments.
Like I think this is a great DCA zone.
Like you don't need to worry about trying to catch.
If you think Bitcoin might go to 55, fine.
But like, are you going to be mad about a 65 intrigues
if your targets are much higher?
I don't think so.
Yeah.
Hyper zoomed in, like this is kind of a weird range to trade, right?
You kind of want to see where we go from here.
Like we had a euphoric day yesterday.
Not crazy surprised to see a little bit of a sell off.
Let's see where we can find a bottom perhaps and start to grind up yeah we'll see where that takes
us but that's really it's on the market side um what are the news though tyler we got to talk
zach xpt right so i mean we gotta go there i guess we talk about it every day the bomb dropped this
morning is it officially a bomb?
Is it like a firecracker?
Did a firecracker drop?
We got the thread.
It turns out it is Axiom Exchange,
but it's one of their BD employees,
Brooks Bauer,
handles at Where's Brooks.
Apparently he was using
information that he had access to
from working at the company to user
details and was effectively able to run what would you call it like a meme
coin like pump and dump scheme is effectively what he was able to do it
looks like going through this so bd employee has access to info that other
folks have he ended up working with some meme coin traders,
effectively some, some KOLs who are one specifically was named Marcel,
a trader that Zach says poor reputation for using his followers on X and
telegram as exit liquidity,
targeted by a large portion of token supply for meme coins.
And then they would work with them effectively to sell.
So a pump and dump scheme.
I don't even know necessarily,
is there even a grand total
listings thread?
I haven't really even been able to find one.
I think it was a couple hundred grand, no?
Or that was something else.
Yeah, I've seen like the 200K number,
but I'm not even like seeing it now.
Yeah, so during February 26,
Brooks outlined a plan to help
profit 200K quickly.
In private chats, he's shared screenshots suggesting he's already been running it. During February 26, Brooks outlined a plan to help profit 200K quickly.
In private chats, he shared screenshots suggesting he's already been running it.
So the total could be more.
But there's not even like a bottom line.
This is how much this expose is showing was done.
So first reactions.
I think it's great that Zach is doing this.
I want to expose this.
So he was retained to this report? I didn't see that part. Yeah, that's great that Zach is doing this. I want to expose this. He was retained to this report.
I didn't see that part.
Yeah, that's the last part of this.
So someone did retain him.
I didn't see that at all.
It's in the second tweet.
Yeah.
Axiom, the crypto trading platform funded by Missing Cal in 2024 after going through Y Combinator's winter 2025 batch,
it quickly became one of the most profitable companies in the space,
generating $390 million in revenue to date.
I was retained to investigate allegations of misconduct at Axiom after receiving reports.
Interesting.
I didn't see that part.
Because people were like, oh, he was paid to do it.
I didn't know it.
Arguably, the most interesting part of the story is who paid Zach to do the investigation.
Yeah, right?
Was it a competitor?
Was it someone who had been a victim?
So I don't know that we'll ever find that out.
But this kind of feels like a blip for Axiom.
I don't think Axiom is really sweating that much.
I think you fire this guy,
you talk about some new controls you're putting in place,
and everyone moves on pretty quickly.
I don't know that I look worse on Axiom now. I've never used pretty quickly like i don't know that i look worse on
axiom now after i've never used them so i don't know but um yeah not i don't know did you see the
market for it this morning was like only 14 and it looks like an insider wallet managed to
yeah there's some nice yes holders and i I was looking at that. So first off, folks, $38 million in volume traded on this market.
Insane.
$38 million traded on a $200,000 expose.
What are we doing is my first reaction to this.
And this is also a market where certain people knew the results and no one else did.
So those are always tricky spots. But I'm looking at the top and no one else did. So those are always the tricky spots.
But I'm looking at the top holders of Axiom.
Scout had 569,000 shares.
Predictor XYZ has been called out as a potential insider.
These are just allegations.
He had 477,000 shares.
So yeah, Predictor XYZ put in 65K at 13 cents.
65K bet on 8 toto-1 odds is pretty heavy.
And I haven't looked through that person's betting history, predicting history.
Oh, man.
But that's a pretty heavy bet for most folks on an 8-to-1 log.
So perhaps they knew something.
something yeah but i mean this isn't even the only market like there was 1.6 million dollars on
Yeah.
But, I mean, this isn't even the only market.
what hour of the day his investigation would drop so like we're uh the pair of markets on these
things are so this explains why the actual market the yes kept going up down up down so aggressively
like people were just building positions on it like there's a point where it was
like 47 and then went all the way down to 6 and it kind of like was stuck there it's funny and
there's probably people lost more money on this than the victims of the the expose laws like
people bet heavily on meteora meteora was saying 30%, right? There's some holders who had 80,000 shares, 50,000 shares.
So they're...
That is absolutely insane.
Mr. D'Oaks
is saying, I mean, don't they get investigated?
So yeah, so Zach is basically kind of raising
this to the SDNY.
So I think Brooks
lives in New York. So
I wouldn't be sleeping super well
if I was Brooke.
No, no, no.
Because last time we saw it happened to Nate Chastain.
So there's that.
I guess
Zach did say
it could be overwhelming because it got
too hype, dude.
This is the type of threat I could have just
gotten dropped right away.
I think he'll be careful about this next time. I don't blame him. this is the type of threat I could have just gotten dropped right away. You know,
I think he'll be careful about this next time.
I don't blame him.
I don't think he knew it was going to blow up.
He definitely didn't foresee a $40 million prediction market.
I don't think he wants that to happen next time.
I don't think he wants people to lose.
It's definitely,
again,
it's not his fault,
but I think next time we'll just,
we'll just get it all in one shove.
Yeah.
It was just a BD guy.
They're going to fire him.
They're going to be like, oh, we're going to pursue him.
They're probably going to sue him themselves.
Make the person or the people that were farmed whole because they have a lot of money.
And then water on the bridge.
It did give us some pretty funny screenshots, though.
I have to bring them up.
The other info,
the employee that was betting on the no.
There was some funny stuff, I have to say.
Like, these kids,
CT's always a funny-ass place.
Free inside info on the timeline.
That was yesterday.
Axiom is not the company being referenced since Iacky bc investigation actually no shares apply marketer free
everyone's collecting here and he literally has insider in his handle just just incredible things
happening yeah it's uh okay man i love ct honestly never gonna get over it it's um it's hilarious i'm um
yeah and that wasn't the only inside training scandal of the day so we also got the blockbuster
headline this was on my local news yesterday in the first 15 minutes. So this one went pretty viral.
So Kalshi is publishing its first ever enforcement actions,
fining and suspending a Mr. Beast employee.
So this is Artem Kaptur.
He's a video editor employed by Mr. Beast.
I guess his real name, James Stevens Donaldson.
Kaptur was trading on K Calci's YouTube streaming markets.
What words will be said, what challenges contestants will complete and other similarly predetermined content details.
Uh, so he had access to these of course, pre-release. So he had all the, the insight info.
I think arguably the most interesting aspect of this is he wagered around $4,000.
So he's, he's going, he's insight trading with $4,000. So he's inside trading with $4,000.
Like how much could he have even made?
Then the outcome of this, Koushi fines him $20,000,
which I'm guessing is probably close to his winnings
or however much he had on the platform
and then suspended him from the platform for two years.
And then kind of buried in this case,
but perhaps even more interesting, Kyle Langford is a 24 year old republican candidate in california who bet
200 on his own governor race what an idiot on kashi no you're kidding me dude and he got fined
suspended um 200 bucks no strange that's such a strange thing to do
How much did he make?
I guess I haven't seen the specific bet
He was fined $2,200
Banned for 5 years
So I don't know if he hit like a 10 to 1
So it looks like this person also pivoted to a congressional run
So maybe he wagered $200 himself dropping out
I would have to
There's no fucking way dude
I'm also very curious like
how can calci find you i guess they can only find you for however much you have in your account
right so that's that's where i'm thinking these totals are coming from um i'm not really sure
that it makes it's like why is mr fine $20,000 and the governor candidates only find 2200?
So like, what's the disconnect there?
But I think a, I think Cal C is definitely going to expect to see this headline a lot.
They get a ton of questions.
They were grilled on CNBC squawk box last week about how they handle inside trading.
So they're going to be flying this, this went up the flagpole.
So expect to see a lot of this this one up the flagpole so expect to see
a lot of this and perhaps a warning for inside traders so if it does shut that down i think that
positive or do it for like 200 million dollars i don't know but this is yeah i mean people are
people are dumb and greedy man like why would you do why would you face inside trading for
for four thousand dollars or two hundred dollars just like stop take a breath think about what you're doing oh my god anyway so there's that
i see brian is too um yeah ty did you have anything else you want to you want to touch on
i think we should bring him up i mean we can talk to other wop tomorrow when we have a little bit
more time it's a fairly meaty headline um but yeah i'm excited to talk to Brian. All right. Let's get Brian up on the stage.
There he is.
Brian Pellegrino, a.k.a. Primo, co-founder and CEO of Layer Zero.
Brian, GM, how you doing today?
What's up, guys?
Thanks for having me here.
Thanks for coming, man.
It's been a minute since we talked.
How you doing?
Great.
Busy times.
Tell me about it. We're're busy i'm assuming you're only
busier you got a lot of stuff and uh and as if you weren't busy enough with larry zero you try
you decided to launch a chain there you have it this is great we we listen by we have a few things
we want to go over with you obviously congratulations, congratulations on the launch, on everything you got coming up.
As soon as it came out, we're like, we got to get Brian on.
But quickly, but first, it would be nice if you, I mean, see, I know who you are.
Tyler knows who you are.
But if you can give our audience maybe a little refresh of who you are, what Layer Zero is, and then we'll get right into it.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Brian Pellegrino, one of three co-founders, CEO of Layer Zero Labs. Over the last five years, have built out Layer Zero.
Layer Zero today is largest interoperability protocol.
So about $100 billion built on top of us, move a couple hundred billion dollars across,
roughly 80-ish, 85% market share, which has been like a long grind because we started
from scratch.
We just announced Zero, sort of upcoming blockchain in this fall.
And before that, my sort of background blockchain in this fall uh and before that my sort
of background in history is all over the place so i'd love to hear a little bit more about yeah
sure you guys tell me i'll spend as much time as you guys want yeah yeah professional poker player
zero entrepreneur then into crypto builders would love to hear about that yeah i was i i grew up in
a town of 900 people just like a nerd with a computer. I loved competition.
I loved video games.
Went to school for computer science.
Dropped out to play poker professionally.
Played poker professionally for eight years.
Traveled the world.
Did 80 countries with my wife in those eight years.
So super nomadic.
Played the highest stakes you could possibly play.
So I did that very, very competitively for a long time.
2011, online
poker got banned in the United States. And so overnight, one day to another, career was gone,
DJ symbols, money's frozen, payment processors are frozen, found Bitcoin in 2011, because that was
how everybody moved money between the sites. Started my first company 2011, sold it 2013,
got into AI in 2013, which was like not cool at all at the time and started building
bunch of machine learning models sold them to some of the pro baseball teams wow started two
other companies uh both got acquired and then did academic research with uh with noam brown
facebook guy research uh now he's at open ai um got cited by deep mind which was like cool as a
college dropout because deepMind was the one
who got me into AI and then started Layer Zero. So I've been like in crypto for 15-ish years,
really heavily like 2013 onwards, racks of miners in my garage, like the whole thing.
Of the poker and the AI background, what's been more impactful on building out Layer Zero?
Poker and the AI background, what's been more impactful on building out layer zero?
Poker for sure.
I mean, AI is fascinating.
I love it.
It was super like, I loved our research.
I loved everything about it.
It was like at by far, when reinforcement learning first had the inflection point, it
was like the most interesting thing in the world to work on.
But poker really is, there's so much about it that is helpful when you're building a
company. And then, you know, just for like a moment of me playing at the time, I played a
lot online. So you're playing like six to eight tables at a time, playing heads up, really high
stakes, making a decision every like 0.3 seconds. Right. And so like every one of those 0.3 seconds,
you're making a decision for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and you synthesize a bunch of information really quickly. You make the best possible decision you
can make. And then oftentimes you don't even get to see what the result is, right? You just like
move on and you're conditioning yourself to not be results oriented. You're conditioning yourself
to really objectively focus on what is the best possible decision that you can make in that moment
in time. And the result like doesn't, you know,
don't worry about what happens because repeated good decision-making is going
to compound over time and that you're going to win.
It makes you not get too married to any particular, you know, hand, any,
any, any of these other things. Right. So it's like, everything is malleable.
It is just do the most value accretive thing that you can possibly do in the
moment with the information that you have.
And you just do that over and over and over again.
And if you're good at doing that, that will compound and great things will happen.
It really is such an important mindset.
I think that's why we see so many poker players go on to have success in other sectors.
We'll congrats on that.
And I want to fast forward to the future but just before we get there
this is pretty notable
so I was going back through the history
of Layer Zero and your history
Layer Zero raised $120 million
from A16Z and Sequoia
at $3 billion
during a terrible crypto winter
so this was the depths
of the 2022-2023 bear
I'm curious
how were you able to pull that off
what was that process like?
Yeah so it's really interesting.
So one, I think we're the first company ever at the time to have A16Z and Sequoia co-lead,
which is really actually important to us.
And so leading up to it, every one of our rounds, we were really super focused on a
certain thing.
Our round at $50 million was like, all we wanted was the largest
or second largest stakeholder of every major DeFi protocol. Nobody knew who we were at all.
We wanted people who were deeply ingrained in the Aave and the Uniswap and the things were like,
you wanted to get adoption long-term. And so that round was co-led by Binance and Multicoin. And
we really optimized for that around people who were like currently very active large stakeholders. Once we got to the round at a billion, that round was crazy. We were 1.65 billion in subscriptions for one hundred and thirty five million dollar rounds. You had people who wanted, you know, 50 million dollar checks and you're like, I can get you like 100. You know, it was just like really, really insane.
You know, it was just like really, really insane.
Which one meant we had, we got to really pick and choose.
We got to assemble like a really incredible cap table.
But we turned down, we turned down a term sheet at a billion five in that round to go
with a billion to get the groups where we want.
So we left like half a billion dollars on the table in valuation just to be able to
get the groups that we wanted.
And we told all of them, we said, listen, like we know exactly what we're building and
how to build it.
We don't want any help on the technical side. What we don't know is how to build a world-class company and
like that is what we want you for and that's like really what we tried to optimize for is that uh
and so like building that and then that round at a billion led into the round at three billion we
got preempted a bunch and people just like wanted larger stake and they want you know we had all of
this amazing momentum.
And so that, you know, that really was the conversation.
But that was that was the thing that we were focused on is we know in order to do this and what we want to do, we have like we really have to be able to build something world class.
And we that was not something we had done before.
We're technologists at heart.
And like that, that is what we were trying to pull out of that round.
Can we double click into that? That's incredibly interesting. So it's like,
what, so what came from that? So you understood the technical piece.
So like, what was the advisory on company billing was operations,
like marketing, like what, what all went into that?
Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's a mix of, of everything. I think, uh,
when you start in everything i had done before
was really just small groups of technologists right and you were between three and 15 people
and you built something amazing you get a bunch of traction you sell it you get acquired right and so
this was like okay you're gonna we're gonna have to do a bunch we made a bunch of like really
non-standard pretty hard decisions at the time. The first, we were at 25 people,
we were fully remote. We pulled everybody in for five months and we just like lived like
literally seven or 8 a.m. until midnight every single day, seven days a week for that whole
time. That was us getting the launch. And at the end of that, we said every single person,
like pack up your lives, move to Vancouver., we're not going to be remote anymore.
And I was like, I mean, that's like, these people have lives, they have families, and like, 100% of people did it.
We're still 100% in person today, which is like very, we get told all the time by everybody, it's so much harder for talent.
How are you going to get great people?
How are you going to do this?
And for us, we actually, like, we love it as an embedded litmus test in terms of like 85% of the people who work
here are not from here, right? Every single one of them is from all over the world. They have
packed up their lives. They have moved here and they've chosen to do like this thing. And so like
the people in the office are here to build this thing. They care about the mission.
They have like made a meaningful personal sacrifice to come and build this. And so like,
we really like that. Things we navigate with,
with like some of the larger VCs, what they've helped. It's, it is like, you know, there's so
many hard decisions. Your company is totally different. When you're at third, like sub 25
people, we were listen, totally flat, non-hierarchical, like zero structure. We're
never going to go past this. And then you hit like 30 plus and you're like starting to stand up all of these
departments. And before you do everything, right. I did every single BD call, every, you know,
every single thing was just my co-founder and I, we did all of it. We wrote every word that went
out publicly, all of it. And then you start to hire these people and you want to hire somebody
who can like grow that team, but also they're, they're like, don't have anybody working under them. So they have to be able to like do the job. Right. And like grow that team but also they're they're like don't have anybody
working under them so they have to be able to like do the job right and like finding that
intersection is really hard and then you hit like 70 and just like like things just start breaking
and then finally you have like proper departments who are doing you are doing this stuff and like
along the way there's a lot of like really messy decisions people who who were very, very early and had like, you know,
put their, bet their lives on this, uh, who like have not scaled with the company or are great as
an IC, but like not great at leading the rate. There's like really hard decisions you have to
make, how you actually get an attract talent, uh, how you navigate a bunch of these things
internally. Um, how you think about just like landing and still this is another thing
i think we pleasantly surprise people with is is even you know even our vcs we get told a lot like
you know don't get your hopes up all of this institutional stuff is like really long sales
cycles like you know one to two years we see everybody talking to them it's fine
and like we leading up to launch, it's amazing institutional adoption.
We've had an amazing reaction around it.
And like some of them like moved heaven and earth to do this, right?
Like we really have tried to take the baseline advice, but then like kind of ignore it.
Like we want to know where the baseline is.
At the end of the day, that was really what I wanted. One of the best things, one of the reasons I really love the set of VCs that we picked is like, if you're hiring for like a head of growth or for like a
certain department and you don't know, I don't know what that function should like. I've never
worked in a big company in my life. I've worked in like small technological things. Like I want
to talk to like the seventh employee at Stripe who like went on to lead growth for the entire
thing and tell me about like the early days of how they grew and all the issues that they had. Right. And so like just having this
immediate network of like, I really respected this company and the way that they've done things.
And I want to talk to the person who was like transformational and making that happen.
I found that to be just like a hugely beneficial resource.
Yeah. That's incredibly fascinating. I think we could probably do a full show or full hour just on that. But I do want to zoom in on the next thing or the thing that you're building
right now. So I saw you called the zero architecture, moving the industry roadmap
forward by at least a decade, bringing the entire global economy on chain. In my write-up,
I described it as one, if not the biggest blockchain enhancement
of the decade. So pretty big claims. I'd love to hear it from you firsthand. What is it? Why is it
so big? Yeah. I want to start with, my goal was never to build a blockchain. We were actually
very convinced. This was something we were never going to do. We had zero intention.
something we were never going to do, right? We had zero intention. And it really started
kind of two and a half years ago. My co-founder, Raz, our CTO, really, really,
like really was getting disheartened with this space. And it really came from
a lot of the early Layer 2 days and Ethereum basically pushing this L2 roadmap, abandoning
Sharding, pushing L2s and basically saying layer twos inherit the security of Ethereum.
And like, it's just like fun.
It's just like not a true, right?
That's not a true thing.
And so he was complaining about this every day.
And I was like, dude,
like all of these layer twos
are our biggest customers.
Like chill out, like take a step back, all right?
Like we're like,
we are the things that connect all of this.
This is driving all of our volume as layer zero.
And he just like kept pushing.
And, you know, he was right. It was like very clear that he was right in the structural side and eventually i was just like all right like well what what would you do right like all right just
like show me he started a whiteboard and he like we really went deep in this architecture and
naturally the way him and i were like sit in a whiteboard and just yell at each other for hours
and it's just very like well you know you're just trying to break the system, right? You have to get to ground truth and you have to
try to like think adversarial and break it and break it. And at the end of that session,
like the architecture they had drawn, I was just like, like, this is incredible. And really like
the core insight of that was that everybody else was taking ZK and ZK was clearly incredible
technology, clearly on this sort of like trajectory
for the past decade. But everybody was just looking at it through the lens of privacy.
And through us, we had heard like, oh, it's going to solve trustless cross-chain communication. So
like layer zero is going to be commoditized, right? We really started to dig and his key insight was
like, nobody was paying attention to by far the most important part, which ZK had the ability to
completely remove replication from a blockchain.
And so that is like,
to understand what that means,
if you have a million nodes in a network, right?
If you have a network with a million nodes
and you want to do some baseline,
you want all your nodes to be a MacBook or whatever,
you're bound by a couple of two things, right?
You can only run as much compute
as that MacBook can do.
I can't do stuff that a supercomputer would do.
I can only do as much computation
as the MacBook can do. And all 1 million nodes in the network reproduce that exact same computation,
right? They all download the data. They all do everything. They run the transaction. They do
the same computation. So you're paying like 1 million times in efficiency. And so his big
insight was that ZK's ability, like ZK's effectively compression, his ability to completely
eliminate the entire replication factor.
And so he drew out this architecture.
And again, this was years ago
and started to describe it.
But we didn't know anything about like ZK itself, right?
Like we thought two things that were really wrong.
One, we were like, okay, like sure,
but who knows when ZK is going to be solved?
So everyone else taking existing systems
and trying to like retrofit pieces of ZK on it. For us, we were just like, assume it's solved. Who knows when
10, 20 years, but like assume it's solved. What does the world look like? Okay, this is clearly,
and we were fully convinced, this is what the world looks like. And then it was, we thought
ZK would just be off the shelf, fully commoditized. And we talked to everybody and everybody's
reaction was like, yeah, like 10 to 20 years. Like that was like the perception, right?
Everyone's really focused on solving Ethereum in real time,
which is like, you know, 15 transactions per second,
every like 13 second chunk.
And so nobody was even close.
And so really like that was the key insight
at the beginning of all of it
was ZK was going to change fundamentally
how replication happened in the network and it was
going to introduce like massively more bandwidth etc then there's like a million things to solve
along the way so we just sort of shelved it almost for a little bit and then our our chief architect
brilliant brilliant brilliant guy isaac uh had a baby and went on paternity leave and like you do
when you have a baby and go on paternity leave he like invented a new database
um so he just like yeah you know um i did this and so he just uh he had this really key insight
that we everyone was building blockchains based on like 15 years ago right there's a couple things
that have changed like the commoditization of like disk itself. So one, just to step back, we work with,
you know, we connect 165 chains today, right? We have went and we've built from the ground up
endpoints really, really deeply. We've found crits in almost every non-EVM that exists,
but you're talking, you know, Solana, Aptos, SWE, Starknet, Stellar, Canton, you know,ana aptos sui starknet uh stellar canton you know on and on and on and on right
all of these non-evms and we sort of looked at how they scale where their limitations are like
what are the trade-offs that they make and physical storage is like universally almost
always one of the largest constraining factors and so perfect example of this was aptos chardines
did this example where they get the million tps right? And this is none of the EVM overhead.
So move VM, you don't have any of the EVM mess.
But to do that, they had 30 supercomputers, basically,
co-located in a data center, and they ran this thing,
and they were able to do it.
But actually, you could only get to like 33,000 transactions per second
for each node.
And the reason was the physical storage layer kind of became the bottleneck.
That was a tradeoff.
And so there's two things that Isaac really challenged
and eventually Raz and everyone else was,
was one, do you actually need a try?
And MPT, like people love,
there's so much hero worship in the space
that everybody just assumes you have to do everything
the way that everyone else has done.
The question was like,
is a try actually the right structure?
And the second question was like,
SSDs are entirely commoditized now.
So like, what if you just build like four ssd up and build the ideal structure there and so uh built qmdb qmdb uh is
like three million updates per second 100 times faster than the next fastest verifiable database
and even like while being verifiable if you benchmark it to the fastest unverifiable database
which is rocksdb out of facebook still 6x faster verifiable versus un benchmark it to the fastest unverifiable database, which is RocksDB out of Facebook, still 6x faster, verifiable versus unverifiable, which is like crazy. So it's a
really big breakthrough. This is now being rolled out and like every new performance-based blockchain
is basically going to roll QMDB. It's just like clear that this is the way to do things and have
log-based database, et cetera. And so then that really like reignited a lot of this.
And then once you have that and you're like,
okay, well now you've solved this physical storage layer.
What can you do?
Like, what does it actually look like?
And the next thing that comes is like
how you actually do scheduling.
And so we published this paper FAFO,
which is how you build blocks and do scheduling.
And this we showed,
you can actually do a million transactions per second
with all of the EVM overhead on a single node, right?
Single node, million transactions per second with the EVM. And overhead on a single node, right? Single node,
million transactions per second with the EVM. And that was like really crazy at the time.
And then we just like, it was just continuously, each one of these things compounded on each other
and unlocked each other. And then ultimately we get to the end state and then state was like,
oh, Hey, this is like the first heterogeneous blockchain architecture ever. And now you're
talking the ability to do like millions of transactions per second
at one ten thousandth of a penny per transaction sort of cost to the network
and scale in a way that was just.
And so then we went out and we started talking to these partners.
So the partners we announced are like, this is DTCC.
So DTCC is like $100 trillion worth of assets.
And they do $4 quadrillion a year in volume.
And then it was the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the parent company in the New York Stock Exchange, like $44 trillion of assets, largest stock exchange in the world.
And then it was Citadel, who does 25% of all equities trading on the period, the big market maker in the world.
It was like all of these groups.
And what we're hearing continuously as we're having these conversations was, we didn't think this was possible. And now it is.
That was like a huge shift. I think that's what made everybody get pulled to this, which was
really fascinating. Are they buying in? So we saw the names, the partner lineup jaw dropping,
right? You just went through it. Citadel,c ice yep arc tether um i guess what was surprising
about those conversations and kind of where are they going one was was again how how fast they
were willing to move we were told years and again some of them like really moved heaven and earth
and they were like they've been incredible as partners leading up to this and doing everything
um so a couple of things i think we're going to drop some some quotes today uh
some some clips from the event and and you'll you'll hear it for yourself really really amazing
uh amazing in terms of what their what their aspirations are what they want to do how they're
acting as partners and all this and so yeah the goal is that we're you know our goal is to is to
build this thing and we we have a really we have a, we're very opinionated in how the world is changing. Right. And like my view,
which I think, you know, it's becoming more and more apparent to everybody is
like very clear. I think nobody is questioning anymore.
The world is going to move from seven, five to 24, seven markets.
You're going to have global permissionless markets.
It's going to trade across every asset class. It's going to, you know,
all of these things are going to happen. Same thing on the payment side.
You have this sort of like revolution happening. You see Tether now, you know,
10 to $15 billion net profit of the year. It is like impossible for anybody to ignore. And so like
all of these things are changing and it's been totally different. The world, the world from 2011
until like 2022, every one of these institutions fought tooth and nail every single
step of the way. Like if they could have snapped their fingers and killed the entire industry,
basically every institution in the world would, right? And now they're here and we're like at
the finish line and we have like regulatory environment has changed. There's like all of
this positive sort of tailwind, all of this amazing stuff. And there's so much demand.
And we still have systems that can only service like a tiny portion of the demand.
And the response from everybody has been like, we're going to make all of these last mile
compromises that are largely centralizing to try to like service this massive influx
and demand.
And like, that sucks.
That like kills the whole, like, they're only here, not because they want to.
They're here because the technology has like forced them to be here. Like it has just like permissionless open systems are just better, right? It's become
inevitable. And now we're like making these last mile compromises. And so like the goal that we
set out to do, our original goal actually was like, it was more of a theoretical, can you make
a system as fast as Solana and as decentralized as Ethereum? That was a simple question we were trying to answer, right?
Are these truly divergent paths?
And what we landed on is you can make a system as decentralized as Ethereum that does millions
of transactions, you know, that is like thousands of times faster than Solana, right?
And so like the end state really is like, how do you accelerate this transition?
You see the world is moving and how do you build a
system that can be like neutral broadly decentralized in services at scale
it's it really is incredible there's a massive vision and the fact that you're able to pull it
off i am curious so that these the biggest players in the world are at the table now. You said in 2022, like they wanted to kill everything.
Is it just the tech?
Is it a combination of the tech and like without going to political like changes in the regulatory environment?
Like what in your view, like why is it different now than it was?
I view there really being only true driving factors and most things in life, but certainly on the instant.
I just spent a huge amount of time talking to the vast majority of the largest financial institutions in the world. We're
doing a lot of this as a team, right? There's two real things that motivate people. One, I think
crypto finally hit like real product market fit where you're like, listen, like Hyperliquid and
Tether make more dollars per employee than any other company on the planet period right like that alone is very hard to look away from um stable coins 300 billion and like rapidly growing like
all of these things are just happening hyper liquid does more volume per day than like you
know a lot like the robin hoods of the world like these these things are changing we're like
permissionless is like inevitable at this point it's just so very clear that permissionless is
winning at scale so one is that and two none of them were allowed to really be interested. And now that's been lifted,
right? And so now they're able to. And so the two things that I think drive most groups are,
one, unquestionably, is a fear of disruption, naturally, right? It is like,
the world may be changing. And if all of the world's markets live on chain, like what, what does my business look like? Right. And I think that's like very natural, uh, in terms of
like, you know, I think jobs and many others are great. It's like, you have to be willing to
disrupt yourself in order to like, otherwise somebody else is going to do it. Right. And I
think a lot of them, there is a fear of disruption, changing landscape and they're being willing.
We're like forward thinking about like, well, maybe we just be the ones to disrupt ourselves and own this. Another is in that same fear of
disruption is like, maybe you're seventh at something, but the world is changing and you
have the opportunity to be first. Right. And it's like a land grab. Right. And the third is just
like pure P&L. And this is, um, there are like merchant banks and there are others are really
large financial institutions, but all they view it on, they view it as a channel of distribution.
They view it as all their constituents and customers
want to move assets and get AUM and do this.
And this is just a means to an end.
This is a piece of technology.
They can give that to their customers
because their customers are asking for it
and then they can profit on behalf of it, right? So right now, I think there's really only like those two levers
and those two things. I think, again, in most situations, like almost everything boils down
kind of to those two levers. And like those, those are the driving forces right now. Those
are people are, people are serious, much more serious. I talk a lot about one thing I think we
did great as, as layer zero early on,
you gotta understand that the environment was like insane.
We're hyper competitive landscape
and people are like paying people tens of millions of dollars
to build on top of them.
And like all of this crazy stuff,
everyone just cared about like marketing.
I remember we had this huge battle
around Uniswap governance and it was like crazy.
And at the end of it, I was like,
what are we even doing? Like, if we win this, it sends one message ever. It's just like turn on
the fee switch. One message ever, right? It does like zero for the bottom line of the underlying
protocol or the business or anything, right? And so like that itself, we tried then, like it was
a huge flip of just like the only thing we care. I don't care about a marketing announcement. I don't care. You can just live in POC hell forever.
I want to find the people who are doing like something real.
And I want to find a way to like meaningfully make their business better.
And like Tether has been a great example.
We built the Tauntron Ethereum pathway.
And then USDT Zero.
USDT Zero was like, you guys already have $185 billion on all these chains.
We're here with us and the Everdawn team sort of proposing this.
We're like, let's just see what happens, right?
Bring it to all these other USTT Zero and just see what happens.
And fast forward nine months, it's moved $70 billion.
And at one point in time, it'd grown AUM by $10 billion, which is like $400 million in
the bottom line.
It's like, oh, this stuff actually matters, right? that's been like a really strong use case for distribution to others so when you talk
you know usdt zero when you talk athena ether fight invented and built native sync pools to
allow native l2 restaking like it was just find the partners who really want to build something
and go really deep with them and i think that's the same thing that was like, there are a million institutions who are like, it's so great. I'm so curious. Like I would love
to follow along. And it's like, fine. That's an okay stance to have, but we shouldn't be spending
all of our cycles trying to like tell them what they should be doing. Right. There are a couple
of groups who know exactly what they're doing. They know exactly where it fits into their business.
And like our job is to accelerate that forward and like find a way to make
that like stick, make it land.
And that's, that's where our time is being spent on the institutional side.
And now you've, you've proven in so many ways that you can do it.
I want to talk a little bit about acceleration and, you know,
the world rapidly changing in your words.
So I think it's been notable that the Ethereum Foundation lately in some of their posts have
been alluding to using AI coding to speed up their development.
I'm curious how you've seen that play out inside your own shop.
Is it making your timelines compressed?
And what other headaches come along with that?
A little bit less intuitive than i thought i thought
and it is in some ways but i thought great we're gonna have this and it's gonna like bring up the
floor of everybody 50 right all equally across all of your developers you'll raise by about 50
and what we found is like it helps everybody but our best it's been like a thousand X4. I, again, our chief architect,
one of the things like ZK is like really obscure sort of basic math. And it was like, you know,
he was like, listen, for me to become like really, really good at this, it would take me two to three
years under like the leading mathematician to do this. Right. And like in a couple of months of just pure obsession and AI,
he found like six errors in a 90 page math theorem. And he like, he is now like incredible,
right. Like at the forefront has brought in all of these other amazing, brilliant people. Like
it has taken our best people and the people who are like sort of people say highest agency all
the time and just infinitely magnified them. Uh, which is that that has all the time, and just infinitely magnified them, which is that that
has been the most, the craziest thing to me is it has had actually had a much larger effect on our
best engineers and our best researchers versus our median engineer. And I thought it would be
the other way around. I actually thought they would be the ones who would get the sort of the
least out of it in the near term. Very interesting. I'm curious, earlier on, you mentioned a few years back, some of the team members perhaps disheartened with the space. I
think we've certainly seen a trend, kind of broader state of the crypto market. A lot of
builders disheartened with the space or just packing up and leaving. What does that measure,
what's that morale look like right now? Are people reinheartened? Is the project reinvigorating
folks? But what's also the kind of broader view of the yeah i mean internally so res and ryan summed it up he summed up really amazing i think when we
gave our event on feb 10th he said listen ultimately we sort of believed these principles
and these things that we cared about would just win on their own on their own merit right and like
they didn't right it's like they like, again, people started compromising,
started doing, you realize that like,
if other people, like if the world,
if it's just not going to happen on its own,
like you sort of have this like moral obligation
to like do this thing,
take this thing that you believe in and drive it forward.
So internally, people always ask,
because we had, we launched into some crazy times.
We launched TGE into like this bear market.
We launched all these things. And like, like we just most people don't care again people are here more like more for the
mission than anything else the amount of time i hear a lot of people where token prices is one
way and like turnover happens i give up you know every three to six months i give up and i i stand
up and i give a speech at all hands but effectively like like, listen, token price is up 5X. You are not 5X smarter or better, right? It's down 5X. You're
not 5X dumber or worse. Like we care about the Benjamin Graham model of the world. Like we are
after the weighing machine and not the polling machine. And like the only way to affect that
is to build something of like real and durable value. You must create something of real utility. And like, that is the thing that we are setting, you know, that is the thing that we've
set out to do. Right. And so like, like internally, I think that is really like the catalyzing view.
People really care. And I still don't think most people like understand the full ambitions of
really what we're trying to do, but they really, really care.
And we all really, really care internally. And like that, just that matters more than anything else. So yeah, I think people are, you know, Ryan wrote this, this noble lie piece and all this
stuff on sort of where we feel the space had, had gone astray in the past, but we don't want to
spend very much time. And part of the benefit of being in Vancouver is Vancouver is like boring,
man. It's a pretty sleepy place. You're not like you know we are we are sort of
like blinders on we don't really care what anyone else is doing like this is the thing that we are
doing this is a vision that we have and like we will just live and die by that the rest doesn't
really matter to us i love it dude it's refreshing to hear and anyone listening to you talk can
clearly hear your passion uh this is incredible i know we're out of time brian maybe last question you look back five years it's 2030
and zero chain successful what will have happened yeah i mean i think so listen we are not taking i
it's so funny because we i mean we started when we launched layer zero nobody knew who we were
nothing i was like some random college dropout poker player. Nobody had, we're from New Hampshire.
Like nobody had ever heard of us, knew nothing.
We just like put in the time and worked with it, but like showed that we were serious about
what we're doing.
And we were like amazing partners.
And we just like ground our way up.
And it was the same thing when we started on the institutional side, I told the team,
I'm like, we might have 85% market share here.
We have 0% market share there. And they don't care, right? They don't care that like this random crypto protocol uses you.
Like it's time to start from square one and do the same thing and build the relationships,
exhibit, like demonstrate value and build the thing. So like, we're under no illusion that you
just like launch great new tech in win, right? And actually like the current state of the world
of like what is existing in crypto
doesn't need a million transactions per second.
It is on us to like, you have to build the whole thing.
So when we built Layer Zero,
one of the things we did is we built Stargate
alongside of it.
And Stargate now is on like a hundred plus billion dollars
of volume is like, you have to show people
what this can actually be used for.
And you have to like create your own demand early on and make it so much easier for people to integrate we are very
mean like we are not just going to launch like here's a thing hope people use it right like we
are very very very focused yeah very focused on just like you have to get that moment right um
yeah i i think again it's on us to do and like we're fine we're fully embracing that
but like the goal is not just this naive let's launch it and let's see what happens um we got
to generate the on demand we have to be the one we view it as we must accelerate that transition
we have to bring the rest of the world on we have to make the institutionals come and we have to
put ideally as much of the world as we can on this
like neutral layer of rails well clearly you guys are you're out there doing it you're you're hitting
the pavement so so hats off to you thanks for thanks for coming on brian this has been fantastic
oh yeah dude thank you guys for having me i did the development in a few months like so many chains
launched and it's just like ghost chains after like a month because all they did was like instead
of as you with the token farm and then there's nothing going on.
So I'm excited to see what you guys do to bring the people on chain
and then come back and talk about it.
Come this fall.
Happy to do it.
Come this fall.
We got a little snippet.
I love it.
So we'll have you again in the fall.
I love that.
Brian, appreciate you, man.
Thank you for coming.
That was really inspiring, honestly.
Appreciate that.
Hi, guys.
Thanks so much.
Ciao.
Yeah, this is great.
See this?
People out there thinking crypto is all about this fucking trading and prices and this and that. And Brian and a bunch of other founders like him.
The real visionaries, yeah.
What do you think of the Xero token here?
I obviously don't want to talk about it with Brian on because it's useless.
Clearly, they're building all this stuff.
And what are we going to ask him?
What do you think about your token?
What are you going to do with it?
I think that would have been a terrible question to ask.
Yeah.
I think if anyone can figure it out,
I'm happy to bet on people in this space.
Yeah.
And I don't know what the near-term price action
is going to look like, but...
He said come this fall,
there's going to be some stuff going on.
The vision's big.
The vision's...
I mean, this feels like
one of those alt coins that like you kind of like accumulate over a bear market and then see
if it's like if everything sticks and everything they're talking about you know then i think it'd
be one of the best trades on the board on a long time horizon right 465 million market cap
what's unlock market cap is Is that FDV?
Is that what they mean? No, FDV is 1.5 billion.
Yeah, it's not.
It's actually not. We know there's unlocks happening
across the rest of this year and for a while.
So you have to factor that in.
It feels like
one of those that you can probably accumulate
over a very long period of time
in a year from now. You're like, okay, this worked
out or didn't. but I like Brian.
Yeah. He's fantastic.
Someone I would bet on, um, any day.
With that being said, should we give some money away?
Yeah, let's do it.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Let it do it.
These are Farouk's
kind of guests right there.
Yeah, dude.
I mean, I love this shit.
He's actually a friend of mine as well.
I just like him.
He's just a smart guy.
He's a big supporter of the ecosystem too.
He invests in a lot of companies.
Someone said, though,
I have to say,
top comment goes to the guy who said,
Ryan, he's the inventor
of the sparkling water.
Sam Pellegrino.
That one had me
cracking up mid-show, Jesus Christ.
All right.
You guys fucking...
Let's go.
Under Oath. under oath wow here every day who is it who is it i missed it oh i don't know i don't know i don't know
other oath yeah on a road correct guy
all right guy and you want a red guy. And you want a red guy.
Yep.
All right, man, that guy's such a big... What do you want to play?
I know you want to play Lambchop.
You want to play some Omaha.
What do you want?
We had a poker player on.
Should we play Omaha?
Let's play Omaha.
We just had a professional poker player on.
Yeah, highest stakes.
Speaking of poker players, tomorrow we're going to have to unfold the drama between Hasib a professional poker play on. Yeah, highest stakes. Speaking of poker players,
tomorrow we're going to have to unfold the drama
between Hasib and his co-founder.
Yeah, that's a good Friday combo.
That's a good Friday conversation, dude.
You know, he said,
what are we playing today, boys?
I think we should play Omaha.
For the sake of time,
but also because we had Brian on.
Yeah, in Brian's honor.
What do you think, Under Rose?
He's good with it.
He says I'm good.
He says he's good with it?
I didn't see.
Oh, he did say that.
All right.
All right.
Also, the last Omaha run was so bad.
Yeah, you're due.
We might hit a double here.
I don't want to get your hopes up.
Let's go.
It can't be worse than last time.
I feel good.
Oh, no.
Aces and fours.
That's a strong two pair. Full house four. Give us that four. Oh, no. Aces and fours. That's a strong two pair.
Full house four. Give us that four.
Oh, shit. Four or ten?
Yeah, four or ten.
Hey!
Did they switch it?
That was 7.5x back then.
Oh, wow.
It became 8x?
Or am I... Yeah, I think you made me re-sing.
All right, 5.92 win. There you go.
Yeah, dude. Remember that you now have to claim
$100 every single day on the platform,
guys, when you win, all right?
When we get Mando and we're going to ask
him why. But he's our overlord, and
we love Yeet.com, and they give money for free.
So...
Let's run it back one more time
for Under Oak.
Oh! Very beat oak oh very beatable
very beatable
pair of sixes
so we both have that
so he's got a king high
wait he didn't get a flush
wait yes
is that a flush
oh you can't use three cards
you gotta use two cards
yeah you can use two
oh we're gonna cook his ass
bang
and we win the one card let's fucking go Oh, we're going to cookie that. Bang!
And we won the one court!
Let's fucking go!
Huge.
So you're walking away with $1,500 plus bucks?
$5,92 plus $500.
You won $1,534.
Let's go!
Congratulations.
Bam!
Huge under. That's Huge. Let's go.
Dude, that's a good hit.
That's a very, very, very good hit.
With that being said, we'll see you all tomorrow morning.
10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Let's go. Thank you. um ah
um Thank you.
