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Litecoin is the New Meta ๐ The Aggregated Ep. 123
Recorded: Aug. 1, 2025 Duration: 3:30:45Space Recording
Short Summary
Litecoin is experiencing a resurgence as a key player in the crypto space, with new projects, partnerships, and treasury companies emerging to support its growth. The community is rallying around Litecoin's potential as a medium of exchange and a store of value, signaling a positive trend in adoption and innovation.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning.
How's everyone doing today
morning Aztec
morning Panda
I see Vasil on stage
great to see you brother
Iago
I'm working on the background
trying to bring
friends up here
good morning on the background trying to bring friends up here. Good morning.
Good morning.
All right, let's kick this off. So Litecoin is the new meta, the aggregated episode one, two,
three. Funny how that worked out. So so 123 episodes we're here every friday guys
excited to kick this conversation off um if you haven't joined our show before
basically we like to introduce everyone and then we jump into the meat of the conversation
we like to have a nice dynamic conversation, free flowing. No one has to raise
their hand. It's just like a bunch of friends talking around a table. How do you like to
describe it, Rock? The Roman bathhouse. Exchanging philosophy and the alpha of the day.
philosophy and the alpha of the day.
Yes, sir.
You can imagine that we're drinking wine
in our robes. I don't know.
Maybe some people aren't in robes. That's up to your imagination.
But the most important part
is good discussion definitely so this was a over subscribed space we
have a lot of friends uh ready to jump in on this conversation so we'll be cycling through uh we just
kind of do first come first serve and uh just request to join if you want to be part of the
conversation so first of all i want to say thank you to everyone that's behind the show,
QuickSwap account, friends at Polygon, LDA,
everyone that sent me friends and DMs to invite.
And, you know, it just goes a long way.
It helps us out at the show.
So much love everyone.
Let's jump into this.
Rock, do you have anything to say at the top or should we just start introducing everyone?
No, ready for intros.
All right.
So I just go left to right on my screen, no particular order.
Go ahead and take 30 seconds to introduce yourself uh let's go david
david schwartz what's up brother hey good morning guys i hope you can't hear my wife making her own
coffee in the background there but uh i'm i'm a partnerships director at the litecoin foundation
and an avid supporter of Bitcoin and Litecoin
for about eight years now.
Much love.
We've actually had people making breakfast
at the same time while on this show.
So no worries with background noise.
Oh, that's not so bad then.
All right, I don't feel so bad.
Alex Damsker is often
taking her kids to school
and her daughter is trying to get on
the spaces. Oh, really? Okay.
Would it enhance the experience
if I was in a robe
as well doing this? It would.
It might. Let's see if I can
find one. No, you don't
need to put a robe on because of us.
Okay, I'll just sit here naked then.
I know Rock's naked, so. Close, close. Let's go. All right, but yeah, much love. Really appreciate
everyone being here and hanging out with us. Thank you, David, for hanging out,
talk some Litecoin here. Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Zane Zaylor.
Good morning, guys. Yeah, my name is Zane Callian, CEO of Lux or Strategic Advisor to LuxFoldo,
soon to be Executive Chairman. Really happy to be here and yeah, big supporter of Litecoin. And
we're the first Litecoin treasury company and really excited to be a part of the ecosystem.
first light coin treasury company and uh really excited to be a part of the ecosystem we fondly
call zane the michael saylor of litecoin definitely definitely much love great to have you here brother
i'm gonna go ahead and uh pass the mic on over to the populist block
hey what's up thanks for having us on guys um my name is animal i'm a co-host of the populace block hey what's up thanks for having us on guys um my name is animal I'm
a co-host of the populace block I've been into like coin for a while actually started my crypto
adventure mining like coin like something like 10 11 years ago or so maybe longer ago but yeah
a huge fan of like coin and what you guys are doing uh huge fan of uh zane and what they're
doing uh with uh luxfolio and uh just happy to be here oh yeah uh we do have we do have a podcast
of spaces every wednesday night at 9 p.m i was about to say i was like you gotta you gotta talk
about your yeah yeah a little show uh wednesday nights 9 p.m eastern what do you guys
usually talk about macro right about crypto uh populist topics you know we're called the populist
block so uh politics mostly um whatever's trending that day or that week you know there's a lot there's
been a lot to talk about recently as you might might be aware. For better or for worse.
We have, I mean, we basically have populism on both sides now.
It's an interesting era.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So plenty to discuss.
We try to keep it interesting.
Although it does get a little bit spicy from time to time.
No worries.
We can handle the spice.
I love it. But yeah yeah great to have you here animal
and uh it's good to meet um actually all three of you uh specifically or and iago i saw at the
light coin summit as well so i'll um i'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to warren lee
mic on over to Warren Lee hey bros good morning good morning everybody I'm
Mexico in the house here but I'm also a like on warrior I'm a mean machine and
I'm the self-proclaimed fake CEO of marketing for looks folder so glad to be here guys
Glad you're here with us man. I love your memes. I love your memes on my I
can't get enough of them so
Glad you're here to jump into the conversation with us in and
It was cool hanging out with you at the fireside chat on Monday as well
Yeah It was cool hanging out with you at the Fireside chat on Monday as well. Yeah.
All right.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Iago.
What's up, Legend?
Hey, guys.
Fantastic to be here.
Thanks for the invite.
I've been building in crypto, mostly in Bitcoin, for the last 14 years. Among other things, started the whole DeFi and Bitcoin
world with Sovereign, which was the first and became the largest DeFi platform for Bitcoin, and have now been spending the last couple of years working on BOSS, which is really
really remarkable technology for the first time bringing programmability to Bitcoin,
remarkable technology for the first time bringing programmability to Bitcoin,
to Litecoin, and unifying all of the UTXO chains into a single programmable mega ecosystem.
Definitely. And super excited to be working with you guys yeah is it just me or did I just take just Rook?
no yeah I think he uh he just dropped off
yeah he must be making breakfast
um all right cool yeah we're uh big fans of what you guys are building at Boss
and your contributions to LitVM and Litecoin.
Amazing stuff.
I mean, this is, yeah, we'll get into this stuff in a bit,
but I'm just, every day in this industry,
as someone, you know, with our venture studio,
I guess I might as well introduce myself,
and that'll give some context here of what I'm talking about. But I'm Rock Zacharias. I'm the CEO of Lunar Digital Assets
Venture Studio that incubated projects like Polygon and QuickSwap and lots of others.
I'm a mentor for Tim Draper's Bitcoin Fi Accelerator. I am the head of global leadership council for Michael
Turpin's BitAngels, the global investor pitch network. We've got 30 cities around the world
where we have pitch events. I serve on the board for Polygon Grants Program, and we have season
three starting here now, actually, actually pretty soon that'll be pretty interesting
adding some new flavor to the grants landscape and then I'm co-founder of QuickSwap and for the
first time in I think what six years five years I'm putting my co-founder hat back on and we're building
lit VM for Litecoin. And now I forgot what the point of why I was, oh yeah, I was going to say
that basically as a venture studio and in these pitch competitions and seeing all the grant
applications, all these things, I have a pretty decent kind of aperture of
where the industry is moving and what's being built. And every day, I'm just so excited when
I have these calls with different teams. And the point was that Bitcoin OS boss that Iago is
working on is one of these really crucial, I think like game changing technologies that,
that really move the world forward and,
and get the world ready for mainstream adoption.
I mean,
we've been saying on this show for years that ZK rollups,
which is part of the technology that boss is building are going to be a huge part of the entire world when
it comes to both scaling, privacy, and other things that we haven't imagined yet. Yeah,
ZK roll-ups and roll-ups in general are just really cool technologies. I mean's it's nerd stuff but it's cool nerd stuff
that's why uh were you guys able to hear my response to to iago or i don't think so you you cut out like a quarter way through probably oh okay yeah so yeah much love iago uh
thanks for being here and um i was just saying that you guys are pioneers, you know, on the Bitcoin ZK side of things.
And it's great to be working with you.
I'm not sure if you heard that, like my whole spiel, but it was something along those lines.
I'm very sorry I missed it.
I think Twitter didn't want me to hear specifically that.
I was probably slipping a pancake, man.
Actually, it was probably Darren.
I think he was moving me down from co-host to...
Yeah, no, it was definitely me.
Yeah.
I just wasn't going to say anything.
Darren probably knows me, you know, knows all of us better than we know ourselves,
and it decided my ego doesn't need more inflating.
Good times. we know ourselves and it decided my ego doesn't need more inflating good times all right i'm gonna go ahead and uh pass the mic on over to two cent timmy gm i'm like very much enjoying sitting here in my robe but rock of like you can imagine a robe
okay no i feel like the dude this morning um but yes i am i am two cent timmy i am on the polygon marketing team also do a lot with
aglare um post some spaces so like i am here i am like i need to say i'm like super excited to see
kind of what aglare is becoming and how we have this like i would say consortium of chains that
are all trying to do really interesting things and then it's really cool that like you get projects able to build what
they're best at and like seeing more people connecting.
I think it's going to a unified web three is really what we need.
So it's awesome to see,
I would say like a light coin coming on when you have like, okay,
it wasn't a smart contract.
And then what you guys are building with lit VM is super, super cool.
So yeah, really happy to be here.
Much love to me and say, and it's great building the show with you as well.
Um, so thanks for being here and I can't wait to pick your brain in a second.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over and I have to, I have to agree with you.
I, I mean, so just in case anyone doesn't know, I'm co-founder of LitVM and CSO at LDA.
I think one of the things I am very excited about, you said Timmy, brought it up, the ag layer.
Having Litecoin part of the ag layer and unified with the rest of liquidity in a trustless way
is going to be really exciting. I'll pass the mic on over to Vasyl from Gateway. What's up, bro?
Yeah. Hey, good evening. So you're all making the breakfast. I'm making the dinner. Lighting up my
grill right now. So yeah, my name is Vasyl. I'm head of the business development Gateway.
so yeah my name is Vasil I'm I'm I'm headed in the business development gateway so we were
co-developing CDK Aragon together with Polygon team and we are the team who managed to increase
the throughput of ZKVM network from 30 transactions per second to 5 000 right now which is crazy and
this is like very nice marketing campaign going on together with Polygon team. So, yeah, we are the ones who are connecting networks to Aglare,
both that are building as that are Alturo Labs and just like a standalone networks.
Big believer in ZK Tech working together with Rock, Adstack and Bitcoin team
on their new project.
Very excited and very bullish about that.
Yeah, and it's really funny
because we just had a call with Iago and his team
just like one hour ago, just like extremely technical.
And right now we have this Twitter space,
which is very, very nice.
Awesome.
Yeah, man, the updates that you were showing us on,
you know, so basically all the stuff
that you guys are building, all the contributions you've had to, you know, the Aragon client that Aztec mentioned, or I think maybe, or you maybe you did.
But, and then the SP1 prover and like, it's pretty crazy to see, you know, and I guess it's, i guess the timelines aren't that far off but you know
vitalik had originally said you know optimistic roll-ups would be first to market and would
dominate for some time and then he said zk roll-ups would be like three to five years out
and it seems like we're finally getting to a place with your largely with your guys's uh contributions to the aragon client
etc um it seems like we're getting close to zk roll-ups or passing optimistic roll-ups which is
kind of perfect timing for us with litvm because you know this is uh part of the technology that
we'll be using along with the the bitcoin os uh side on the litecoin rollup
side but yeah really cool stuff um yeah definitely and uh i'll start visil did you want to respond
real quick before i pass the mic oh yeah yeah just like i wanted to say thank you and uh what is
the most crazy thing for me is like how quickly the prices of zkvm rollups
drops uh you know remember when we just started to talk uh it was like around a year ago since
then we managed to decrease the prices three times without and then improve the throughput which is
crazy i mean like it's it's it's yeah it's just wonderful yeah i mean i guess and and in some ways
it's it's reduced even more than that.
I mean, there's like the cost of running the basic infrastructure of the chain.
There's the cost.
There's lots of different costs.
There's the cost of stamping to Ethereum.
There's all these different, but yeah, anyways.
Cool.
We'll get too far into the nerd weeds yeah if you don't stop me so let's
yeah we we got to introduce jack we got it and then we can jump into the meat of the conversation
uh what's up brother glad to be here guys uh am i loud and clear can everybody hear me yep yes sir
excellent just for the record i'm not wearing robe, just to carry on that thread.
I am on the board of Luna Digital Assets alongside RocketAztec, mainly responsible for launches.
And I am also a co-founder on a tokenizable DeFi strategy marketplace called Stratex.
So I'm happy to discuss with you guys today some of the cool DeFi things that is going to be popping up on Litecoin and Violet VM in the next few months.
And just for the record, all nerd shit is cool nerd shit that you said earlier, Rock.
I like that. Somebody quote that.
This is coming from somebody that's bookmarked the next two weeks of quality time with my fiancรฉ to make a watch,
the entire extended cut of all three Lord of the Rings films
and all three Hobbit films to give a context
when I make jokes about Lord of the Rings.
Yes.
Let's go.
Good times, man.
How long are those extended movies?
Four hours a piece.
So it's like 12 hours for the
first three and roughly 12 hours for the second
three so we think it'll take about two weeks in
total
that's awesome man
good times man that's going to be fun I
actually want to watch those with my wife
as well I think
I think that's much needed
education so good times guys all right
not to tell her it's uh it's your love language and then she'll she'll be on both you gotta and
you also gotta like somehow slip her some caffeine so she doesn't fall asleep you know a quarter of
the way through because that's my experience with cindy and lord of the Rings. Good times, man. I got to get her a drink, a coffee,
or have like an espresso martini or something.
You want to run by Dutch Bros real quick.
Yeah, good times.
Yeah, Dutch Bros is a coffee house near me.
I don't know.
Probably most people don't know what that is.
All right, good times, guys.
Wait, wait, wait.
Actually, let me use this moment to throw in a little shill for Litecoin Coffee Club.
We got some coffee at the Litecoin Summit.
We got to give a little shill to Litecoin Coffee Club.
Have you brewed some yet?
Cindy did.
I haven't. I don't drink coffee i actually want
i don't drink coffee either but i want to i want to try some uh so definitely let me know i'm pretty
sure you can order it and they i'm pretty sure they said they ship it it's it's absolutely worth
it it's delicious uh and strong do they have like different types of roasts?
Yeah.
I mean,
they have,
it's kind of like a seasonal thing.
They have flavors and batches and stuff that they'll,
that they'll ship.
It changes from year to year,
season to season.
that would be a really cool Christmas gift too.
what is it means?
It's,
is it,
is it July?
Oh man,
I can't say Christmas in July.
Okay.
Cause I was thinking I'll just buy a bunch and give it to family too.
But, yeah, good times, guys.
I got to taste it.
It's on the bucket list.
Time to jump into the meat of the conversation, guys.
So this space is titled Litecoin is the New Meta.
This space is titled Litecoin is the new meta.
Obviously, if you're here, you probably know that Litecoin is getting a ton of traction in many different areas.
You know, institutional tech, there's not only like layer twos, there's new wallets coming out and mentioning that they're building for Litecoin or doubling down on Litecoin building.
And there's payment applications that are upgrading and Litecoin treasuries that are stacking blue dots.
Shout out to Zane.
And we see all this traction all around.
And I think that's one of the things
that we want to kind of dive in today
is what consists of the Litecoin meta.
And specifically, I want to ask everyone here,
so there's no wrong answers.
And I know one person in particular can really
answer this well but i i also want to get everyone's perspective so everyone jump in on this
uh there's a lot of excitement around litecoin treasuries stacking litecoin So why are companies choosing Litecoin for their treasuries? In your opinion,
anyone can jump in here. Yeah, maybe I'll start. I think at the end of the day, it's the whole
concept of digital assets and specifically Bitcoin and Bitcoin kind of starting that,
the whole thesis. And Litecoin has the idea of hard money, right? The idea that this is not only a perfect store of value,
but it also is a currency that can be used in the real world on a day-to-day basis.
And I think as a treasury asset, we treat Litecoin exactly like we treat cash.
On our balance sheet, that's how we treat it.
And I think that's the only way you get mainstream adoption, right,
is for us to believe and treat litecoin exactly like cash and as hard money it should be
um like that's how we should consider it so as a treasury assets it's the best right like it is
the idea is the it's a core store value um it's inflation resistant, and as digital assets and adoption of digital assets accelerates,
then logically other companies should follow that same track.
I also think if I could just jump in here, that when you compare on a like-for-like basis
that, you know, when you compare on a like-for-like basis with Bitcoin,
which is obviously the current other Treasury Reserve asset,
you can see, like, a lot of favorable metrics.
I mean, if you compare them on a like-for-like basis,
whether it's transactions, hold account, or basically pick a metric,
Litecoin vastly outperforms, and the ratio that's painted is, you know,
way higher than it is today.
And there aren't many movers in that space in the Bitcoin, in the Litecoin treasury space.
And so, you know, you guys have kind of kicked this off here with Luxfolio.
It's really exciting.
Yeah, no, it's appreciated.
And I think, like, we, as we said, kind of when we started this whole journey, like us
being the first treasury company, it logically should follow that others follow in that same footstep.
The same way it happened with MicroStrategy and Bitcoin Treasuries thereafter.
All of this is just trying to drive more adoption, drive more.
Like Charlie said it perfectly the other day, I guess, on that podcast too.
It's all about just trying to drive more eyeballs, get more people aware of Litecoin, the value of Litecoin, comparative to Bitcoin, comparative to cash, for that matter, and really drive that forward.
So we're happy to be the first treasury company, but I think it logically falls that others will kind of fall in those footsteps.
And to us, that just kind of confirms our thesis and our conviction.
in our conviction. Yeah, I think it's an interesting kind of debate or concept where
people are, you know, some hardcore Bitcoiners, and I consider myself a pretty hardcore Bitcoiners,
but some hardcore Bitcoiners will say, you know, we don't want ETFs. We don't want all of these
things. And I just think that's a flawed way of thinking.
I mean, I understand the wanting to keep things cypherpunk and, you know, try to try to keep everyone moving in the direction of decentralization.
I do it, too.
And I and I, you know, would tell people best to hold your stuff in self-custody.
But I think there's a whole class of people that self-custody just doesn't work for, at least today.
And over time, we're going to continue to build out better self-custody options and these kind of things.
But for now, we get to use one of the great traits of Bitcoin and Litecoin is optionality.
You build these platforms, you could consider
Bitcoin, Litecoin, all of these things, you can consider them in a way platform that you could
build on top of. And if you can build layer twos, you could build ETFs, you could build treasury companies you can settle countries international trade you can settle
banks you know end of you know day balances and even potentially repo markets and and all of these
things um side chains different kinds of roll-ups there's all kinds of things that you can you can
settle to these
things so i think the more the merrier we should be trying to get everyone to get involved in this
industry and for some companies they're just not going to buy the the asset itself they need some
institutional wrapper either for legal mandates or just comfort, or they're scared they're
going to get hacked or things like this. So I think having ETFs, I think having micro strategy,
I think having Luxfolio, etc. These are all great ways to provide people optionality.
Yeah, and I would just say at the end of the day, it's all about adoption too, right? Like trying to โ mainstream adoption is the way that we get โ that digital assets get critical mass.
And all of โ to your point, all of these things are just โ they're optionality, but they just provide more eyeballs, more people avenues to get into this.
And like I totally appreciate the hypocrisy of running a treasury company and being a big
proponent of self-custody and decentralization.
It's a paradoxical position, but at the end of the day, these are all just ways for more
people to get involved and to continue to grow critical mass and just drive adoption.
That's the core mission here at this point.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's good that you're being like,
I guess, fair, but it's, I don't see this hypocritical at all. There's so many other
like examples where you can see this. I mean, it's like running a centralized exchange,
but telling people, hey, you should have self-custody. But we know that we need centralized
exchanges at least for the first, call it 30 years of this technology for on-ramp, off-ramp until, you know,
we have, as Andreas and Antonopoulos would call it, the infrastructure inversion where we don't,
right now we're kind of, we're running our whole industry, but we're still doing it kind of on top
of the fiat rails. But over time that will flip and fiat will run on top of us. And we're already
seeing that with stable coins as one example. But for the time being, we need these things. And you can be a self-custody
proponent and still run a business that gives people what they need to get into the industry.
You need on-ramps and off-ramps so that people can, you know, convert their dirty fiat to, you know,
Bitcoin, Litecoin, Doge, ETH, Pol, etc. And there's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.
Yeah, agreed. One thing I'd also add is, like, as Luxfolio is very committed to the idea of
self-custody, even to the point that we do all of our own self-custody as well.
And I think that that's been something that was core to our mission
from the beginning.
And just being able to say that, being able to be like one,
we believe we're probably one of the only treasury companies out there,
if not the only, that really takes that to heart
and does manage all of our assets on a
self-custody basis.
I guess also more broadly and yeah,
definitely kudos to you guys, Zane at Luxfolio.
You guys have really kicked off the Litecoin treasury company.
I'd like to open this up also you know
because i want to get more people involved in this treasury conversation um what do you guys see
crypto treasuries growing from here so there there's a there named Mark Moss. I think he's with Mara, a big Bitcoin miner.
And I was listening to him recently and he was just talking about how our space is evolving where
we're going to see institutions diving in.
You see the regulation that's coming
and kind of laying out the groundwork
for institutions to build upon
and that over the next evolution of our cycles,
we'll see more treasuries coming online.
Bitcoin, of course, I believe Litecoin because
it's hard money. It just makes sense. And then I think other treasuries will grow. I think
there was Thumbs Up also mentioned that they're stacking Lightcoin alongside kind of a list of other cryptocurrencies.
Do you guys think that this is where we're going, where a lot of institutional money is going to flow into these treasuries?
treasuries and then in the future as more ETFs unlock and and indexes spring up is is this where
a lot of that institutional money is going to flow and is this kind of the the future of of
where crypto is going what's what you guys thoughts on this
there's a fundamental reason that these treasury companies exist.
And I think as a result, it's not a flash in the pan, but something which is going to
be structural and here for a long time.
And that is that there is now a shift led by Bitcoin and in its wake, the rest of crypto,
turning into a true asset class recognized by effectively everyone.
But that is a shift which is going to take time.
So while it has begun, and there is demand for exposure to these kinds of assets,
because of the structure of traditional finance, the huge amount of capital that would have interest in exposure is not able to.
So if you look at the TradFi world, different types of funds, pension funds, hedge funds,
they all have different mandates.
And there's a very good reason for this, right? If you think about each of these, you know, they've gone through, you know, well over
a hundred years of sort of the same financial Ponzi-nomic shenanigans that we've seen in
crypto.
And so they've had to build ways of constraining the kind of shenanigans that people who are managing other people's money can engage
in. And so every single fund has a mandate, which says you can invest in this, but not in this,
you can take on these risks, but not these risks. And so now this capital is held in these different vehicles. And in order to be able to have exposure to crypto,
it needs to effectively have a wrapper for crypto.
So effectively, what these businesses are,
what these treasury companies are,
is they're in the same way that people wanted to have
BTC exposure early on to DeFi, so they created
wrapped BTC.
We're now creating wrapped BTC for TradFi.
And after that, we're creating wrapped LTC for TradFi.
And then you can sort of slice and dice these into different kinds of, let's call them tokens,
right?
TradFi tokens.
Each one representing a different way of gaining yield. So you can have convertible notes, which are appropriate for the kinds of investors who invest in convertible notes.
You can have fixed income instruments, which are appropriate for fixed income investors.
And so each of them provides different ways of gaining exposure to the upside and the downside.
So like the fixed income investor can say, look, Bitcoin's growing at, you know, on average 45% annualized.
I'm not that greedy. I just want 10% annualized.
So if you give me the 10% annualized, I'll give you all of the rest of the upside, but you have to make sure that I'm completely protected from the downside.
And so these are sort of like DeFi, what we think of as like DeFi strategies.
That's what Strategy and Michael Saylor have been constructing for the TradFi world, wrapping assets, building strategies around them, and selling them.
And so what this is actually doing is it's taking what has up until now been, let's call
it a $2 trillion sort of pool of capital, which was crypto.
And suddenly the gates have been opened. There was like this wall between that $2 trillion and the $950 trillion of other assets.
That gate has come down.
And now they're effectively becoming a single pool of capital.
capital because when someone buys a Litecoin treasury company, that means that that company
is taking their money, funneling it into Litecoin.
And so people who are holding in self-custody Litecoin are seeing the benefit of that.
And so what we're effectively seeing is $950 or $1,000 trillion in capital suddenly being
trillion dollars in capital suddenly being made available to crypto
made available to crypto.
100 and and guys if you have uh spicy takes as well don't don't worry about it you know we like
to we like the discourse and i'm happy to talk about however you know you guys see these things
yeah i got some spice from um yeah and guys you don't have to
raise your hand as well uh thanks uh animal i think it was warren else had your hand up just
just piggyback off of uh all the legends here yeah if if things get too rambunctious and it's
hard you know sometimes uh people can be like if the conversation gets very, you know, either heated or, you know, again, yeah, ravenous, then you could put your hand up if you want to, like, be polite and jump in.
But feel free to just jump in whenever.
I just wanted to make, like, an important note about the treasuries.
note about the treasuries and like them.
One of the important things Luxfolio is doing is like it's besides being the first one
in being a Litecoin treasury, there's they are also building Litecoin.
So that's one of the it's a difference from being leachers, from being builders also. So I think that's a great point that treasury companies that keep adding to the vast ecosystem of them, they should be also contributing to the growth of their, of the, of Litecoin, right?
So that's one of the main things Litecoin has.
It has growth in an organic way, no paid shills,
no millionaire lobbying or whatever.
Litecoin just works.
So it's one of the things that many times like a lot of us do charting and technique and
we do technical analysis about that but and most of that tends to be like or many call it
like a self-fulfilled prophecy because like that's like the aim we're targeting. And sometimes the mentality of positivity
and building like we're doing now,
it makes everything like get together,
like almost everything,
all things are wrapping all, all together for, for,
for the growth and, and, and betterment of the,
of the ecosystem of Lycon. Right.
I think that like the, the way that I look at these,
like early treasury companies ourselves included Luxfolio is that they kind of
function as I don't want to say
banks is like, it's almost a dirty word in this context, but they almost function as pools of
liquidity that are there to service the ecosystem, right? Like, we're very committed to investing in
builders who are working in the ecosystem, but that's, we hold Litecoin as a cash asset,
and we have to leverage that. We have to deliver
to our shareholders. And the best way to do that is to invest in the ecosystem, because that is
our mission. But the interesting thing is that these early treasury companies are all about
driving adoption, all about investing in their own respective ecosystem, Luxfolio and Litecoin,
MicroStrategy and Bitcoin. And you kind of see their core mission. But what will logically kind
of fall from that or follow from that will be that you have big companies, you have the Teslas of the
world, you have the Xs of the world, you have the Apples of the world that eventually do adopt
digital assets as treasury assets as well, right? Because that's how they, that's, it's, it's hard money, it's cash. And, um, that's the best way that they can protect their capital and actually continue to grow it.
So the early today treasury companies, I think are kind of their proof of concepts and really
trying to drive that adoption as entities. And the core function of like Luxfolio is to really
just invest in the ecosystem. Cause that is the best thing that we can do with our, with our
capital.
But for companies that maybe just more traditional businesses that are not necessarily completely committed to digital assets at this point,
and I logically follow that pretty much every tech company in the world
will have to do that,
the idea is that they will start to adopt these Litecoin, Bitcoin, etc.
as treasury assets as well.
I mean, it just makes sense.
At some point, they will have to.
Their shareholders will demand it.
You cannot sit on cash.
I don't understand how these companies are sitting on so much cash.
I mean, there's so many things they could be holding.
Yeah, exactly. I think they're holding, um, if I, I'm pretty sure they're holding some of that in bonds. Uh, and some of these companies do hold like short dated bonds,
like T-bills, but, um, I think a lot of them are just holding it in actual cash,
which is just losing money. And i mean bonds you're you're barely
breaking even in real terms people need another investment uh avenue right like in the past it's
people you know family and stuff like that they've all been investing in real estate right
and when you see these these mega corporations buying up single you know single family homes
inflating the prices of the real estate market in most sectors, you got to ask yourself, there's got to be a better way
to park your cash, right? Like, in my opinion, speculating on real estate during a housing
crisis is an extremely unethical thing to do. You know, and so that's why there's a demand.
We saw JP Morgan, we saw Jamie Dimon Dimon right capitulate yesterday on the news saying that they're going to be offering crypto uh crypto assets right
because there's a demand for it people need to do it they've been priced out of the housing
market largely um he's got it he's got to eat his words at some point right you know so I think it's
just it's it's it's an ethical place for people to put their money where, you know,
it's hard money.
It's a store of value.
Litecoin is also a medium of exchange, so we can also use it.
We don't just have to sit on it, right?
Companies like MicroStrategy, I don't know if you guys were familiar with MicroStrategy
before they bought Bitcoin, but the place that I work at, we actually use them for their
business intelligence
software oh cool as far as i'm concerned um their bi sector or their bi software was losing market
share to something else something called tableau right um so their business was going down the
toilet their share prices were going down Michael Saylor he threw a Hail Mary
right and it landed big time um but without it the greatest Hail Mary of our generation
I would agree yeah I think uh because he was a naysayer at first right but then he came around
during COVID I guess he did his research and he saw it as you know as a life raft that it is
And he saw it as a life raft that it is.
So yeah, I think companies like Luxfolio and there's MyPharma as well, who does oncology research and pharmaceuticals.
These guys, they're ahead of the curve.
They're looking at it correctly.
I said I was going to have some spice.
You guys heard about the tragic shooting that happened
in new york this week right it turns out that one of the victims was the ceo of blackstone's
real estate investment branch it seems to be it's a targeted attack people aren't happy with these
giant you know funds buying up all the real estate it's it's not good for society it's only good for
you know the portfolios of these elites um and bitcoin and like i i'll let you finish your
sentence and i want to jump in there with a little little pushback but uh yeah go ahead for sure and
that's you know it's a little spicy and i expect some pushback and I welcome it. But yeah, just to say that there's now an avenue for people to invest in who might not
be comfortable with the stock market or trust necessarily, you know, what companies are doing
and all the shenanigans that might be happening in the stock market.
Yeah, so I'll say a couple of things. I'm with you on some parts, some parts
I'll push back a little. So on the, you know, speculators buying properties, um, to rent them
out or to, you know, hope the price goes up and stuff. Like I'll start with, I think that there is an issue there, but I think there's also net positives that go with it.
First, I think Bitcoin, Litecoin, all of these things are going to absorb lots of capital from assets that have monetary premiums. Real estate is one
of these assets that has a monetary premium. You're correct. People want to store their value
in real estate. When they're sitting there going, how am I going to not be subject to inflation?
Real estate's great because the loan actually depreciates over time because of inflation.
appreciates, uh, over time because of inflation. So, you know, you owe a million dollars on a house.
Well, that million dollars in, you know, so X amount of years is only now worth 800,000,
even if you didn't pay anything on it. Um, and so, and then the, the price of the homes goes up
kind of, kind of matches inflation. Um, so people do use real estate as a monetary asset. Same with art. People are not
buying art. I'm going to venture to say probably most of the art market, and these are not numbers,
I'm just pulling this out of my butt, and this is just a feel, and just from talking to a lot
of rich people. A lot of art is not bought because they truly just love this piece or this billion dollar piece or $10 million piece is so much better than something you could buy for probably $1,000.
That's probably like nobody could tell the difference if they're not like some art aficionado.
But anyways, all these assets have monetary premiums. And I think over time, especially the hard assets, the more commodities of our industry,
which I would say, you know, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Doge, these hard assets,
over time will absorb that monetary premium. And I think it will help to bring costs down of real estate and art and gold.
Gold, maybe if our industry absorbs a lot of that monetary premium,
then the price of gold maybe won't go up as much over time or will even come down.
And then you can use it in industry or in commercial stuff.
This is a metal that we can use and build things with,
but you can't really do that right now very much because the price is so high because of this
monetary premium. So I think a lot of these things that are kind of being used as money,
you know, they used to use tobacco as money. All of these things that have this monetary premium
over time will lose some of that monetary premium to our industry.
Now, the part where I'll push back on you is that speculators, investors, people buying,
purchasing properties to rent out, people buying properties you mentioned during the financial
crisis, these are actually important parts of the market. And I think there may be some things that
are unscrupulous that
happen there, but I don't think we should completely discount that this is like a useless
activity or this is terrible for society because you need people to come in. Like if speculators,
quote unquote, that you used, didn't come in during the financial crisis, we might not get
out of the financial crisis for a longer extended period of time.
So you actually need people to come in for sure to come to come in and buy these assets
to start getting the market moving back in a normal direction.
Another example is the fires in Hawaii and the fires in California, where I'm from.
If if you don't have people that come in and buy up these lots and start building,
it never gets rebuilt because a lot of the homeowners, they're not in that business.
They're not, they don't, nor do they want to sit there and try to like, you know, develop this,
you know, property. Maybe they are just like, I just want to get out of here. And if nobody buys
it, then nothing happens. So investors do do things.
I mean, look at how fast AI is growing.
That wouldn't have happened without investors, right?
AI might be 10 or 20 years out, self-driving cars with Elon.
If Elon didn't come in with his own money as a speculator on this technology, we wouldn't have self-driving cars right now, right?
So I just want to say that there is some importance
to these speculators and investors.
It's not all net negative or anything.
Yeah, real quick, just some show up keeping.
I see several hands up.
Yago, you had your hand up.
David just put his hand up.
I just want to welcome Michal to the show
from American Fortress.
And also this is an over subscribed show so we
have a lot of friends that want to join the conversation um uh so we'll have to cycle
people down uh over time so just pointing pointing that out uh but i i do want to uh
pass a mic probably i guess uh iago you probably wanted to piggyback off this or
i've got good news for you which is that i'm going to have to drop for another call, so you won't have to cycle someone out.
I'm recycling myself.
I just wanted to say something short, and then I'll jump off.
And I think what I'm going to say might not be popular, but I think it's important.
I think it's important. So there's a weird thing that within our industry, what we're building
effectively is borderless, free, unfettered tools for free markets. And yet we still sometimes get
taken in by narratives, which I would describe as economic populist narratives. Like there's some
big guy out there and they're doing something wrong which is hurting us
an example of this is this idea that blackrock are a significant driver or a driver at all
of the inability for most people to get onto the property ladder
they've studied this specifically with regards to blackrock blackrock when they purchase properties
and start renting them out what happens in the neighborhood is the cost of rent goes down. And the reason is because BlackRock,
they're able to invest and make money because they're more efficient. So the time that units
remain vacant when BlackRock purchased them goes down, which means that more units are available.
The reason that art, which was the other example that was given, goes up in value
when the artist dies is because no more art is going to be produced by that artist. The reason
that property prices are going up faster than other parts of the economy is because people
aren't building more property. The economy has a very cool, self-balancing, decentralized way of achieving balance and equilibrium.
And that is called supply and demand.
And what has happened is that governments and local regulators in particular have basically destroyed supply and demand in the homes, in the world of homes by making it impossible to build more homes. And that is why our, you know,
generation and the generation of young people are suffering. It's because old people who already
own homes want their prices to continue to rise. And so they get together and create HOAs and local
bylaws and regulations, which make it impossible to build new things. So what we need to do
in crypto and out of crypto is build thank you very much everyone that's an excellent point
uh and just to piggyback on that i'll just say like you know when we talk about these big funds
you know blackrock is an example that's given but you could you know put like throw a dart and pick
a fund vanguard or or any of them um what you have to remember is like these are not
monolithic entities that are owned by no one you know these funds that are constructed that are
you know whether it's a reit fund real estate fund or some other kind of fund um they they're
usually for the benefit of uh basically normal people that invest in them via their pension
so it's easy to get carried away
in this like or some other investment vehicle but the point is it's like the reason why these
companies are so big is because basically everybody saves for retirement and a lot of
the passive flow ends up in these uh like portfolios and ends up buying things like
property or whatever else and i would just say like you know just try and think
when when you when you hear these big the names of these big funds it's easy to like get caught
up in like you know that there's an entity that's doing something bad but you could also think oh
like maybe my maybe my grandma has you know some small percentage of that investment because she
invests through one of their funds and so that that when you frame
it like that it's completely different and yes the board members of blackrock are probably getting
paid fantastic bonuses and you know maybe their size is so big that it distorts the market a little
but you know these are still things that everybody could own you can go on aside from you know
cryptocurrency related stuff uh is relevant here you can go on to you from, you know, cryptocurrency related stuff is relevant here.
You can go on to, you know, buy iBit, which is the Bitcoin ETF and anybody can do that.
And so I'll just like reframe it a little bit in the sense that like it's not some big shadowy cabal of people.
It's like it is a shadowy cabal of people, I guess, but it's one that's operating on behalf of shareholders, which can be anybody.
Yeah, I mean, that's good.
OK, I guess just to put a bow on this, because this is like not directly Litecoin related, but I would say that these kind of entities and generally like in free market capitalism, there are bad actors.
But I think on the net, you know, capitalism is a good thing on the net. Having people that can come in and invest in homes is a good thing. Are there people that take advantage of situations
and people in dire, you know, straights and things of course but in general i i just think
it's good for us to see both sides of it that's all um 100 i i saw uh david's hand up there uh i
actually want to switch the conversation just a bit to etfs but um before i do that uh rock soak
uh did you want to finish your thought no No, I'm good. Thanks, man.
We're getting off topic anyways. We tend to do that.
No, no, I love this type of conversation and just free flowing.
David, did you want to piggyback off something?
If not, I'd like to ask me how a question as well.
And then I have the ETF discussion.
Yeah, I was, it was related to the real estate portion. But at the same time,
it was also sort of like a way to segue back over to crypto a little as well. but in general, um, as much as real estate and, and I understand and appreciate
everybody's thoughts on it. Uh, the majority of the reason why there was any type of an issue
with the real estate market in the mid two thousands was because of greed and it was instruments that were created to enhance those that had this this greed
right which is where i mean the perfect example just if anybody's never watched the big short
i would highly recommend it it's literally a microcosm an example of greed in general
and how it's used in one specific instance to ruin an entire market.
And that was not done by, you know, Joe and Jan Smith,
who owns a medium-sized house on, you know, Buffalo street or whatever.
It was the people that were creating instruments to create more revenue
streams based on leverage and leverage correct
uh and leverage on behalf of people that weren't them unmitigated leverage right it's probably the
best way to put it and so uh i i just i think there's some some concern on my end that as
I think there's some concern on my end that as, you know, whether it's treasuries or whatever instruments they end up coming up with to help capitalize on or create additional revenue opportunities on top of crypto.
I do have concerns that over time you will have over leveraged, which happens already, I suppose,
if you look at just traders, right? But there will be over leveraged opportunities as a whole
at a macro scale where I just, I feel like when we sit here today and we're talking about Bitcoin
and Litecoin treasuries, and I mean, obviously there's Solana and other treasuries as well.
There will be a point of saturation where you have crypto that really has no business probably having any part in a treasury being highlighted.
And I think those should be indicators for everybody that, you know,
there could be a potential bubble in that area that is ready to burst. And it's probably
appropriate anyway. I mean, if you look at the 2000s, the early, you know, late 90s and 2000,
when we had the internet bubbles and everything else. It's a perfect example of what would happen. You'll end up having some sort of trickle back to where it's a basic set of cryptos or whatever that survive.
And not just survive, but thrive.
Because you could say Yahoo survives.
Is it thriving?
There'd probably be some arguments for or against it.
But it did actually survive.
But is it something where people are spewing out Yahoo's name for anything?
Google, on the other hand, it's synonymous with when someone wants to look for anything, you Google it.
So they're thriving.
Yeah, I haven't heard anyone say, oh, just Yahoo it in a while.
Well, I used to use Ask Jeeves. I loved it, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't do that anymore, right? So how many Ask Jeeves of crypto are we going to have
after this whole, you know, treasury play or whatever else is going to come out of all of this being adopted
happens. And so I'm always worried about, unfortunately, most people are not educated
in the nuances of crypto and what makes a crypto valuable enough to have staying power.
crypto valuable enough to have staying power. Right. And so, so to go and yeah, to, to segue
back into some, some crypto related stuff, I, I worry that there will not be enough, um,
self-regulation there to, to allow this, you know, crypto to not go through some sort of housing market crash itself.
I would say that, like, I think we go through these cycles, like in crypto, we've been through
a number of cycles. And I would completely agree that this, that the whole, it's almost mania right
now in the in this treasury space. But the interesting thing that I kind of am curious to
see how it kind of shakes out when that,
because I'll be honest, it's inevitably going to happen at some point that everything has to come back down to earth at some point.
But the interesting thing that I'm curious to see is unlike, let's use like .com as an example,
almost all of these companies are sitting on cash.
They're sitting on an asset that is cash.
So I'm curious to see when, call it the retail mania and the attention to this space, it kind of subsides and cools off a little bit.
Then you have all these companies that are sitting on ridiculous amounts of money, especially the ones that have raised this capital in ways that are less toxic and less debt.
Then you have all these companies that are sitting on ridiculous amounts of money,
Things are getting a little bit more creative, to your point, David.
It almost feels kind of like that 2008-1999 kind of feeling.
but it'll be curious to see what happens when you have all these companies sitting on huge amounts
of cash that are typically in the form of of crypto and digital assets and how how that'll
play out because unlike the dot-com where you had a bunch of money flowing into the sector and then
it being burnt on building stuff and things like that i'm just kind of curious to see what happens
when you have these companies that since principally sit on cash and where that goes.
And I think it depends on, so like where I see the blow up happening is with the companies that are over leveraged.
coin or litecoin um and you're basically finding ways to get more um people to to hold these assets
through your either etf or treasury company um that's not very unsafe because if it goes down
it's okay you could weather the storm and these assets are going to be around for a long time
so you could potentially have hundreds of these companies. And we see this in gold, right? There's tons of gold ETFs.
And there's lots of other examples.
But where the real risk is, is that MicroStrategy has created a trend of leverage.
And now they're pretty clever with it, it seems, at least from my angle, it seems like these are pretty sophisticated and well thought out
and risk mitigated strategies. But then there are companies, we had a company pitch at BitAngels
that was doing, they wanted to do basically 100x, they wanted to do a treasury company on
microstrategy, not on Bitcoin, but on microstrategy. And they wanted to do 100x they wanted to do a treasury company on micro strategy not on bitcoin but on micro strategy
and they wanted to do 100x leverage basically on it that's exactly what i'm talking about like you
end up having tranches just like i said go back that's literally what you're creating it's just
a different way of doing it yeah where does it and it becomes obfuscated, just like the mortgage-backed securities and all the different ways these got wrapped and sold and, you know, graded.
But the grading was clearly off and people just didn't see the โ they didn't know what they didn't know.
And so it's hard to say where this will go, but, like, I think at the end when the โ like, and I think we're still far from the top on these things.
I think we're still far from the top on these things.
And what it'll come down to is how smart are the people running these companies and how good are they at predicting how much leverage?
This is like what a lot of investors do is they go, how much leverage can I take but not get blown up?
Right?
Yes.
The more leverage you can take, the more money you can make if you're investing in an asset
that's, if you make the right directional bet,
and then you make the right size bet with leverage.
And if you go too much, you blow up.
If you go not enough, someone else outperforms you.
So there's not a lot you have to predict.
I admit I've never used leverage for anything.
And the reason being is if I don't have confidence in what I'm choosing to invest in, you know,
a hundred percent that it's going to create some, some sort of a magnitude of, of more
wealth than what I started with.
Then I just like, I don't, I don't know.
It's me personally, call it whatever you want but i
just i don't understand leverage to a degree so yeah for most people they shouldn't use it and
it's i mean even sophisticated people screw it up yeah also i to to zane's point as well i i
actually think this is uh just getting. It's definitely not frothy.
And then there's a ton of research that's out there that shows that this is only going to
increase. And a lot of investment in institutional wealth is eyeing these type of new vehicles. I do want to talk about ETFs
as well, because this is another thing that Litecoiners and Bitcoiners have been talking
about for a while. But before I do that, I want to shout out some housekeeping here.
Flippin Finance has joined us. What's up's up brother i love your light coin content
uh your all your content's great uh dash i believe there's joelle uh behind the dash account uh much
love thank you for being here and mija has also joined us mija came out with some uh recent news
what man what what where were we i've been on so many calls so many shows i would think oh coin merge
we did coin merge uh earlier in the week and you you were talking about uh building a litecoin
wallet so uh very excited i mean we're talking about the litecoin meta here and you know there's
so many builders that are building for Litecoin, which is really exciting.
I mean, I have to say, you know, as a builder myself with LitVM, I love seeing even the competitors building because that's how, you know, you fully decentralize that technology.
And we all grow together.
Maybe other teams make breakthroughs, which help us all.
So it's important to see you know everyone
building and and um it's really exciting to see this happening so quickly on the light coin side
miha did you want to say something about the wallet maybe real quick and then i can jump into
etfs yeah sure um so i'm i'm ceo matterfy in Fortress. We're building a UTXO Litecoin sort of primary wallet, UTXO only chain.
So Litecoin, BCH, BTC, eCash, Dash.
Those chains that uses universal stealth addressing via sent to name.
So basically you register for a name and then after that all wallets in the world could compute, receive addresses for you dynamically. Um, you know, and that's a unique address between the two people
that no one knows about except the two people. So that's why it's a stealth address. So the net
for the users, it's like PayPal for all the crypto, but no one knows what you're doing. And
one of the things that really excited me about this, you know, talking, um, to the Litecoin
foundation and, and David and, um, you know, we've had a bunch of meetings on this,
particularly in the last week.
So you're going to see like some actual official announcements coming.
I think we're, yeah, we have a meeting later today
with the PR from Litecoin Foundation.
So you'll get more specific.
So I don't want to like drop too much alpha
because it seems like we're making it official.
But the really, the magic of our system is that no one, like it's like PayPal for making it official. But the magic of our system is that it's like PayPal for all
crypto. So you can just, you register names. So say your name is Mihal and you want to send me
crypto, then the counterparty wallet only just has to know my name and it'll instantly compute,
receive addresses from me on any chain and token. And the only people that know what that address
is, is me, Mihal, and whoever the sender is.
So like with our metadata,
all you can do as an attacker is just, you know,
compute how you're going to send money
to all these counterparties.
But these aren't the same addresses
that everybody else is using,
like Unstoppable or ENS or Friend.Tech.
So it's fully private, but in that sense, you know,
but the one thing I've always wanted to improve,
which I can't improve with
my tech alone, I need Litecoin for that, is now if somebody sends me money and it's from address
X, I'll be able to look at that address and see what the balance is. If I'm trying to be super
clever, well, not even super clever, just a regular user, I can just look on chain and be like,
oh, this came from an address that had 100 Litecoin or 1,000 or 10,000 or whatever. And now, you know, I know that even though third-party observers know nothing, I know that, you know, if this person sent me $5, that they might have another 500 or 500 million or whatever, right?
And that's obviously not a property we want to have.
So, what's really exciting about Litecoin is the MWeb feature, which is essentially a balance blinder, right? There's mixing going on too, to some degree. But the key thing combined with mweb and um when you do that um even when you send to counterparties they won't know
how much money you have yet you'll have a full kyc essentially between you and them so like
they'll know for sure that it's you um and and we have these sidechain proofs that do that so even
if you're mixing we have these extra proofs running that guarantee that between the sender and receiver you can have 100 transparency if the
two parties desire that but it is optional it's not like some mandatory thing so um but this is
really you know instrumental for adoption and custody and institutions because like no one's
really made this exact combination of things before um Well, for sure, no one has.
And when you have this combination of things,
you have like traditional fintech functionality in crypto
that's actually fully decentralized, right?
So like between two parties, you can have 100% transparency,
yet it is actually decentralized.
The entire system is decentralized.
And, you know, but from, you know,
if you need to do a transaction that requires a bunch of kyc the two parties can just agree to do it even if funds are being balanced
blind and mixed and the other thing that you know aztec i sent you a note i don't know if you saw
but like you know one of the sort of revelations i had after talking with you on on litvm was let's
add just balance blinding itself to litvm so that's just part of the chain because
you don't need to mix to get the benefits of balance binding because our system takes care of
like what normally people perceive as the balance the benefits of mixing um um yeah i love i love
the idea of having these options you know and and i think there are so many people, I'm a huge privacy
advocate. Not only do large private investors and institutions, you know, they're going to require
privacy built in, you know, so that competitors can't see, you know, what they're scaling into or, you know, just to move quietly.
But, you know, the average, like me, average person, I don't want everyone seeing what I'm doing.
And so privacy is so important.
I can't wait to cook with you.
And obviously we're still talking and figuring things out, but I'm sure
we'll figure something out. Really excited. And you're going to call this veil, right?
Veil is the name of the, the tentative name of the wallet. Like where I got to run it through
the PTO and see if there's like no trademark conflicts, but yeah, we're, you know, we're
actually like working all that out today. And this will happen very, very quickly. Like we
should be in production. Like you'll see an alpha within weeks and then we'll
be in production in September because on our end, like, you know, we've had Litecoin actually
working in our tech stack for years. We just, you know, we didn't really like super prioritize it
because we had other customer stuff happening. But now we're at a stage where everything's going
to production. And then, you know, I found out about mweb and i was like oh my god like this is the thing i've been
like i wanted a chain to have this feature yeah specifically me how has been talking about mweb
now for days he's so he's so pumped on on how this technology actually rounds out what he's
building and is one of the kind of missing pieces in a way it sounds like
maybe you're correct it is the missing piece it's it's yeah it's awesome it's the it's the thing
that we need to just have paypal-like functionality but there's no privacy leaks and it's super easy
to use you know and and you have not to stir the pot not to stir the pot too much but a layer two
that has like mweb functionality inherently in it is freaking awesome.
And I think that's,
that's meta right there.
So I don't know.
I'm,
I'm now you got me going.
and,
and,
and well,
I mean,
I know the difference between mixing and balance blinding.
So you guys kind of understand if you want,
if you want a minute on that,
I'll explain it. So yeah,
we won't go too deep into the nerd weeds, but yeah,
maybe another 30 seconds. Cause I want to jump into, uh, uh,
ETFs.
We do love the nerd.
Okay. So I'll give you the minute.
Some people talking to you.
I'll give you the minute on. So when you mix, right.
The recipient doesn't know where the funds came from, which, which can be a problem. And this
is one of the things that like mixing has been flagged in the space, you know, for fraud, because
you can easily use it to essentially, you know, obfuscate stolen funds, for example. Right.
But people, people have thought that like, okay, well, we need to have mixing. So like when a
sender doesn't you need it to to
hide the balance but you actually don't right you just need balance binding um so mixing is
beneficial and what's what's cool about our tech is that we can make the even if the funds are
mixed you can still see that they came from the the right person so now the mixing doesn't matter
like we make the mixing okay but the other thing I would say is balance blinding isn't mixing.
Like mixing is you don't know where the money came from because it was mixed.
Meaning that like there was a pot and, you know, 10 people put into the pot and then you got your like three LTC that you were supposed to get.
But you don't really know where the three came from.
It could have come from, you know, user A, B or C right in the pot.
In balance blinding, there is no
mixing. What happens is the money just goes straight from user A to user B, just like in a
normal chain. But the chain hides how much money the sending user has, which actually makes the
problem I'm trying to solve, which is optional full KYC, even when you have mixing simpler,
because you don't actually need that extra mixing step. Now, there's other benefits to mixing,
obviously, but in either case, either balance blinding, which automatically is included inside
of mixing, these are the features we need to make what I call the perfect privacy meta.
And that's what we're building. So you're going to see it like in weeks.
It's going to happen on Litecoin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just a new gym, man.
This is, this is so awesome.
Um, I'm really excited about it to, to be honest.
Um, but, uh, yeah, flipping finance, I see your hand up.
How about this, bro?
Can I ask you the ETF question?
Can I just kick it off to you or do you have, do you want to piggyback off something?
Oh, hey guys, I'm GM, I'm flipping finance.
My name is actually Raphael, if you want to call me that.
So I just wanted to chime in with a little something.
I like the idea of balance blinding,
because I feel like, you know, together with Mimblewimble,
it could be very instrumental for ETF issuers
when it comes to when the Litecoin ETFs get approved.
Because I feel like they're going to like the idea of not getting their balances stocked
like the way we see with Bitcoin.
Because we see lots and lots of accounts that just go, oh, BlackRock's doing this or BlackRock's doing that.
I think they're going to like that idea.
But what I don't know is if the regulators are gonna allow something like that because i know that like regulators have been really really harsh when it comes to anything that has to do with
privacy so i want to know if like any of that's gonna pass because i i feel like as useful as
it's gonna be for etf providers i see a situation where uh you know i don't know
if regulators are going to allow that to just russia i i think it's we we've seen this play
out with just internet the internet uh and then uh there was a ton of regulators in the government
especially in the u.s government they were saying you know we can't have uh privacy on the internet
They were saying, you know, we can't have privacy on the internet.
It's going to cause bad actors to have, you know, the ability to kind of get away with whatever, you know.
And over time, what they realized is that people were being taken advantage of because there wasn't some layer of privacy or obfuscation of, you know,
metadata information, private information. And over time, you know, there was like this
discourse and discussion and then, you know, now we have a layer of privacy on the internet.
You know, now we have a layer of privacy on the internet. So I think we're going through to change though, especially once institutions realize
that, you know, they need it. Just like you said, BlackRock, you know, I'm sure BlackRock doesn't
want everyone knowing that they were scaling into Ondo, you know, as an example, you know,
and then all the other like real world assets stuff that they were looking at. So, you know,
they're going to need privacy, just like you said. And, but everyone, I believe, you know, they're going to need privacy, just like you said. But everyone, I believe, you know, privacy is a fundamental right and that everyone should have it.
But, yes, I think it's definitely going to change.
And we're going to see that privacy is needed and that regulators will not fight us on this and that there will be clarity passed for, for privacy and that this is just the way of adoption and, and, you know,
the future of crypto.
Yeah. I mean,
I jump in for like a minute on that. Cause I have a lot of answers on,
on what's happening there.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.
So far the line has been clearly drawn at mixing, right? But lately, even things that mix have not been really targeted, right? It's like they're kind of finishing up the lawsuits, right? And there's this misunderstanding amongst the regulators, like, oh, mixing is 100% actually bad.
and it's, and you know, I'm willing to die on the hill of like explaining to them that it's not,
um, you can have a side proof that proves your counterparty is. So now a bank can receive fully
mixed funds. I mean, they could even be tornado cashed. Um, but with the side proofs, like they
can know that they got it from Alice here is Alice's ID. Right. So what we have to divorce is this, you know,
and maybe I'll write up, you know,
white paper called like balanced blinding is all you need and just like
release like my method of doing it. So it just gets even more adoption,
but balanced blinding essentially does that,
except it just tones it down a notch. Right.
Because you're now not mixing at all
right so we're just um so this is like you know why it's super interesting and and and you know
but essentially like what we're doing is the second we release you know this this wall it's
already going to have this extra kyc functionality so you know even a bank can just jump in and be
like oh wow like even if i mix, I am not breaking the law.
I know who my counterparty is.
This is really cool.
So that is an important distinction, I think, because we just have to educate essentially the regulars about what the tech actually does and why it's beneficial.
And then, by the way, here's the features you guys want.
Because obviously, like all the institutions,
you're just going to follow the rules.
And the rules are simply know who your counterparty is,
know how much money they sent you.
That's it.
And that's exactly what our tech does.
And what's interesting is you need the privacy for that to even function.
Like, that doesn't work at all, right?
So there's even other things we can do
with these side proofs
that are built on the scent and name layer that like, you can prove like where are the funds you
got them from. So like, say you're depositing money for a house into some real estate thing.
And they're like, what's your source of funds? Well, now like you got to send out a bunch of
paper, but in our system, you can literally prove, no, I got these funds from, you know,
Kraken or I got these funds from this source over here. And you have better KYC through privacy than you did before.
So I think that's where the meta is going.
And I'm willing to die on that hill.
Dash?
Oh, that's actually...
Yeah, I was going to kick it to Joel.
Go ahead, Flipin.
If you have a response to that really quick, then we'll go to Dash.
Okay, okay. Oh's that's actually great i actually had a little idea for that as well
before because i was also thinking uh you know that the idea of balance blank and the way you've
explained it you know it actually does make sense and that's probably something that could actually
pass the regulators but i'm also thinking that with mweb that i don't know if the etf issuers
could do something like a proof of transactions or something where i mean of course every single transaction they're gonna make even
if they do it on the mweb they'll still have to have like a physical recording on you know
your servers or whatnot so they can meet the regulators so i don't know if whatever way uh
you know i don't know if the right persons are actually representing us to try to
make these clarifications
in front of the
regulators, because I feel like we are not
really being represented very well
in this
spaces, and I don't know if that
might actually set us back a little bit.
Oh my God, that's a can of worms right there, man.
It's a good can of worms though
maybe that could be the next
topic
should we have dash
I just want to say the flipping is right
it is the side proofs do do that
that's exactly what Artec does
so his hunch is
my three years of work
100% yeah but I do want to discuss So his hunch is my three years of work.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
But I do want to discuss, Rafael, what you're talking about with regulators and how we can better represent ourselves and get everyone's take here.
But before we do that, Joel.
Yeah.
I just wanted to chime in.
And sorry for being late. I have like four spaces in the space of one hour kind of thing, you know.
Oh, much love, man.
Thank you for being here.
Yeah, absolutely.
I wouldn't miss this one unless I really had to.
But one thing I've kind of, I kind of have a lot of maybe perspective on this whole thing
on this whole thing because I remember using Bitcoin back in 2013 and I had my first wallet
because I remember using Bitcoin back in 2013.
was a blockchain.com wallet or blockchain.info as it was called and I had a one static address
for everything in the beginning and I remember when they moved to HD and you got a new wallet
a new address every time I got mad because I didn't understand like why do I need more than
one address like how how things have changed but I think that we went from thinking that like Bitcoin was anonymous, completely like private anonymous to realizing it has some significant privacy drawbacks to then this whole era of just no one knows about privacy.
And obviously Dashable and privacy functionality in 2014.
And over the years,
it's taken lots of arrows in the back for that,
not for specific legal reasons.
Like there's been maybe a country or two that has had like South Korea
is kind of aggressive on that.
But mostly it's just been like FUD,
like, oh, if you have the P word,
it must be spicy and mean.
So therefore you're going to get delisted, sorry.
And just having dealt with lawyers and stuff on that recently, things are a lot clearer today.
They're still not clear necessarily.
But I think the biggest thing that's not clear is just how much risk people are getting by not having any kind of privacy features whatsoever.
And I think that people kind of view this as a binary.
Maybe the Monero people haven't really helped with that that being it's like always on or it's nothing but um
they're like the idea that you send an nft to someone or whatever and then you or you buy it
from someone and you can just see your entire wallet balance and everything that you've ever
owned like right there is just wild just insane to me. And I think that we will-
Yeah, imagine you bought a piece of art, you know, from an art store or a museum, whatever,
and then now the person who sold you that piece of art knows everything about you. If you bought
some kinky sex toy with your wife or wife or you you know everything you've ever
done every political donation you've had every you know you know that you you know your diet
what food you eat like your your life's net worth your who you work for because they can see their
wallets it's kind of a crazy thing we have here yeah it's absolutely crazy and it'll only get worse as we have more things in our crypto wallets such as say that
the the pass keys to your apartment are in your wallet as nfts your car title is in there just
everything your birth certificate is a digital document in there like at some point it's just
going to be way worse than it is. And I don't
think that the average human being who's not a crazy crypto degen will ever adopt this as long
as we have no privacy. So that being said, I've noticed a trend moving towards, first of all,
what really opened my eyes was last year's consensus, not this year, PayPal was advertising the PYUSD stablecoin on Solana.
And one big thing was confidential transfers that they were talking about.
Later that year, Circle came out and was talking about a confidential ERC-20 framework.
And in a lot of this conversation, they've been talking about, they've been sort of splitting
the privacy concept into two different things,
which are confidentiality and anonymity. And basically you're saying anonymity is not
necessarily a right or guaranteed. You know, you don't necessarily need to have that, but everyone
should have basic confidentiality. And what this has turned into is kind of the old school idea of
confidential transactions or CT, which is part of Monero's
ring CT, it's ring signatures plus CT.
It's part of Mweb as well, what's basically hiding transaction balances.
And a lot of the much more regulated stablecoin world is moving to that where it's like, okay,
if the merchant, you can tell that you paid to that where it's like, okay, if the merchant,
you can tell that you paid at Starbucks, that's not damaging, but as long as you can hide the
amounts and how much you have. And so I kind of feel like that's, I've taken to that term,
MVP or minimum viable privacy, and it seems like CT sent is MVP, that every serious project in the future at some point,
maybe I'm like reaching on it a little bit, but I don't think so, will have to at a minimum just
be able to keep your balance confidential and your amounts confidential. And it's like,
oh, you interacted with this person, you bought from Amazon, you did this. That's not as big of a thing as like the actual amounts.
Although I still highly believe that
that should be private too if the user so wishes.
So basically that's kind of what I'm looking at
in the future is we should be able to at least get CT
in just about everything and not have complaints
from like the banksters and the regulators
or whatever else.
And on the other hand, um, like zero knowledge encryption, things like that stuff that like,
I think that the Z there's so much that gets opened up in the ZK world, um, just based
on not having to have that, the amount of data you can publicly expose.
If it's not publicly exposed,
the efficiency gains you get from that. I think we're going to start to see some breakthroughs
in the next few years. And then when that happens, then it's not going to be like a,
well, should we allow some privacy, man? It's like, no, this is the entire system works amazingly.
If you can throw all this data on chain that no one
else can see other than the person that actually looks for it.
So maybe I'm just being a little bit weird and bullish about this, but like, I do think
that the next cycle will be a massive privacy cycle.
Nice.
I love that.
I've been saying that a term I've used is that privacy is the final frontier.
And I agree a lot of this technology that you were discussing is maturing to a level where you can really do privacy.
I mean, look at what Mihaly is doing.
You know, it is a perfect example. I have other friends like SilentSwap with Shiptoshi.
And, you know, so you see different types of solutions.
And you were just mentioning big entities also trying to create standards.
And so it's definitely, from a tech perspective, it's pretty much here.
And now we just need to push it, you know, as all of us together.
Together is how we get things done.
I think I'd love to dive into the can of worms that Flip and Finance brought up,
which is how do we represent ourselves?
You know, I think one of the things I see in the Litecoin community specifically is that everyone wants this ETF to just get approved already.
And there's a lot of people that are upset.
You know, it doesn't make sense why it hasn't been approved.
But, you know, not only from an ETF perspective, how do we represent ourselves and get out there so that we get certain things
approved but but uh how do we uh go to you know lobby in a way or to the regulators or to the
institutions or the the large companies and and get them to be okay with privacy and and um get
more comfortable with using the technology i i seen OGs back in the day like
I got a shout out um John Kim uh I think it was like Johnny Litecoin um and they were recently
talking about this on a on a space but but early on I remember there was many light corners for
instance that were going around to shops and just talking to companies and trying to get adoption.
But other than banging on the doors,
I think that's an excellent way to get out there
and get adoption if we all play a part in this.
We're gonna make waves,
but what other things can we do together? That's crazy. Dash, Joel, we literally, uh, we're talking about this yesterday, the point
of sale stuff and, uh, BTC pay server and all of these various options and how do we get this into
square point of sale devices in this? And, uh, yeah, Litecoin is definitely one of the ones that's being utilized most there,
I think. That's another topic. But I guess I'll just say one thing that's important to me,
and this is as a libertarian who doesn't like large government, and many libertarians,
and I think this is part of the reason that libertarianism has not ever gained great political traction, other than an idea in the heads of, you know, the minds of the different political parties as like something they think about or something they kind of self-identify as, but there's no great political organization there.
organization there. And that's because a lot of libertarians think we shouldn't play the game of
the government. We shouldn't be lobbying. We shouldn't be even voting. A lot of libertarians
will say, and like, you know, an example of this from someone who I respect a lot, actually one of
my heroes is Eric Voorhees. And Eric told me when, you know, I told him that I was, you know, preparing to go
into politics as a libertarian. He said, you know, Rock, you shouldn't do that. It's a waste
of your time. It's like only going to create problems in your life. And you can do more from
kind of the outside through the private markets. And the world will be better if you're focusing on,
you know, pushing your values through, you know, getting the adoption of our industry and
building decentralized technologies. And, well, I respect and appreciated that feedback. And I've
always taken his feedback pretty well. He gave us great advice for QuickSwap in the early days
when he was moving Shapeshift to be a dow and i was getting advice from him on you
know how we should set up quick swap foundation and these things and he gave us great advice and
i i always took it but this libertarian um like not participating in politics is one that i'm
just gonna have to go against him on and um i it's just i think i have to do it even if it makes me a
martyr um because i think we do have to be there you know in washington on capitol hill we have to do it, even if it makes me a martyr, because I think we do have to be there, you know, in Washington on Capitol Hill.
We have to. It's unfortunate. I don't like lobbying.
And if I get into politics, I'm one of the things I'd like to do is get rid of lobbying.
But while there is lobbying, we have to play the game that's in front of us.
the game that's in front of us. And if we don't, then other more nefarious actors or people who
would like to see our industry die, they will play the game and we will lose because we're not even
participating. Now, I'm not saying that I don't think our industry can ever get to fruition if
we don't do the political game, but it could take decades longer.
And so I think it is important that you see all the changes happening now.
And that was because we got into campaign donations and lobbying
and we were able to donate to the last presidential race.
Both parties combined, we donated 48% of all donations. That means we basically matched pharmaceutical, military, industrial, agriculture, insurance, import, export, all of these industries, every industry combined in the world.
Both parties combined, we donated 48% of all donations.
That seat at the table is helping us, you know, either we're Trojan horsing the politicians or, you know, maybe they're Trojan horsing us or maybe a little bit of both.
Maybe it's a common, like, symbiotic friendship.
We'll see how it plays out.
But I do think we need to be involved.
We need to get involved in politics.
We need to talk to our congressmen and senators.
But, yeah, I'll pause there.
I agree with what Rax said, but it's like a tricky thing.
It's like a double sword be the one influencing the government, noticed with with Bitcoin, it had like all the great side, cyperpunk
vision ideals, but as they they started to to massifying everything and getting up with government government and that they are kind of like deviating from the original uh vision of it so it's it's a
i know what you say i get you but it's like you need to be be very smart so you don't
turn to the to the enemy you you swore to destroy right oh my god man it's so true and i think this al enemigo que te supe a destruir, ยฟverdad? Oh, Dios mรญo, es tan cierto.
Y creo que este es el camino de muchos polรญticos.
Y, you know, yo digo Cindy todo el tiempo,
si tรบ me ves cambiar o diciendo cosas para, como,
pedirle a los maestros y no estarse adentro a mรญ,
por favor, me diga.
Porque todos somos, como humanos,
susceptibles a esa corrupciรณn. and not, you know, stay true to myself, please tell me. Because we're all as humans susceptible
to that kind of corruption or to, you know, it starts small, I think, with politicians. I really
believe a lot of people that get into politics do it for the right reasons. But over time,
the political machinery and the game that you have to play to get to the top in it,
it does lend itself to doing weird side deals and, you know,
okay, well, I, you know, you could easily justify to yourself why you're going to do some policy
that benefits some campaign donor, because in your head, you're saying, well, it's net positive.
You know, if I don't get the campaign donations, I can't get to this position. And if I can't get to this position, I can't change the world. So maybe I do have to do a deal with the
devil and take this, you know, little, it'll just start as a small donation from some, you know,
industry that's nefarious or something, and then it can get worse. And then I think over time,
they get just corrupted. It's, it's like the ring, you know, uh, in Lord of the Rings is like,
you know, you, at first you just put it on real quick because you're in a bad situation and you need to, you know, you're Frodo and you need to go invisible to, you know, to evade sidetrack but while we mentioned lord of the
rings day in the new uh rings of power uh spoiler turn off your uh speaker if you haven't seen the
end of the the new the newer season i'll wait okay turning off so wait so how am I going to know when to come back on? Just it'll be 10 seconds, 15 seconds.
So Elrond, who is the one guy who seems the most incorruptible to the ring's power and keeps telling him when you can't use these rings, these are bad.
They're going to screw us up.
But when Galadriel is dying at the end of the season, he puts on her ring because it has that particular ring has uh gladriel's ring has some
healing powers and so he puts it on to save her and even he who is the most noble and the least
corruptible becomes corrupted or at least now this is could be the beginning of his corruption
because he started to use the rings that sauron made so anyways i'll stop there um
yeah we got to be careful you're totally right warren i was
you guys remember the the canary etf uh filing in uh well in the month leading up to the the
light coin summit uh the sec had delayed the approval right uh the approval decision and
they asked the community for some feedback for
comments. I'm wondering how much weight those comments have, and if it's worth it for us to
write up the SEC and write a comment for them. And if there are other places for other ETFs that
might have similar comment sections for the public. Does anyone know? I was hoping David might be here to answer,
but I don't think he is anymore.
Maybe he's listening.
He could chime in or something.
But does anyone here know about this stuff?
I don't know about that one in particular,
but I think writing comments does help.
And I think calling your congressman helps.
They don't listen to the messages personally,
but they'll basically get,
you know, one of their people on their staff will say, okay, we got a thousand calls, you know,
saying pro ETF, and we got 200 saying anti ETF, and they were primarily from these, you know,
jurisdictions, and they give them a summary, basically. And I think that does help. And if,
if I think it's evidenced by you know
stand with crypto and many of these entities who did do this stuff they got people they you know
coinbase uh would have they had a thing on their site and they they did a call to action hey
everybody we gotta lobby these people we gotta we gotta comment to these people we gotta call these
people and they put they made it really easily that you could, they had a draft that you can, um, just like cop the, it's already there filled out and you could just send that and
say, Hey, I support this or whatever, or you could write it custom yourself. And then they had the
phone number, uh, a way, um, there's a system where you could like find your local representatives
and things, and you can actually call them or leave messages or email them and i think it does help i but i don't know
that we have that we don't have that much in litecoin i don't think i think we talked to
uh david uh who unfortunately dropped i think we talked to the foundation very briefly about this
at some point that we don't have enough representation and i think we actually have
something coming that i can't leak what it is here yet.
Aztec will kick my butt, but we are building something that could help with this actually for all of Litecoin.
It's not lit again.
It's entirely separate.
Yeah, it's for Litecoin in general.
I was just going to say, specifically with the Litecoin ETF though, just to talk about that specifically for a second, I do feel like just in our dealings with the SEC and regulators in general and just kind of having a general understanding of where things are at, it does feel like there isn't any lack of desire or motivation to get a Litecoin ETF approved at the SEC. I think unfortunately,
we're at this point where there's obviously a lot of kind of movement in the federal government and
shifts in kind of budgets and focus and also priorities. And I think with that, there's just,
unfortunately, the Litecoin ETF probably would have been approved, like under the previous administration,
it probably would have been approved months and months ago.
But I think just given the fact it kind of got caught up
in all this bureaucracy and all this shift,
it kind of got grouped in with everything else.
And it's unfortunate because it doesn't really make a lot of sense.
But it is just one of these things, like to your point, Rock,
that I think you have to play the game with politics in general general but the thing that i think people often try to look at politics and say okay
well like we have to attack this and and i will give you that it is changing a little bit but they
look at politics and say okay like let's attack politics like a business but the issue and i think
elon musk learned this the hard way unfortunately is that politics is such a it's such a different
landscape like to your point like it's the your point, the currency in politics is not money, it's power.
And that corrupts people, but it also makes people very emotional in how they react to it and how they approach it.
And that polarizing nature of it just makes it a completely different game than trying to run a business or trying to operate in like a general business sense.
And that I think is something that people often lose is like you have to play the game and the game is completely,
it's played completely differently because emotion is so much more involved in it.
And I think that that just like bureaucracy and all those things,
like common sense almost goes out the window when you're talking about politics in a lot of ways.
Yeah, mind if I chime in on that so too yeah so uh personally my previous career was in politics um i worked in public policy
non-profits mostly um did work briefly for the bush white house way back in the day as well
and thankfully i got out of that world and got into White House way back in the day as well.
And thankfully, I got out of that world and got into making an actual difference in the world.
But still, my wife is full time in that as well.
And working on some crypto policy bills as well.
It's absolutely a different world.
I kind of salute the people who are in it. And generally speaking,
I kind of view politics as like,
obviously involvement in politics is like unnecessary evil,
but it's,
it's should be probably minimized.
Like I think the crypto space did so well because it was just out of
politics for like 16 years,
just did nothing but build,
grow,
do whatever, just kind of like build, grow, do whatever.
Just kind of like at the end of the day, at the end, waning moments of the Biden administration,
it does seem like things got too far.
We're now the the U.S.-based crypto industry faced an existential crisis.
And it's at that point you had crypto people get going hard on politics and kind of like tip, tip the scales to a point where now you get, you have like a land, you could call a
landslide victory, right? For the current administration. And immediately pardon Ross
Ulbricht, call off these SEC cases and just things but like night and day
better now I think that the lure for that is that oh politics is awesome let's just hang around here
for a while and sure you do want to have people like you know coin center and things like that
with the finger on the pulse of things and just making sure to do kind of threat watching out for
threats and you do want to get involved if you need to,
but I think it's a massive waste of time
for the industry to start getting involved
in politics on the day-to-day sort of level
where you're like, oh, well, let's just,
this stablecoin bill here and this thing there.
And like, once you get some basic regulatory frameworks
and everything is like,
you know how you can not go to prison in this industry,
then unless someone attacks you, just you can not go to prison in this industry, then unless someone
attacks you, just try to go back to working, try to go back to what you do the best. And I think
that one of the reasons why the crypto industry got so much of what we wanted in the US is because
it kind of like was neutral, like not a known quantity, just kind of like sitting on the
sidelines, not doing
anything until it came time to come out and really push a big victory over the line. And it kind of
feel like the way to keep that power is to just step back and disappear again, just kind of be
there where it's like, okay, if you push us too far, then, you know, don't tread on me. If you
push us too far, then we'll bite back. But once you're a politically entrenched interest group, then all of a sudden things become a lot more clear. You know exactly what
kind of effect you can have. You know exactly the kinds of participation you can affect. You're a
very clear target to like, this is how we work around them. This is how we co-opt them. The
politically involved parts of here's the bones we can throw so then we can trample them later. Here's the different talking points about these
entrenched interests like, oh my gosh, the lobbyists and big crypto, blah, blah, blah.
You can start to get a target and deal with that more effectively in the future. And a big,
I guess, secret of politics is like no one, almost no one
gets convinced to change their vote. It's just like zero people statistically, almost no one.
The game is engaging the people on either side, getting them to get out to vote. And so by having
this like clear target, the people who hate crypto can just say, these are the votes we have to contend with.
Can we win despite not having those votes? And then they just figure out how to make it happen.
Or how many of our voters can we engage to just make the crypto lobby useless? So basically,
I would just do what the crypto industry has done so far, which is stay the hell out of this until it's time to make a big move and then go back and just wait for massive sort of defensive moves on that.
Man, these are really good points. I don't think that the political world does, but I'm going to
have to drop off. I really appreciate Aztec Rock, really appreciate the forum. It was great chat
with everyone. I'm looking forward to doing more of these and really appreciate all the support, guys.
Can you tell people where to find Luxfolio?
We should have had the Luxfolio account listening at least so people could click it.
I don't see it.
He might have dropped off.
You can follow us.
That's at LuxfolioH on X.
The tickers, you can find our stock.
It's Lux, L-U-X-F-F
in the US
and L-U-X-X in Canada.
And yeah,
our website is luxfolio.com.
And yeah,
anyone feel free to reach out on X
directly to me or to the Luxfolio account.
And yeah, just guys,
really appreciate the...
Yeah, awesome. Thanks for coming, Zane. And love the work you're doing. And now, just guys really appreciate the work. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for coming Zane
and love the work you're doing. And now what you've done is contagious, like micro strategy.
You really are the Michael Saylor of Litecoin because once you did yours, now we're seeing
many others coming on the market. You know, another one just raised a couple hundred million.
And like, I think we're going to see a plethora of these.
And you, you know, we've discussed this offline,
but like similar to Michael Saylor,
you realize that it's actually a good thing
when more of these come online
because they all buy together
and it all is strong for the Litecoin community together.
So yeah, Michael Saylor literally goes around the world
doing conferences
trying to get other people to copy him because exactly more of us do it the better yeah no i i
think uh i i can't can't agree more i think more more and more people are gonna are gonna catch on
here and it's it's inevitable it's he used uh saylor's uh saylor's term Litecoin is inevitable. Litecoin is inevitable. Definitely.
We'll post, we'll pin something from Lexfolio to the Jumbotron too.
Maybe Aaron or Aztec when someone finds something.
Thanks guys. Okay, we'll talk soon.
I'd love to jump in on that last point as well.
Hey Jack, real quick.
I'm sorry, brother. Real quick. Guys, we have a bunch of people, friends in the audience. If you want to jump in in this conversation, please just request, especially if I know you. I would love to have you part of the conversation with all of us we probably we we have uh the aggregated we recently uh opted to
go only two hours so we're at the two hour mark but i think this is a good conversation we'll go
a little bit longer and i'd love to get more people up here so um and just involved uh jack
please take it away right so yeah i just just want to jump in on that last point
and just kind of frame this for some people maybe who are new to the space.
But the only reason the industry really got involved in politics in a big way
is because we were relentlessly pushed out of the mainstream
to the point where, you know, you had like a big turning point,
I think, in a lot of people's minds when coinbase which is probably the most legit like what was at the time anyway probably the
most legit crypto company in the us in one of the most stringent jurisdictions for crypto they were
publicly traded on the stock market and so they had to disclose everything about the business model
before the sec started and then the sec started with these suits that were alleging that they were basically listing.
They were acting as a broker-dealer of securities, and they were listing unauthorized securities.
At that point, initially, Coinbase tried to kind of play ball with the SEC.
And they realized after a few months that the SEC actually were not interested in playing ball.
I mean, Brian Armstrong famously, you know,
had some calls with the SEC and said like,
hey, you know, we want to work with you guys.
How do we, if you're saying this is a security,
like what isn't, what's the framework that we need to use?
And the SEC replied famously,
we're not giving you legal advice, which is
like hilarious for the regulatory body to be acting in such a hostile manner. And I
think when Coinbase realised that and then started to dig the heels in and kind of really
recognised this for what it is, which was a fight for survival for the industry. Then I think a lot of other people who might have otherwise been crushed by the SEC and
settled decided to fight as well.
And then we get the big crypto lobby coming in a couple of years after.
So I think a really interesting podcast on this actually just dropped in the last week,
which was Sean Ryan, his podcast
with Brian Armstrong.
Really interesting to get a good
two hour scoop on Brian's
opinion on all this, like how it all played out,
how they tried to
negotiate with the regulators and stuff.
I think one thing that's really interesting is
the real sea
change in this industry came
when,
as Rock pointed out earlier,
that 40-something percent of all donations came from the crypto lobby this time.
And it was essentially like this realization that,
if you're a senator or a congressperson,
or even potentially a president,
that if you don't, and this goes through every country,
this isn't just a US-specific thing, although the organizational efforts are probably best in the u.s the idea is that if
look this is a massive industry now it's a multi-trillion dollar industry a lot of great
brilliant intelligent people are based in this industry and love it and if you don't play ball
with us it does this is going to affect your political career because we represent like, you know, whatever, 10, 20% of the voter base,
which may have at some point or think positively about using crypto.
And then there's also a ton of money that's being generated by these companies.
And that, you know, represents a massive amount of economic energy,
which can be deployed for or against you know any any entity that is
negative or positive towards the industry and i think like there's probably like a bit of a wake
up call for some people that were kind of ambivalent on crypto not really interested
mainly negative to kind of realize that there is something here and there's no point in just
ignoring it you need to engage and then when you engage you realize there's actually some really good ideas good technology great people in this industry
and it's not something that you would just want to outright ban because you know some guy 15 years
ago used it to sell some weed on the dark web you know it's like the industry's come a long long way
since Russell breaking Silk Road.
And I think we need to recognise that for what it is.
So I think the main point I was trying to make with that is just I don't think this industry would be as far ahead as it is today
if it wasn't so relentlessly bullied by the SEC for many years.
It's in that, like, kind of, you know, like,
iron sharpens iron people say right and so
it's interesting that in that like really difficult period where the the industry faced
a very significant adversarial threat from one of the biggest most important regulators on the
planet you know the industry mobilized effectively and dealt with that threat. And I think this is really interesting.
And, you know, to everybody that was here during that time
and had their portfolios, businesses, livelihoods
suffered through that period.
Congratulations, because you stuck around, number one.
And two, you know, you earned your seat at the table.
I mean, Jack, you knew.
I mean, I don't want to give your personal info,
but you made personal
life choices that were pretty big based on some of the things that were happening in your country
and so did i i moved from california to puerto rico yeah i sat down there was a i won't go into
it in detail but there was a bill that was released in my home country and i read the bill
and within two months of reading the bill i had moved my entire family out of the country.
It feels like this, it's not just what the bill says,
it's what the bill means that somebody would write this into law,
and that people don't, like, the people that are writing this
do not understand this industry at all.
And that was enough for me to think this is not good enough.
And, you know, I love this industry so much that I'll
uproot the family and move.
Guys, I
got to jump off for
clients. I just wanted to say
bye. Michal from Matterfy
and AF. If you want
more news on the wallets
that we're building, just follow my
personal account and super
appreciate the space and super appreciate the,
all the other people that are making privacy cool.
Ian,
you,
you are me.
If we need,
we need to chat.
So I'm chatting the most of you already,
but there's someone that,
you know,
needs wallets or what have you,
or just wants to talk.
yeah,
just hit me up and do.
Yeah.
They build custom wallets guys
if you need a custom wallet built for your project for your chain uh especially focused on privacy
and you know they can do other features uh definitely look to them they're building some
really incredible stuff uh and have like basically acquired multiple wallet companies and technologies
over the last like five years or something.
And they're the guys to get it done.
So check out Matterfy and American Fortress.
And their TGE for American Fortress will come soon.
And disclaimer, we are invested in and incubating them.
So just want to keep that full transparency.
But yeah, I really love what they're building.
They're freedom fighters for, for privacy.
Uh, and it's also coming to MetaMask.
So that got approved.
So you'll probably see that in September, uh, live.
So I'm excited about it.
Anyway, love the love.
Love you guys.
Chat soon.
See you on the next space.
Amazing.
Thanks rock.
Yeah.
Thanks for showing up brother.
Okay.
So, um, I don't know if I could chime in with a little something.
So still on the topic of having representatives for us politically.
So, you know, the idea, the point I was trying to really get across is not really having people try to pull strings for Litecoin like getting too close to the sun that we get
burnt because i understand like you know the idea of for example the bastardization that has been
happening somewhat with bitcoin where we have the people who are representing it but don't want it
to get like the integrations that are actually good to actually you know make the chain better
like you know privacy or trying to make bitcoin uh you know a medium exchange. And so we could see a conflict of interest with that.
But like we can actually do something with Litecoin where I mean, work those that are
actually like working to make the chain, you know, what we wanted to be are like completely
different from the people that are representing us because the representation that we really
need is not necessarily pulling the strings for us but like standing up for us
and not allowing ourselves to be written off because i feel like most of the time when i've
been seeing uh people talk about litecoin in the big places and they're not litecoin natives
they often use uh terms that are actually super wrong to just write them off for example they
just say oh it's a copy of bitcoin and you know when you have those people
being the loudest voices in the front of you know the regulations and the government you know those
people are just gonna write us off and that's just gonna be the eyes that like the government are
gonna use to look at litecoin they're gonna say oh it's just a bitcoin copy and you know it's
something uh similar to what we see with opals, right? Where, you know, the whole thing starts going around that Opals bring bad luck.
And all of a sudden, nobody uses Opals for proposals anymore.
And, you know, because it's the same, right?
Because there's a rumor that goes around that that started with the beers, right?
The guys that, you know, control the diamond supply and, you know, the big, you know, advertisements and making sure that diamonds are like the standard.
And so, you know, the rumor is like they, they, they started the whole
Opals bring bad luck campaign and it sort of caught on.
And of course, Opals are just as beautiful as diamonds.
They are fucking great.
But, uh, because of the perception that, uh, these, you know, it's repeat a lie
long enough, it becomes true right because
and that's the thing we should avoid and that's why we need to have people that are in those spaces
not necessarily trying to pull things in favor of litecoin but to stand as the voice of reason so
whenever we have uh people uh like uh you know this uh guy from galaxy mike novogratz who's going
out and saying oh i don't know what Litecoin is.
It's just a glorified Bitcoin copy.
You know, and when you have people like that talk,
we need to have our own people in these places who can be like,
oh, no, that's actually not the case.
You know, Litecoin has this, Litecoin has that.
And, you know, that can, you know, provide a counterbalance
in ensuring that we're not just being written off
and just, you know, pushed to thebalance in ensuring that we're not just being written off and just,
you know, pushed to the side as some sort of, you know, Bitcoin copy and, you know, by, you know,
that, you know, by extension, being denied the opportunities we should get. Because I feel like
that might be the reason, you know, in a way why we're not really getting the ETF approvals we're
supposed to get. Because I feel like the people that are actually like spending big money to try to get the other ones approved might just be saying oh you
know litecoin litecoin can wait it's just it's just a bitcoin fork or whatever you know and and
that's why we really really do need people there to represent us and just to make sure that we're
not being sidelined by people who do not have our best
interest at heart 100 we got to put pressure on them i agree and uh i think at some point in the
future when i can put more focus on this it's definitely something that i want to do uh find
ways to do it or mobilize people or fund it or or whatever you know we need to do
um one of the one of the things i'm curious about here is uh the rise of stable coins you know
uh yeah last week we were talking about the genius act and some of the concerns about
some of the concerns about how stable coins could be used like CBDCs, maybe like some kind of
private issued stable coin. And I see the rise of these stable coins or stable coins
kind of taking over as payments options.
And I'm wondering, from your guys' perspective, you know, we also see Dash here and we see
Litecoin and more like these decentralized options also being used very widely.
also being used very widely.
you know,
Litecoin was,
recently,
I think there was a report where Litecoin was used more than,
is it USDC?
rock.
And this report,
actually,
Jose,
I believe it was posted by Jose who's in the audience right now.
I have the tab still open on my computer let me
go try to find the exact details on that thank you brother yeah and so with with
the rise of stable coins and and also the fact that people are using decentralized uh currency as money do you guys think that uh something like
litecoin or dash and bitcoin will actually stand up to the the rise of of uh fully you know the
the stable coins fully trying to take over.
Yeah, I mean, I personally don't believe in the idea because I see that floating around a lot.
People say stable coins are the actual utility of blockchain.
And I'm like, wait, did these people ever read the white paper?
Because, like, I mean, if we're talking about transmitting the U.S. dollar,
you know, in a speedy way, we already have that, right?
So stable coins,
I mean, I do not see them as being anything other than just ways to get in and out of crypto,
or I don't really know, but I just don't see them as like the future of money, because I feel like
the whole space lost its way when we did not separate the money from the chain, right? And
that's one way that I look at, you know, crypto is i look at it as is the money good and is the chain good and that's why we have so many i
mean it's it's what we have with all of this proof of stake uh chains that are out there and and you
see uh you know they get to uh bring all of these coins and sell all of these coins and private
sales and then you know they have this coins that are that are being uh transacted on their chains but that's not good money right it's not good money because you know you just print it out
of nowhere there's no uh natural way for the supply to uh the supply to get uh introduced into
the market and you know you have something like my coin that was just fairly distributed and i feel
like over time this plays into supply demand dynamics And should we be able to grow the way we're supposed to grow?
And, you know, we start getting to the point where we start to see things like diminishing returns playing and, you know, the price fluctuations are not that much.
And we can have at that point having something like lightning or a way for people to transact you know very
instantaneously with litecoin once we have that i feel like that's the whole point of what we're
trying to build in the first place because like stable coins in my opinion render the underlying
asset of that chain purposeless i mean what what's the point of having usdc on solana what's the point of solana
then right because like no normie is going to try to like always uh deposit gas fees in their solana
wallet just because they want to do a transaction oh i'm at a 7-eleven i have a hundred bucks in
uh you know my solana address oh i gotta deposit some solana and then make that transaction why
would i do that i could just use my card and i don't have to worry about the so gas fees nonsense so if that's really the
direction i really don't see it i mean we're just finding more creative ways to transmit
worthless fiat and that's just not i i feel like that's it's gonna run its course as long as
the entire financial system is definitely going to, you know, become obsolete.
Then the true medium of exchanges, right, the true coins that are not chasing after hives, Bitcoin, Litecoin,
we can build our infrastructure in order to make sure, you know, transactions are happening much, much faster.
Then, I mean, that's it.
We can actually become the, you know, medium of exchange and the actual direction of crypto. So that's, that's it. We can actually become the medium of exchange
and the actual direction of crypto.
So that's how I see it.
Definitely.
Joel, I see your hand up.
I want to say that stablecoins on proof-of-stake chains And proof of stake chains don't necessarily make the chain's gas token or the main token of the chain obsolete.
There's a lot of chains that have governance built into it or they have revenue share that flows back. They're staking the, like in proof of stake,
the token itself can secure the network in some cases.
So there's definitely some reasons to have these coins,
but I do agree that we need options
that we need options outside of these like centralized stable coins and and that a litecoin
dash bitcoin you know whatever it is that's decentralized money is is definitely a better form. And I see that regardless of the stablecoin market growing,
we still see that the decentralized money is still active and in some cases growing their user bases or finding growth in different categories
so i'm i'm interested to hear what you're going to say joelle on uh kind of what your thoughts
on the future of of you know the convergence of decentralized and centralized money and how that
you know how this what does the picture look like you in the future and your thoughts overall so yeah there's a i just wanted just to make a a a note there that i think it all
narrows down to freedom so that's one of the main things lightning has that it's it gives you the
liberty of doing plenty of things now it's going to to be much more of it
so it's like i've been i've been posting it like like when it's going to be the internet of
everything it's going to be the everything uh many of of you guys have read that so i think it it's
it's about freedom you you can choose what you want. It's not like in the past, like the Inquisition,
like just one person decided what to use, how to use it,
and what was the way it was supposed to do it, right?
So I think that's one of the main key advantages
of the core ideals of Lycon, the freedom, even privacy, it's optional.
So you're not like stuck, like maybe in Monero that you're stuck with privacy.
So you can choose, you can decide what you want so you what you guys are uh you have showed us of the of the VM it will
just give plenty of options to to to enter like DeFi like real war assets like DAOs or kind of
those kind of things if people want just to stay like true litecoin maximalists or something that they just
want to have it like a story of value and and digital cash for payments they don't need to
to interact with other things but people that want to do to do to to interact with those and want to do it with best blockchain available in that sense that
it's like the most close one to Satoshi's white paper, well, you can do it. So I think
it's part of freedom, the core mentality or vision of LightCring.
Yeah, one of the big keys to this here,
if I could just piggyback on that for a second,
is one of the big keys of LitVM that was key to us and important to us is,
and I think this was something that was interesting
to Charlie Lee and the foundation,
was that LitVM's implementation requires no hard fork,
no soft fork, no changes at the core layer,
which is really cool. And that's me as like, I call myself an ossophist, especially, particularly
when it comes to Bitcoin, is I don't want to tinker on the L1. I think there is some tinkering maybe required, and I was supportive
of SegWit as a soft fork and generally supportive of Taproot, but didn't follow it quite as close,
but was generally supportive of it and Schnorr signature type stuff and all this. So there are
some things that will need to happen. Potentially quantum resistance is another thing that may need
to happen at the L1, but the least tinkering we can do on the L1, the better.
Over time, we don't want these to change anymore at all.
Eventually, they should ossify.
And all technical innovations should happen on the higher layers or in some other ways that maybe aren't even called layers that we don't know yet that we'll invent over time. And I think what Bitcoin
OS has done here, along with Gateway, so we have two dev teams working on this, solving this
problem, you know, one from the UTXO roll-up side and one from the EVM roll-up side. And what we
figured out is we can do this without any, you know, changes to the L1. And just like you said there, Warren, people don't have to use it if they don't want to.
If you want just good old-fashioned vanilla pure Litecoin, you can just keep using that.
That's totally fine.
But for those who want to build things on Litecoin and bring more functionality to Litecoin,
bringing will and testaments to Litecoin, bringing this on-chain kind of escrow to Litecoin,
bringing DeFi and ways to get yields on your Litecoin that weren't possible before
without trusting centralized entities.
All of this could become possible now and is becoming possible.
And it's optionality again.
And it's optionality again.
Real quick.
Hey, real quick.
I think when I responded to Flippin Finance that I think you might have wanted to respond to what I was saying.
I was trying to kick it over to Dash.
So I was trying to kick it over just because I'm trying uh make sure everyone's kind of getting a chance to speak but um i didn't mean to put you maybe in a position where you didn't get to
to respond to what i said but uh yes please uh if you could uh respond and then yeah i'd like to kick
it to to joel all right so um just to clarify uh i wasn't trying to say like um you know proof of stake uh tokens or or coins i'm not
trying to say that they are worthless uh what i was just trying to say is the money factor i don't
think lots of people really pay attention to the money factor like i mean i understand the utility
in proof of stake chains for governance and you know for yields earning and all of that these are
things that i've participated and benefited from especially in the early days of defi really did make a lot of money in it so it's cool it's sweet i like all
of that but like i feel like more and more time like people forget that what it's all about what
crypto is all about is cryptocurrency we're trying to be money we're trying to replace money and so when people say that usdcs or whatever stable coins
are gonna be the money that will be transmitted primarily for the main things we're trying to
build which is money then we're pretty much saying that the underlying token is not money
and that's what i'm trying to say and that's why why I say that I don't see a way where stable coins, you know, where stable coins are actually the things that actually replace money and, you know, become the future of money.
No, Litecoin and Bitcoin are the future of money. Proof of stake tokens are great for what they are. They are very valuable assets. And I do support a lots of proof of stake chains and whatnot.
But I'm just saying the money factor of it is something that I don't see.
Because if stable coins are the money, then we might as well just pack up.
Just leave the current financial system the way it is, unchanged.
I love your spicy takes, man.
I love it.
And I'm not a big proponent of stable coins. I,
and, and maybe it's because, uh, I lost, I don't usually talk about this, but I, I took a big loss
when, uh, Tara went down with UST, which, you know, we, we all thought, uh, at the time,
you know, no, no big deal with, uh, with, uh, you know,
UST was super safe and everything, but, uh, with the way they,
their system was set up, uh, and the way it was attacked and unwound,
you know, that was, that was really, really horrible.
But regardless, just more fundamentally, I, I, um,
I think that even like DeFi AI agents and people as this space matures more will realize that
stable coins are great and they are good in some instances but I don't think that they will
I think there's like this period of time right now where stable coins are growing very quickly but i imagine that there's a full circle
back to cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency will uh especially you know hard money decentralized money
will take the lead as money again you're not just a digital store value and i i see this happening
value and i i see this happening with the mature with the technology as it matures around uh
decentralized money similar to like what we're doing with ledvm and providing more functionality
programmability for this money um i think it comes it comes full circle back to hard money. So yeah, I agree there.
Joel, what's your thoughts here?
Yeah, a lot of the same kind of sentiments
have already been echoed,
except a little bit,
if you look into the stablecoin bills, right?
The Genius Act in particular,
the kind of things it enshrines in the law,
including it basically forces stablecoin
issuers to be backed and regulated and have certain abilities to comply with lawful orders
to freeze funds, to censor funds, to spy on funds, et cetera. And I think that the entire idea
around stable coins being the new meta,
like obviously stable coins being a new meta
is just the legacy financial system
finally coming on chain.
That's kind of what it is.
And in that case, it is like a big thing
as far as it's big and important,
but it's not like, it's not the end game. It's not
what we came here for. And I mean, obviously it could go on all the, you know, the stuff that
we've all been talking about, about, you know, scarce decentralized sound money is like the real
thing. Yeah, sure. All that is true. In a much more short-term practical sense though i think that pretty soon
people are going to figure out that using stable coins like the less the centralized stable coins
are going to dominate from here on out and using them will become much more like using a bank
account or a payment app like paypal or something with all the usual like oh my funds got frozen
because of this and all this got restricted because of that.
And like all that same stuff.
And I think that the reason why people like stable coins so much is because
they kind of let people cheat the system by having none of the risks with volatile crypto,
but also just all the freedom of something really decentralized.
And that freedom is going away very soon.
And I think we're going to start
to see people be like can we take something scarce instead let's you know let's pay with
dash let's pay with litecoin things like that because otherwise they're going to have to you
know deal with the same restrictions as before so stable coins are kind of like a dance with the
devil sort of thing where you can't just ignore them because people
are not going to use something like even Bitcoin as a unit of account for a very long time. It just
that things aren't accounted in it. Things aren't, you know, you don't, your debts aren't denominated
in it. You, if it changes from month to month, all of a sudden it complicates your accounting or responsibilities.
But we should understand that they are what they are.
And if you want to play fiat rail for a while just to make some on-chain revenue, that's fine.
And the other thing is, as much as scarce money is real money, is going to win out in the end in some way, shape, or form,
I think we also have to be
realistic about the timeframe and what has to happen for that. In order to get that kind of
stability, we need constant volume at massive levels that are not speculative, that are not,
well, it's hope the coin pumps. It's, I need this for that purpose. And then it has a very
stabilizing factor. It needs to be
kind of like almost like oil prices where it just becomes relatively, you know, a stable commodity
over a long period of time. And then people can be like, Hey, I'd rather price my goods and
services in oil or the new oil, whatever it is. It rather do that than a depreciating something
like fiat currency, but it's the fiat currency is going to
collapse but it's going to not be five years from now i think it'll be like 10 plus
oh that makes perfect sense thanks so much for that clarification i think i i understand uh you
know the way you put it right now especially the way you worded it as uh you
know stable coins being a way for institutions like ombart uh massively i think that makes perfect
sense what i was just uh you know i think that that makes sense yeah the conclusion that uh you
know um it's not really the end goal and you know the stability we would need to uh make uh bitcoin
litecoin dash you know the things that are trying to be money
actually function as money, you know, it's not going to happen over the next five, 10 years.
So yeah, that totally makes sense. I appreciate that clarification.
I wonder, guys, you got me thinking there, Joel, is like stable coins are this,
I don't know, kind of a good is the enemy of great type thing where it's like they're
useful. Obviously, they have great product market fit. Everyone, their growth is massive around the
world. It's one of the biggest growing assets in the world, not by price, but by usage.
And I wonder if there's a world, like a parallel path that could have been taken
where this wouldn't have been the case and people
would be using hard money like Bitcoin, you know, uh, Litecoin, Doge, Dash, um, these kinds of
things, um, or even like a gold backed stable coin type thing, uh, in payments. Like if we didn't
invent stable coins at the time we did and they didn't get this like early mover kind of advantage, I wonder if the world would be in a different place.
Like if, you know, something else like Litecoin or Dash would be being used more for payments, with Bitcoin being more for store value.
It's an interesting concept to think about.
I mean, I've known Brock Pierce, one of the founders of Tether.
I've known him for 25 years. And just the other day, we were drinking some wine and talking about
some just like history of some of this stuff. And I hope this is okay for me to share publicly. I
don't think he minds, but he didn't know or didn't have high expectations for Tether in the beginning.
They didn't know it would be such a big thing. You know, it's like in business, it's very hard to know most, most of the things that, that we invest in or incubate from
LDA, for example, or even from my personal, um, you know, funds, we, you know, a lot of these
things I only look at, you know, okay, this has like a, a 20% chance of getting to this stage or like an 80% chance of getting to this stage.
And most things in the VC world, in the investment world, the speculative world, a lot of these things are like, you know, smaller bets.
I'll say like QuickSwap is an example like, well, let's start with Polygon.
Polygon, when we were first getting involved, I actually did have pretty strong faith that
Polygon had a pretty good chance of success.
You know, but I would still only put it at like, at the time, maybe 20% chance of, you
know, unicorn plus, like, so you like billion dollar market cap or higher, and then like
all the usage it got.
But it was like the best possible thing
at the time that I saw to solve the problem of Ethereum not having scalability or too high of
fees. And so we made that bet because the way you think as an investor is not, you don't just look
at what's the chance of success. You have to do like a multiplier of what's the chance of success multiplied by the outcome.
And so if you think something is, you know, 60% chance of success, and if you lose, you lose,
you know, $10. And if you win, you win $10, then you'd take it because it's, you got that 10%
kind of margin there of like, okay,
this is a, this is a winning, this is a good bet maybe. And then you have to decide between which
are the most winning bets. But like, you could have something where you think this is only a
10% chance of success, but if it succeeds, it's, you know, a hundred X. And then that's a, that's
a really good bet. Right. And so Tether for Brock Pierce, he says it wasn't, uh, he didn't know,
you know, and quick swap, like, this is like one of the most, um, unsure bets we ever had,
you know, Sandeep came to us and said, Hey, can you build a decks? And, um, I said, I don't know,
we've never built a decks, but you know, we are good at building communities. We're, uh,
good at BD. He said, he said, you guys are the best BD and marketing people I know. I want to pair you with
the best developers I know. If I do that, do you think you could do this? And I said, I don't know,
we'll try and we'll just like give everything to the community and see what happens.
And at the time, if you asked me like what were the chances that QuickSwap was going to get to
over a billion market cap or 1.5 billion a day in volume and have the most users of any application in the world at its peak.
And still to this day doing, you know, has like 400 million in TVL.
It has more TVL than Cardano, which has a thousand times the market cap, ridiculously.
Not to bash Cardano, just saying, I don't know how this industry values them.
They'll them for you
yeah um but it has it has more tbo than the entire cardano chain just quick swap one application
um it has i think 10 times or more of the volume of cardano uh but it's somehow valued it again
one thousandth of cardano it makes no sense me. It generates way more revenue than Cardano
by many multiples.
You know, Quickswap's done a 10th of a trillion in volume.
But anyways, I'm getting off,
I'm getting into ramble territory.
Just to touch on what you're saying about the what if,
I don't think that Tether
is what caused things to go in this direction
tether was just a trading tool because people wanted to be able to cash out their crypto gains
on exchanges and everything was you know unbanked unregulated as fuck and so they created a little
token that would just let people do that it was kind of like an internal trading tool, basically fiat without having to KYC. That's kind of what it was. And if we remember back during Brexit, Bitcoin was more
stable than the British pound during that time because it was used a lot for commerce. A higher
percentage of its usage, I would say, was used for commerce. And the pound had some kind of
volatility at the time. We could have had Bitcoin that they're worth in goods and services priced in bitcoin i know i priced some myself i paid for
things to nominate bitcoin i've done that with a few different currencies but it was we had a real
shot at that and then bitcoin transitioned to a more of a speculative asset after that
and now stable coins took over so i definitely that stable coins, it's kind of the result of that failing that first
mover advantage that set us, if you want to call us being scarce crypto, real sound money.
I think that set us back a decade, the fact that Bitcoin lost that momentum for payments.
And it is what it means.
You could say it had to happen that way.
You could say it was a hijacking, whatever you want to it's I think that's just kind of like the way things happened
yeah it's interesting it's separated go ahead Aztec yeah apologies just uh basic swap has
joined us and uh they've had their hand up for a bit here so uh just for everyone that joins
the show you don't have to raise your hand we we ask
everyone just jump in the conversation rock i think you're going to say something but i'd love
for uh i'd love to kick the mic over to basic swap at some point i'll just put a quick bow on it
basically that over time you know bitcoin separated from smart contract stuff because
bitcoiners just didn't like that stuff they They were resistant. They called all these tokens scams. And so Ethereum was built. And so Bitcoin now was separated kind of from a lot of
the smart contract and other stuff being built. And it left, I think, a void for both payments
and for like this, you know, thing that is used to trade against these other assets.
And I think that's OK. I think Bitcoin doesn't have to be everything for everyone.
I think it's great to have Dash and Litecoin and others.
And now Polygon is very focused on the payment stuff too,
with like stable coins on Polygon,
which is growing massively actually.
But I think it's totally okay for Bitcoin
to be the thing that it's doing best right now,
at least for now is store value.
And then we can have the other things do other stuff. coin to be the thing that it's doing best right now, at least for now is store value. And, uh,
then we can have the other things do, do other stuff. But I think eventually I agree with Aztec
stable coins are like a temporary thing. I think eventually, um, you know, the hard money assets
that we've been talking about, those will be the stable coins in the future. But for now,
because they're so volatile, they're not as much those those you
know they like they are used for payments a bit you know they're some of them are used for payments
a lot but i think you know stable coins are still growing fast uh but i think over time stable coins
are just like this they're just a temporary bridge until we to remove the fiat component altogether
but yeah basic swap love what you guys are doing. So good to have you building really cool stuff on Litecoin and Monero, etc. But yeah, go ahead,
basic swap. How you doing? Well, hey, yeah. So, hey, thanks, Rock. Firstly, it's really great to
be here. You guys have been running a killer space. So kind of listening in, I think a lot of
what I want to say just kind of ties into a lot of what's been said already and So kind of listening in, I think a lot of what I want to say just kind of ties into a lot
of what's been said already and hopefully kind of brings it together in a sense. So, you know,
talking about stable coins, I do believe they're an onboarding mechanism for the masses, for people
who generally don't really understand currency or finance. I think what you'll find though is,
you know, it kind of ties back into a lot of what's been said
already you know you've got hard money which fundamentally is non-inflationary or at least
net non-inflationary and then you've got soft money which is basically fiat currencies you know
where the issuance is basically determined by central trusted authority, you know, central banks. Now, I think stable coins are great
because, you know, they help with onboarding because for regular people who don't understand
financial concepts like inflation or where money comes from, or, you know, how money's managed or
how interest rates work or all kinds of other things. I think, you know, it's just a great way
for these people to go,
here's something that we're kind of familiar with, that we understand, where we don't have to worry
about volatility, where the associated use case is more for non-speculative stuff. But the problem
with stablecoins is, you know, they're all ultimately linked to or backed by fiat currencies.
So the issue is when you get mass adoption of stablecoins,
the underlying problems of the fiat currencies haven't gone away. And the biggest underlying
problem of fiat currencies is that they are inflationary in nature. They are inflationary,
central, trusted. They require trusted issuance and they are inflationary and you know to kind of give to give a very
personal example for me and certainly something that applies to a lot of people I work with
you know me I'm speaking right now it's Dr. Cap I'm one of the advisors to basic swap project but
you know my professional background is as a doctor in medicine I work with a lot of medical
professionals and the vast majority of them,
you know, they've only really recently come to understand what inflation is because inflation
over the last three or four years has become a real problem for their daily living, for their
daily cost management. The cost of living has gone up substantially in the last three, four
years, particularly in the UK and that's created and contributed to a growing
climate of anxiety and instability for people who have everyday jobs, you know
professionals, you know laborers, anyone that basically contributes or works in
the economy as a whole in a non-speculative fashion, i.e. they're not
people who have to earn their money not through speculative trading or investment, but just
through literally turning up to the nine to five or whatever it is. And what they're seeing is
from 2010, from the financial crash onwards, what we've seen is if you know, from 2010, from the financial crash onwards, you know, what they, what we've seen is,
you know, if you had ยฃ30,000 in a bank account in 2010, it's real-term spending power's gone down
by at least 30% since that time, at least. And that's something that didn't happen all at once,
so it wasn't immediately noticeable. It's just that's something that creeped up over time
because it was a compounding effect it was a compounding effect because inflation was two
percent but the interest rates on most savings account in the uk were less than one percent
so most people were just quietly going on with their everyday lives not realizing the real-term
spending power of their money was decreasing and then you had a number of inflationary shocks, which were due to,
in part, you know, liquidity issues in supply chains. You know, you can say you contribute
some of this to COVID, some of this to geopolitical conflict, various other things. But then the other
side to that is, you know, central banks are just printing loads and loads and loads of money.
Now, this is the thing. All none of these problems have gone away and these problems
continue to compound day to day and the inherent instability they bring regardless of you lie on
the analytical spectrum is an ever-present problem. So even if we get masked up of stable coins, the flying inherent interest that stable coins represent aren't going away.
But this is where it's good. And this is where I'm a real optimist. And it really ties back
into a lot of what you guys said. I don't have a finance background. I learned all I know about
finance through getting into cryptocurrency from 2016 onwards and just talking
to people and studying and learning about the monetary system. And as these worsen,
turning to cryptocurrency and looking for the next pump, a lot of these professionals are gaining
an increased awareness that the soft monetary systems that have been serving them, irrespective of what
their politics are, irrespective of their other beliefs, are gradually and increasingly failing
them. And I think that in itself will spur a growing demand and a growing movement from,
you know, what I would consider mainstream aspects of society for hard money and hard currencies i.e
currencies that are not inflationary which you know because to me people say taxes are theft
but I would say inflation is the silent theft that you know most people don't know about
and most people don't know about this and most people because they don't know about this they
don't still assets like stocks bonds bonds, golds, et cetera.
So they never earn yields to outperform inflation.
So their standards of living will keep falling
and their frustrations will keep growing.
But that growing, I guess, that growing anxiety
and that growing culture of what the fuck is going wrong,
what the fuck can we do when we turn to?
Sorry, I'm swearing, but a lot of people look at hard currency, or indeed anything meets hard currency.
Is he breaking up for you guys? I'm sorry. I'm sorry, brother.
Yeah. You're breaking up just a bit? I'm sorry. I'm sorry, brother. Yeah.
You're breaking up just a bit.
Man, you are on fire.
You're on fire.
I don't understand why more people aren't angry about what you're talking about.
Because it is silent.
Inflation is silent.
That's a British accent.
He's probably needing KYC before he can swear anymore.
No, like, you're on fire, brother.
And I don't know if it's, like, where you're at positioned or something,
but you started breaking up towards the end.
And I have to fully agree with you that I think people are waking up.
The reason that you see Litecoin still extremely active
over multiple bear markets
and used just as much as stable coins today
and used more than Bitcoin on some payment applications,
you know, and the rise of the Litecoin meta is all because people
are waking up to the fact that one, they need real money. And two, that there is a whole
group of technologies that are maturing that are going to enable hard money to do more things
and so you also have because in the beginning of this conversation uh roughly almost three hours
ago at this point we were talking about the institutions and how they're flowing and and i
i do i believe that this you know they people call it smart money, realizes all of these things
as well. It's not just like some speculative asset. They're not looking at it just that way.
I mean, they're also realizing the same things that we're realizing. And that's why they want
Litecoin on their balance sheet or Bitcoin, you know? And, and so I fully agree. I think people need to be more angry. We need,
we need to group together and,
and make more noise and get people excited about the future because the
future can look a lot better.
We can fix a lot of the issues that we're seeing a lot of the issues that
you're talking about basic swaps. So yeah, much love. Thank you. I don't know if you're
in a better spot now, but please, please continue. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that was really the
gist of what I got to say, but it kind of following from what you said, I'm an optimist. Like I said, I think, you know, the central banks have taken a reactionary stance by, you know,
by taking positions that they initially resisted cryptocurrency because, you know, central banking, these are
people with power, individuals, you know, groups who have self-interest. They make a lot of money
for the jobs that they hold and they represent the interests of a lot of people who would like
to keep the engine of central banking going. And I think, you know, this, I feel like the sequence of events we've seen over the last eight years really reflects that, okay, let's just try and knit this in the bud.
Let's just try and crush this through regulation, through stymieing the banks, through executive orders to say, stop this.
And then in spite of that, the underlying message of hard money, the understanding of what a powerful concept, hard money, i.e. non-inflationary currency is, that's just kept growing.
And this is the really interesting thing. You know, you may have like central banks getting pissy about the fact that their hegemony, their status quo is being challenged.
But the merchant banks, the investment banks, the retail banks, at the end of the day, their status quo is being challenged. But the merchant banks,
the investment banks, the retail banks, at the end of the day, most of them don't care. They just
ultimately want to represent their customers who are the average people like you and me. And
the nice thing is that message of hard money has been understood by enough people who have a fundamental understanding of the inherent
compounding structural instability built into currency or into soft fiat currencies that
we've grown now to the point and and and gained sufficient political power to the point where the
entire regulatory landscape has changed from crush try this to, okay, we have to adapt, otherwise we're going to die. The fact that these
gene factors have been passed, the fact that seeing the emergence of stable coins and regulatory
climates that mean stable coins are being backed by respective fiat. That is a self-preservation act by central banks who
realize there is no other way at this point, that the alternative is to die.
But the problem is the underlying problem of central banks still isn't solved because
the underlying structure of central banking is fundamentally corrupt.
So it will continue to diminish in power over time,
and you'll continue to see the transference of power
from soft money structures and soft money architecture
and industry into hard money infrastructure,
hard money in industries.
I think that's a really optimistic way to look at things.
I think the fact that Litecoin has positioned itself as a very much as a pragmatic payments service or a pragmatic payments platform or a support for that, you know, being a hard money currency, I think that will pay dividends over the next 15 years.
But that's all I've got to say.
And thank you so much.
Yeah.
Much love.
Great points.
I don't know if anyone wants to piggyback off that.
I also want to welcome.
Oh yeah.
To the,
to the space.
Flippin finance.
Take it away,
man.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. There are lots and lots of people who are waking up. uh flipping finance take it away man oh yeah oh yeah definitely definitely definitely there are
lots and lots of people who are waking up to oh my god sorry my mom was on the call i need to go
somewhere else hold on oh yeah so uh yeah there are definitely lots and lots of people who are waking up and
the thing that uh basic swap said uh about uh you know his colleagues or their colleagues or
doctors and are now just starting to understand inflation and this basic concepts and you know
because of what has happened uh particularly recently you know over the past since covid
basically and you know this type the past since COVID, basically.
And, you know, this type of thing, because I'm Nigerian, by the way,
and this type of thing is something that inflation has been a very real thing over here.
And it shows up not like over time, because like I'd imagine when I read reports and like, for example,
they could talk about, you know, for example, in the United States, like maybe the prices of eggs used to be, I don't know how it's priced, but maybe it was 12
bucks like three years ago. And now it's like 15 bucks, but like over here, it's like you could go
and I'm going to use dollars just so that I could put a very, very, you know, a very vivid image.
You know, you can understand what I'm talking about. So you could go to the market today
and you're going to get a crate of eggs and it it's 12 and you can go literally tomorrow and it's 14
dollars like it's that real and and and this happens to our currency right the naira and we've
seen so so much devaluation happen to the naira that it was not even very hard for me to like
on board my mother uh and my my father and my siblings to Litecoin
because like I definitely had to like educate them on what it is.
And they totally understood the inflation part and, you know,
how Litecoin has a controlled reducing inflation perpetually to the point where, I mean,
it definitely is going to like preserve your purchasing power over time and this
is a real thing and yeah lots and lots of people are starting to get very pissed off and starting
to wake up to uh you know the fact that yeah i mean the only way we can actually protect ourselves
as individuals and protect our spending power and you know a purchasing power and all that is if uh more
and more people continue to pivot and adopt hard money you know hard money like uh bitcoin like
like coin the rest
yeah well said i i don't know how
governments have been able to i'm gonna use the word scam people for hundreds of years
and how we're just still okay with it you know i'm we haven't had a choice until about 15 years ago.
Yeah. I mean, it's true. We, we've tried lots of things too. You know, I, I'm good friends with Anthem Blankert and he, you know, had tried to do a gold money style thing. And there's been
several others that tried to do that. And most of them were pretty much blocked because that,
that to me before Bitcoin, that would have been the best option would be like a centralized, um, you know, gold backed currency, which is what the U S was
supposed to be till they rugged, uh, till they rugged everyone, including the other countries
who had their gold here, you know, through Bretton woods, we were, the dollar was pegged to yen and the other major currencies,
and the US promised to back the dollars by gold. Thus, all the other currencies that were pegged
to the dollar were also backed by gold indirectly. And then the US over time, maybe a lot of
theories are because of Vietnam War and yada yada, but they started printing
more than they actually had of the gold, and they didn't tell anyone that, and then the
countries started to suspect there was something going fishy there, and so the French were
the first to realize and say, hey, we want our gold.
We'll give you your dollars back.
Give us our gold.
And the US said, hey, yeah, we can't do that We'll give you your dollars back. Give us our gold. And the U S said, Hey,
uh, yeah, we, you know, we can't do that. Or, Oh yeah, sure. I think at first they said, sure,
we'll do that. And then they said they were going to like transfer it into like some account. And
they were like, no, we want the cat. We are, we want the gold. We want, we don't want you
transferring our money to some other like fake account. We want the actual physical gold.
And they came with basically a warship and grabbed their gold.
And then when England asked next, I think the U.S. was like, okay, this is a problem.
This is basically a bank run, and we don't have the gold because we've printed more dollars than we have.
more dollars than we have. And if people start doing this, you know, we could become insolvent.
And if people start doing this, we could become insolvent.
And so Nixon famously said, we have to protect against the speculators. They're trying to attack
our currency. And so we're temporary, temporarily closing the gold window. And, you know, the rest
is history. Now we just print infinitely as much as we want. There's no, we don't even have to hide
it anymore. We don't have to pretend we have the gold anymore.
So I would have thought someone in the last hundreds of years would have found some kind of solution.
Like how many times have countries' currencies collapsed?
How many lives have been destroyed?
How many people have died because all of their money that they saved for their entire lives was wiped out?
I mean, there's some countries where they've had their entire family's generational, you know, there is no generational wealth because it doesn't last a generation in most of these countries.
But all of their multiple generations have experienced, like even single generations have experienced being wiped out like three times in
some countries like how are we okay with this how has this taken so long to find a solution but
here we are we found it
oh yeah 100 100 100 like this that thing you said about like generational wealth, not less than a generation.
I legit know people who were like very freaking wealthy in Naira in this country when, you know, about 10 years ago, who, I mean, nothing has, it's not as though like their businesses went down and they definitely did have lots and lots of money in like savings and all that but just off of based off of the inflation that we have seen i mean the naira was about 150 naira for a dollar in 2011 when i started to
understand that the concept uh behind you know naira dollar you know exchange rates and all that
right now it's about a thousand five hundred naira per dollar so i mean the the dollar is
you know inflating away on its own but like
the naira has inflated 10 times more right and you could just imagine someone who probably had about
1.5 billion naira in his account uh back then that was probably 15 million dollars uh but right now
that was probably about 10 million dollars back then over right now that's just about a million dollars and like the person did nothing but just hold that money in an ira and and i see lots and
lots of of things like that happen and i you know i continue to go oh my god this is it's a very
hopeless situations i i wonder why people haven't really woken up to this and by the way there's not
a lot of people that have woken up to this yet. And, um, you know,
but, uh, yeah, it's, it's,
it's very concerning that something like this has actually continued to
prevail. And like, you know, everyone's just like, uh, you know, that's,
that's, that's how it, that's how it is.
Right. Right. Well, now we have solutions.
We have fixed money where we're adding more optionality
and programmability um i didn't talk very much about libvm today honestly guys i wanted this to
be a very special conversation about hard money litecoin you know the future of litecoin the meta
that is unfolding and we successfully did that in the last three hours. Much love to everyone that's joined us today.
I think we should have more of these conversations on the aggregated in the future.
If you're not familiar with the aggregated, we talk about all the subjects.
And we're also starting to jump into some subjects outside of Web3 and crypto and, uh,
jump into some mainstream conversations, uh, as well. Um,
because we want more people talking about, you know,
we're trying to bring everyone back to crypto and web three. And so,
um, this show is a place where we give everyone, uh,
a platform.
You know, if you want to join this show in the future, we're here every Friday.
And if there's a topic that you'd like to speak about or just join in the fun, love to have you on.
Always great conversations. And again, much love to everyone that joined this space today and made it special.
Um, we've been here for three hours.
So I, and I actually have a call right now that I have to hop to, uh,
rock. I'd like to shout some people.
I don't know if you want to say anything before we start wrapping up or if
you're trying to keep this conversation going or or what i just
have to hop i'll just like say because we didn't talk about litvm much we wanted to give the stage
to you know everyone else for the most part um but i think it is worth just mentioning you know
we are uh building litvm uh and litvm is a layer two for Litecoin that brings programmability and all
this functionality to Litecoin, again, not requiring any hard forks or anything, using
ZK rollups directly to Litecoin, but still plugging into Ethereum through Polygon's
ag layer. So this is going to be this, you know, this is an omni-chain, we're calling it, a ZK omni-chain that brings together all the proof-of-work chains through Bitcoin OS, what they've been building, and then all of the EVM chains and more also other L2s, L1s.
You know, from the grants board, I recently wrote a large grant to one of the main Cosmos developer teams to plug Cosmos chains into Polygon.
And so LitVM will basically bring together now, so polygons bringing together all the evm and many
other types of chains and then uh lit vm uh with boss and then now plugging into ag layer and
vault bridge and all these things will now unite all of the proof of work and evm chains so um
really really fun stuff i'm excited to be working on it. And if you want to learn more about it, you can follow.
The LitVM account is there.
I see in the listeners.
Maybe while we're shouting people out, maybe, Darren, could you post something in the Jumbotron about LitVM so people could go follow?
We're raising right now 5 mil at 50 mil valuation.
now, 5 mil at 50 mil valuation. And we will be doing TGE in the coming about four to five weeks.
And so, and we will be doing, well, maybe I shouldn't say yet, but we'll be doing a,
I'll just say, we're going to be doing an airdrop to Polygon holders, users.
We haven't decided exactly where that will go, but there will be an airdrop to Polygon, either stakers, users, validators, delegators, that kind of stuff.
But I haven't decided how we'll do that, but there will be an airdrop at some point.
Yeah, there's a lot more to that airdrop stuff
that it's not public yet.
So I'd love to share that in the future.
So definitely keep an eye on LitVM
because there's other communities that would be involved.
But yeah, much love guys.
I wanna shout out
SixGoXD.
It's great seeing you here today.
We've talked in private messages and you're awesome guy.
Indigo, see you in chats chats as well looks folios here
i saw guy malone throwing some emojis hey brother good to see you here uh learn litecoin
gotta follow them uh oxire much love the bitcoin os account is here thank you um it just works ltc dot ltc much love
uh actually it just works that that's what uh something that uh charlie lee said at the
litecoin summit he said that that might take over as uh litecoin is is uh silver to Bitcoin's gold kind of narrative.
It's true, you know, Litecoin's never been down.
So that's a great narrative.
Also, to be Lortes, Luke, or should I call you Sidney?
Sidney Sweeney Luke.
I mean, you didn't get to talk.
I wanted to talk to you while you were on the panel, but much love, man.
Got to jump on some fortnight soon uh sam uh steph stefanina
stefanina uh yeah good to see you man um on chain foundation glad to see you here nikki
burns oh bro burns what's up bro I I seen I seen some
messages from you uh on the timeline or not messages but uh seen you on the timeline recently
something about a secret um sounds interesting man love to see you uh Banksy here uh basic
Swap thanks for for joining the conversation dads Dads, Polygon dads, much love. I love you guys.
I own some of their NFTs on Polygon. Jared, a good friend. And Jared.eth was also at the
Fireside Chat. So we had a litigation week with LitVM this week where we were just dropping all
kinds of information about what we're building and all that. We kicked it off in our Telegram,
and we were just talking about just showcasing like going to the community,
and much love, Jared, for being there as well,
seeing you here.
Yeah, awesome, man.
We go way back with Polygon and everything.
Hero of Ethers here, Richard.
Richard actually, he's a good friend and he kind of
helped kick off the uh lit vm process and and uh conversation with the litecoin foundation so much
love man shout out to you ls doge we got a bunch of doge friends here as well makes sense uh cuban is here
king dink kush what's up brother from lda uh favor i'm just reading i'm just going down the
these are all friends here and people i see on the timeline i just want to shout you guys out uh pyriteer.eth eric uh wvr i'm having to click on the names lucky m panda
so if you guys don't know panda he's behind the quick swap account right now much much love to
you darren uh chris i've seen the 100 right now in the throwing some emojis, Pete block Haven.
Uh, man, this is a long list of guys and friends that are here.
Um, whoa, whoa, wait, Burns is on the stage.
Hey bro.
I got a hot man, but what's up, man?
What do you want to say something before we hop off?
30, 30 seconds.
I love you. Thank you so much for hop off 30 30 seconds i love you thank you so much
for having me up real quick appreciate you guys um so uh defenders 2fa security just went live
on polygon uh it's got four evm chains uh we have been cooking over the past year and it's completely
free to use right now for the next month um so hop on beta is freaking beautiful the ux and the ui is very
very tight uh stops while it drains and right now we just want people to farm us um in preparation
for tge so get on there and get secure it's shipped awesome man yeah i need to go i need to go look
man get some get my nfts locked in um much love man yeah much love to everyone that joined the conversation
flipping finance see your hand up uh man i love the fire luxfolio really kicked it off really
strong today as well with a lot of the institutional information warring lee thanks for hanging out for
the full three hours man uh follow warren lee bro he's a he's awesome memes he has great information
Warren Lee, bro. He's awesome memes. He has great information. He's also really instrumental in the
community, helping out in different areas. So much love to you, man. Joel, always great to talk with
you. I heard Nicole told me a while back that you were the one that got me when I was doing those
interviews a while ago. we go yeah so i found
out bro i'm gonna get you back man next time yes the um the hard money interview question that was
very famous and you know it's funny i also got that turned into an edm remix that i play at the
beginning of our thursday spaces so your voice starts us off.
Wait, I haven't heard that yet.
I was late this week.
Did I miss this?
I love UDM too.
So I need to hear this, man.
I got to go up so I can hear it.
Okay.
Well, let me just, I'm sorry for the other shill. I'm just sharing the space that we did yesterday in this thing.
Just open it so you can listen until
the theme song starts out. You should recognize
your own voice. You say, Nicole, what does
hard money mean to you?
So, yeah.
Oh, my God, dude.
That's so funny.
I have to see this.
But, yeah.
Expect us,
bro. I'm coming for you. Did you shout out Azte'm i'm coming for you did you shout out i saw uh johnny
light coin was is in the audience did you shout him out i didn't see him on i mean the list was
so long just scrolling down brother if if you were here uh much love uh and um you got to get you on the next Litecoin space.
You're an OG.
Yeah, I reached out to as many people as I could to get them on.
And I know there was a lot of people that were just tied up.
People were moving.
There was teams that there was, oh, 84 million wanted wanted to be here but they were they were going
through something uh so yeah much love to to everyone that couldn't make it and and we'll get
to get you guys on next time but yeah flipping finance did you want to say something real quick
oh yeah yeah definitely i just wanted to uh announce that uh i'll be hosting a live stream
uh soon it's a entertainment live stream it's all season tour so basically we're
just going to be going from community community you know just uh talking about you know altcoins
is going to be a fun hangout if you want to join you know you could just come anybody could talk
you know and it's going to be cool and uh the uh idea of that is just uh you know to just create
a space that can um allow me to be able to like push litecoin
into the information super highway and you know not just uh talking about litecoin in this echo
chamber where you know almost everybody who's uh seen a litecoin or people that are litecoin
or litecoin friends so that's the idea of it so yeah it's gonna be fun and if y'all wanna uh come for that i mean it's gonna be
happening somewhere towards the end of august so somewhere around 20th and i'm going forward so
yeah that's just what i wanted to quickly plug in i hope uh i didn't do anything wrong by plugging
that in no man love it yeah we we love for people to be able to talk about what they're building in
this space that's it's really one of the first things Rock and I wanted
for this space is because there's a lot,
there's nothing wrong with this,
but there's a ton of shows where there's pay gates
or friend gates.
And we wanted a place where no matter the size of the show
He wanted a place where, you know, no matter the size of the show or project or, you know, no matter what community you were part of,
that people could come and have a platform to speak and showcase what they're doing or who they're helping and what they're bullish on.
and what they're bullish on.
So yeah, much love, man.
I love the idea that you're starting a show
and that it also is going to be another place
where people can talk about Litecoin
and you can tap into all the different communities
and ecosystem.
That sounds exciting.
We got a lot to look forward to there.
And then of course, guys, you got to follow Dash.
Joelle here, they do an awesome show every week
as well um burns much love um really excited happy that uh that uh you're you shipped and you're live
uh i think i think pretty much shouted everyone i can think of right now i gotta hop uh rock any
any last thoughts before we go much love love to Polygon, QuickSwap,
everyone at LDA that makes this show possible.
Yeah, shout out to Polygon for building, you know,
a big part of the stack that we're using with LitVM.
It's really incredible technology,
and they've invested like a billion dollars in this technology.
And we get it from them for free so that's
pretty cool uh it takes to be able to use a billion dollars of technology uh for free obviously
we have to adapt it and build it in to be to work with litecoin and all that which is you know a
process but uh we're standing on the shoulders of giants here oh um yeah you could hop off aztec i
know you're late for your meeting i have 15 minutes before my next meeting so i'm going to just read some um audience uh comments questions real quick
uh we have a lot of we have like over 50 comments yeah yeah and much much love jack uh stratx man
i'd love for you to talk a bit about stratix at some point uh um So we didn't even get to shout out Stratix.
Just hit me right now, I was looking at the screen.
But yeah, Rock.
Yeah, I guess it's on you, man.
I gotta hop.
Okay, later brother.
Love to everyone.
Okay, let's see.
So we got, Guth says,
stop moving around, Panda,
and posted a gif of The Rock.
Let's see.
Okay, this is just Panda and Guth fooling around.
CK Cardano says, tagged us in,
it looks like he tagged a tweet of his saying, we see you too, Laura.
Do not succumb to despair.
Scientia Potentia EST, we leverage information asymmetries, 21 million Bitcoin, 84 million Litecoin, 45 billion ADA, etc.
Okay. The Populous Block says you can sign up for news on when their next batch of coffee is released oh about the uh litecoin coffee club man i actually
was gonna try to make a cup of of that litecoin uh coffee club coffee uh even though i don't drink
coffee i actually take caffeine pills just because um they're like um less acidic and stuff and it's
just i don't know, a little
health thing I do. But I was going to try to make a cup of it, but I couldn't find it. I don't know
where Cindy keeps the coffee grinder and it's beans. I was on the spaces, so I couldn't call
her. She's in LA right now on a business trip. But anyways, okay, so let's see.
CK Cardano says freedom stables,
OB Mayer artifacts labs versus compliance stables.
And it says there will be pairings in freedom liquidity pools,
DEX,
Thor chain,
et cetera.
You guys could read more about that.
He has a post you could look at.
Let's see.
Vasil says,
Hey there.
Nice to meet you all.
Vasil from gateway here. Caruso says light coins, a new revolution that hey there, nice to meet you all, Vasile from Gateway here,
Caruso says, Litecoin's a new revolution that DeFi's been waiting for, new change, new light,
LitVM says, posted a GIF of, is that, no, that's not Vanilla Ice, that's someone else,
it looks kind of like him, saying, let's get lit. Jared E says here for the lit talk.
Warren Lee says sup beaches.
Kingdank Kush says woo woo excited for the space today
talking about Litecoin, Luxfolio, LitVM.
Luke Burkfield says
my twin sister sends her greetings.
Shane says let's go. Leroy J
says Litecoin's the new meta.
Callisto says Litecoin should be up there together.
Did you see that like post-rock?
Huh? Do you understand that reference which one the lick one i forget i'm trying to put in the jumbotron oh the twin
sister thing no i don't know what that was yeah yeah check the check the jumbotron okay let me
i'm already i'm gonna lose my place so let me read the rest and then I'll, I'll go to that after.
Let's see.
Where was I?
Okay.
Guth says, let's get aggregated.
Dad's polygon.
Dad says GM crypto Spartan says ready.
Daniel simula teams is locked in.
Krebs says guys, stable coins.
Don't fix fiat inflation.
They make it even worse.
Stable coins aren't dollars.
Dollars aren't stable coins. So if I make a stablecoin to represent a dollar, I've now made
$2. I could spend both on different things. I mean, yeah, I could see the possibility of that
in their current state. It doesn't seem like that's what they're doing, but usually it starts
this way where it's pegged one-to-one. Andlex damsker talks about this that like pegged assets always fail
because like someone cheats them essentially and so you're you're right krev that that likely will
happen in time where they'll turn stable coins into fractional reserves um so that they can
print more money you know especially if these there's talk about these stable coins becoming
part of the central banking system or becoming central banks themselves.
Yeah, so crazy stuff.
You're totally right.
This is all dangerous of these fiat derivatives.
Yves Edwards says, why did Coinbase use the tagline, update the system?
It's because they're scared to do or say anything revolutionary.
Yeah, that's kind of like when Gemini said crypto needs rules.
A lot of people, including myself, were like kind of irritated by that.
But they were, you know, they're trying to appease the regulators, which I think is, you know, part of the Trojan horsing of all this.
So I don't fault them for trying to buddy up to the regulators.
But yeah, it's not like it's not very cypherpunk, I suppose.
That's a whole nother debate that we kind of started earlier.
But anyways, Amid says, sorry, folks.
Have a hard stop at the top of the hour.
Keep up the great combo.
Amid, I didn't even see you, but I'm, I see you're an advocate for Bitcoin, Litecoin,
and American crypto.
I just gave you a follow.
Red says, consider joining LitVM Twitter community.
Awesome.
I'm not even in that.
I just joined.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I'm one of the co-founders and I wasn't in it.
Thanks, Red.
You're the man.
Okay.
Spectacular.eth says, gotta go.
Thanks for hosting the most interesting spaces.
I've just been passively mining and holding Litecoin and following Litecoin, but had no idea there's so much going on and around the chain.
Love learning about everything.
I appreciate you all.
Yeah.
Cool stuff.
I'm following you now.
Spectacular.
Takacrypto says, right time, man. Gee, Sharathath says pull is already dead and you say easily 14
dollars paul he says yeah i i disagree i think it's far from dead but um you know this was what
people were saying when it was under a penny uh when we were first working on it and i told the
community to you know have faith um and it went to you know 350x after that i'm not saying it will
here and pull is on the show,
and they probably don't want us to give financial advice or anything,
but, yeah, I don't think Paul is dead.
I think Ag Lair is, like, on the cusp of really breaking out, actually.
Paulie says, I can see a lot of good projects are listening.
Let's rock and roll.
Litecoin, Litecoin VM, Bitcoin OS, Hyperware AI,
also Media's ETH Daily.
Yeah, shout-out to ETH Daily and my beloved TwoCent Timmy.
Yep, shout out to TwoCent Timmy.
SrivardashSVP says, pull.
Byrne says, great space, everyone.
Jared says, he says, join Defender Security Today, stop wallet drains.
Yeah, I love that project.
Anything that can help, you know, regular users protect their security. Jared.e says, how do we join the community pre-sale for
lit VM? Um, so there's a private sale happening now. Um, it's a minimum 10,000, um, is, is the
minimums. Um, but you can reach out Jared, uh, there will be a public sale. Most likely there'll
be a public sale. There's actually a chance that we just launch it on DEXs
and just make it more like community feel
like we did with Quickswap and others.
But we might do a sale just because we're probably going to have a VM
on one of the larger centralized exchanges.
And so then they'll require us to do some kind of public
sale on their exchange. I can't say which one we're looking at right now, but we have one in
particular that we think would be a good fit. Burns says, feeling lit. Bitcoin Boss says,
aliens and web. He said dynamic. Not sure what that's referring to, but Bitcoin Boss,
in web. He said dynamic. Not sure what that's referring to, but Bitcoin boss, I'm going to
follow you. Trim says, who's bullish on fine art? Actually, I'm trying to follow everyone who's
leaving comments and I'll also try to follow anyone who followed me today. And if I'm not
following you and you're following me, feel free to, just so I see it, you can unfollow me right
now and follow me back and I'll go through and try to follow everyone. Sometimes I miss them. I try to follow everyone back, but sometimes I miss them. If I have missed
you and you've been listening to the show for a while, if you unfollow me right now and re-follow
me, I think it'll show in my notifications and I'll try to follow you all back.
On says, Paul always tuning up for the community.
Am I?
Obi says, Paul.
Zlem says, GMGM. Fan Latwan says, OB says pole. Zlem says GM, GM fan.
Letuan says,
hello guys.
Polly says GM,
Erd says GM.
Okay.
That's,
that's enough.
The rest look kind of like spammy.
Okay guys.
Cheers everyone.
Stratix.
did you,
did you want to give a quick,
like a one minute on Stratix and,
you know,
we'll have you guys on again,
of course.
Will you check out the pin post?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So for those of you that don't know,
Stratix is a tokenizable DeFi strategy marketplace.
So essentially what we do is we provide a marketplace
where anybody can build or any, at the moment,
we're just looking at fairly sophisticated DeFi teams can build or any at the moment um we're just looking at fairly sophisticated defi
teams can build um d5 strategies so these are strategies that can involve lending and borrowing
looping uh using different d5 platforms to get the best return or to get an outsized return
compared to staking or or single-sided lp LP and other comparable ways to achieve yield.
And then we aggregate the best-performing strategies
for each asset type into vaults.
So these vaults would be, you know,
Strat BTC, Strat East, Strat USD to start,
and then we'll also do chain tokens.
And then those vaults themselves can be tokenized,
and those tokens can trade on the secondary market
as yield-bearing instruments.
And so you can have, you know,
instead of providing liquidity to a DEX
or doing a more complicated strategy involving multiple platforms,
you can just buy the vault token and receive the yield from that.
So, you know, basically, like,
you'll have the best d5
strategies in the market doing the work and then you can hold that token and then you know you'll
you'll get the yield from that and this isn't yield like crazy ponzinomics yield where you're
going to get like you know 300 or whatever this is just the naturally occurring yield that's in
the d5 marketplace so if you're a more mature investor that wants a yield that will be basically the same um or more or less the
same when you uh join them like you know six or twelve months down the line then this this will
be of interest if you're somebody that wants like 300 which decreases to like 10 after one month then
probably not the thing for you.
But we think, you know,
the market generally wants more mature yield options and we can look at Lido as an example of that
where they can get, you know,
you just get a few percent extra for liquid's sake
and it has billions of dollars in TVL.
So, yeah, so that's what we're doing.
It's really interesting.
We've been doing quite a lot of testing.
We've done some testing on Polygon.
We're going to be launching a public version on base in the near future like weeks not months and then the reason we're on this space is because obviously a lot of these
complicated defile lego pieces um we're helping with in the vm ecosystem so we're going to be
bringing the strategy marketplace over definitely in those
yield bearing tokens to aggregate and make more efficient some of the yield that's on litvm when
it goes live and we'll also be helping with uh some of the other d5 pieces as well so super
excited to have a new ecosystem to play in and super excited for what the Litecoin community can do when it gets full functionality.
Yep, great stuff.
Love what Stratix is doing.
And I think it's going to unlock a lot of opportunities for Litecoiners and all the EVM assets as well on Litecoin now through LitVM
with StratX. I mean, this is the cool thing about this industry, the DeFi Legos, right?
We're using Polygon's AgLayer and VaultBridge to bring EVM assets over to LitVM, which is
layer two on top of Litecoin. And that, and that's being done with Bitcoin OS technology.
And then we're using, you know, potentially not, not finalized, but Matterfy for some of the more
customizable wallet functions. And we're even considering like Aztec would like to get the
governance built into the, into the wallet. Like, I don't want to make a bunch of promises because
these are hard things and we'll take some time, But these are all the type of things we're trying to explore to have a more native experience where there's like account abstraction, wallet abstraction, chain abstraction, all these things.
That really is what the industry needs to make this stuff move forward. a really badass team who like the dev team there has worked on stuff from each foundation from aave chain link,
balancer,
quick swap,
et cetera.
But anyways,
okay guys,
thanks for being here.
Great space.
Thanks everyone who spoke.
Thanks everyone in the audience.
Thanks for all the questions in the comments and yeah,
keep an eye on light coin.
I am putting pretty big odds.
I think we're like, i think like 70 to 80 chance
that litecoin has a meta and then i'd give like a maybe 60 chance that it's going to be a massive
meta that you're going to see like a lot of people in the industry talking about this og coin or
dino coin coming back to life with because there's just so many people building stuff on litecoin
right now all of a sudden and i i think you know, I'll take, I think we could take a little credit. I think,
I think a lot of people who are thinking about building on Litecoin previously, you know,
they were obviously in waiting. They were like in the, in the hallway waiting and trying to decide
if they should do it or when they should do it, or maybe waiting for the market to turn around.
But I think the combination of announcing LitVM with the big backers that it has, like
Polygon and Tendeeb and, you know, with the support of the Litecoin Foundation and Charlie
and all these things, I think it just told, it showed a lot of people that, hey, there's
something there.
We were right.
We were unsure maybe, and we were waiting to launch or announce.
But once they saw LitVM coming out, all of a sudden we're seeing all these announcements now of like, you know, Bitcoin computer coming to Litecoin and drive chains coming to Litecoin.
And some of these were already like considering, but now they're like, I think everyone's getting off, you know, getting off the, maybe not the right one.
getting off the maybe not the right one no the only ones come to my my mind right now is like
uh getting off the the the toilet shit or get off the toilet it's like everybody is now like okay
it's time Litecoin Met is happening we are gonna uh we're all gonna build and all these ETFs are
coming live the strategy companies are coming live um you know BasicSwap who was on earlier
is now building more stuff.
And Nexus Wallet has been building great stuff for a long time, too. And there's all these
things happening, and they're all ramping up all of a sudden. And it helps that the market's
turning around and that OG coins are getting a lot of love lately, like XRP and Stellar and
all this stuff. I would like to see more Doge excitement, but I haven't, it's been kind of slow on that front
for a while. Maybe still in the wake of like, you know, the coming off the sugar high of Elon,
but anyways, okay guys, cool. Cheers everyone. Thanks for coming and have a great weekend.
Bye-bye.
