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Kuru Live! - feat. @FitzYap
Recorded: April 10, 2025 Duration: 1:40:30Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the recent acquisition of Slingshot by Magic Eden, signaling a strategic partnership aimed at enhancing mobile trading experiences. The conversation also delved into trends in DeFi, emphasizing the need for improved capital efficiency and innovative solutions like Agra's on-chain prime brokerage, which could revolutionize asset utilization and yield opportunities.
Full Transcription
Thank you. . I'm not. Thank you. . And. Thank you. yo what's up guys?
Welcome to Live.
Fitz, thank you for joining us.
Because you're with us.
Yo, thanks for having me.
How are we doing?
Fitz, we're doing great, dude.
Doing great.
Wednesday night.
Just hanging out, man.
We're so back.
Part of the deal space if it wasn't
here that's definitely what i would have named it what a day just a few trill added to the s&p
meme coin spx is a it's a reality now you're pretty happy you know what guys i have a confession to
make yeah i 100 ate a whole onion this morning i didn't record it i was you know but i 100
ate one it's good luck you saved the markets again kb was manifesting
i respect it you know isn't onion supposed to be good for uh like onion and garlic cloves are
apparently good for like circulation or there's some sort of health benefit outside of it being
a ritual um i think i'm not i'm not brian johnson but yeah definitely go ahead cozy no no but i think
i've i think i've talked about this on the space before, but it's definitely, I don't know about onion, but raw garlic.
So every once in a while, if you're getting a cold, you take a raw clove of garlic, smash
it and shoot the whole thing, eat the whole thing.
It gives you like this boost in like an antioxidant that's supposed to like kickstart your immune
system to like fight off cold.
So my story is that I did this for like weeks leading up to my wedding,
which was during COVID.
And I just really didn't want to get sick.
And honestly, negative EV because my wife, now wife,
my breath smelled awful all the time.
So really not like a winsome thing.
Did you, you didn't get sick though?
You were good?
I did not get sick.
And she still married me.
So I would say win overall. Yeah. you came out victorious. I respect the effort. I'm a sometimes I'll hit the zinc. I know people say that shortens the length of your cold. But you know, I don't know if I'm that dedicated. That was KB last week.
yeah i was on a ton of zinc um but i definitely will say there are
yeah a ton of health benefits to onions um way more than beans
shout out gizmo nice yeah i don't know the lore on that one
she's like it's british they just fucking eat beans for no reason oh yes okay I don't know the lore on that one. She's fucking British.
They just fucking eat beans for no reason.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
Have you guys seen the Spud Bros?
Okay, so Spud Bros.
So I'm really talking to my wife tonight,
but I just, every once in a while I go down,
everybody does this, right?
Your YouTube shorts are like your Instagram reel, like just a little wormhole. And I'm on food, man. I like food, YouTube shorts. And they
give me Spud Bros all day long. They chop up these baked potatoes in a little to-go box.
And they put like raw, just like regular cheese, beans, like baked beans on top of it.
They'll put tuna on it.
They're insane, bro.
It's ridiculous.
But then it's crazy like Irish accent or I don't even, English accent.
And they're like, oh yeah, bro, if you want some cheese and beans.
They call it cheese and beans too, which is insane.
I've seen this, yeah.
They film it like POV with, like, Ray-Ban Meta or something, right?
Exactly.
They do it from a food truck.
Yep, yep, 100%.
Yeah, it's kind of scary, like, the amount of time that is possible to spend on YouTube reels.
spend on YouTube reels. That's like real bottom of the barrel. Like, like just, you know, it's
That's, like, real bottom of the barrel.
either like uplifting cute, you know, animal videos or like, um, yeah, I don't even know.
I'm trying to think of what, what I've seen on reels recently. I, I, I seem to have curated at
least on Instagram, the, uh, the yap dollar, like Xiao Hongiao hung shoe shorts um i don't know if you guys
know what i'm talking about maybe i sound like a crazy person no definitely give context though
there's like a um it's it's like a oh man how do i even describe it it'll be like an example of this
is like there's like some video from china where this
dude is is making popcorn in this like industrial like rickety machine that definitely should not be
used to make popcorn uh especially around people it's like he's heating it up with like a blowtorch and then he opens some valve and like
lets the popcorn expand and it has this you know intentional explosion and there's like a there's
an ai voice that narrates it in like poorly spoken english um and so it's just like review
like reviews that are completely meaningless of all of these random
contraptions um definitely one of those memes that like i start explaining it and then i realize that
this is just a complete and utter waste of everybody's time listening to me say this
no i mean like you can't control where the algorithm takes you dude like you can do your
best to curate it but it's going to take you where it wants to take you.
I'm at the point, for one, what that reminded me of is that I just rediscovered one of my favorite videos of all time.
It's a five minute long video of this white guy living in China.
And he speaks like fluent Mandarin.
And he like goes around and he like shops and he like talks to the locals.
And then he boils a pig
head and eats it it's very entertaining i'll find it maybe i'll drop it in the space comments after
this but yeah the only other reels related thing is that i also so in addition to food the other
thing that i get are like sports or like pokemon card people at like expos and stuff. And it's so stupid.
But the one that I love is like this really, really nice guy.
And he like gives out Pokemon cards to kids.
And they get like so excited.
He like lets them pick a free one or like take a free graded card.
And I'm not going to lie that sometimes if I'm having a bad day,
I'm like, yo, you know what?
I need to watch this random like 40-year-old dude like give some free Pokemon cards out to kids.
This is going to brighten my day.
So, yeah, man, that's big time.
That's wholesome.
Last, you know, tangent relating to that.
Have you guys seen, isn't there like a mobile app to pull Pokemon cards now?
There is.
I haven't interacted with it much but i've seen the
fantasy guys the fantasy top guys are like on this because it's like
710 keeps posting it and then i've also seen there's there's one uh i think there's courtyard
and then there's collect uh crypt collect is maybe what it's called or Collector's Crypt, which I think what it is, is it lets you pull real cards.
So like there's just an animation on top of like you're entitled to the underlying, at least for the like the external platforms, not for like the native Pokemon TCG thing.
So I don't know. It's worth a look. I feel like it's maybe a more fun way to gamble.
Who knows?
Yeah, I mean, as of like 12 hours ago,
probably would have had a little more interest
on the Pokemon card game.
Feels like the market kind of came roaring back,
but those are some bear market vibes for sure.
You're like, you know what's a good idea right now?
I'm going to download the virtual Pokemon TCG app.
Let's see what's going on over there.
Yeah, just scratching the itch.
Oh, yeah.
Ayo, what's up?
You've got your hand up.
How are you doing?
Hey, go guru.
Yeah, it's a very interesting topic.
You know, I will find the video you were talking about.
I think you're talking about in Xiaohongshu.
There was a video in the popcorn or something.
I need to find it.
And what the other one you're talking about?
Pokemon.
Yeah, there's a lot of foreigners in China.
They speak very good Mandarin. People love them because, you know, Chinese people love Western guys who speak good Mandarin
because it seems they like the culture.
That's why they mingle together.
Anyway, so you guys continue.
I just think the topic's very interesting to me.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And we should definitely get some notes in the background from Fitz on some of the brain
rot that he's watching on Instagram.
But yeah, KB, how, okay, so just take me through, and we'll get everybody's read on this. Also,
what's up, Gizmo? What's up, Nick Lachey? My man, Nick Lachey. I'm a little worried that
Nick Lachey is up here. Um, but, uh, but I'm glad, I'm glad he's with us. Um, but yeah, KB,
I mean, crazy few days, a little tariff, uh, mania for us, just a casual trade war.
I feel like zoomers, I yeah i don't kb you're
kind of a millennial i don't want to dox you here but you're you're a bit more in the millennial camp
but but we're just we're just so used to financial crises i think it was jason janowitz tweeted
that like crypto people are just like this is just a tuesday like this is just a one that doesn't doesn't affect me
my net worth fluctuates by like 40% every day but what have the last few days last week been just
watching a little casual tariff trade war going on with China the rest of the world global financial
system how are you taking it yeah I mean like it's kind of like our two world leaders are just
these like big toddlers kind of going back and forth.
And I think like as a crypto investor and like, yeah, millennial.
And then like the people that are here are either like Zoomer and just kind of inexperienced or very like high risk millennial.
And I think that it just comes the territory because we're told that like crypto is a scam.
And like, don't,'t you know don't put your
whole portfolio you know in crypto even though we do um but when like you see these like and i know
nothing about bonds because i don't have any of them when you see like you know these bonds just
like take the these hits i think that's when you know things just don't look good overall when the
market is acting like a meme coin.
And then the volatility of that, of, you know, like trillions being like, you know, dissipated
and then just like, just put right back in, which is one news, right?
Like Trump tweeted out, it's time to buy.
And then everything just like pumped astronomically. And so even for us who like have kind of been through the ringer
and you're almost like, okay, nothing surprises us.
We've been through 9-11.
We've been through, you know, pandemics, housing crashes, pandemics.
But, you know, this is, yeah, I don't know.
It's definitely, I think that we're being in crypto.
I think we are kind of fortunate, but it's kind of interesting to see the world at large.
I don't know, but I haven't really, I know Nick is doing stocks right now.
Sorry, but like, you know, I'm not really doing stocks right now.
I thought about it, but I have no idea, man.
This is just, I think, out of my realm at this point. I'm not really doing stocks right now. I thought about it. But I have no idea, man.
This is just, I think, out of my realm at this point.
It's so hard to predict.
It's just so hard to predict.
I know.
I agree.
And I do think that you get the, as a person in crypto, you just develop portfolio numbness.
You just don't feel pain.
It just doesn't affect you anymore.
Every once in a while, there's like a pain. You're like, oh, this is what it used to feel like to be afraid. But I will say like, so that's pretty much how I felt over the last few days. This morning,
I woke up at like 530 a.m., something like that. You know, sometimes you like wake up,
you got to go pee or whatever, and then you come back. But like you just think of something and it
just gets your brain going and you just can't fall back to sleep. And that was me this morning. I ended up on
Twitter, not my best decision. This was after I couldn't fall back to sleep. And I was watching
people talk about the 10 year bond rate, which dude, I know, dude, I don't know anything about
this. I have an econ minor in undergrad. I could not tell you anything about bonds or any of this stuff. And so like people
were talking about the rates were spiking overnight, the Japan, they were talking about
like another unwind of like the yen carry trade potentially, or like China selling bonds like
crazy. And like the macro guys were freaking out. I retweeted on, I retweeted on my main account. I bet I can find it real quick here.
Somebody said, seeing the Bond guys panic is like seeing your parents cry as a kid.
You don't understand it, but you know it's bad. That was so true. This morning, I actually felt
a little bit of slight panic at what was going should have been that should have been a signal for me to unload everything in my bank account into the market because it was the absolute bottom signal.
Trump called the bottom. Dex was paid. It was a great day in the markets.
And yeah, then he did a 90 day suspension of the tariffs on the rest of the world.
But China. OK, so China hiked back on us.
Then I don't think we hiked it any further, but we're keeping the 108 percent on China.
Seems like Trump is trying to get the rest of the world to gang up on up on our friends across the
ocean. Kind of wild here. Nick Lachey, I would love to just hear any reads that you have on things.
You're dabbling in stocks. Yeah. What's the last few, what's the last week or so been like for you?
How are you taking it? Yeah, I think we're still playing back 2018, mostly. So 2018 was when mid
last Trump's term. So midway through his first term, he did his tariff stuff. And the target
back then is what the target is now. It was always China. So everything else doesn't really matter.
It's still kind of a play, right, in terms of world powers, in terms of world economy.
So I think from that perspective, like that's always been the target. And so in my opinion,
stuff like tariffs, like all those things eventually resolve, right? It's best for both countries to find
a happy medium. The last time they found the medium at the current rate it was at in the
20s, right? Before this all happened. So I'm then in the market started to tick back up.
So I think for me in the last few weeks, it's you just try to buy the lows on stocks because
they'll eventually go back up.
And these are longer timeframes whenever they find resolution or stability.
It doesn't mean that the tariffs will go to zero or like they're going to all of a sudden China and America will become best friends and they'll all drop their tariffs. It's more that there's a sense of stability there where both sides agree to a number that works for both of them.
And then we can move on. And then the Fed can also do what they have to do after that so i think it's sort of a domino effect in my opinion where you buy the
stock lows because that's what makes sense it's this is the same in history right like the s p
and the stock market and all that stuff over the last century eventually goes back up um so i think
people that are purely in crypto can't quite understand
that because stuff in crypto does just go to zero and die forever. But the stock market
as a whole in the US eventually goes back up if you have a longer time horizon. So I
think in that sense, like it's been a good time when the market nukes in terms of the
stock side to buy. I think for sustained upside, though,
we still need China and the U.S. stuff to get to a place
where they both agree on a number.
And then after that, I think we'll also see the Fed
be more willing to talk and get involved.
Because my personal take on the Fed is that
they're kind of a lag entity.
So they're going to wait till they are sort of the last resort of kind of fiscal policy change or fiscal action.
And that just means that they're not going to do it while have to do when they see the economy and
its picture without sort of the the involvement and the spikes and the
downsides of Trump tweeting or whatever it is so I think also like that's what
we're heading towards right so tariff pause all this stuff if they can resolve
stuff with China the last thing I'll say is that in 2018, this took from kind of like Q1
till close to the end of the year-ish for it to really like, and into the next year, early the
next year to get some level of resolution. But the difference this year is that Trump has speedrun
like escalation, and so has China, because the two world leaders are the same.
So China's world leader and America's world leader are the same as 2018.
They've been through this dance before.
And so, again, like I think it'll resolve.
So like the world is not falling, the sky is not falling.
But I think it's just a level of patience.
And especially for stocks, if you're willing to buy the lows, that's what you're looking for over time
because they're typically longer term holds.
So that's my take.
I don't think it's like overly worrisome.
I haven't really touched crypto much
since the end of last year,
but have been desegating stocks on the dips,
especially tech ones.
So, you know, that's kind of my take,
but mostly I'm here.
I can't stay too long today because it's early morning here.
But I'm here for a bit cozy and also for Fitz because Fitz is great.
But I'm here to hear your bit because I've been unable to attend these for the last few weeks.
So thanks.
Well, Nick, I mean, for that market analysis, I've got to what can I say?
I've got to I've got to do it.
Fitz, you're new to
the space. I've somehow once revealed that I did stand up back a few years ago. And I mean,
now I'm a spaces host, so I guess I'm still just making a fool of myself. And so I just,
Nick Lachey just likes to draw bits out of me. So I actually, I saw Nick Lachey in the space.
I pulled up my notes, my, I have a bits list. I have a running bits list. And I actually, I saw Nick Lachey in the space. I pulled up my notes. I have a bits list. I have
a running bits list. And I was really looking. I'm not going to lie, Nick. We haven't been doing
these over the last few weeks, but I'm kind of starting to get down to the bare bones here. So
I've got to start observing more in my life, I think, just to keep my ammo up here. Okay,
but I've got one. It's not much. I don't think I've done
this one before. I might, I'm going to start recycling because I'm like, oh, that's a good
one. But okay, here we go. I'll do this one's for Nick. Okay. I'm, this is just me. I'm a
procrastinator. I'm a procrastinator. Some people, they're average procrastinators. Some people, they're mediocre procrastinators. I like to think of procrastination as an art, and I've mastered it.
I'm a procrastinator. Some would even say I'm a master procrastinator. I've been procrastinating
since I was a boy. And I just think that people that are not procrastinators should keep that
word out of their damn mouth, right? If you're not a procrastinator,
if you're just somebody that's putting things off because you suck at life, just call yourself what
it is. You're not a student of the procrastination game. You need to get in the lab, put in your 10,000
hours if you want to be a procrastinator. Okay, that's all I got. Bravo,vo is this all i bit thank you fitz thank you man
were you in the war room sipping crass the nation oh yeah oh yeah tristan tate in the war room
yes dude 100 yes just uh i was i was uh yeah consternated over that crassination, bro. That's what it is.
Yeah.
There you go.
Cheers to that, big dog.
Dude, I heard that.
Is it Shreyas from the Monad team does stand up too?
He does, yeah.
It's funny.
I haven't ever seen him in person i made a i made a point um to go and see him because he had a show
in new york not too long ago at this this uh this bar he plays like open mics for um i think he's
done you know a very solid amount out there and he's trying to make more of a point of like
publishing it um so if you're if you're a lurker and you do your homework you can
probably find some clips of him on the internet for anybody any listeners that are curious
but yeah i'm i'm hyped to see it i feel like it's cool to have uh co-workers that have these you
know other um other interests outside of clicking on screen i. And I think that he's a dev too,
which is actually epic.
So like,
yeah,
my man's got a,
my man's an engineer with a sense of humor.
That's epic.
So I'm going to have to lurk on this man.
I'm going to have to look up some clips and yeah,
that's awesome.
Yeah.
Damn.
I just knocked over an American flag in my office.
I feel a little bad about that.
That's a bad omen right here,
but,
but us, USA, USA.
It's okay.
We got the Gulf of America now.
So true.
Nothing can hurt us.
Break is now.
America restored.
That hurts so much still.
You have no idea.
I'm still fuming about GOA.
That coin is embedded in my soul.
Oh, man.
Yeah, it's dead.
I live right next to the Golf America.
They changed it on the iPhone.
It says Golf America now.
Let's go.
And the coin did nothing.
The coin is still at zero.
Yeah, they still haven't changed Canada yet.
I feel like they need to update that and just add it into the u.s geography by now nice okay good good little
canada dig just to get us into it i feel like whenever i think about macro now too i think
about canada because of fijao on the timeline who i really like from forward guidance but
i i really like the guy in the analysis that they put
out. I don't know if you guys know this Bloomberg pod. It's like a crypto macro pod called Forward
Guidance and their host is a Canadian, but he's really sharp, dude. But I want to just troll the
shit out of him just because he's Canadian. So I always feel bad. Like I just want to chirp him,
even though I like him. So that is the sign that you like someone in real life, though. So that's
good. Fitz, are you much of a macro fiend like what's kind of your uh read on the last
week or so been how's that been for you I'm really I'm really not a big macro guy and I I don't try
and LARP like I am um I mean I I try and absorb as much as possible from people smarter than myself. But I don't know. I tend to think of my longer-term outlooks as like, again, I try and ascribe who I think
are historically good traders and have sensible reasons for the views that they have.
And then just distill an opinion from there like
um yeah i mean in equities i've had like a handful of okay trades like i was i've been
long robin hood for quite a while and that um was a very basic thesis that uh i don't know just
it just happened to work out well but i mean on the whole, I really have no idea what's going on outside of, like,
seems like we have 90 days of breathing room where things can hop around a bit more,
you know, as opposed to whatever the inverse of that was.
It seemed like last night imminent death is kind of the vibe on the timeline
dude so true and hood is a robin hood is a great trade man i remember back in this was probably
2022 i saw a bunch of people shilling coinbase stock like super hard and a lot of them were
like pair trading it with hood and they were were like, okay, these both are going to do super well.
And hood was like eight or $9, maybe $10, something like that.
And Coinbase was like $59 when I got in or something like that.
I remember this because I was newly married and I wanted to tell my father-in-law to do
this trade, but he would have like gone in with like adult grown man money and i just was
not confident enough that like coinbase was actually going to succeed uh which i probably
in retrospect should have been but i didn't buy hood and i just saw the other day literally like
oh hood has crashed down to 30 and i was like damn that was a lot more than when i looked at
it like three years ago which which I guess makes sense.
But yeah, it feels like a good time to be a Robinhood bro.
Like now I would probably be bullish on them and how they move forward in the future here.
Sailor Neene, what's up, Neene?
How are you?
Hey, I'm unfortunately on my desktop, so I might rug.
I hate admitting that when I do spaces.
I know it's a faux pas, but I'm doing well.
I'm just here to support Fitz. Right on, right on. They don't know, I just picked up Nini from Petsco.
Oh, nice. Nini, you're looking like a nice little unevolved Rattata right now, if I do say so myself.
Yeah, I'm just cozy and comfortable in the space.
I love hearing what you guys yap about.
I'm also watching Love on the Spectrum at the same time.
Wait, okay.
What is Love on the Spectrum?
What do you think it is?
Okay, okay.
Nice, nice. Are they both on the Spectrum? Yeah, is? I think it is. Okay. Okay. Nice. Nice.
Are they both on the spectrum?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's pretty wholesome, actually.
Nice.
Okay.
That's good.
That's good.
Yeah.
I mean, if it was like a Love Island show or something like that, that would just feel not...
That's not great.
But I could do love on the spectrum, I guess.
I don't know.
That feels like a lot still.
But wholesome.
I agree.
I agree.
That's good.
Good.
Man, big week.
Yeah.
I posted this at the very beginning.
Not a crypto meme.
The American stock market after the president of the United States told you to buy is just up and to the right.
Straight up green candle right there.
We added $3.5 trillion today to the stock market.
Casually added more than 1.5.
Or no, maybe that's just about the entire crypto market cap that was just added back to the stock market.
Yeah, the crypto global market cap is $2.7 trillion. So just a little like 1.3x there
or something like that of the global crypto market cap added back, which is a nice little trade
right there. Big day, Nick Lachey, probably on top of the world. I hope you did well, sir.
You did well, sir. With that in mind, another big kind of interesting update today was Magic Eden acquired Slingshot, which I'm not super familiar with as a platform, but it's kind of the second in this like mobile wave of acquisitions that we've seen.
a few weeks or maybe a few months back here, announced that they were acquiring Moonshot,
which is another mobile crypto app. So it's going to give Magic Eden just a whole new dimensionality
in terms of their kind of like go to market with retail and all of those things. So I'll pin a
tweet here from them, but pretty big update and surprised me, but it kind of makes sense in terms
of how that was going kb what was kind
of your read on this did it take you by surprise what is your early reaction yeah i think i was
definitely surprised i've known about slingshot but i actually never downloaded it i don't do
too much crypto on my phone um so and but that's just cause I have like a whole, you know, battle station.
Um, but I am familiar with the app and I know that it's just very easy to buy tokens like all across the map for mini chains and it, it uses USDC.
You can buy it with like, uh, MoonPay.
Um, so it is very like retail friendly, but I don't know much more than that.
Um, and apparently they have been kind of working with Magic Eden for almost a year now until like the acquisition. So, you know, I think that there and Robinhood really did onboard a new class of traders.
Definitely a lot of the COVID traders, right?
Like I was one of those, like I put my stimmy into Robinhood and, you know, I played around.
And so I think Slingshot is probably similar to that where you're going to be able to just buy tokens off of a mobile app. So definitely GG's to Magic Eden.
And yeah, I think there's definitely a mobile movement because it is just more, you know,
more accessible to a lot of people. Not a lot of people can have a laptop or have the space even.
have a laptop or have the space even. So I do think that it gives a lot of opportunity to
onboard different types of users. Yeah, no, agreed. It really feels like,
especially if, this is a lukewarm take, but I mean, if you want to onboard more people retail,
the majority way that they interface with finance
is through things like Robinhood. Like it is just kind of ubiquitous, right? They expect
to be able to go in, like they're probably not like DCAing into like an S&P 500 index or something
like that, but they're going to buy Tesla when they think it might like two or three X or something
like that. And so slingshot, Moonshot,
these are kind of the ways that you can get exposure in that way.
And I'm really curious to see how Magic Eden
will like integrate it into their offering.
Right.
And like, I think Moonshot is mostly Solana based.
And I think the, with the Slingshot app,
I went to, I meant to download it today and I didn't.
But I know that it's almost like every chain.
Like, so they're supporting.
And now, and also like this may be, you know, some good news for us, but it could be a runes
catalyst and offer liquidity to runes and it be tradable on Slingshot.
So if they can, and you you know because magic in is very like
pro ordinals and bitcoin ecosystem so if they can pull that off um i will be very happy because
maybe my bags will actually recover so maybe i'll be saved like maybe slingshot and magic eden
um will save me and my runes because runes ruined
my life uh what are you saying fits is this uh i was gonna say how much of this is a reach because
of bag bias like how deep are you in ordinals and runes no no i'm like no i'm very i i was very deep
in ordinals and runes at one point i was like i'm retired and then now like i got two jobs i got two jobs like
two chains no but i mean like that it's not just me there's a lot of there's a lot of bag bias
with the ordinal and bitcoin community um and so like even in the magic eden um you know, post here, the first thing they say is every chain Bitcoin soon.
And they did have a space earlier today, just, you know, Magic Eden and Slingshot and then the
people involved. And runes was a very big topic because a lot of the Bitcoin bros are, you know,
hitting them up. Like, is this going to be a runes catalyst and you know this isn't that so
besides everything else like besides it being like you know you know this kind of like you can
you can trade every token on there um you know for for people in the runes ecosystem you know
i mean at magic eden i i believe was a huge catalyst for Orginals back in, was it 23, right?
Was it 23, Cozy?
Late 23, early 24.
Okay, late 23, early 24.
The reason why Orginals got so much volume during that time, which was essentially a
bear, you know, kind of a bear market, was because of Magic Eden.
Before that, you could only trade ordinals through
like spreadsheets or something like obscure so um and like otc so you know i do believe that
magic eden was a huge catalyst for ordinals and so maybe slingshot will be a catalyst for
runes but who knows definitely it'll be interesting to see i feel
like yeah i mean that that's the other part too is like i can't even think of another marketplace
where runes traded extensively like it seemed like everybody sort of had the the setup of like
xverse wallet and then trading on magic eden or was it um I think what their native wallet was popular and then Unisat was
one of them what did you know it was it was Xverse Xverse was like the main wallet yeah
gotcha yeah it'll be cool though I'm hyped for their team I feel like a big thing that people
kind of under play is that if you look at the apps that have largely generated the bulk of revenue this cycle group of people that are trading in almost any market that exists ever.
So, you know, it'll just be neat to see like whether or not this is a significant, you know, it turns into a significant portion of their revenue.
Because I got the sense that they will keep it as a completely separate brand.
So it's not like going to get mashed into the, you know, Magic Eden front end or like,
obviously it's a mobile, it's own mobile app.
So I feel like that also is an interesting, you know, an approach that I really like.
Like you can kind of have separate brands and go two different directions, but still print on fees and provide a good experience.
Yeah. I feel like moonshot and slingshot are kind of in this like interesting category where,
and, and I don't know if there may be people in this space that are big users of them,
but I feel like most people that are like us are just one step too deep where we're
like, I mean, like you would just go to like your phantom wallet. If you were going to trade on
your phone, you would just go to phantom and like open up bird eye or pump fun or like whatever it
is. And you would just trade like directly from your wallet. But that is kind of like one, like
what moonshot and slingshot are doing is
just kind of abstracting that layer of custodianship of like a few extra clicks, like all of those
things. So when I think when we think of these apps, we're kind of like, oh, that's kind of cute.
But I when something like a Trump or something like that drops, I feel like there is probably
like a real use case for like a moonshot or slingshot
where Robinhood is just not going to list these things, right?
Like, although Coinbase is, maybe if it was launched on base, Coinbase would.
But yeah, like you just, I think we can kind of forget that this is like a good medium
for people.
And I don't know what their like revenue numbers or whatever look like.
But yeah, I'll definitely be curious to see how Magic Eden can kind of leverage this into, yeah,
potentially having it be kind of like a cash cow, especially when, I mean, we were just,
where was I? Oh, yeah, nevermind. Yeah, I was on a call with someone, and they were just talking
about how they think that they're a person working in the monad
not working for monad but working in the monad eco and they basically just said that they think
that a lot of nft marketplaces that don't have good network effects are going to start shuttering
in the next few months just from like the lack of like yeah just activity in like the nft sphere
so for something that is very cyclical, like NFTs,
it makes a lot of sense for Magic Eden, I feel like,
to expand into kind of like the meme coin
or even just the trading game more largely.
Like if it's Moonshot or, sorry, Slingshot
could become a place to go to
that's kind of like a Robinhood alternative.
That'd be kind of interesting.
So, yeah.
Well, Fitz, we'll turn the script. Oh, you jump in oh you jump in you jump in no no all you uh
take it away right on right on well let's uh what's your what's your or yeah feel free to jump in a
sure yeah i like to jump in for this topic because uh for uh ordinals and the runes token, I have a lot of them.
I remember in the beginning, we meant a lot of NFT in the BRC20 and also BRC20 tokens, I think SADs.
And this actually was a very interesting kind of a milestone.
I believe it's a milestone for btc and for crypto because a lot
of people a lot of new not new guys uh new users they they they come in they buy brc
20 tokens like stats and all the and later you know they they do a lot of air jobs for the nft holders so like they the air job the ruin stone the nft and the
tokens which is called the dodge do dog so it's very i think it's very interesting phenomenon
because i believe it's a kind of milestone because uh never never than before you know b BTC is so promising.
So many people come in before just the miner.
They actually mining and they sell the BTC.
But later, because the BRC20 and the Ruin token,
so many new users come in. So it was so like a milestone for the BTC ecosystem
and for the crypto ecosystem. That's what I think. But later, of course, some people make a lot of
money, but some new people, they may buy at a high price and they probably lose a lot of money.
So it's mixed effects that's
what i see thank you yeah no ayo i totally agree i really think that i mean kb and i were both like
i think we both did well in ordinals and runes but there's some there's yeah there's some bag
bias there there's a little bit of there's a little bit of pain there maybe the bags are still with us that that could very well be the case like
i might still be a bitcoin puppet pfp right and now the fair thing is i got in like very early so
i'm not i'm not in pain it's just like watching like a 30x like turn into like a 2.5x like
doesn't feel great like you kind of when you're going to your
wife and you're like no babe listen this is i'm going to be a whole coiner like don't worry like
this is going to take us to the promised land and then it goes down 90 when it has a mantra of going
to zero like you don't feel like the smartest trader in the world when that happens but that's
okay you take your lumps and you just keep going so um yeah but i really feel like that was my mid curve of the cycle no sorry you go ahead
i'm a whole coiner in jpegs um it was the best of times and it was the worst of times
um but yeah i had i know i had really great times in ordinals but we can we can switch it up no right
on right on we could we could that was we
talked about ordinals we talked about orals a lot when this space started but that was back in the
fall and we still we were leading up to the magic eat and drop which we were like this is going to
be the catalyst for the rooms and ordinals ecosystem and in fact it was not but uh but
that's okay we keep going we Bullish Monad, bullish Fitz.
Brother, thanks for being here again. Like we said. Yeah, would love to jump in.
Just want to kind of get to know you better and hear some of your thoughts on where Monad, DeFi, the ecosystem at large and all that is going.
So I'm happy to kick it over to you. If you don't mind just sharing a little bit, like how did you get into crypto?
Like what was what was Fitz's lore um back in the day getting into the space
yeah for sure um i'll try and keep it as like concise as possible um and and avoid rambling but
uh if you want to double click on anything you know feel free to stop me so yeah I mean I was in my senior year of college in 2021
or sorry in yeah 2020 and into 2021 and funny enough I actually wanted to work in fashion
before I wanted to work in in crypto I caught the idea kind of randomly because I had a buddy that was, you know, he's my same age.
He was trading ICOs in 2017 and had showed me some of, you know, the stuff that he was up to.
And it just didn't really catch me at the time.
And then like 2019, like, you know, as BTC was sort of, you know, consolidating and curling up under 20K, he was like, hey, like, if there's any, you know, if there's any time to like actually put some time in and pay attention here, you should probably do it now and just see if it's if it's something that, you know, catches you.
So I took his advice and, you know, bear in mind, this is during COVID.
Right. So, you know, bear in mind, this is during COVID, right? So, you know, no classes
were in person. I was working part time, I didn't have a crazy class load. So I was just like,
I went from, I think, the first money that I onboarded into crypto, I put like a thousand bucks into Coinbase. The next week, or no, two weeks later,
I had basically just like, you know, deposited my net worth minus the next month's rent,
and was just like jamming market orders, scalping on GDAX, on Coinbase Pro,
and obviously doing horribly, like chopping myself to pieces on fees.
But, you know, I caught the bug.
And so it became pretty clear and that like around that time that there was a ton of excitement
and I made an alt.
And I think that was the big turning point of like actually, you know, you kind of go from just like I'm somebody who owns a bit of crypto on Coinbase to like I really want to stay informed here and like gain a network online.
And so I think that that sort of helped keep me in check and just, yeah, it threw me down the rabbit hole a lot further. So, um,
yeah, just to fast forward, you know, I, I, um, I graduated college. I worked for about six or
seven months at a, uh, a company called Benzinga, um, where I'm from, not to location docs, but
what's one of the few financial startups in the city that I grew up in.
And yeah, so they port news and data into traditional brokerages like TD Ameritrade,
Robinhood, and a few other places.
So what I would do is I would write articles on crypto and do a lot of like basically just getting a wide breadth of content out there that could then be monetized either through like juiced ref links or whatever else.
So it was, you know, good on paper experience.
And then I realized that I wanted to work formally in crypto and be super hands-on.
And through a crazy random series of events, I got a job at FTX that is probably a full story for another time.
But yeah, a lesser known piece of lore.
That was really my proving grounds and where I got the bulk of my crypto experience. So I was at FTX US from
September of 21 through the end. And then I actually stayed on for a little bit afterwards
and worked for the bankruptcy estate while I was figuring out what my next move was. So, um, yeah, obviously
crappy ending there. And, and, uh, it was a really tough thing to, to watch happen in front of me,
but, um, you know, I learned a ton. I don't think that there's, uh, really any career experience
that can shake me, um, after having, you know, gone through that and, and seeing,
seeing, um, how things operated, uh, what the downfall was, but yeah, I'll pause there. I know
that was kind of long winded with a lot of steps. Dude. Awesome. Awesome story. And, uh, yeah,
super cool. I would, I mean, not for right now, but I would love to, the fashion stuff would be sick to talk about someday. But for this space, the only other question that I had from the background that I'm curious about before we move to the Monad chapter is just like when your buddy told you like, yo, you should is an, oh, this is a great answer if it was, but was it like, oh, this is
number go up technology? Or was there something kind of like about the space or like the ethos
of crypto that kind of like resonated with you? Like, how did the thesis kind of like,
come to resonate with you? I mean, I think that the, the forward point that my friend was making to me was like, you know, he was investing and he was proposing that same thing of like, hey, like this is a space that's an asset class that's primed to rip.
But at the same time, like once I got involved, I realized that it resonated a lot with me, what, you know, what the core
tenets of crypto were.
Like, I grew up, whatever, I grew up skateboarding and sort of like, I don't know, I generally
viewed myself as like a, whatever, anarchist or, you know, I resonated with the principles
a lot.
Like, I thought that this is something that I believe in. And, you know, as soon as I started
to realize those benefits, it, you know, it made me think like, it's a, it's a super interesting
asset class that has a ton of room for growth. And, you know, I'm, I'm aligned with it from a
belief standpoint. Right on, right on, dude. That's awesome. Yeah. So, okay. We don't need to,
we'll save it for a beer someday, more of the FTX story. Right. But, but onto the next chapter,
right. So things don't go ideally. You're looking for the next thing. Was Monad like the direct
next step? Like, what was it like kind of like coming across Monad and like, yeah, like getting into working for the team and everything?
Yeah.
So Monad was not the, you know, there was a period there, which I'd imagine everybody
remembers where it wasn't exactly clear where crypto was heading.
And, you know, I did like try and I floundered for a while figuring
out what what the next move was. And it was just coincidence that I got in touch with the team,
the Monad team. Funny enough, through Tristan Ivor, who's one of the co-founders of Backpack.
I used to, you know, work closely with him and sort of view him as a mentor figure.
Um, and he helped me out a lot, uh, for, yeah, in a number of ways, but, um, you know, it was May of,
of, uh, 2023 that I joined Monad and, um, it was, you know, things looked very, very different then, right? Like, um, there, that basically Bonad was just,
you know, not a consensus, like, winner in, in a lot of people's eyes, or like,
people didn't even understand the thesis. It was kind of just like, you know, um,
it seemed like a lot of people had, had been interested in Monad from the perspective of like,
well, we know that this team is technically competent.
And like, that's sort of all of the, you know, the data points that we have right now.
But I think the pitch just like rung a bell immediately of, you know, I was like,
when I was first using crypto, I was priced out of using ETH mainnet.
And I immediately started using Solana super heavily.
And, you know, some of the folks that I talked to in so many words just described Monad to me as like,
it's kind of like if you were to build, you know, Ethereum, if it had the skeleton of Solana.
And, you know, obviously I'm under pitching it, but that made a lot of sense to me.
And, yeah, just went from there.
Things have changed so much in, you know, a relatively short time.
No, totally, man.
And, hey, shout out to Bill Monday down there in the listeners crew in large part to this man, Sailor Nini.
Also, my man, RWLK hanging out.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Monad team goaded.
But yeah, Fitz, that's awesome, dude.
So maybe you can just take us into like what your current role looks like now.
Like what is the give me the Fitz POV day in the life?
No, not really.
But like, what is your role look like with the team?
For sure.
So I've done a lot of random things during my time here.
But now, I guess, on paper, I'm focusing on DeFi ecosystem, which essentially what that
chalks up to be is there's a handful of, you know, super interesting DeFi protocols on Monad, some that are exclusively on Monad and, you know, some that are bringing deployments over from other chains.
And myself and two other people on the team basically just try and work closely with all these teams, honestly, as a support function.
So like that can manifest in a few different ways,
right? If a team is super early stage, and they need funding to get through the door,
and be able to hire and scale the team and the vision, you know, we might help them with
fundraising, like, what is the actual problem that you're looking to solve? Like, how do we have you,
you know, help you guys communicate this concisely and get in the raise process and, you know, close it quickly and move on to the next thing?
You know, myself personally, I really like any Dex platform.
I feel like I can provide like really good UX feedback on and give people an understanding of the landscape, you know, like, like, what does
DeFi on Monad look like? And how could you potentially have a leg up by like, you know,
working closely with these other ecosystem teams. So I hate to use the word like consulting or like
advisory, advisory, especially just because kind of has negative connotations in crypto but that's kind of
that is how i would describe the the actual like day-to-day is working with um these different
projects just on whatever their main priorities are at any given moment and just seeing how we
can be helpful no right on dude yeah and this i want to get into the Monad DeFi ecosystem and more of your thoughts there. I feel like that's super interesting. The only other piece from like the background thing that I'm just curious about is just like, so you were working for FTX, which obviously is like a company, centralized exchange, all that deal. I'm just curious, like, how is that compared to like working for kind of like a startup, right?
Like a protocol.
It sounds like when you launched into FTX, they were like probably kind of an established
player.
And so how is that kind of like bootstrapping mentality and the difference of like working
for like a decentralized L1?
Like, what has that experience been like for you?
Yeah, I think it's just the biggest change like um having to be extremely self-directed
at a place like monad right like when i came into when i started working at ftx you know there it
was um the international business the the derivatives exchange was just printing money. It was doing insane amounts of volume, you know, from some of the biggest market makers and traders in the space.
And so it was very clear. It's like this set of things that you have to do are like keep your existing trader base happy, like support them well, answer their questions and, you know, bring in new you know, new high volume players that will supplement
that volume and, you know, account for any churn to keep revenue as strong as possible.
And so in the case of Monad, it's like Monad is not a business, right?
It's a protocol.
And you're helping like you could be working on uh supporting any number of like 300 plus startups
on any given day and and it's kind of just a question of like how do you establish priorities
like how do you decide um which of these uh how do you assess rather which of these teams like is is best you know benefits the most from uh your help or or
you know like the the time that you can spend with them um it's just super open-ended it's like
there's 50-ish people on the monad foundation team and um on any given day like people are
working on just such a wide variety of things, and this changes regularly.
So, yeah, it's just like a priority.
You're on this treadmill of constant re-evaluating what your main focus should be at any given moment.
moment. And frankly, there's just like, you know, there's a lot of distractions. Like it's,
And frankly, there's a lot of distractions.
it's a very interesting mental game to have to play to be effective.
Yeah, man. I mean, I, I totally agree in that regard. And this is really not about me,
but I've just found in the time working with Kuru and everything, like self-directed
is really the name of the game. Cause like when you're working at a startup, you're really like
building the plane as you're flying it. And like, I know just for Kuru, I mean, Mana has a slightly
bigger team, but in terms of like the scale of things, it's still not like a huge team by any
means. And you're, I've just found that it's like anything that you want to do,
that can be a value add that's within like the rough parameters or scope of your role.
It's going to be a yes. It's like, oh, you want to run a Twitter space? Like, yeah, absolutely.
Like, go. Yeah, that's a part of your job. Like, oh, you want to do like, you want to build stupid
cloud monsters and like have people customize them? Like, hell yeah, like uh you want to build stupid club monsters and like have people customize them like hell yeah like that's going to be fun for people right so like all of these silly things
i've got an idea that i'm cooking on right now and i was talking to fravashi about it and he was like
if you're excited about it let's just see what happens like let's run with it so but but at the
same time there's nobody really um there is kind of like this element of like you're pushing towards
a goal and everything but like in the day-to-day especially being fully remote like nobody's
looking over your shoulder right like it is kind of like a results-oriented thing where like being
self-directed can both be like a blessing and a curse because if you're like having an off day
and you're just like scrolling the timeline all day this is pointing to figure out myself like
you're just gonna miss you're gonna be stressed because you're gonna be like oh shit like i need to
i need to be self-directed right now so it can be a real uh challenge but if that's something
that we're like creativity and being able to like flex and do the things that you want to do
makes sense i mean there's just a bajillion opportunities in the ecosystem right now so
yeah just encouragement to the listeners to really dive in. Definitely.
Yeah. And I think like one thing that you, you, you seem to be heading in the direction of is like,
I don't know, I don't think that this is not coming from an arrogant perspective, but like,
I don't think that working in crypto is particularly difficult. Like, I don't think that there's some secret set of knowledge
that people have
that somehow sets them apart
to be able to do a certain role or function
at most crypto companies.
At the end of the day,
people are building apps,
people are building infrastructure,
they want others to use it.
And oftentimes there are leaders on the team
that will have some rough semblance of like,
here's what you could be doing at any given moment.
We have to knock all of these things out
over the next year
to even have a shot at being successful.
So how do you just divvy those things up
and put the effort and time in?
Yeah, man, no, that's definitely true.
And we've talked about it on the space before,
but I think it just bears repeating.
Like I know for myself, I talk to people now,
I had a pretty hard pivot in terms of my career
when I started working full-time crypto.
And now I tell people like, oh yeah,
like I work in growth or I work in marketing.
I tell them I work at a fintech startup
because unless they're cool
and then I'll talk to them about crypto.
But they're like, yeah,
how did you get involved with that?
I'm like, oh, you know,
Twitter, that, yeah,
I met a bunch of people
with animated profile pictures
and they gave me a job
and they paid me money to tweet and
to talk on a space. What's the space? It doesn't matter. It's kind of like a podcast. So yeah,
man, I mean, not to say that I don't, I think you're right on though. Like it's real. The real
key is you can get a job in crypto by doing the job that you want for free and putting out like real value on the timeline. Like that will actually attract people's attention and you can get a job in crypto by doing the job that you want for free and putting out like real value
on the timeline. Like that will actually attract people's attention. And you can go through the
grind and like be doing BD and like networking and all that stuff. But like if you just start
putting out long posts on stuff that you're passionate about or shit posting or writing
or making video content or like whatever it is, like the bar is not still
like it's becoming higher progressively.
And I think in a year or two will be much higher.
But like it is not an impossible feat to like get your get your foot in the door.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bill, Bill has an old tweet that's like you have like you can make a conscious choice
to basically increase your luck surface area, which I feel like that's kind of like, you know, something that your your story of working in crypto reminds me of is like.
um all the time and and being you know witty reply guy-ing people like you know maybe the
the the paths wouldn't have crossed for you to be you know working at akuru dude 100 true no
totally i mean and and this was the this is the fun thing for me last thing i'll say about myself
is like i enjoyed it that's like a great thing And like cryptos, I really think that if you like crypto, you can pick the thing that you want to do and have fun with it, right? Like if you're like, I talked about doing standup earlier, this is the only way in my entire life that I'm going to get paid to be funny, right? In any in any form or fashion, I'm not going to go on the road and be a comic.
go on the road and be a comic. If you are passionate about, you know, development or
engineering or those things, you can start doing long posts, find a job as a dev rel or as an
engineer, whatever it is, like you can get on GitHub, you can show your work open source,
you can do all those things. And so again, not easy, but, but definitely doable. Yeah. You know,
it's just to return back to where we were just a few minutes ago, would love to hear.
Obviously, we're building in the DeFi sector.
I think a lot of people on the space are bullish, Monad and DeFi.
I just saw someone today talking, maybe it was yesterday, talking about like how there's been like this dearth of chains.
I think they were referencing like how Ethereum and Vitalik, not to throw shade or anything, but they just, it seems like they don't really like DeFi, right?
Like they're not really fans of it.
They don't particularly participate in it.
Solana kind of, but it's not exactly the thing that they've pushed or directed a lot of resources to, although there are good DeFi expressions on Solana and everything.
And I do think that that's starting to become a wave there.
It feels like to me that for Monad, DeFi is like a real concentrated push.
It makes sense with James and Keone coming from their HFT background and everything.
But I just wonder for you, you mentioned earlier kind of like that pitch, right, of like what Monad enables.
How would you kind of like sell that to like a prospective builder?
What just kind of like makes you excited about DeFi on Monad?
Oh boy, it's a broad prompt.
So I think, all right, if I were to start,
if I were to address some of the things
that you said throughout your,
the way you posed that question,
I think like even just starting
with how you define defy right
like i think most people think of i feel like most people have a a pretty unnecessarily um
narrow view of what of what uh defy actually is like they would separate meme coins out and say like those are not a point of you know
Not included within the DeFi sector
in some cases and I would disagree like I think like at the end of the day, right these
blockchains are you know decentralized on a spectrum, right?
They have varying levels of decentralization and there's some financial involvement to like
99 plus percent of apps that run on those blockchains.
So I feel like the takes of like, oh, certain ecosystems leaning into sectors more or less than others is kind of like a, I don't know.
I feel like it's a kind of like short-sighted to box, to try and like make these assessments, right? But I
don't know, not to digress. I think that the main thing that excites me about DeFi on Monad is like,
I would urge people here to maybe just like take a little bit of time.
And this will sort of help you answer this question for yourself. Take a little bit of time, and this will sort of help you answer this question for yourself.
Take a little bit of time to understand what happens in the lifecycle of an order on a
centralized exchange, a centralized crypto exchange.
And then I would say the next step further would be understand the cycle of an order that gets placed on a centralized equities or commodities
exchange, like the CME, for example. And really just try and think about how crude the crypto How much higher latency, how much higher variability in how these systems perform when compared to their centralized counterpart.
It's like there's miles and miles of progress that can be made on DeFi.
that can be made on DeFi. And all this is really to say that, like, I still think that it's like
an actual fair take to say that trading on chain, like any form of risk transfer on chain,
or economic function, like, you know, lending, like, these systems are operating at like,
extremely low efficiency.
Like there's so much more juice that can be squeezed out of these systems to the point
where, you know, maybe there's a part of the reason that crypto is not really taking off
to the masses yet is like these apps simply need to be better.
And to be better, they need,, they need better developers and better infrastructure.
And that's sort of like the unlock that I point to with Monad and with Kuru
and a number of different apps that are taking unique advantage of Monad's performance
is like these systems have a ways to go. Think about this idea of,
like, 1300 transactions per second on Solana, arguably, like, the most packed block space that
anybody can can transact on right now. You know, kudos to Solana. It's extremely impressive. But,
like, it's 1300 a second.
Like think about how many people in the world are buying and selling goods at any given moment. Like
how many people are active on the Amazon website at any given moment, you know, surely many times
more than, than that. Um, and so I don't know, I know this is super long winded, but I'm just saying like,
ETH and, you know, like the, the, some of these systems that were built
five, six, seven years ago, you know, they're amazing developments for their time.
They've completely changed the way that crypto works and we owe them everything
for getting us to this point. But the reality is that these systems were built and they got
technical debt over time. And it's very hard to reverse some of that technical debt. It's very
hard to stay coordinated amongst an ever- an ever decentralizing set of contributors.
And I think that Monad is just like, you know, the Monad Foundation and Category are two
contributors that are like focused.
Like we know, you know, what we want to do.
We know what the goal is and we know what kind of apps can run once you do have an environment that's just like
you know a great a great deal more scalable than than things that exist nowadays so
yeah super philosophical but in the defy sector like to bullpost kuru for a sec
we talked about fee sensitivity earlier i made a swap earlier on Aerodrome on base again, no shade, great platform.
Um, I swapped like a relatively small amount of CBBTC into USDC slippage was, uh, almost
1%, like 0.74%.
That is egregious when you compare it to TradFi.
Like it's kind of a joke, like,
a person that trades at a centralized trading firm that trades equities would laugh at that.
And it's like, that's not a specific thing to, you know, to Aerodrome or to Base. It's like,
the norm in crypto. Like, we just think these things are reasonable to accept as like,
oh, yeah, that's the best that things will get, which it's just not, you know, it's like we could be getting like assets could be trading on chain 10, 20, you know, 50 times more efficiently and
more efficiently and with significantly better pricing than they do right now.
with, you know, significantly better pricing than they do right now.
Dude, I don't think that was too philosophical at all.
That was a great answer and totally agree.
And I feel like that's one of the places where I think that you're 100% right about
DeFi having so much room to grow and go in terms of just like being more usable,
being more intuitive, being more intuitive,
being more efficient, better, deeper liquidity, all of those things.
And I mean, on one hand, right, that's not great, right?
Like that's an obstacle.
But I do think without becoming too like David Goggins honest or whatever, like I think the
builders look at that and they see like an incredible opportunity, right?
Like this is and then you I'm getting excited right now,
but like you see these great barriers that have to be overcome
and the unlocks that can come in an ecosystem like Monads.
And you realize like, not only can we make these huge performance strides
and go to the bounds of like where intellectual curiosity
and like deep passion will take us.
But like additionally, we can do it in a way that is like decentralized, right? So like there are
all of these challenges to do it. But like at the end of the day, you're going to be able to provide
like ideally KYC list, like thing that nobody that is permissionless that like nobody can tell you
whether you can or can't trade there, that you can have self-sovereignty for assets, like all of those things.
So like what a great challenge to like be working on and to be building towards like that's just super exciting.
Yeah, to me, I'm excited to be building Monad DeFi.
Let's go, baby.
But yeah, no, I love it.
But yeah, no, I love it.
Fitz, I wonder for you, with that in mind,
I'm just kind of like what Monit enables
in the DeFi sector and everything.
Damn, I feel like I should pick your brain more on DEXs,
but we kind of have like, we try not to,
we don't like to talk ourselves up too much.
So I'll probably actually get at you offline
for more like feedback and thoughts and everything. Cause I need to really pick your brain on that. But just kind of more generally,
I wonder, are there innovations in the early stages of other projects? You can point them
out specifically or just kind of like the primitives or whatever it is that are interesting
or exciting to you that you're looking forward to seeing? And just to piggyback off of that, and I know I'm not doing the best job of framing some
of these questions, but like, are there things that haven't been built yet on Monad that you
are like, please, somebody like, come along, like this would be an awesome innovation to like bring
to the chain? Hmm, things that I'm seeing currently that I like or things that I haven't
things that are not being built yet on Monad that I would like to see?
Oh, well, kind of both because I'm a bad interviewer, but take it whatever direction
you want. Okay, got it. So on the derivative side of things, I think one of the most exciting areas of improvement that I want to see, and Drake Exchange, shout out to Drake, they are doing some work in this area, is allowing for much more diverse types of collateral on PerpTexes.
So there are a lot of people out there that believe in the BTC Phi, BTC Layer 2 thesis,
purely because they say, well, there's a lot of Bitcoin holders out there that would love to do
things in DeFi, but they don't want to sell their Bitcoin.
I think the same is true. And I think, you know, that would unlock a lot of idle capital from people that have, you know, wrapped Bitcoin and want to do things in DeFi. But again, like,
they've held on to this position for forever. They don't want to,
they don't want to incur a taxable event or whatever it is. Um, or, you know, just if you
think about people in a bull market, um, for people that, you know, have traded on platforms
in the past that did this, like if you're holding a spot token and you open a long using that spot
token as collateral, um, you know, your, your margin that is available to use on the platform is growing in value.
So it's like my long is getting, in theory, more safe if both asset prices are going up.
My liquidation price is probably going down.
Or I could even get more levered if I wanted to,
if my collateral grows in value.
So it's just like it's a capital efficiency thing.
It's very difficult to do from a risk standpoint.
That's why I think most platforms don't do it.
GMX does this, but extremely conservatively,
as in they don't let you unlock that much utilization from the
collateral that you post. But yeah, I think like doing this at scale could basically just ignite,
it could make the market less muted if you allow this at scale. Let's see, what is another thing in in the ecosystem that excites me there's a project
called agra that i'm super excited about it's similar it's in a similar vein to this on on
the capital efficiency front agra underscore xyz if you guys want to look it up there'll be a team
that deploys on a few different ecosystems but but the concept is super cool. It's
basically just an on-chain prime brokerage. And they've thought of a lot of the problems that
these previous on-chain prime brokerages have had and try to solve them. So I won't get into
details there, but the big benefit here is same thing.
Capital efficiency, being able to have assets that are traditionally really hard to borrow against or to free up, you know, capital against to get a loan against.
Such as like active open positions on platforms like these are things that traditionally you cannot use to open other
long positions on other platforms. And these are the sorts of things that they could potentially
allow. So I think you guys can probably tell, right, the common theme here is I think leverage
is good. I think that actually more people should use it responsibly.
And I think it's kind of under talked about how like what these instruments are actually good for.
Most people just think like perps are the craziest way to gamble in crypto, which I agree with as well.
I see that take. But yeah, that would be two like existing teams that I think are really interesting for people to look into if you want to nerd out on some of this stuff.
And then I think things that I want to see built funny enough, this is not a defy product, but I'd be curious to hear your guys' opinion. There's this thesis that I
have, which is basically just like blockchains collect a ton of data, but it's very hard to
access that data in a really easy way. You know, usually you're going to like Dune or you're going
to go to a block explorer.
I think that there should sort of be built in social profiles at the wallet level, like potentially an enshrined feature.
And this, you know, you could take this a number of different ways.
But yeah, curious if you guys have looked into different like DID or like social profile kind of platforms in the past.
Would Ethos be considered one of those?
Yeah, Ethos is a great example.
I need to do more homework on them.
Yeah, I haven't.
I got invited to the platform, and I don't think I did much after that.
But I know Ethos is a big one where, yeah, it's kind of like a Yahoo for crypto influencers or not Yahoo.
What am I thinking?
Kind of like Yelp.
Yelp.
Yelp.
Yeah.
And so like people are essentially like writing reviews of people and but you have to like
sign up so you can't be an on.
So you can't be like an an on like, oh, this person like sucks and it's like a lie.
So I've seen that.
And then I think there's that vector is a kind of a social app, but that's just showing
like your trades like publicly and there being like a leaderboard.
So are you saying kind of like more so on the social aspect of it or like the trading aspect of it?
So I feel like Vector might even be doing this under the hood and like just preparing a feature down the line. But like,
if you look at ethos, and you look at vector, they're both like a front end that you visit,
right? Where you can get information about somebody's reputation or like,
how good their calls are or whatever else, depending on which one you're looking at.
What I want to advocate for is like, actually creating a primitive so that like, all right, I'm transacting in this wallet.
And there's like some sort of, you know, stored, like, tags about me based on the activity that
I've done in that wallet. And then, for example, a use case that
could be cool here is I go to the Kuru front end and it shows me the pro mode automatically if I've
done a lot of volume. Whereas if I'm a brand new user, the Kuru front end shows me the light mode
and gives me a pop-up tutorial on like, oh, this is your first time here and you're probably a newbie.
Like, here's how you actually use Kuru.
Almost like a cookie that lives on chain.
Dude, that's very cool.
And yeah, no, tangential.
But I just want to shout out Ethos
because I think what they're doing is really cool.
One of the coolest things, if you guys haven't, I think you need a ref link.
I actually am on the platform.
I don't know if I have any ref links.
But just one of the things that you can do is you can embed Ethos as like a browser extension.
And I have it overlaid on crypto on my browser.
And it shows every Twitter profile around in their around their pfp it
shows their score so like i don't use it all the time but every once in a while i'll just be
scrolling and i'll see like a questionable take or like something that i'm not sure about
and they'll have like the lowest score in the world it'll be like dave portnoy and it's like
as low as it can get and And it's just kind of helpful.
It's instructive and one of those interesting things.
There is something called – Fitz, have you heard of Ethereum Follow Protocol?
No, I haven't.
So it's built by Brantley, who is one of the core guys at ENS.
And you should check it out.
Their pitch is on- chain social graph protocol for
Ethereum accounts. So it's kind of like a social build out of this kind of like embedded, like
giving you like this social dimension. It's a little bit different than like the kind of cookie
thesis that you have. But it's pretty interesting and kind of in line with that. I think that
Vitalik's actually on it. Definitely worth looking into.
I haven't interacted with it a ton, but I agree with you.
That's a very cool idea.
And it feels like an on-chain extension of the kind of identity thesis that's played out on Twitter,
where people identify with their PFPs and everything.
But I also think that people could identify with
on-chain activity, with the NFTs that they own, with the trading activity, all of that
stuff, and it could create some really cool niches.
Definitely, yeah.
It's a super tough category.
It requires so much social coordination and BD work to get people to integrate stuff like
this at first.
But I have faith.
I think somebody will do it well eventually.
Nice.
Yeah.
Well, we're coming up to time here, Fitz.
We don't want to keep you too long.
I do just want to open it up real quick here to any of our speakers or KB, if you'll please
jump in.
I don't know if any of you guys have questions or anything,
but yeah, feel free to jump in for any questions
for Fitz or otherwise.
No, I think.
I have a question.
Oh, go ahead.
No, no, please go.
Did somebody have a question no I don't think they did oh no I'm good I think um that was a lot of info uh Fitz thank you so
much for just sharing everything I really had no idea that you're at FTX that was like
insane for me um to hear and it's super super cool and yeah I think we had a really good
space and just want to give it to the rest of the audience here and then we can close it up
yeah right on I'm keeping an eye out for hands up I don't know that anybody has a further question.
Oh, this was my only other, this is just the last thing.
Oh, yeah.
Ayo, feel free to come off.
Yeah.
I want to thank you for giving us the incentive of rewards for you.
I think you have a million dollar a million people followers uh so we there are some tokens uh airdrop for tokens to to the account i think i claimed uh i claimed the one yeah
what is the deadline uh so do you know there's a deadline to claim the the tokens do you know
i think those were just sold down nfts and all of them should be sent out uh
but i'll have to ask the the growth folks you're talking about the million the million follower
oh yeah yeah but i think a cool rule also had yeah the 100k um career monsters yes yes are you
talking are you talking about like i don't know what token you're talking about, though.
I believe there's...
I forgot the name.
Sorry, I did it a couple days ago,
but I think the official Twitter said
there are some tokens we can...
Do you have a token crew?
ISP or something?
That was from Leverbets.
So I think that's still live.
So you can still go to Leverbets.
I can pin
the tweet here so you can
find it. Yeah, if you've interacted
with Kuru before,
I think it was like Tuesday of
last week,
we did a crossover
with them.
Leverbets is a sports betting platform that allows you to use leverage,
fits well like that, responsibly.
But yeah, and so it's very cool.
And if you've used Kuru prior to last week,
you can go and get 1,000 PSP to be able to interact with their test net, um,
offering,
which is pretty cool app.
You can like bet,
live or on upcoming like sports games and everything.
And it's just a little bit of,
test net funny money to yeah,
go and be able to interact with their,
with their,
protocol.
Great.
Great.
That's what I'm talking.
Exactly what I'm talking about.
Okay.
I'll click. I'll go ahead to claim it. Yeah, cool. Cool. 100%. Well, guys, thanks so much for being here. Fitz, thank you, man. Really very fun. Yeah, I don't know. Do you have any? Fitz, I got to put you on the spot. Do you have any like, parting words? Is there any piece of like, I feel like a lot of pods do this. It's a little cheesy, but I'm happy to be cheesy, honestly. Is there any like one piece of like life advice or like anything like that that you would just give to give to the crew here? If so I don't want to preach from the soapbox about, like, this is my one special trick.
But I feel like it's very easy to get, like, bummed out at various times in this hectic industry that we work in.
But I've heard there's even just, like, you know, I've been trying to practice gratitude, as corny as it may sound.
practice gratitude, as corny as it may sound. So like constantly reminding yourself that,
you know, like there are people out there with much less than, you know, the average person. And
we're extremely blessed to be able to work in an industry that's like, as crazy as it is,
as informal as it is, as creative as it is, like, it's, you know, there are people that have it much
worse. And we should be extremely thankful that, you know, we're all in the, we all have
the chance to click buttons and, you know, pull money out of the computer sometimes.
So yeah, just trying to do that myself as things get hectic.
But, yeah.
Dude, so true.
Yeah, I love it.
Man, I'm just a big gratitude guy.
I love gratitude, man.
I'm always working on it myself.
Man, dude, the journal really helps. Or just keeping a note on your phone of, like, things that are just, like, crazy, that are, like, in your life that you just don't deserve or that are just huge blessings and you just look back on it whenever you're feeling
down damn you'll just run through a wall dude it's awesome so good way to stay self-directed
um yeah Fitz thank you again man for the time thanks for coming out with us this is a super
interesting space very fun um good to hang out with all of you guys. Thanks so much for coming out. I think, KB, that we have a pretty fun space plan for next week.
It sounds like tentatively we've got some awesome guests, so I'm really excited for that.
Ooh, and KB, what is dropping tomorrow morning?
Oh my god, I forgot.
Um, yeah, so Monad Games will be premiering tomorrow morning at 10am on YouTube.
So I will pin that to the top very quickly.
And yeah, like definitely subscribe and get in there because you know, the YouTube numbers
are always really great.
There is a prediction market as well to predict who you think is going to win. And then after the premiere,
there will be a Monad in the mornings at 11am and I will be there on stream, not in the office. But
so we'll be talking about the Mon monad games and yeah it should be a
interesting and busy morning uh nini what are you guys doing in the discord
if you're still here and it's okay are you guys are you guys doing anything in the discord for
monad games yeah we'll just be yapping around and then we'll
actually we'll all be on youtube wait what so like when it's premiere like the premiere will be
on youtube and we'll be watching it there and then you know we'll cross over into discord and
we'll yap away okay cool yeah i'm so excited yeah it should be it should be a lot of fun um and uh and yeah so
that's that's tomorrow i pinned it to the top check out the pipeline um and i think where is
there a youtube channel i don't see it hmm on here okay okay wait let me pin let me pin the youtube one all right the youtube one is pinned
so go uh bookmark it and yeah 10 a.m tomorrow morning should be i'm nervous man i'm nervous
to get on to this uh for this to like be premiere not gonna lie i was so hung over this day
cozy nose like I was so hung
over.
Thank you for the insider betting information.
Yeah, I was a mess.
I was three hours
late and
still managed to
somehow participate for a five
hour shooting.
A shoot, so yeah.
A five hour shooting?
Brutal. It was like shooting like my spirit
no i'm kidding it wasn't that bad um i i was like wearing sunglasses the whole time
it was like very bright um and it was it was fun it was fun we had fun kb uh did did you win I cannot confirm nor deny yeah I know but like did you win though
I can't say oh man all right all right you know what then my pick is possibly spam okay
then I pick possibly spam all right anybody I mean okay we don't have that many okay nini who do you who do
you have a prediction i don't have a prediction i have a conviction i'm writing will kb of course
like mine is mine is obvious who i you'd think will win okay right on right on
fits do you have a conviction, not a prediction?
Sorry, I lost my tab for a second.
Hmm.
I kind of want to root for Spam.
He's a funny fella, but I don't know.
I'd be happy to see an upset, you know.
Right on.
Right on.
Well, go to Opinion Labs.
Get in the game.
Long KB.
Come on.
You got it.
Come on. If you're here and you're not, I mean, I'll forget Fitz for the possibly spam.
That's a good take.
We like spam here.
But come on
dude you're at the cruise space man you gotta go put all your freaking test mon on kb man come on
she was hung over but yeah kb's like yeah i was hung over it was really bright hung over person
says the lights were bright that's crazy yeah it was so bright i was like oh my god like there's like a million there's like a million
lights like five cameras like it was uh yeah it was good though it was something i've never
experienced before like i've never been a part of like a um like a production like that and
juice up did i say that right this time nene just up just up damn it yeah yeah i did well it's better than it was i think i called him j-sub before i just like i
don't know it's like i see the sup and the j i don't really see the u juice up is definitely whatever um but yeah no whatever like how how put together like he put his like production
um it's like super impressive and they you know and all the editing um i'm really excited to kind
of see everything be put together at the end jace up big time okay well we are over time but this
was super fun guys
fits thank you again man super fun and just really great to hear about your story and get
some of the forecasting on just your thoughts around mana defy and like everything that's
um that's good to be excited about coming down the pike here just bullish man very excited
we're cooking on some fun stuff and weurob. We're cooking on, oh, I can't believe I didn't mention this. We're cooking on sound effects for your trades, dude.
That's going to be fun.
Let's go.
Let's go.
I'm pumped for that future.
You posted that, and I didn't know if you were kind of joking or half serious,
but literally it took like 10 minutes,
and Frivashi was in the marketing chat on Slack.
And then we've literally been like posting
like sound effects like the rest of the day where we're like yo we should get this in like
and we're talking about like if it's like a small buy a big buy a medium buy like having different
sound effects like it's actually a killer idea so shout out to fits whoa that could be crazy like
if somebody else buys something you can hear it in the book. Oh, wow.
Okay.
Well, you guys have some work to do.
Thank you again for hosting me.
I got to jump, but have a good night.
You guys talk.
Right.
Thanks Fitz.
Okay.
Peace brother.
All right.
All right guys.
That's all for us from crew rely for this week.
Make sure that you go watch the premiere of the modern games tomorrow at 10 AM Eastern time. Going to be a lot of fun getting the YouTube chat with Nini and the rest of the Monad games tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
Going to be a lot of fun.
Get in the YouTube chat with Nene and the rest of the crew.
I bet Bill Monday, that son of a gun, will be there too.
So you should go hang with him.
And, yeah, guys, it's going to be a ton of fun.
Thanks so much for coming out and hanging out with us.
And, yeah, hey, have a great rest of your week.
And I look forward to seeing you guys again next week.
Oh, we might actually stay tuned on the time.
We might actually be doing 6 p.m. Eastern time next week,
but we'll update you on that.
Should we give a sneak peek to next week's guests?
Oh, yeah.
Should we just say it?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I mean, we're pretty sure they're gonna
come on they're gonna come on yeah okay you want to say or should i say it the the rick rick
sanchez is coming on okay all right that's good it'll be fun i might even be a debate it's gonna be a lot of fun i
can't say more than that one of them may or may not be a co-founder at uh monad although he was
not listed on the recent uh follow the founders tweet controversially but uh but that's okay um
but yeah no guys excited we'll be back next week. Have a great rest of your night. Thanks for,
thanks for yapping with us.
Yeah.
Peace guys.
