Welcome to episode four of Into the Cosmos.
Today we're gonna be discussing synthetic assets
and these tokenized RWAs, which are real world assets.
Just give us a couple of minutes
for just getting a few people in places,
getting some people authorized,
I'm getting our house in order,
so just give us a minute or so and then we'll get started.
I also see some familiar faces in the audience,
so great to have you guys here.
Like I say, bear with us and we'll get started shortly.
All right, okay guys, I think we've got a lot of our speakers
authorized now, Evmos, just to let you know,
if you are listening, I've just sent you a speaker invite,
so if you could accept and we'll get you up here.
Oh, actually I see Jax is already authorized,
is that because you're speaking
from your personal account, have I got that right?
Yeah, that's right, I'll be speaking.
Okay, awesome, that's great then.
So yeah, Evmos accepts if you want or not, whatever.
Cool, okay guys, so what we're gonna do first
is we'll just get started with some quick intros.
If all of our speakers can just intro themselves,
then we'll kind of move on basically to the first topic,
which is synthetic assets feast tokenized RWA's.
So I'll start, so my name's Jack,
I'm co-host here of Into the Cosmos,
I support Kinetics with marketing
through my role at Lunar Digital Assets,
which is a marketing and incubation firm
that ROC manages, I'm the chief launch officer there,
which means I'm responsible for new product launches.
So that's my short intro, ROC, do you wanna intro yourself?
Sure, good morning everyone, I'm ROC Zacharias,
co-founder of QuickSwap and CEO of Lunar Digital Assets,
which is an incubation and marketing firm
responsible for incubating projects you may know of,
like Polygon, QuickSwap, Dose Chain and Kinetics.
Always great to have your expertise, ROC.
You've been around the space a long time,
so great to have you on the space as always.
I think we should have, I'm just looking for,
Sean Melch has dropped off,
he's now a listener rather than a speaker.
So Sean, if you're listening,
we'll try and get you up shortly,
I don't know what's going on there, so just bear with us.
Space is being funny as always.
So, Jacques, do you wanna start
and then we'll go to whoever's on the Atmos account.
Yeah, no, I just had the Atmos account
just for visibility, but I'm Jack,
so I joined Atmos not too long ago
as their ecosystem growth lead,
but I've been working as BD in the space
for about seven, if you count, you know, 2013,
Just grabbed a little bit, did a small project,
that's like 10 years ago.
Been working on a lot of decentralized show show,
I don't know too much about where we're assets,
and a lot of these great speakers,
including our partners like PIF,
does a lot of work in this sector,
so I'm really excited to, you know,
ask stupid questions, but most importantly,
Well, if you're thinking that you've got a question
and you might feel stupid for asking it,
there's probably 1,000 people who are listening at home
that would really wanna know the answer to that question,
so it's always better to ask, right?
Sounds good, I'll be doing it.
So, okay, we've got Cryptoceto here.
It's probably a bit late for you, right, in Dubai?
GM, GM, yeah, it's 10 p.m. actually now.
I think the last weeks were,
I think it was a bit later, right?
But yeah, Kotlin Creator mainly focused
and also co-founder of Cosmosverse,
and SteakSuito also running Bali data infrastructure.
And yeah, I must really say,
I think, I mean, obviously we've been talking
over the past couple months,
but I think this format for the spaces
is exactly what we as kind of also
the Cosmos community really need, right?
Like getting everybody together, just talking,
learning from each other, asking questions, right?
Because I feel like Cosmos
is obviously a fragmented ecosystem,
but also sometimes, too many times, unnecessary drama.
So you guys are the drama resolvers,
and I'm happy to be here.
Great to have you as always.
And yeah, that was our kind of vision for this space, right?
So I was actually speaking to Sean
about this earlier today.
It's just, it's like we wanted this
to be like an impartial forum
for everybody in the Cosmos and the IBC ecosystem,
and its peripheral ecosystems to come together
to speak about the things that people wanna learn about,
a little bit of discussion on governance when appropriate,
and like kind of move the ecosystem forward
We also hope that the Into the Cosmos Twitter Spaces group,
which many of you guys as founders and builders,
can be used for informal networking as well,
because a lot of you guys will be introduced
to each other through that group.
And so if you've got a business
you wanna conduct with each other,
or you wanna follow up on something
that you've discussed on the space,
that group will evolve into a networking space as well.
So yeah, great to be here
and the support in the Cosmos and the IBC ecosystem,
and great to have you all.
Hey guys, Eric Weisen in here.
I am the co-founder of AstraVault,
which is the premier decks on Archway right now,
working on going multi-chain.
I also do a lot of rogue tokenomics consulting.
I designed Archway's tokenomics.
I work with Flappy Birds, a lot of other random groups.
So yeah, I'm just a general tokenomics guy.
Nice, tokenomics are obviously vital,
so it'll be interesting to discuss that with you
All right, we've got Siddharth here from Comdex.
I know you guys over at Comdex
have been in the kind of synthetic assets
and real-world asset space for a while.
We've shipped Fi and some other products.
So yeah, great to have your insights on the space.
Hey Jack, thank you so much for having me here
Just a quick intro on myself.
I'm the co-founder of Comdex.
And I think as Jack mentioned,
we've been working on RWAs for quite a few years now.
Comdex is an RWAD5 focused chain in the Cosmos ecosystem.
And yeah, a lot of exciting things on the pipeline
and would love to talk a bit more about that
further into the spaces, but happy to be here.
Awesome, I like your bad kid as well.
Cool, okay, so we've got Melch, or Sean, rather.
I always call you by your second name, man.
I don't know if it's slightly disrespectful or not,
but it's what you put out there.
Yeah, that's disrespectful at all.
It's part of my last name.
So it's a nickname that I've responded to
ever since being a kid, so it all works.
I mean, being in Cosmos' lead gen agency
over three years now, a lot of familiar faces.
But I'm excited for these and to help these grow
because like Sito said, I think it's a good time
and the right time to be bringing a lot of people together
and kind of making the Cosmos cohesive.
So excited to do it and get more teams in here
as these continue to roll on.
Great to see you, Melch, brother.
Awesome, just by the way, guys, just a quick note
for any of our speakers or any of the teams
that are supporting into the Cosmos,
if you have other teams that want to get involved
or you have other members of your team
that you want to go, just add them to the Cosmos group
and that's the place where they can request topics
and kind of want to jump in.
Cool, so we got Vincent here, I think from Hover.
Yeah, can you guys hear me okay?
So I'm Vincent, I'm one of the core contributors
We are a lending platform at heart
but mostly a yield legal system across Cosmos.
So, pleasure to meet you guys.
Great to have you back, Vincent.
We got Mark here from PIF, always a pleasure, Mark.
GM, GM, thanks again for having me.
Things the third time in a row are close
and thanks also for putting the time a bit earlier.
And oh yeah, again, happy to be here,
working for PIF, blockchain Oracle,
live on bunch of Cosmos trains and many other
and working alongside the amazing teams at genetics,
Hover, Tashi and I'm gonna blank on some of the names.
I mean, your expertise with synthetic assets
and real world assets is gonna be unparalleled,
I guess, on the price feed side.
So it'd be great to have that expertise later on.
And also, just a side note for everybody,
if you are listening or if you're participating,
if you wanna shout out the space, retweet the space,
show the link around, that would be greatly appreciated.
It helps us grow, it brings us listeners
and also makes me feel special.
So thank you for that, anybody that's done it
Cool, okay, looks like we've got Dave here from API3.
Thanks for having me on Jack, Niroc.
It's always a pleasure to be on the Cosmos Institute of Spaces.
API3 is an Oracle project.
We supply data to Carver Chain
and we have projects like Kinetics building on us.
Similarly to Mark, I'm looking forward
to be able to contribute around some of the uses
for real world data in powering protocols,
especially when it comes to synthetic assets.
And yeah, big fans of Cosmos in the ecosystem,
so excited to hear updates from everyone else as well.
Awesome, so we've got three requests.
We're also waiting for somebody from Stargaze to show up,
who's meant to be on the space today,
because obviously a lot of the talk around synthetic assets
and tokenized real world assets,
some people have discussed the use of NFTs in that space
because obviously some real world assets are non-pungible.
And so yeah, if you are requesting from Stargaze
and I've missed your request, just bear with me.
We're working on the sheet we've got to organize this space
to figure out who's meant to be speaking from that side.
Okay, so yeah, I think probably we'll just get into it
and then anybody else that pops up, we can add as we go.
Real quick, Jack, Carter's from the shade team
and I know he's got some bad wifi right now,
so he may not be able to get up,
but yeah, he's a DeFi gigabrain,
so we'd love to have him up here if we can.
I actually saw him authorized a minute ago,
but now he's not on my side.
So Carter, just request and obviously welcome back.
Carter, definitely a gigabrain.
He's on, I think like maybe two of the last three episodes,
he had some really good insights,
really some of my favorite insights.
Yeah, I think some of the discussion there
was really, really interesting.
So yeah, feel free Carter if you request.
Okay guys, so to get into this then,
I guess Siddharth, I'll start with you.
So I don't know if you want to share,
so I know you guys, you originally started working
on ShipFi and that was tokenized real world assets.
And then I remember some of the work you was doing
back in 22 with Comdex and then you kind of pivoted away
to the more synthetic side.
So I want to kind of understand a little bit
about your journey through,
because you've kind of been on both sides of this, right?
So I want to understand your journey
and then like learn a little bit about why you made
the decisions that you made.
So I think that'd be quite insightful for the panel here.
For sure, so yeah, you know,
we actually started building Comdex back in 2018.
You know, myself, I come from a background
So the first time I learned about crypto and blockchain
and everything that the tech stands for,
the only use case that like intuitively made sense for me
at the time was its application and kind of revolutionizing
the way RWAs are owned, you know, they're transacted in
and how they're financed.
And that's what kind of motivated me
When we started in 2018, of course the vision was,
you know, focused around commodities as an asset
and trying to create an economy around it,
which, you know, revolutionizes the way,
you know, commodities are traded,
the way they're financed.
And that was kind of the goal.
Of course, we launched the first iteration of our platform
around 2020 and, you know, had several institutional clients
that we onboarded and tokenized commodities there.
But whatever infrastructure and tech we had available
at the time, you know, it wasn't sufficient to facilitate
the creation of an economy that can support, you know,
complementing services like payments and financing.
And what we realized is, you know, it would be a task
for us to start building the infrastructure first
before we get into the application part of it.
And that's what kind of drove us towards, you know,
becoming more of an infrastructure layer
before we started building out the application
that was shipped by at the time.
In our journey of building out the infrastructure layer,
what we found is that a lot of the core structures
that you apply, you know, a lot of the core principles
that you apply in building a platform
that can support RWA financing are pretty much similar
to what you can utilize in a lot of the, you know, DeFi,
you know, primitives that kind of exist.
So, of course, seeing the way regulations were at the time
and seeing the kind of general lack of openness
towards adoption of, you know, on-chain assets
on business balance sheets, we had to kind of
shift focus temporarily towards, you know,
applying our infrastructure on DeFi
where it's made more sense at the time.
But, you know, fast forward now to 2024,
regulations have definitely improved,
and there is far more openness now from enterprises
and institutions to kind of custodying on-chain assets
and, you know, being able to handle them
with the right kind of regulatory framework in place.
So, it's kind of the right timing for us
to, you know, refocus our vision
back to what we originally started with,
you know, apply whatever infrastructure
we've built along the way to kind of come back towards,
you know, being the RWA-focused product
and chain in the process.
So, that's kind of, you know, broadly
what the motivations were behind, you know,
the decisions that we took along our way in the journey.
So, in some sense, it seems like a pivot,
but in many ways, it's kind of like an extension
of the same vision that we've been working on
Yeah, that's really interesting,
especially some of the insights you had around
the regulatory side, I think, definitely since 22-21.
Things have been clarified.
Sometimes, I would say, for the worse,
and some of the clarification
has not been very clear at all,
but I think we're sort of, like,
generally trending in the right direction.
Just a little update for everybody as well.
We're gonna have another speaker joining us shortly.
Cryptoceros just stepped down,
and we're gonna be swapping them out for somebody else.
Roshi from movement labs,
so they'll be contributing in space.
If you can just request again, Roshi, if you're listening,
had some issue with authorizing you just sent,
so I've just cancelled your request.
If you can request again, I'll let you up.
But yeah, so it's great to hear that insights
that are from your side, I think.
The more we can get regulatory clarity,
and the more, you know, like, you know,
some of these big funds like BlackRock and so on,
as you mentioned, are starting to move into the space.
You know, I heard Laurie Fink say recently that, you know,
Bitcoin ETF is one part of the process,
and tokenizing stocks and bonds and everything else
is something that they see in the future.
You know, these guys have the power to make this happen,
as well as, as well as just kind of, you know,
like, discussing the trend.
So it's really interesting to hear
those guys echoing some of the things
that I've heard you discuss,
and some of the other people on this panel
So yeah, really interesting.
So Mark from PIF, I don't know what you feel
about the regulatory environment around real world assets.
I know, you know, many protocols,
kind of take the synthetic asset route
because it's easier to use price feeds
and track the price of real world assets
rather than actually have tokenized real world assets.
So I don't know if you want to speak to that at all.
Yeah, I think we've seen, like,
like we've seen many perpetual protocol
or synthetics protocol launch,
like, and succeed synthetics, GMX, et cetera,
but very little tackled anything else outside of,
let's say, gold and silver and effects.
But with this Bitcoin ETF,
like maybe we'll see, like, again,
those type of like USDC or whatever backed perpetual product
on those, let's say Bitcoin ETF.
Is there, like, does it bring a big level of innovation?
And I'm not sure even crypto people on ChainTrader
would want to trade this or not in big volume.
I think the next big step is like more
when those regulated products start becoming way more kind
of like native to the crypto ethos.
and I'm gonna butcher the name, isn't it?
Like, iBit that I think daily like updates on their website
and show that what is that old, all these assets.
So I think first it start with this,
then it kind of comes from iBit to decide,
okay, what if now we would start enabling trading
those actually backed product,
but directly on trade and not just on IZ or CME or wherever.
So I think the biggest evolution we could see
would be coming from that end.
I think long-term that's like what we should all hope.
Cause even if it's regulated, like,
and with the cosmos and even the like modularity kind of,
or everything is its own chain,
we're gonna see permissioned regulated blockchain.
So I wouldn't be shocked if like,
this would be the biggest driver or the biggest adoption
or the most positive thing we could see.
Yeah, I think that's really interesting.
By the way, guys, feel free to jump in.
you don't have to wait for me to call on you.
So Jax, it looks like you've unmuted.
Yeah, at this time for me to ask my stupid questions,
I guess, for me, it always does seem to the case
that there's gonna be this spectrum of blockchains
that are more and less permissions.
I think, that's just the way how,
assets are naturally generated, right?
when you have stocks within the company,
those individuals basically control that ledger, if you will.
And I think with blockchain,
you have truly permissionless platform
for you to issue these token.
That's something that we never had before.
But I do think that, like Mark mentioned,
sorry, was it Mark that mentioned that?
But yeah, we are gonna have like these assets
that are much more private.
So for example, like NeoKingdom, Project of ours,
they're creating legal frameworks.
And one of the first assets they tokenized
was this mini disco in Berlin.
So this is a very small asset.
It's a very limited asset.
And it doesn't make much sense for that to be,
I mean, they're operating on F most right now,
So if they were gonna spin off their own chain,
it doesn't make sense for that chain
to then be completely permissionless.
So I don't know, that's just sort of my thought
that I wanted to throw out there.
Yeah, I think there's obviously, as the space develops,
there's gonna be different levels of permissionless
and different levels of decentralization as well.
And while like a lot of people in this space,
decentralization maxes, at least,
I think the majority of us would admit as well
that there's times where that's appropriate
to be super decentralized and super permissionless.
And these are the times where it makes less sense,
even if the ideal state is completely decentralized
and completely permissionless.
You know, and I think probably one thing
that we're gonna have to accept is as the big boys,
the black rocks of the world and so on
get involved in this space,
it's gonna tend towards being less decentralized
and more permissioned over time.
But I think as long as the heart and the ethos
of the industry remains that there will always be areas
and sectors of it that are completely decentralized.
And I think that's a really positive thing.
And the fact that we can have this discussion
and have a spectrum rather than just having in the past,
which was, you know, like the big funds of the world
and the big money players, they would just dictate
and almost everything was centralized and it was permissioned
and not just permissioned from a technical point of view,
but also, you know, there was certain things
that you couldn't get access to unless you had,
you know, you knew the right people or whatever
if you go back a little further.
So the fact that we've moved more in this direction
is a really positive thing, I think.
I'll be interested to get Dave's opinion.
Obviously, Dave, you're another data provider, right?
In the same way that PIF is.
And so it'd be interesting to see if you kind of,
if you're seeing similar things to what PIF is seeing
I just wanted to chime in quickly on the point
you're making about decentralization.
I mean, I've been in blockchain a long time
and a decentralization maxi,
but I think even if regulation comes to the space
in a way that makes everything less decentralized,
the other kind of tentative blockchain
or Eastern public blockchains is transparency.
Sorry, it's transparency and auditability.
And I think that's undervalued really.
If you have banks that in the real world,
we wonder if banks have sufficient assets
to have enough collateral to prevent bank runs.
Whereas if you brought that model to blockchain,
people could transparently verify that themselves
that they're depositing in a bank
that has enough collateral to cover all of its liabilities.
So even in the worst case scenario
where a lot of decentralization is lost,
I still see value in the kind of programmability
and verifiability blockchain.
And also I don't think all decentralization will be lost.
What was your question, Jack? Sorry.
So it's just in relation to synthetic assets
So obviously Mark mentioned some of the insights
that he's got from working with Pith on that side,
whereas people are getting data feeds for commodities
and that's becoming more popular.
I was just wondering if that's something
you guys have seen on API three.
I think we are seeing people wanting
to look at being able to potentially hedge exposure to
or gain exposure to novel assets.
There's not as much of that around
maybe as I would like to see.
I think I would find it interesting
if you had a leveraged perp decks
where you could trade really exotic assets in indices.
And I don't see that very often.
People seem to want to speculate on conventional currencies.
If I can just cut in there,
what would you describe as exotic?
It's just for the audience.
Strange things like, I mean, even like the price
of a Big Mac, it would be a nice one
because the kind of Big Mac tracker for inflation
is quite a universally acknowledged thing.
Just esoteric things like that.
And the problem a lot of the time
is having enough demand for these exotic assets.
And I think with blockchain adoption
will come, DEX is able to serve more interesting types
of data and allow people to speculate
because there will be a higher base level of demand.
So they won't be making this product
or this pair that just doesn't get used
and ends up being deprecated.
If I could interject just a little bit here.
It's really, really tough to do properly as a DEX.
You run into the same issue as like,
why can't Augur overtake sports betting in casinos?
And that's because like a true casino,
a true sports book can accept losses
because they aggregate liquidity.
And the only way that you can kind of accept bets
like these on exotic pairs
is if you have aggregated liquidity
which requires some level of centralization.
Perhaps that can be done through a DAO process
where you have liquidity providers
that cover the whole of everything.
And then you have like, it's still,
it's really, really tough to do decentralized.
I mean, most of the time, wouldn't it be done
where you have people LPing
and they basically act as the house
if people who are taking positions win
and the downside of people who are taking positions
win and the upside if they lose.
Yes, but certainly this is,
if I could just jump in real quick,
this is, I mean, certainly possible in web three.
I don't know a lot about the sports betting side.
I mean, with Kinetics, GMX,
and many other purpose models in the industry,
there are multiple assets,
sometimes 10 plus assets that are pooled.
basically the house is the people willing
So you could easily have a sports betting platform
that had different exotic
and types of sort of pairs you may call them, right?
One team against another or whatever
that could just be put into the houses pot
that the LPs fund and take the risk.
And if, you know, the better wins,
they pay out the loss and vice versa.
Yes, we was actually thrusting with a team recently
on the subject of exotic assets,
talking about luxury watches.
Like it basically, it was like a synthetic,
the track luxury watches.
And so I don't know exactly how they would do it,
let's say they were talking about a Rolex,
they might do like a 2008 Day-Date pool, I guess.
Or like you might do a Day-Date pool
that was just, you know, makes years or whatever.
So I think that's kind of an interesting thing.
It speaks to the same thing Dave was talking about,
It's just like more novel niche assets
I think it probably helps with the virality as well.
If you're building a platform
and you want to differentiate yourself
from the GMXs of the world,
if you can say your list, you know, Big Macs or whatever,
that's like an interesting viral marketing trick as well.
Even if there's not like a massive amount of people
that want to speculate on that,
it's just interesting to say that you can do that.
I'm just interested to know about like hedging and stuff
Like it'd be, yeah, like from an instability point of view,
they're probably a lot more unstable
than pools that can be hedged really easily, right?
Like Bitcoin or whatever.
Yes, they're difficult to hedge.
either you need liquidity providers
to take the other side of that exact bet,
or you need aggregated liquidity.
And the difficulty with aggregated liquidity
for new exotic bets is they technically have to like
pre-approve whatever new bets you come up with,
existential danger to their existing liquidity.
Even if they're fine with all the existing liquidity,
if you want to add Big Macs,
either you need new LPs to come in
specifically to take a weird exotic bet,
which is usually not going to be profitable
and kind of high risk for the users.
You run into the lack of growth, kind of like Augur did,
where they're not going to take that exact bet.
They want to just get generic APR
and so that the house can assume bets,
but you don't want to necessarily give full access
to whatever the platform chooses to put up a bet against
because lots and lots of bets are gameable.
So I guess like this is like the classic question
or like coincidence of wants, right?
And I think I understand you, Eric,
like it's really hard for us
to have a generalized wearable asset platform
just because the demands for different assets
is so different coming from different backgrounds,
knowledge, it's very difficult to say
that there's one type of robot asset.
And for the ones that does have like real estate and gold,
those markets are pretty,
they have like a very robust traditional market.
And while having them represented on chain
does open up for more liquidity,
it is like you said, it's almost like this is like a dilemma
where the smaller the asset class,
the more niche asset class, the more it benefits,
but at the same time, the less coincidence of wants
and therefore is not able to generate a big enough market
for that to become successful.
Is that how I should understand it?
Kind of, and just in general,
a lot of these problems of being able to do niche markets,
of being able to grow and scale
are solved via centralization.
So even though like I'm also a decentralization maxi,
I would love for a lot of this to be solvable
by DEXs in ways that make sense.
It's going to be very, very difficult for DEXs
to compete on niche markets on big max.
Whereas the binances or the FDXs of the world
could do that kind of thing easily
because they have the slush liquidity
that isn't constantly audited
that can take a whole bunch of bets
because their wins will outpace their losses
without having to have actions kind of take place on chain.
So like there are ways to do it.
Even aggregation, even DAOs doing things,
it's never going to be as efficient as centralization is.
So we have to really figure out
how to price the centralization
and how expensive the liquidity that you're going to put up
is compared to opportunity costs.
Like it's not an easy calculation,
but it's possible, but it's going to be tough.
Yeah, everything is harder with blockchains
given that they're these,
like when you're talking about efficiency,
they're these pretty damn inefficient,
The beauty of them is that they're incredibly secure
and they're incredibly decentralized if done right.
And that's a really big deal in the world.
And so now we have to find,
we have to solve a bunch of little mini games,
a bunch of little mini computer science problems.
And each time we solve one,
we make these platforms more and more
like the centralized counterparts.
they're better than the centralized counterparts.
I mean, for example, you don't have to trust,
Binance or FTX with your assets.
I mean, I talked to VCs and different funds
and they're all trying to hedge their bets
and by not having all of their assets
on centralized exchanges.
And there's a bunch of other conveniences,
not being as worried that the government
in whatever country you're in may like go insolvent
and have to confiscate your funds
like happened in Cyprus and Greece,
or even in the United States
where they confiscated people's gold early on.
So there's a lot of benefits,
but yeah, it is really difficult.
These things are so inefficient in so many ways,
but we're finding so many solutions through.
I mean, IBC itself was a huge solution
of like helping to unfragment liquidity and scale.
And you have roll ups as a great solution.
You've got account abstraction.
There's so many things we're doing to solve these problems.
I'm so excited just talking about it
because I love solving problems and I love to see,
I mean, everybody on this stage are problem solvers.
I think this is a good time to bring,
oh no, it's just drops off.
I was just gonna, I was just gonna interview,
sorry, I was just gonna introduce Roshi
who the minute I started talking drops off.
So Roshi requests again and we can have you on to intro
and then see, join this discussion.
Yeah, real quick, just wanted to go back
to the point Eric raised, I think was 100% spot on
and just kind of share like one of the things
that we faced on our journey
and pretty much along the same lines.
One of the things, one of the products we had envisioned
was to have synthetic assets on the complex chain
and again, focused on quote unquote exotic assets.
What we thought about was having agricultural assets,
like agri assets like barley, soybean and things like that
as synthetic assets on chain.
But of course, like deep into kind of ideation for it,
what we realized would be a big obstacle,
would be kind of creation of that liquidity
because essentially anyone who creates that liquidity
on chain becomes someone who's taking a short position
on that and in a lot of kind of skewed markets,
you wouldn't find a lot of people who wanna go short
There wouldn't be enough liquidity to support that
and you'd of course have that asset deep egg heavily
from its underlying asset.
So the only scenario in which that made sense
is to introduce some degree of centralization
where you have some white listed entity
that holds that asset or custody is that asset physically
in the real world and is then able to issue
synthetic equivalents of it on chain
to kind of hedge that exposure.
But yeah, I think 100% spot on what Eric said is
essentially you can't solve this problem
without introducing a degree of centralization
in the process and until we kind of reach that stage,
it's going to probably be that way.
Just wondering that the original synthetics design
had inverse assets as well.
So that you could have inverse ETH or synthetic ETH
to make it so that the people at LPing weren't
automatically short everything there.
Would that be a design feature that would make a difference
or is there something else that that introduces
It would, just the difference was that
when we kind of originally ideated for this product,
we had imagined it more to be like a maker DAO style
minting where you kind of over collateralize a crypto asset
and then mint the synthetic against it
and which essentially makes you a short position
Of course, with the help of Oracle's,
it would be possible to mint the inverse of the same asset
but it still would run into the same kind of liquidity
problem that we imagined where in the absence
of sufficient liquidity, you would just face scenarios
where that particular asset would very likely just get
de pegged from its underlying
and it just wouldn't hurt users in that process.
So that's kind of what steered us away
I wonder if there is like a fundamental contradiction
to having these were assets because at the end of the day,
you do have to like, I think, sorry, I forgot
who was speaking about this again.
You do need to have institution holding it, right?
You do need to have some sort of regulation to,
for I'm guessing for it to be real,
like a real tokenized asset, you still have to rely
on the legal system to enforce that.
I think one of the like the really missed opportunities
or maybe this is something that will come back
with NFTs in the future is the idea of NFTs
being an intellectual property.
I think I'm very intrigued and appealed by the idea
because it makes sense to me.
So much of our sort of digital ownership these days
are in the form of songs, movies, pictures, content
that we create, blog posts that we write.
But even with like these very natively digital assets
that has very robust regulations protecting copyright,
that's still haven't been able to make their way on chain.
So it does mix me skeptical that these other assets
that are so much less regulated in terms of chanceability,
in terms of breaking it into shares,
in terms of turning it into derivatives.
I feel like there might be a fundamental contradiction
in where assets tokenized, where assets are trying to do
and what systems there are in place to support it,
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
And just off the back of that as well,
just another thing to consider is whether or not
fundamentally you wanna participate in the market.
So I'll explain what I mean by that.
So obviously to some degree, whether you're holding
a synthetic or a real world asset that's tokenized,
you're participating in the market, right?
But in a sense, when you hold a synthetic,
you're accepting the fact that your contribution
to the market, your trade is not probably not gonna move
the price even by a micro degree
of the actual underlying asset
because you're trading a purely synthetic derivative,
And so I guess on a fundamental basis,
like what do we think as a panel about whether or not
that is a healthy development or do we think
that all participants in the market should be trading
the underlying asset ideally, this is an ideal world,
so that their trades, their positions,
then go onto like the aggregated market wisdom
that sets the price, right?
What do we all think of that idea?
I think it similarly to decentralized stable coins
falls into a debate of scalability versus security.
And that is always a bit more secure
if you're trading the underlying asset
and affecting the price in real time,
but it's gonna be way, way more efficient
And therefore synthetics will probably win out
even if it's more of a short-term play
because people will make more money of it
Same as like, you know, DJED didn't really take off
but UST did because it's infinitely scalable
even though it's not secure at all
that makes people money faster.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
And also to some degree, even though synthetics
don't affect the price of real world assets,
to some degree, it can serve as a price signal
that can affect the price of a real world asset, right?
So like if you have a niche community of traders
in one particular area that knows something
about a real world asset, but is trading synths,
what will probably happen is the price
will diverge massively and that will signal something
which will trigger other people to look into
whatever's happening with that underlying asset.
And that could signal an issue with the price feed
or an issue with the synth, or it could signal an issue
with the real world asset that hasn't been realized yet.
And so that's like, it's interesting.
Like it doesn't directly affect price,
but it can affect the price
or it can serve as a price signal.
I just think it's interesting because obviously,
the market's meant to be like the aggregate
of all of our collective wisdom about the value of an asset.
And when you do a synthetic asset, you sort of saying,
okay, my contribution to that is gonna be put over here
in a box that doesn't really mean anything,
but it can make me money in the short term
because it's a speculative thing.
So it's just interesting like philosophically
whether or not you feel like your trades
should be part of the market.
In a sense, they always are, but then with synths,
it's kind of like sectioned off, right?
So it's kind of interesting.
We have our new speakers just joined the space,
which I believe is Donovan from Astro Vault.
I'm not 100% sure if that's the correct name,
but that's the name that I've been given in DM.
So Donovan, do you wanna just give a quick intro
and then we'll let you join the conversation.
Benji, I think it means you.
Oh, right, okay, yeah, Benji, got it.
Okay, maybe we'll come back to you, could be having-
No worries, it's just my CTO who can't figure out
how to unmute, don't worry about it.
Well, spaces is particularly challenging.
I don't think it's a dev worthy task,
but I think out of all the things that we use
on a daily basis, it's probably the one that works the least.
Elon needs to fix this, I think.
Hello, yes, loud and clear, go ahead.
Hey, Jack, I don't know what's going on
in terms of what brought me up.
I would just do some stuff on the screen here.
And then I heard my name being, I was like,
who's Donovan from the Extra Vault team?
Anyway, hello, everybody.
I'm Benji from the Extra Vault team, not Donovan,
from the old TV show called The V,
for those who are into sci-fi.
Cool, so welcome to the panel.
We're just currently discussing
Synthetics V's real world assets.
And apologies for the name mistake.
Somebody sent me a DM saying to light you up
Oh, somebody dropped me in it.
I always blame Eric for everything.
It wasn't Eric in this case, so you say Eric.
Yeah, so I think that's kind of like an interesting point
about the efficiency angle.
Like Synthetics, clearly, because of the way
that they can be done with price feeds
from the likes of Pith and API3.
From a blockchain point of view,
we're just far superior in terms of efficiency.
And the market, as we know,
does trend towards more efficient solutions over time.
So then, do you guys think on the Oracle side
that we're gonna see that the use of Synthetics
is gonna increase massively over time?
Or do you think we're gonna stick
to some form of tokenized real world assets?
So obviously, we've, so like in the tradfire world,
whilst most people use them like since,
they're meant to represent the real world asset.
And you can, you know, you're meant to be able
to take delivery of said asset if you need to.
Like if you're trading like a gold contract, for example,
you know, you could, in theory,
you could take delivery of that asset if you wanted to,
even though most people use it to, you know,
for like a short-term position or whatever.
So I just think, yeah, it's kind of interesting.
That is, in a sense, like a tokenized real world asset,
even though it's not specifically tokenized.
Just before you made an amazing point on like,
on-chain or Synth, on-chain Synthetics,
driving real world asset pricing.
And I haven't seen the movie, maybe some of you have,
like about the whole GME saga.
Pretty much everyone, or all the exchanges stop trading,
what is buying or something.
And then pretty much market has stopped.
Then if you had the GME since on-chain,
Would you still keep like, keep trading open?
So, and from one perspective, it would be amazing.
Like while traditional world's blocking it,
you can actually take exposure and actually,
or give this kind of like weekends
and we had the whole BTC futures on CME.
Like does it sell the week?
I think it's a super interesting angle.
I think we're still too small,
let's say to have such an impact.
But also in here, if you link to the Oracle perspective,
is let's say PIF has a GME price feed.
This price feed comes from either exchanges,
US exchanges like SIBO, Memex, et cetera,
and traders that trade them.
If all markets are suspended,
publisher, like what would they publish?
Because the official market for the assets,
it's pretty much thought.
So here, like arguably, however you're built,
Oracle I think cannot save you for this.
Then after it's more to the protocol implementation.
And I think more and more and we see it,
I think it's a time swap going actually Oracle West.
So here in the case of real world asset,
it's a bit harder because like,
you don't have something backing it.
Like, okay, you bought GME at 200,
based on the trading of chain,
it rocks to 400 on chain.
Like at the end of the day, it's just numbers on screen.
While arguably on the web to world,
you get the actual like contract or share of the eye.
But it, I mean, I think we'll see more and more
The GME, like tokenized, no, not tokenized,
shares as of today, plus sample tokenized directly.
Well, I don't know if you're aware of this,
or if anybody on the space has some insights into this,
but a lot of trading, interestingly,
especially with amateur traders or day traders,
is done with CFDs, which are like,
they're not, I guess I wouldn't put them
in the same categories as synthetic,
but it's essentially just a contract
for the difference in the share price
when you buy it and when you sell it.
They're usually associated with predatory brokerages
where they'll take the other side of the trade,
or they'll do, they'll basically do something
that's slightly manipulates the situation,
so you're more likely to lose.
But yeah, so it's interesting, right?
Like a contract for the difference
is not the underlying asset.
And so if that's very popular
in the sort of like web two trading world,
there's no reason why synths can't become
increasingly popular in the web three world.
And I think the point you made about weekend trading
Like, you know, since, I mean,
it'd be difficult from my point of view
because if you was trading a stock,
so what one point actually I wanted to make is,
when it comes to stocks, I know from the industry
that people have an aversion to listing stocks
on perp's taxes because of the regulatory stuff.
It was something that Kinetics looked at
and obviously have the facility to do,
but I've decided not to do because of the regulatory,
the potential regulatory risks around that.
So it's kind of interesting, right?
Like, while the facility is there,
is it something that's been really adopted
Like, you guys run the price for each, right?
So from that point of view,
for the Oracles that you have that are related to stocks,
is that something that you see an adoption on?
Like, are there a lot of protocols using it?
Or are people generally shying away from it
sticking to commodities and Forex and that kind of stuff?
And I think you totally nailed it.
It's mostly what's gonna happen to me when I do it.
So I guess it's gonna be very quiet
till, let's say, XYZ legal clarity,
and it's gonna go zero to 100, or one to 100 very fast.
our goal is also to show what's gonna,
arguably technically possible today,
which to kind of also guide towards what not we should do,
but what can be done in the future.
And whether it's with those ETFs that borrows there,
But yeah, we're still so far away from seeing,
like, whether it's stocks, even ETFs,
like whether it's US ETFs, European ETFs, Asian ETFs,
I mean, I think I have three or four apps
coming to mind, that's it.
Yeah, I thought that might be the case, unfortunately.
It almost feels like somebody should break new ground
I know that that's a really difficult thing, right?
Because a lot of these protocols have legal teams
that say, don't do things like that.
Don't break any new ground, don't rot the boat,
don't put your head above the parapet.
this is like a real interest in utility.
Like the idea that you could trade synthetic stocks on chain
is a really, really good thing.
And I think a lot of people in DeFi
would wanna take positions in said stocks,
especially if it was things that are kind of adjacent
Like micro strategy or Coinbase or something like that.
I think that's something that people,
there will be a massive demand for on the retail side,
but it's just which protocols are brave enough
to take the first shot, you know?
And we have quite a lot of entities listed on our market,
which is market.apr3.org and a lot of commodities as well.
We see some use, not as much as I think be nice to see,
but surely this is one of the use cases
where a protocol that was afraid of regulation
could deploy in an anonymous manner,
sign up programmatically for the feeds
through the APR3 website.
And it could be done completely programmatically
without needing to identify any people in it.
Not that I'm saying this would be a good legal thing
for them to do, just speaking theoretically.
I'm sure as well with the increased visibility of blockchain
now that there's the ETF for Bitcoin
I'm sure that regulators will take a position
on whether blockchain based trading platforms can trade
or can be directly redeemed somehow
for these more traditional assets.
Can I ask you, you mentioned the ETF had physical settlement.
I was under the impression that that was bugged
at the last minute and they went for cash.
Only rather than in-time redemption.
Physical settlement, I think,
and custodied by Coinbase as well.
I think they buy once daily.
That's a really positive thing.
I mean, obviously, like, you know,
because these are regulated financial institutions,
I know this is a difficult word for this space,
but you would trust that they stick to the responsibilities.
But yeah, you would trust that they'd fill the ETF, right?
But at the same time, the idea that you can have
physical settlement or you can have in-kind redemptions
is really positive because it means
that there's a check there
so that if they ever did decide to, you know,
like go for 50% back, 25% back to whatever,
that the community coding theory withdrawal
and then, you know, that that would keep them
from doing really crazy fractional reserve stuff.
But yeah, I think that's quite interesting.
I'm interested to hear more from Mel,
I know you've been a bit quiet on some of these topics.
I don't know if you want to jump in with any insights or-
Yeah, you know, I think I take this
a bit of a different direction since
outside of crypto, I'm obsessed with
investing in real estate, right?
Rentals, property, and so my brain always goes there quickly
when I'm thinking about RWAs.
And I'd be curious what these guys,
what some of this panel thinks about.
It seems to be such a painful process to do it
how people traditionally invest in real estate now,
that it seems like you could free up a lot of liquidity,
fractionalize a lot of property.
I like watching what, I'm gonna put you in the name
as a property on Ethereum and what they're building.
Apparently got my eyes on like a six bed,
10 bath in Miami for 10 million.
So, you know, let's hope that bull market comes soon.
But yeah, does anybody else keep their eye on a,
about that project, what are they doing?
Cause I'm also very interested in this.
Yeah, so they're tokenizing real estate,
but they're taking the approach
where you can be a real estate agent
and like you can list a house.
I don't know the fundamentals on like
how they get around some of the regulation
and title fractionalize rentals.
You know, are you just like owning pieces of a rental?
So I can speak to that a little bit
because there was a platform that was based in the UK
They, I don't know if they're still around,
this is like three, four years ago.
They weren't blockchain based,
but I can tell you how they did it with WebS2 essentially
What they were doing was they would crowd fund
the purchase of a property.
So it would, this is like large properties.
This is not like single family homes.
This is like an apartment block with a hundred units
or whatever, you know, for a few million.
They would crowd fund the purchase of that.
And then for each property that was bought
through the crowdfunded app,
they would then start a UK limited company
that would hold the asset.
So whatever it was, the apartment block or whatever.
And then they would issue the number of shares
that would correspond with the number of units
that were sold to the various people
in the crowdfunded app, right?
So if like, you know, I don't know, whatever,
crowdfunded this apartment block,
it would issue a thousand shares.
If 500 did, they would issue 500 shares.
And then the rent was then paid out
as a dividend through the company.
And so that's how they did it.
That was using just purely traditional financial stuff.
There was no Web3 involved,
but you can see how just from that model there
that a similar model could be applied to Web3, right?
And probably the crowd funding aspect would be a lot easier
because people, I think people would be interested
for some investments that you could fund through Web3,
but they were negatively correlated to Web3
because obviously during the bear times,
it's always better to have negatively correlated assets,
I actually could see like that very easily could, you know,
like in the US already, right?
Like you have states like I think it was Nevada
that actually recognize the formation of DAOs.
So these DAOs that are formed
and governed using smart contract
actually could exert legal jurisdiction
over the assets under their control.
I think that's like a very powerful way to do it.
And like, that's how Neo Kingdom is doing it right now.
They have like a DAO that's incorporated
with the Estonian government.
And the DAO basically, you know,
the smart contracts on the DAO
mirrors the governance of the real world assets.
I think if you are gonna do tokenized assets,
you need to have that perfect mix
of like the legal enforcement,
that it's almost like that the on-chain votes
acts as the triggering mechanism for any legal actions.
Cause at the end of the day,
with like these real assets,
they really are truly real assets.
Some national government somewhere
is gonna have control of them.
So unless you have that, like, you know, again,
the marriage of the legal system
within the jurisdiction you're working with
and the on-chain governance to make it work,
I don't see how else you could do it, like, you know.
Yeah, I think that's a great point, Jacques.
Just this idea that the legal framework
has to match what you're doing on-chain.
And I think just another point about that as well
is like the, so in the UK, I can speak to this
and also probably in the majority of like European
and the US probably have similar banking legislation.
There's legislation that's to do with source of funds.
So if you wanna buy like an apartment block
or you wanna buy any kind of property really
over a certain value, you know, only after KYC
in the traditional way, you know,
with your identification and so on,
but you also have to prove source of funds.
So you can't just turn up with like a million dollars
in crypto from a crowdfunding app
and say like, can I buy this apartment?
Cause the bank won't allow the transaction to go through
because they can't prove source of funds
like everybody that's contributed there
to that crowdfunding effort probably
would have to have submitted something to say like,
okay, I bought this cryptocurrency through my job,
which I work regularly, not through crime or whatever.
And I know that, I'm not saying that
because that's like, I think this is a good idea.
I'm just saying that that's the current landscape.
And so it's difficult to imagine how crowdfunding
in the same way that you would do it.
Like if you was just moving money
from a normal bank account in a developed country
to somebody else's bank account in a developed country,
then that's kind of like seen by the system
It's like, it's come from point A, which is regulated
to point B, which is regulated.
So the government kind of says, okay, this is fine.
But if you move it from a non-regulated environment,
which usually means, which is crypto obviously,
but also it could be a non-developed economy
or a developed economy where the banking controls
are a lot looser, then the government views that
and the banking system views that
as like potentially cloudy funds
or potentially funds where the source is obscured.
And so they tend to react quite harshly to it.
And so one of the things that we have to solve
as an industry, I think is like, first of all,
we need to get some regulation that allows people
to use crypto for larger purchases, like property
in a way that's not obstructed,
in a way that the banking system accepts
that this is legitimate currency.
And I think things like the ETF are one way to do that
because this is like, now suddenly from being
something that you'd use on Silk Road
to buy drugs and guns, now Bitcoin is something
that your grandma might own in a retirement account, right?
So it's becoming more legitimate.
From a PR point of view, that's great for crypto.
And then I think the other side to that is
I think we need to encourage our regulators
on a government level to pass legislation
that empowers the banks who want the business
from the crypto community, but are worried
about their own financial conduct regulations
that empowers the banks to actually deal
with those as an industry.
Because one of the issues we've got at the moment is
when you say crypto to a bank,
they immediately think money laundering, drugs and guns.
And so that's like a huge issue that we need to overcome.
And that's only gonna come when our legislators
back us and start to speak positive, go ahead.
Well, the good thing is many big institutions
and regulators and politicians are finally saying,
hey, we are gonna see a lot of tokenization.
You have Larry Fink talking about it
all over the fucking place.
You have, I think even Jay Clayton,
I believe the ex-SEC chairman,
who was a big hawk on crypto,
but now that he's no longer SEC chairman,
he's like getting on stage with Larry Fink
and others talking about how we're gonna tokenize things
and how stable coins are gonna be great
and how Gary Gensler is too hawkish on crypto.
It's a bizarro world, but anyways,
so it's good to see because it seems very clear
that this is gonna be a better system.
I mean, I don't own a lot of real estate.
I own some, but I don't own a lot
because to have to make a bet on a property that's illiquid,
that there's a variety of reasons why,
I may not just go out and buy another house,
but if I could buy 1% or 10% or 20% of a house
through a fractionalized token, if I knew it was safe,
and in this case, I probably would want,
generally anytime there's a centralized party,
I think, I'm pretty anti-regulation as a libertarian,
but when it comes to things like centralized stable coins
where there's someone holding assets in the background
or pegged either gold or someone owning real estate
and then giving out fractionalized tokens,
that I personally, I probably would want to invest in one
that was regulated and did have proof
or if not regulated, audited and in a jurisdiction
where I could go after them if they run away
with all the property or money or something.
So that's kind of an interesting one.
As a libertarian, for me to say that,
it's kind of interesting, I think.
And actually, I don't know if we can roll from up here,
but a good friend, JXR, with his incredible mutant ape,
lives in Chicago with me and he had a really cool story
they just put on my radar about Chicago trying to do this
and he was a bit involved.
So if he's bold enough and able to come up, man,
I would love for him to come up and give details
about what he was pulling there.
Yeah, just to echo that, if you do request
and you are relevant to the panel or in any way,
you've got some points to add, please do come.
And in terms of audience members, just to be clear,
it is great to have audience members come up
Sometimes the panel gets a bit packed out,
especially in the first half.
So just bear in mind that it can be
a little difficult sometimes to get people up
so they don't feel like I'm ignoring you, essentially.
Wouldn't it be cool if not only fractionalized real estate
where you could just buy 1% or whatever,
and imagine how good the pricing mechanism would be there,
how much more efficient it would be
than when you buy a whole house.
Because people can buy and sell individual percents,
so the price would fluctuate based on that.
Hey, Benji, sorry, could you mute your, you got your mic.
Yeah, I was just, no, I am muted actually
Okay, go ahead, go ahead.
Yeah, this subject is one of fascination to me.
And some of the points have been rather interesting.
We have to not forget that 10 years ago,
the people that wanted to regulate didn't regulate.
Thankfully, we ended up where we're at now,
with the whole movement being the web three.
So I'm not really a fan of thinking
that we have to wait on anybody
to tell us how we advance our technology.
So waiting for regulators to tell us
what we can and cannot do.
God, we'd be waiting until 2030 at this rate.
I think that building a sound investment up
to be able to go to lawyers and say to lawyers,
look, nobody knows the path.
Let's do something that creates a solid legal framework
through NFTs to allow RWAs and those kinds of things
to happen sooner than waiting for any government
to tell us what we can innovate.
That's my point that I just wanna get across
I think that's a great point, man.
Like it's like the philosophy is move fast
And if the thing you're breaking is current regulation,
but it's for a better future,
then maybe that's a positive thing.
That's not legal advice, by the way,
so don't go breaking a bunch of laws, guys.
Yeah, yeah, it's not about breaking laws per se.
It's just, a lot of times these laws
just do not factor in our technology
and what we're doing is we try and push forward
and we are wherever we are being disruptive
to change and improve the state of life.
And to allow all the people to get involved,
like things like fractionalization
and be able to allow people with a less stake
to be able to get involved into the property game
or whatever the system's gonna be
to allow a greater number of people
to purchase stuff, really, yeah, and get a dividend.
Yeah, and I think a better value as well.
So from a real estate, just sticking to the real estate,
so then we're gonna go to JXR, by the way, in a minute,
because he's come up with his mutant ape, like Melch said,
so yeah, so just before we get into that, though,
if you're a small property investor, for example,
and you could go and buy a small apartment
in your local town or city,
and that might yield a modest return,
or you could get a slice of something that's much bigger,
a deal that's been negotiated by a professional legal team,
the deal is a lot better, it yields a higher return,
like that's an efficient thing from a market point of view,
because it's more efficient to have one person
managing a block of apartments
rather than just individual apartments.
So from a market point of view, it's more efficient,
and also from an individual point of view, it's better,
because you're likely to get a higher rate of return from that,
and so empowering people to be able to do things like that
is a really positive thing.
I mean, this happens already all the time,
to where developers, these kind of like project managers,
these people that, these big real estate companies,
they do development, or they make deals,
they build things, and they need funding,
but they're working with people they know well,
they're working with big institutions,
they're not working with us, or the little guys, right?
Imagine if someone in Ethiopia could invest, you know,
50 cents buying a dollar,
buying a piece of a property in, you know,
Manhattan through Web3, and I say that, and it's not a joke,
I mean, on Quickswap, you know, when we created Quickswap,
that's what we saw, you know,
when Uniswap had average trade sizes of like 20,000,
our early average trade size was like $50,
and we saw all the time 50 cent trades,
five dollar trades, three dollar trades,
and this was before any bots had at all come to Polygon,
this was very early days of Polygon,
and so we, you know, it was just crazy to see that,
and seeing like, you know, a lot of the people
of these countries were coming from like, you know,
Africa, Latin America, so yeah,
if we can open up real estate to these people,
if the regulators will allow it,
you know, that's a great thing for the world,
I definitely agree with that, I'm just gonna,
Rock, I'm just gonna move over to JXR,
because he came up to discuss that,
the thing that Melch was talking about,
which is very relevant to this, so I thought it's okay.
Hey everyone, how's it going, GM?
Yeah, so thank you, Melch, I appreciate it,
I'm not really wanting to hop on stage,
I'm more behind the scenes,
but I had something to add to this subject,
because back in 2000, with some context,
my name is Jordan Xavier, I work for myself,
been in the Cosmos for about four or five years now,
started off at Secret Network,
I advise to a handful of teams like Shade and Estro,
alter a few others, just no context,
but in 2017, I was working for a co-founder of Ethereum,
and there's a pilot project here in Chicago,
I was posted on my Twitter,
oh, if you guys look at the link I just posted,
about a minute ago, but in 2017,
I did a pilot project where they were trying to put
the property deeds on the blockchain for Cook County,
and there's a working group, it was really good,
it was a really great experience,
but unfortunately, they wanted to use
and everyone knows how many blockchains it didn't help,
and et cetera, et cetera, and it created a whole, whole fuss.
But if you guys look at the pictures,
or the snapshot I took, one of the key takeaways
that it could really help make things more efficient
and get rid of a lot of redundancies,
and we know in government,
there's nothing but redundancies,
I work in compliance, so trust me, it's a whole thing.
But one thing that they were anti-Ethereum,
but they were just not open to the idea of anything else,
it was 2017, so I completely understand,
but much brought up, it could be really interesting
because the RD government agency already tested it,
they already gave out the conclusion,
there's numerous reports about this,
and so maybe it's time for us to go back to 2017,
and pick up the ball that the technology
just wasn't there yet, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think that's a great point,
I think there's definitely a lot that can be improved
from an efficiency point of view,
just to give a personal anecdote on this.
A while ago, a few years ago,
I bought a property in the UK
that was quite an old property, it was built in 1890,
which for you Americans on the call
probably seems like thousands of years ago.
And essentially, it's an older property,
but the land that it was built on was leased
when it was originally built,
and so it's technically a leasehold,
even though it's treated as a freehold,
and so as part of the discovery process
I had to go back through basically all the deeds
going back to the 1890s to find out the descendants
of the person that owned the leasehold on the land,
and then the various companies that they'd use
in their descendants used to collect the ground room,
which by the way, is about $5 per year in total,
but they have some kind of strange claim
and so you have to keep paying it,
or you have to try to pay it.
And I couldn't help but think
when I was going through that process,
we need to fix this, this is insane.
Like why does my solicitor have to track
the sort of descendancy of the people
that own this company from the 1800s
like for like 150 years or whatever,
to try and find out who the living descendants are,
and if they have any interest in collecting $5 a year,
this is insanity, you know?
There's another thing, sorry,
there's another peculiarity in UK property law as well,
where if you live near a church,
sometimes you might have to pay
for repairs to the church.
Indemnity, yeah, that's mad.
Yeah, so this is the thing.
So there's insurance policies in the UK
called indemnity policies, which is like,
basically if this is for the church,
but it's also for other things,
like if you launch requisition due to mining or something.
And basically, yeah, if you,
the church can request or demand rent from,
not rent, sorry, a fee to cover,
to repress to the church, as Dave says.
And this is just an insane bit of legislation
that goes back to the days when the church
had a bunch of power and authority over the local community.
But this is the type of thing
that blockchain should solve for,
because all these records,
instead of individual solicitors having to request them all
from the individual physical records,
some of the stuff I got to do with this house
were handwritten deeds from the 1800s.
And I kind of think this is something
that should just be all on a database
that I can just search like Etherscan.
I feel like that'd be a much better approach.
Well, I think another real world use case.
and we used to do our budget in the air.
George, there's nowhere I can get you to be more honest
So of course, crazy as it may seem,
the windup period is like 20 minutes
just to kind of get on the runway and all that bull.
I would always notice he would write down
in his little journal what happened
and whenever he had mechanic
or whenever he needed mechanical checks
And I'm gonna ask one day, I'm like, yo, what is that?
And he was like, oh, this is my ledger.
Whenever I saw the plane,
this is the ledger that kind of continues to go through.
this is the providence of this flying vehicle.
You should probably have like very, very accurate details
and not leave it up to handwriting.
What if you can't read the handwriting?
What if it's not accurate?
What if there's chapters or days missed?
Like there's definitely software
that can be made to work in conjunction
with current web two things to make things better.
I feel that we try so hard to go to web three
that we miss web 2.1 through 2.9.
And there's a lot of money,
a lot of opportunity we had help bridging the gap
compared to expecting them to come to us
I was gonna say just adding to that quickly,
your experience of it being a peculiar inefficiency
in the aviation side is actually one of the things
that led one of the APR three contributors to join us.
I can't believe legal engineer
had an aviation law background.
So I'm pretty sure that the inefficiencies
in aviation planning and documentation are pretty well known.
The only thing I was gonna add there
is number one going backwards.
There's certainly, you don't drop one tech.
I'm from the school where you don't drop one technology
just because a new one exists, right?
The history is littered with people
that try and innovate things.
And the thing that they try to innovate on
and create a so-called solution for
is actually worse in a lot of ways than what we had before.
Hell, look at electric vehicles
compared to just using gas.
But that's another subject there in itself.
Some things are idealistic to be converted
from a real world sense into a data sense.
They make sense a lot of the time,
but the problem comes into fact
is when you really look at it from a business perspective.
And it's like, well, how many people
are actually gonna perform a search query
on this particular data set?
Therefore, how much is it actually gonna cost
to put the data there, collect the data,
maintain the data on storage and so forth?
I have seen resources, governmental resources available,
companies house and all that kind of thing.
And yeah, they have made a bit of a business out of it
where it's like a hundred quid
to get the ability to have a report
sent through to your house and stuff like this.
But often I'm not sure about,
yeah, a real scalable return on the investment
after creating such a searchable database kind of thing.
True, but my point is from the government's point of view,
if we're paying tax dollars, you wanna get a report,
you might as well get a report on something.
If you're gonna have someone do this,
it's better off having to be a government agency
versus like you said, just a regular Joe Schmo
trying to query a random data set.
Like I don't think the random person,
when you sell your house,
I'm pretty sure the report says
there's more about cutting out the middleman
of like the hold of the deeds, the licenses,
et cetera, et cetera, not the actually person
purchasing or selling the property.
Well, it depends what you're,
so part of it is like, it depends what you survey in.
So when you buy a property,
there's a bunch of surveys that get done right.
Some of the surveys are like, for example,
like when we have in the UK a lot,
is there any raid on gas present
underneath the property, right?
So, but every time you buy or sell that property,
you have to get that survey done,
which is kind of silly because
raid on gas takes millions of years to form.
And so if it wasn't there 10 years ago
when you bought the property,
it's not there now when the next guy buys the property.
But because that raid on gas survey is not on a database
that's like accessible to solicitors,
they can't just pull it up and say, yes, it's not there.
They have to request and then somebody has to send out a form
and the whole thing takes like six weeks.
So it's just kind of like some of these inefficiencies
I think can be worked out.
The thing with that is I wonder who is the one
that could have thought about that 20 years ago,
for example, and deliberately didn't
because they're making money each time
somebody puts in one of those requests for data.
That's entirely possible.
Usually at the heart of persistent inefficiencies
in the market, somebody's getting money out of it, you know?
So just to pivot slightly here,
I'm just gonna bring in NeoKing DAO to the conversation.
So this is the team that I think Jacques from Edmos
was mentioning earlier, who are doing some DAO formation.
So I don't know if you wanna intro yourself NeoKing
and then discuss what you have to contribute.
My name is Benjamin and I'm the co-founder of NeoKingdom.
And yeah, what I like about this conversation
is like we're talking about real,
like, you know, that's part of the real world assets.
And that's where I think the whole space is getting real.
So initially we're talking about synthetics,
which is like how real can a synthetic be?
Like it's a contradiction in itself.
So now the whole conversation has gone more into like,
you know, real estate and like illiquid assets
such as like real estate.
And in our case, like we're incorporating DAOs in Estonia,
but not just the DAO that we've been seeing
like these discord communities,
like it's real world businesses.
like we're not talking about real world assets,
but real world businesses.
And I think one of the main challenges
when it comes to these like the world real
is that quickly it associates
with the security token topic.
You know, is it a security token
and how do you get around that?
And then the whole regulation kicks right back in.
So yeah, we're basically just taking our approach
and like incorporating DAOs,
but not these like cyber DAOs,
like real world businesses in Estonia, like in our way.
So that's just, I don't know if there's more question
How do we, you know, just like, you know, yeah, yeah.
I've got a couple of questions for you.
So it's really interesting that you mentioned that.
So one question I have is,
so like when you, if you form a company, right?
Like a lot of the things that you get asked for is,
you know, who are the directors?
Who are the, you know, who's the treasurer
who has influence over the company and so on.
So like with a DAO structure,
I know this is going to be obvious
to the people that are in web three,
because if they've done, you know,
they may have settled DAOs or been involved in DAOs,
kind of like, at least in the web three space,
the way it's thought of is like everybody's equal
and there are contributors to the DAO,
and everything's done through democratic vote.
So I'm just kind of wondering what that looks like
from a legal point of view when you setting that up.
And if it's like, is Estonia the only company
that's friendly to this method of working
or is the other companies, other countries opening up?
Well, it's interesting question.
So basically, you know, like anything is just
as decentralized as your weakest link.
So by, let's say in our case, Estonia being the country
of incorporation for our DAOs,
like that is the weakest link.
So, you know, if it's one country,
it's the regulation of that one country
and that is, you know, in a way you could almost say
that breaks the decentralization.
On the other hand, it's not really in our case,
it's not really that Estonia has specific regulations
It's more like the, you know,
I guess our token structure,
like the way we have designed the tokens
or like the way these DAOs incorporate by separating,
like, yeah, it has a separation.
So basically the token itself in our case is the,
it's a tradable token and the benefits from it,
such as ownership and dividends and like all these things
that make these assets security tokens,
that is separated and it's only accessible
once you do certain actions.
So while inherently the New Kingdom token
the promise or like the access to the ownership
and to the dividends and to like the things
that are desirable and that make it real is only achieved,
like, or you only get that after you KYC,
after you sort of like go through these like hoops of,
you know, that people are trying to avoid,
like, you know, decentralize is like, you know,
as soon as I KYC is like, I am no longer anonymous,
I guess these decentralization questions come up.
So yeah, that's how, in our case, that's how we do it.
Oh, I have something on this that I just thought about.
I forgot about this completely.
Here in the States, a state called Wyoming
has a legal wrapper that allows DAOs
And I remember I asked my CPAs how to go about it
because it was super interesting,
but I think what it was is the state allows it,
but the federal doesn't acknowledge it.
And so that's the hiccup that was run into the roadblock,
really, that was ran into there.
But if that roadblock is no longer there,
then there are already vehicles out there,
like I said, like the state of Wyoming,
and I think Dixie, I think the scams,
that allow DAO to register its entities
and then you can start the fractalization
without having directors and all this and that.
I mean, sure, somebody's gonna have to KYC here and there,
but if they're just like a legal representation of that group
and just a participant of that group,
they don't have no responsibility.
And I believe the SEC, this year,
or probably last year, actually,
they had to drop a case against the DAO
because they didn't show up, there's no one to sue.
Just because it was included in the lawsuit,
they didn't know who to sue.
So I think there are avenues to make these rural assets
and investments there, it's just,
we gotta remember the original hurdles and maybe,
I mean, I've been in the space since 2014
and the golden rule is first one through the door,
And so, and this is nobody wants to go through the door
So I get the reservation of not wanting to do it,
but I also understand the wanting to be a trendsetter.
But you can take me down to the other ones.
So yeah, just one point and then I go to you, Jax.
So yeah, interesting what you said there
about the legal case where the SEC dropped a case
against the DAO because there wasn't anybody to sue.
I think this is like the interesting part about this.
And this is also the reason why I think
from a regulation point of view, it's a nightmare
for the traditional powers that be,
it's like the whole diminished responsibility thing, right?
If you've got a group of 100 people
and they're all contributing to something,
it's difficult to know without penetrating
without knowing all of those conversations and so on.
It's difficult to know who's actually responsible
And if the DAO is so, you know,
correctly and completely decentralized
and people are contributing in the right ways
rather than, you know, just, it's just a DAO name
only that's being led by like three people,
then it is decentralized enough
to create quite a spiky attack surface
from a legal point of view.
Now, this being said, I would offer it,
I would say to anybody that's in a DAO,
the legal framework around that at the moment
is really, really difficult.
And so I would try to put your best foot forward
whenever dealing with the authorities,
because what we want over time is for the authorities
to recognize that DAOs are not a threat
and that they're a legitimate legal structure
that a group of people can choose to adopt.
And so if we have a bunch of DAOs that do crazy shit,
then that's not gonna help, right?
If we need DAOs that are ethically run
that are decentralized enough
and that are difficult to tackle
from a regulatory point of view,
but that are actually doing anything wrong,
because then the motivation for cracking down on them
And people can then use the DAO framework
to run legitimate projects,
which is what a lot of people are trying to do.
Fun quick fact about DAOs
and something interesting they can do is,
Jack, did you see, I may have linked it to you,
because I know you on a recent spaces,
I don't know if it was this space or another,
but you said that you recommended the book,
and they talk about virtual states in the future.
Voorhees just retweeted an article talking about,
I forget, it was like a Vitalik.
Vitalik hosted some conference thing about weird DAOs
and people would pitch their DAOs and stuff.
We can post it in the Jomotron,
but really cool to see these theories
people are having about how you can use a DAO
that could eventually convert to being like,
if you buy land and then make it a physical,
like you get some kind of jurisdiction
Was there not a project with a bunch of Bitcoiners
Is it, I don't know, maybe Liberland?
Yeah, going back many years,
there was like a kind of push from a lot of the Bitcoin
markets to create like a breakaway physical area
with its own laws and stuff.
But yeah, it might have been Liberland.
It's been talked about for a while.
I would be so, so happy if this can be pulled off.
Well, you know, some of the small Pacific Island nations
like Palau are moving towards,
not exactly a DAO framework,
but they're moving much towards like
accommodating digital nomads
and trying to create legislation that's friendly.
And I think one thing that that book talks about a lot
is the idea that right now,
the situation is that you're born somewhere
and the government doesn't have to compete for your labor
over the course of your life.
You just, it just gets it because you were born there
and most people aren't likely to move out of the country
But now, because transport is so good
and because communication is so good,
you know, you can FaceTime somebody
on the other side of the world with like, you know,
for free basically, because you can, you know,
just pay your wifi bill and then you can go on the wifi
and use WhatsApp or whatever.
And there's loads of apps that can do that, which is great.
It's accessible to everybody, basically, very little cost.
So communication is great, transport is great.
Online banking and crypto and stuff
means that you can send funds anywhere in the world.
So all these kinds of pieces have fallen into place now
where you can be born in one country
and decide to legitimately move your entire life
and your work and everything else
to a completely different country
and have very little impact on your actual life.
And this is where now for the first time in this decade,
governments are gonna have to start to be more competitive.
So instead of the government having a monopoly
on services, right, like they, you know,
you're gonna get your healthcare from them,
you're gonna get your education from them
and then you're gonna, you know, grow old
and get your elderly care from them as well
and then you're gonna die there.
Instead, you know, if a government isn't competitive,
Now, for some places around the world,
Like in the US, the government, for some or no reason,
still demands tax revenue even when you don't live there,
which is insane to me, but that's the system you guys have.
And so, but eventually, and I think the majority
of countries are going in this direction,
they will start to have to market themselves a little bit.
And so that won't be, it will be a small thing at first,
like a trickle, but eventually I think it will be a flood
and it's like, you know, advertising competitive tax rates,
competitive services and so on and a safer environment.
And this is all kinds of things that have happened
in the last 10 years as we move more
towards a digital economy and also a decentralized economy.
It's really interesting to see, and you're right,
the book, The Sovereign Individual does speak to this
and that was written in I think 99.
So very, very, a lot of foresight in that book.
If we can get, and I believe, I really believe
that the world moves in a positive direction.
Like it moves in the right direction.
At times it swings in the wrong way
in shorter time periods, right?
We have like dark ages and, you know,
weird things that happen, but communism was a bad,
it was a bad, you know, the world started moving
in a bad direction, for example, in my opinion.
But I think if we can, I think over time
things will move in a more positive direction,
even if at times, like right now I think we're on a,
on the micro, we're losing freedom and privacy,
but like on the, if you zoom out, we're actually,
like freedom is highest, if you look far enough back,
you know, it's been on a positive trend.
And I think the pendulum will swing
and I think people of the, of earth,
not just of countries, but of earth will,
the whole planet, the whole species will,
will push for this kind of stuff,
like competition amongst governments.
That is the way like consumers win, when businesses compete,
citizens win, when countries compete.
But yeah, I completely agree.
And I think like the more that we can make our voices heard
and more importantly, you know, vote with your finances
and in other methods are actually hurt.
So like, you know, going out on, this is,
I'm not, not advocating protest,
because obviously that's your democratic right
to go out and protest, but I would caution anybody
that is disenfranchised or a little annoyed at the moment
about the way the government's acting,
protesting, it looks very obviously like the right thing
to do because it makes a lot of noise and it disrupts things,
but it very rarely actually gets anything done.
Usually the ways to actually influence the situation
is something a little more subtle.
And that can be the way that you, you know,
voting for example, depending on what country you're in
Another way might be lobbying or trying to move the needle
in terms of the way your government views
a particular issue, like over in this election cycle
in the US, for example, this is going to be
the first election cycle where cryptocurrency and Bitcoin
ownership is a massive thing with various candidates
advertising their allegiance or disavowing
various cryptocurrencies.
I know that like, you know, candidates, for example,
like Kennedy Jr. is talking about Robert F. Kennedy,
Yeah, R.F. K. Jr., that's it, right, right.
Yeah, he's like very pro-Bitcoin,
he's vocally pro-Bitcoin, you've got, you know,
some other candidates as well talking about this.
And so like for the first time, after this has been like a,
there's I think like five different candidates that are,
there's this one, and I think like this has been a fringe
issue for a decade, it's been a fringe issue for a decade.
It's been a reasonably niche issue for like five years.
And I think finally, it's becoming a mainstream issue,
which is like, you know, we have to get
control over the currency.
This is an unsustainable fiscal path.
That's actually a quote, an unsustainable fiscal path
is a quote from, I think, Jerome Powell last week.
This is like the, you know, the US
is on an unsustainable fiscal path.
And this is the head of the Federal Reserve.
So it's like, this is when you central bankers
saying things like that, this is a very bad situation.
And so this is why you see presidential candidates
embracing technologies that might help solve that problem.
And so it's interesting, but like I said,
this has been an effort, like a really big effort,
thanks mostly to the Bitcoin community,
lobbying and lobbying and lobbying for more than a decade
to get this into the mainstream.
And now you've got presidential candidates
finally that are talking about it.
By the way, shout out to Jerome Powell for saying that,
for being seriously, for being honest.
For actually saying that we have a problem, you know,
like it's so often, especially in his position, say,
you know, to admit that, you know,
either himself or others involved,
I guess he's kind of deflecting and putting it
as a fiscal thing, not a, you know,
a management of the money supply and inflation and stuff.
But either way, shout out to him for actually being,
you know, honest for once.
Yeah, saying the quiet pile, that.
But yeah, I think like, I mean,
that's a positive thing, right?
You have to have, even if, I mean,
we've spoken about this before,
the idea that you have elected,
like people in official capacities
that are working for the government,
have like their official position.
And then they have what they actually think,
which doesn't always correlate.
And it's difficult as a citizen of a country
that might be engaged in things like, you know,
massive financial manipulation or whatever,
Because on the one hand, you know,
the government doesn't want to panic you.
And once, you know, in theory,
tries to look out for its citizens' best interests,
I say that with a pinch of salt, obviously,
but they kind of take a greater good approach
which is that the individual citizen doesn't matter,
And so they try and manage the economy
But the problem with that is often,
that means that they'll lie to you.
And so it's very difficult to navigate that space.
And like, when we talk about DAOs, real world assets,
investing, crypto and all that kind of stuff,
it's very difficult sometimes to look through the fog
of official positions and government messaging
and propaganda in some cases,
and see what is the actual truth.
Because the truth is the only thing
that's gonna allow you to build a map of the world,
a framework from which you can operate
and invest in from an investing point of view,
that really matters to you.
Well, they lied to you for your own good though, man.
Come on, you gotta, let them tell their lies.
the parent tells them about that Santa Claus is coming,
Do you know, I know you're saying that cynically,
but I kind of half believe that.
I don't believe it's because they're like all loving,
entities that really wanna look after us.
I just think that sometimes,
our own good and their own good align.
And so they kind of do things
that seem to be for our own good.
so like Jerome Powell this week, right?
The US is on an unsustainable fiscal path.
It has been since the 1970s, right?
When they de pegged the dollar to gold
and they started printing fiat.
Everybody, most economists from that point knew
that we would end up somewhere like we are today
with massive inflation, you know,
what is it like 50% of the dollars
that have ever existed have been printed
in the last couple of years.
Everybody knew that we would get to that point
because it was just a kind of mathematical thing, right?
If you borrow more than you bring it in
and you do that year on year on year,
you're gonna get compound inflation.
And if you don't manage that,
it's gonna get out of control.
Governments are always gonna overspend
if you give a group of people the ability
they're always gonna try and do that
because the party wants to get reelected each year.
And so they're gonna keep doing that.
So there's not really a way to get around it.
if the economists in 1970 would have scared everybody
to death and said, yes, you know,
it's gonna crash and burn.
And that was just the way the Federal Reserve acted
despite having to do what the legislators told it to do.
It just meant more money.
That wouldn't necessarily have helped the situation either.
And so it's kind of like the acknowledge
but then they do the best to mitigate it
and it doesn't always work very well.
And then you've got other things like,
put politicians acting cynically and stuff,
which is a separate issue, I think.
We've kind of veered from the topic a bit.
Let's just agree with the fact that like,
let's use Bitcoin as an example.
If you create synthetic Bitcoin
and if it doesn't settle using real Bitcoin,
and let's just say, hypothetically,
whatever platform you built that with
or suite of platforms or lots of different platforms,
let's say that became large.
Let's say it became 10% of Bitcoin trading
That would be 10% that would have been traded
That means people going long
would have been buying real Bitcoin,
but now instead they're just making these
essentially synthetic side bets.
Does it mess with the integrity of the asset itself?
Or is it bad for in the case of assets we believe in
and that we want to get adopted
and we want the price to go up
if people are buying these synthetic versions instead?
Is that a problem to anyone here?
It's kind of like, I'm in the US,
so it's kind of like gambling, sports betting here
Europe, you guys had betting,
all the ups and downs that come with it.
We're just now going through the headaches of it,
of all the things that can be manipulated,
But the game is still pure.
Watching football or soccer or whatever you may call it,
It's still the game, the side bets,
the prop bets, who's going to get this at halftime?
It don't take away from the game.
I think it just adds to it.
So what could be in the Bitcoin pool at 10%?
Is it, are you losing 10% or are you gaining 10%?
Well, to counter that point though, JXR,
just to take devil's advocate position there,
the difference is when you take a side bet during a game,
like who's going to get a pass
or who's going to score the next goal or whatever,
that doesn't affect the outcome of the game.
if you have 10% of trading taking place on sins,
then it's possible that that could affect
because those trades would have been placed on Bitcoin.
sees the sports betting analogy,
imagine that instead of everybody using sports betting,
some people run on the pitch.
And that's kind of like the thing with Bitcoin, right?
You can see some of those people that would be trading
since we'll be actually playing in the game,
they will be buying the real asset.
And so that's an interesting, interesting.
I mean, we spoke about this before
with price discovery, right?
So like some people who are like market purists
want their trades to count in the market.
They want to participate in price discovery
because they want to affect the price of an asset.
because they just want exposure to whatever the price does.
And so they'll use things like contracts
to the difference or synthetics or whatever,
which don't really have any bearing on the price.
When I buy Bitcoin or ETH or ATOM or Polygon
I like to think that my buy is me voting with my wallet,
that I'm supporting these things that I believe in.
And if we use synthetics,
it feels like it's taking away from that to some extent.
And in my opinion, that's how I've always thought about it,
but I'm curious if other people disagree.
I mean, there are situations where,
like in general derivatives,
I'm not against like derivatives in general.
I actually think that derivatives
play a really important part in markets.
The ability to short an asset
actually helps dampen volatility.
It helps find better market price discovery.
It's good to have different ways to bet on something
or to bet different directions
or to bet even with leverage.
For example, like leverage helps with price discovery
because it has problems too,
but it helps with price discovery
because if I'm a little guy
and I don't have a big wallet,
but I really believe that this asset's gonna go up
and I've done my research and I'm sure,
and I've spent my life dedicated to understanding something
but I just don't have the money
for my bet to be meaningful.
Well, I can 100X long it or short it
and then I can reap those benefits
and things get more, less asymmetrical, I guess,
So I think that derivatives do play a role,
but these kind of paper and synthetic assets,
I'm trying to think of like
what the pros and cons are of them.
I thought you might take the position, Rock,
that you want your trades to count.
I know you as a big free market guy
and so it makes sort of sense
that you would really want that to be,
that you're voting with your wallet,
that really matters to you, I definitely thought.
There's a lot of things I buy
and it's almost purely voting with my wallet.
There's lots of times where I buy a stock
or sell a stock based on the actions of that company
or the actions of that team.
If I see a team that's doing something
that I really believe in,
maybe they're focused on something like privacy
and I just think that that's a really cool thing,
I may invest in that, even if I don't even,
it becomes less about the money I'm making on it
or the bet like that, it's more about my beliefs
and me trying to affect the world with my wallet.
I don't know if anybody remembers
when Patreon was quite big back in the day
and around the time when YouTube sort of ramped up
de-platforming various people,
I would take like $50 or something around there
alternative media sources on Patreon
just for that same reason, right?
Because I really valued the content that they was creating
and I'd send it to them just so that I knew
in some small way, I would guarantee
that the content that I valued
would keep getting put out in the world.
But just one counterpoint to that
and I think we're getting to the point
where we're gonna wrap up here, guys,
just coming up to the two hour mark.
So thanks everybody for joining us.
But yeah, I think just on that,
there's obviously a balancing act
between what you want ideally
and what is market efficient.
And so like when we mentioned
the more niche synthetics that could be created
like Big Mac indexes and all this other kind of stuff,
obviously it's super inefficient
for you to trade Big Macs physically, right?
So if you wanna do anything like that,
it'd be more efficient to do that on a synth.
But there's also, so firstly is like exposure
to exotic stuff, which you really can't get physically.
It's more efficient way to do that.
And then the second thing is
just from like a efficiency point of view
So like if you go onto like Coinbase,
you buy Bitcoin and then you send that to a ledger wallet
or however you wanna store that treasure,
however you wanna store that properly.
So you've gone in, you've affected the market
and then you've got the asset, like the actual asset.
The problem is if you just wanna hold that short term,
it's really inefficient to do that process
because the whole process probably took like 45 minutes
and then you actually have it, which is great.
But then if you wanna sell it again in 15 minutes,
there's really no point in doing that.
Whereas in that case, if you're a trader
and you're trading hundreds of positions a day,
buying a synthetic then becomes a lot more appealing
because you don't get settlement,
but you get the price tracking instantly.
And so that's my opinion on it.
So there's like a balance between efficiency and ideology,
But yeah, so interested for the other guys here
on the panel, if you have any closing remarks
on real world assets or DAOs or real estate
or any of the things we discussed today.
These spaces are getting more interesting each week.
Definitely getting more and more interesting each week.
Yeah, shout out to Jack and I think Anna
who helped organize the Kinetics team organizing.
I think CryptoCeto helped with some organization
of helping introduce us to some of the guests.
I think Sean Melch may have supported.
So yeah, shout out to all you guys who are organizing this.
It's coming along nicely.
And I think like CryptoCeto said early,
this is a great thing to have for the Cosmos ecosystem.
And I think one of the things he kind of alluded to,
which it seems really important is just because Cosmos
has had a lot of interesting factions
and infighting and stuff, I think transparency
and getting people together, communicating is great.
Like today I saw, you know, Evmos and Kava both on.
Both doing similar things can be seen as competitors, right?
both using, you know, like Ethermint stack
But having them on the same spaces is really cool.
And having, you know, Kinetics, which does perps
and then having, you know, other perps products,
Synthetics perps products and others on
to discuss these things is,
we had also API3 and Pith, two great-
Just the fact that these guys can come together.
Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
I think there's a slight delay rock.
I had an alarm going off and it cut me off
and then I couldn't hear, yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, but you make a great point, right?
The idea that, you know, competitors in the marketplace
can come to have productive discussions
in this space is really good.
Because what we really want from this space
is to increase the level of education
for people to come and listen to some things,
hear topics discussed that they don't know anything about.
Like I learn things all the time on these spaces.
And it's really good to hear from some of the experts,
some of the guys that have been
in the trenches building this stuff.
Like earlier when we heard from Siddharth from Comdex,
who originally was building a real world assets platform
and then pivoted for various reasons,
like regulation to synthetics.
And now he's thinking of exploring real world assets.
Again, now the regulations caught up.
That's really valuable insight to hear
because somebody that's been in this space for a while,
you know, you kind of see some of these things unfolding
as you watch the protocols evolve,
but you don't always know the decision-making
So it's really interesting to hear that kind of stuff.
And I think for listeners in the Cosmos ecosystem
or guys that are invested in IBC projects
that are on this spaces now,
if your community members go back
and speak to your communities
and ask if they want to be part of into the Cosmos,
if they want to share development updates
if they want to showcase some of the insights
that they've got about these, you know,
managers and Word hopefully will filter up
to somebody who can make that happen.
And us on the space, myself,
Rock and any of the other guys here,
I'm sure if you reach out to them,
you'll find your way to the right place
and we'll be able to get you up as a speaker.
Just as a side note as well,
me and Sean had a call before the spaces started
and Sean's going to be supporting
with some things going forward, which is pretty amazing.
Sean's a really good asset in the networking space
within IBC, he's been around a long time,
So I think that would be an amazing person
to have on board helping produce the show.
Oh, go ahead, Melch, go ahead.
I was going to say, thanks so much.
And a big thanks to Jack Rock and Kevin Kinetics
for creating that kind of environment.
I think it's been lacking for a while,
but Cosmos being that IBC mentality, it's there.
I think that we just kind of need somebody
with a big engine like you guys to create the platform
and then keep it consistent
and then keep it consistently open.
So I'm excited to keep it carrying forward with you guys.
Yeah, Cosmos has an interesting,
it's one of the strengths and one of the drawbacks
is Cosmos, because of the way it's built,
is super decentralized of an ecosystem.
It really is, there's different teams
working on different implementations and code bases
and infrastructure for Cosmos itself.
Then you have all of the different teams
that are building all of the different chains
and these chains while they are kind of,
can be seen as either a strong or loose coalition.
Some of the chains maybe play with other chains
more diplomatically, some of the chains,
they just love the tech, they're less interested
in the Cosmos like community, I guess.
And I think, and that's a positive and a negative
in terms of like it brings decentralization,
but it's not as coalescing sometimes
as I think maybe some other ecosystems maybe.
And I think having a space like this
helps bring all those chains together has,
having a town hall makes these teams feel more aligned
and like kind of coalesces the community a little more
and gets different parties speaking to each other
that may not normally speak to each other
as they might see each other as competitors.
Yeah, and also it allows people various different ideas
about the way things should be done
to proliferate in the marketplace
and people to listen to them and decide what they like.
And that's really good, right?
A lot of the time teams are busy
and they don't have time to host their own spaces
or they're worried if they host, then nobody will turn up
because they've not got like 10 different protocols
that all wanna come on as guests.
Well, if that's you, then join into the Cosmos
and you'll have time to share your ideas.
We try to avoid shills, so no shills,
but you can definitely come up and share your ideas.
And if you're insightful,
then people will follow your profile
and then potentially go and use your platform as well.
So yeah, it's a great launching path like that.
So thanks everybody for coming.
Shout out to everybody rocking amazing NFT profile pictures
in the audience, saw some great bad kids earlier
and the mutant ape on JXR is pretty cool as well.
So shout out, but yeah, everybody in the audience
see some really good ones.
So thanks for coming everybody
and we'll see you guys next time.
Oh, one side note as well.
We may be taking this weekly soon.
So at the moment it's been roughly every two weeks.
We're looking at maybe doing this as a weekly thing
because of how popular it is,
which will allow us to more smoothly manage our guests
because we always have too many guests
at the speaker slots at the start and it's a bit awkward.
And so that might be something
that we're looking at going forward.
So yeah, if you wanna see that,
definitely retweet the space and give us a shout out
cause that would be greatly appreciated
and it lets us know that we're doing the right thing.
All right guys, thank you for coming
and speak to you next week.
Thanks for making it happen fellas.
And it was great to be here.