good morning good morning everyone gmgm welcome to another episode of homo power
today today is thursday april 3rd
and it is uh it's a sunny morning here in Chicago.
It's actually looking absolutely beautiful outside.
As long as you haven't looked at any charts, which are in fact the opposite of beautiful,
as Trump's tariff tsunami has wreaked havoc across global markets.
Stocks are down, crypto's down, the dollar's down.
Now the question is just how bad
is it and what happens next? We're going to break that down and all the news on today's show. No
Farouk today, but we've got Mando, we've got Logan, GM guys. Mando, how are you doing?
GM, what a day. What a day. Yeah, let's get into it in a bit but yeah i'm doing good as always a lot to lot to unpack
curious uh for your reaction across the pond and then logan uh live from latin america he's
bringing some some new perspective there from us for us as well logan gm how you doing hey good
morning tyler uh beautiful day here again this morning
in peru on the west coast of peru uh i actually saw a uh a noun sticker on my walk here this
morning wow which uh was very surprising to me um but yeah things are things are going well here
aside from the markets of course where are you in peru you're near lim Near Lima? I'm in Trujillo, which is the third largest
Is that where they do the sand surfing
There's surfing around here,
but I don't know about sand surfing.
Nice. I have not a different different life i was 18 years old when i went oh wow yeah
i've been to brazil i have not been i've been to uruguay but not i have not been to the west coast
so logey you'll have to give us the full recap once you're deeper into the journey i am
surprised to say the least that that nouns culture has permeated into the third biggest city in Peru.
It was very surprising to see.
I believe a noun-ish sticker is something about an art school.
I was walking quickly to try to get here on time.
I'll have to take a closer look, get a better picture on my way home.
Yeah, you will, for sure.
flew into uh columbia um i went down but it was me and four other guys and we this was back in
the day of like you would go to like a we went to i think it was with sta travel and they like
organized your trip and they were like you're gonna fly into barranquilla which is like they were like it's
where shakira's from you know it's gonna be amazing we turn up and barranquilla is like an
industrial city in the north and as soon as we turned up at the hotel they were like you cannot
leave like you will just get robbed if you if you if you walk around here um that was a good start and no one spoke any english at all and we were like oh this is gonna
be we were there for four or five months wow yeah that's quite the trip we'll have to unpack that
at some point folks we are going to talk more than our South American trips on this morning show.
What are we going to talk about?
This Trump tariff turmoil.
Impact on markets, initial reactions, bear case, bull case, all of that.
We've got recession odds nearing 50% across markets right now.
We're going to talk about Incoin Outlook.
We're going to talk about MetaMask, shipping a major update, this Edge token that you might be qualified for.
And in the back half of the show, folks, we're going to have the parallel Wayfinder team on,
talk prompts, the future of AI agents, and a lot more.
So excited for that convo.
Before we dive in, shout out to our partners, starting with Galaxis.
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As always, shout out to them.
Mando, if you're ready, let's just get into it.
Who is the man, macro daddy of the land? Mando. Can you dig it? yeah that was not a great day uh i i thought liberation day would be a lot less than that um turns out he dialed it up to 11 on the tariffs and in some ways simplified it
and just went after the people with the biggest trade surpluses with the us but in other ways
that is just going to lead to wild inflation in my opinion if this continues so i thought this was
how this was going to go.
Let's put it that way. I thought he would
or quasi enemies of the US.
high tariffs for a number of different countries um
this is going to affect a whole range of goods um and cut and u.s based companies that create their
goods overseas um and yeah like uh it's just it's not that's not looking too good like a 90 percent tariff
on vietnam is kind of wild um also just put tariffs on even if there's a trade surplus
australia and the united kingdom both have a trade surplus with the us both got a 10 percent tariff
um i said there could be a world you know where with negotiations everyone's tariffs come down
this as a starting point is is going to be very very tough for that to happen um i think that i
saw some maths this morning that the average global tariff now goes to the highest level in
history uh very very high levels of tariffs across the board the um. So there's two ways you could have done this math. You could
have been, this is reciprocal tariffs, right? The EU does have a 20% global tariff on goods coming
in. So he could have said, look, we're going to do a 20% tariff on that. And he could have gone
after India, which has very high tariffs and been like, look, you have these tariffs on your goods. We're going to have on that. That's not what happened here.
What he actually did or the Trump administration actually did was they went after who are the countries with the biggest trade surplus against the US.
So Vietnam, for example, which is getting a 90 percent tariff, doesn't have anywhere near as high tariffs as that.
Yet it's getting a 90% tariff because it has such a big trade surplus against the US.
And that's because a lot of goods are often made in Vietnam, a lot of cheap labor.
cheap labor. But Vietnam is a place, I've been to it as well, kind of pretty friendly with the US
since the war. Actually, it's like very pro-US when you go out there. It's kind of like quite a
lot of international companies are based out there. It's just like, I mean, I know a lot of
clothes are made out there, all this sort of stuff um so they've never really had like unbelievable tariffs against the against the u.s uh and yet
this is going to happen so and yet countries which do have high actual tariffs are less of
are seemingly less affected so you have these like really weird scenarios where like small
countries with a trade trade surplus because the u.s are getting taxed at like unbelievably high levels um
yeah so it's um it's i don't think if you're doing economics 101 this is necessarily
how you would negotiate, let's say,
because like, I don't know what Vietnam can do, right?
It's not like they can come back to Trump and say,
hey, we're going to drop our tariffs,
because that's not what this calculation is.
This calculation is literally just who's got a trade deficit.
And that's something that isn't solved via negotiation
with a lot of these, i'm honest um sorry yeah 46
versus vietnam but they've they've um that's the calculation that they've used to to do it because
they've said 50 of that basically it's going to become a tariff so yeah like i the math behind
this for me isn't math like isn't what you would have done in a negotiation like
this you would have gone right eu has got 20 tariff we're going to go after the eu and do those
japan has got very high tariffs we're going to go after that that india's going to have very high
tariffs and then you would have negotiated with those countries to bring those tariffs down
this is like a scenario where i don't really know what some of these countries can necessarily do in terms of negotiating it down, which just means like and also this wasn't what was really flagged to people.
When people said receptacle tariffs, I think they were thinking, you know, like, all right, well, it's going to affect these countries and we can deal with that.
This is actually more affecting some of the global supply chains which which
affect uh many u.s companies you know the reason why a lot of these have u.s um trade deficits
trade services whatever is because they generally import unfinished goods into the u.s
and then u.s either assembles them or some sort of final process is done in the US.
So it really affects that.
So it's a real breakdown of just like global trade.
This is an attack on global trade rather than on attack on countries which high tariffs.
So you're going to, the only way I see this half this now happening you're gonna get massive
inflation in the us like um and the one ray of sunshine here is that ideally this causes
countries to then immediately come to the negotiating table like this is the highest it
will be so maybe like it's baked in but it's also a case of like
how long this stays in place is also like the worry um and yeah it's really going to upend a
lot of global supply chains so i i think this is i i didn't think this is well done if i'm honest
if i was in the us i wouldn't think this was the best the if I'm honest. If I was in the US, I wouldn't think this was the way done.
This isn't like a tip-to-tap thing,
which is kind of what I think the US were getting on board with,
and I kind of understand.
EU's taxing us this, we're taxing that.
They've actually gone after the trade deficit with all the countries,
and that, as a logic, is an attack on free trade,
global trade. And I don't think that's the strongest of logics when it comes to economic
growth, because I think trade is actually one of the, like, underpins a lot of global growth. So
yeah, I think this is maybe not the best way to have gone about that.
And I think stock market's telling you that everything's selling off very, very badly today.
I personally think this is the sort of thing that could easily cause a recession.
Like the way it's been done, very, very easy could cause a recession of discontinuities.
And it's not one that's very easily dealt with now with monetary policy because this is going to cause inflation.
You know, like if your clothes are made in Vietnam, like Nike, your Nikes are made in Vietnam. I forget where the actual office is for Nike, but like or various clothing companies like you've just got a 45 percent tax right now on those.
That is going to drive up prices.
That's going to drive up prices.
And that's not something that just like changes like that.
This is going to take months.
And that affects their ability to fight it with monetary stimulus,
which has always been the base case of, right, rates are so high.
They can fix some of this stuff.
This is a difficult one now like this is um this is actually far more complicated to fix if this
is the position that was taken and i think honestly it was taken in a very simplified way
do you know what i mean like all right we've got this one formula and that's how we're going to
look at look at them all that's the lens we're going to look at them all and i think part of
that was just because it was becoming difficult to work out, like, because some countries produce it in China, then send it to Canada, and then it comes into the US.
So it's like, right, this is the best way to do it.
But this was also going to lead one of the harder ways to negotiate them down because some countries will not be able to get to a trade surplus with the US.
because some countries will not be able to get to a trade surplus with the US.
And that will also mean much longer negotiations.
And this also affects inflation, in my opinion,
way more than the other forms,
where it was reciprocal as in like, you have a 20% tariff,
we're going to put on a 20% tariff sort of deal.
So yeah, I think I am not a fan of what this
was i think this was not done well yeah very very fair reaction logan i'm curious for your thoughts
as well i think just quickly a couple reactions on my side i do think that the calculation on
how they got to this has been one of the biggest problems with it.
And now there's even people starting to uncover, like,
Kobe, did they literally just run this through ChatGPT
to come up with a basic way to come up with this formula?
And I don't know if that's been necessarily proven or not.
But the logic behind these calculations and some of the countries on this list
are very easy to poke holes in, which I think has undermined some confidence.
I think the biggest thing for me is the uncertainty.
Like, is this just a negotiation tactic with the intent to actually bring these
down to more reasonable levels or not?
And if you're a company, how are you supposed to operate in the near term
if you don't know the answer to that?
Are you supposed to bet that these are going to come down?
Are you supposed to move forward like this is the new world order?
And I feel like everyone's in this holding pattern trying to figure this out.
That's where my head is this morning, Logan.
What was your reaction? Yeah. I know, I don't have like, you know, too much additional to share,
not a macroeconomic expert. And, you know, I think most people have made up their minds
reading their feeds as to whether or not they see this as a positive or negative.
The one thing I'll say, aside from some of the silliness, as you alluded to here with the
potential chat GBT inclusion, the herd islands thing, you know, where they're implementing tariffs on an uninhabited island.
Like, oh, man. Anyway, the one thing I will say is I'm still very much struggling.
And part of this is my own curation. So my own fault.
But I'm still very much struggling to see the the positive cases, you know, like my feed is all the negatives
and Amanda went through a bunch of them, the potential negatives, right? I I'm just like,
I'm not getting enough of the argument for why, um, right now. And there's not enough like pro
counterpoints for me to like, get to a point where I'm feeling, okay, you know, like this can resolve itself.
This can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just, I feel,
you mentioned doom posting this morning, Tyler. I mean, like,
that's kind of how I feel just because I'm not getting any hopium from,
from any sources of macroeconomic policy or whatever, like who,
who out there is championing this aside from Trump and the administration.
And where can I go to, to learn more about why I should be thinking positively.
I got to wait for the podcast.
So in the near term, I still have to be, you know, kind of in this, like, whatever, you
know, I'm, I'm not an expert.
I have no reason to think positively because nobody else is showing
me anything positive about it. And the market is not reacting positively either. So I know that's
an oversimplification, but it seems like that might be all that's necessary for this administration.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's also semi-consensus.
I think just get into the logic of it like vietnam i just checked it now chat cbt
has got a two to five percent tariff on some goods from the u.s yeah so if you're in the u.s
that you think that that maybe you should have done a two to five percent tariff back right and
that's not what's happened that's why i think people are getting very confused with the logic
here they think oh we're going to go after go after Vietnam. Vietnam doesn't really have tariffs against the US. A lot of goods do get imported to the US,
but it's because they included this in the fine print there. Tariffs charged to the US is not just
tariffs. It's seen as currency manipulation. What this really affects is low-income countries
that have been made in China, made in Vietnam made in like a lot of these countries which which make the goods actually um i don't
know if that's what the u.s wanted from this maybe they did want to onshore a lot of those like very
low paid that you don't really have the workers to make those goods so you're just going to make
those goods more expensive for yourselves.
I think there's a lot of nuance to it.
I don't know that the average American wants to bring all the goods
that are created in Vietnam back on shore.
I do think there's – you can be pro-onshore manufacturing
for certain types of goods instead of all of them.
I feel like looking at this list, one thing that I have seen to take
and it does kind of jump out,
And is there some kind of a global supply chain shift
telegraphed in these numbers?
That is my exact takeaway too.
if he comes off to the EU, kind of fair.
Like they do have a common import tariff in the EU for various different goods.
And it ranges from 5% to 20%, I think, depending on the goods.
Like any good that comes into the EU generally has a tariff on it.
We do do, like the EU does do that.
One of the few like big blocks to do it.
countries that abuse tariffs for this uh and that's they're not necessarily the people that
have been affected as much by this yeah it looks like latin america central america is all at the
10 minimum for the most part so i think that is perhaps one of the takeaways here. There's a lot to unpack.
Maybe, Amanda, let's talk about markets a bit.
So we've seen the 10-year almost come under 4% here.
It's lowest it's been for the entire year so far.
I think you've mentioned stocks are down.
I think S&P is down 4% right now in the day.
The dollar is down four percent right now on the day dollars down two percent as well
crypto majors down quite a bit as well here so bitcoin down a full four and a half percent
each down five percent solana ten percent so basically the further out you go on the risk
curve the worse it gets for a coin down quite a bit i guess what do you make of of this
i think yesterday on the show you mentioned dips are meant
to buy have you changed that perspective a bit well i said for bitcoin if it goes to 80k you
meant it like you meant to buy it bitcoin's held up actually remarkably well like remarkably well
and it continues to because because gold is doing the dollars a little bit weaker as well um
do and the dollar's a little bit weaker as well um honestly this is the sort of thing that could
stocks could drop like a lot more like a lot more and weirdly as well like you know we spoke about
how trump could go after go after um big tech a little bit and then you know the average person wouldn't care like in many ways
this does affect a lot of the industrial companies in the u.s you know like there's a lot of raw
materials or labor or parts which are made elsewhere that are then finished or created
or assembled or whatever in the u. And those businesses will get massively
affected by this. Like this, this is going to affect a lot of companies. Like a lot of people
probably work for Nike, you know, is Nike a company that necessarily you expected Trump to
kind of go after for someone like this? And there'll be tons of companies like this. I haven't
gone through them all, but like, there's a lot of brand customer um
consumer products companies here that are going to be really badly affected really really badly
affected so i think the i think this can go like the real question is here the reason why stocks
aren't down 20 is because there's an expectation that there'll be some like negotiation
between these like like already you see Bessent coming out like trying to slightly downplay it
and be like oh you know it won't be that bad and all this sort of stuff I think that's the hope
but then you also have not that sort of commentary coming also going from the same
administration because they don't want to be seen to be saying,
you know, we're going to walk all this back straight away.
And also this is kind of a cornerstone
of what they were going to say.
Like, this is really going to affect global.
In my opinion, it's going to really hurt US inflation
and it can hurt a lot of companies in the US a lot.
I think that's my challenge. And Logan, I'm curious for your additional thoughts on this too but i feel like
i feel like i'm so conflicted right now i'm just laughing because i don't know like it feels 50 50
like this is negotiation tactic and they're going to lower these and this was just a starting point
and then there's also the other side of me that thinks this is a part of the core populist agenda and they're trying to change the world order. And this is regime change and global trade change. And we are at the very start of all of this.
done is follow through on his promises. I think he can,
I think his base can at least be happy in that he's doing what he said he's
going to do. Now, if you set this all up and then you walk it all back,
or then are you not going after those promises? So,
so that makes me think they're going to keep following through with this.
So I don't know. I still haven't made up my mind. Logan, what?
Yeah. No, I mean, I'm right there alongside you, Tyler. Like,
like I said, I mean, I can see the case, the case that's been made here previously by this
administration. I understand to a degree, right? But whether or not it's negotiation tactic,
whether or not the things that were displayed yesterday were intentional, whether or not,
like some of those things, we just don't know. And that level of uncertainty in how they're putting forth policy in their future plans and
whether or not they wish to hold true to them. It just like, I don't know how you can possibly
comment on it with any level of certainty or understanding. There's so many little things
that are going to change from day to day that we've come to expect from Trump. And yeah, I'm just, I'm at a, I'm at a loss to be quite
honest as to, as to like what the, the next steps will look like. Cause they, it feels like he's
left the entire playing field open. Like he still has every card he could potentially play, but that
just sort of feels like how he operates anyway, you know,
because you can do, if he does something really silly, you'd be like,
oh, well, it's just Trump. He's just being really silly.
If he does something crazy, you're just like, oh, well, it's Trump.
He's just being crazy. Like, I don't know.
The guy who doesn't know how to play poker who sits down at the poker table
and all cards are in play.
I don't know what to expect.
I did find one bull take on the timeline.
I'll share this for some of the bulls here,
and then maybe, Mando, if you want to give reactions to this,
I want to do a couple other quick headlines.
Kyle from Milk Road saying,
the bull case are basically tariffs are the highest they are going to be right now.
So we have countries removing tariffs for negotiation.
He's saying inflation lower and that inflation was high because of the scare.
I think he's also been sharing those true inflation numbers.
I think that piece is a little bit more debatable.
We did have the headline right before the show that traders are pricing in now 50% chance of four Fed rate cuts.
So that is potential bull case
dollar lower um china printing money global liquidity higher stable coin bill
valid bull case reactions to this weirdly like i think the case for crypto is slightly different
than the case for um a lot of other things right like this actually does weaken the case for the dollar
slightly because it attacks the concept of the dot us being the center potentially of trade as much
you know um if they're going to slap a 50 percent import tax on from certain countries then maybe
they're going to sell their goods to somewhere else um so the dollars are
a week which which and i in some ways that's meant that bitcoin looks okay gold gold looks okay
although gold did fall as well even on the back of this i but for stocks i think this is what i
just told you there is like this assumption that you can bring down tariffs.
Firstly, that has not been the reaction from the vast majority of of the countries.
EU said it would respond. China said it would respond. Japan said it would respond.
The only ones that have showed restraint have been Australia and the UK, because I think
they know that they'll probably be able to get theirs down. That would be kind of crazy for at
least them to face some sort of a tariff. Most of the others have indicated that they're going to,
they've just said that we're going to respond. I don't know how aggressive that's going to be.
But also the second bit of this is this isn't this isn't an attack on
reciprocal tariffs but like forget that word this is that's not what this is this this isn't this is
an attack on anyone who has a trade deficit with the u.s and that is very difficult to negotiate
from for a lot of these countries like they can't just like change the the trade deficit they can if it was if it
was about tariffs then i think you can get into a deal making and you know that can be sorted in a
deal in a trade deal between two countries and be like hey yeah you've got these tariffs reduce them
um you can't do that with half these countries like and it's shown most ridiculously with the small countries with zero people.
Take that to the extreme.
There's no way that that country can do it.
It's not like they've got a 90% tax from the US.
So yeah, I think this is going to have a long-term impact.
I think Bitcoin can do okay here still.
I'm not bearish on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin dominance is going higher again, right?
That fix up only to me yeah not great when our leading risk indicator global indicator is down 30 percent
uh i saw that last night that's when i started sweating a little bit more
this was the this was the chart I had my eyes on the most.
But it could still be a handle.
It could still be painting that handle on the cup here.
Folks, I think that covered the tariff story.
I'm sure we'll be talking about it more on the days and weeks to come.
A couple other Web3 headlines.
I see our parallel guys in the studio here. on the days and weeks to come. A couple other Web3 headlines.
I see our parallel guys in the studio here.
We'll get to that conversation in just a couple minutes.
I guess while we wait, if we have the roll bit code,
I actually haven't had a chance to see that.
We'll get that out there.
Tariffs is the code for today.
We'll be doing those spins at the end of the show.
MetaMask kind of snuck in with some big news.
Logan, not sure if you saw this.
You don't need native gas tokens. So you just got an airdrop, let's say, on BearChain.
You can just do your swap right there.
Reactions to this? How big are you?
I mean, it's going to feel like not big a deal to a lot of people
because everybody hates MetaMask and thinks they're so wildly behind.
And, you know, in that case, a lot of wallets, things like Rabi have had things like gas accounts and other features similar to this previously.
So they're not the first to get here, but it's a big deal.
I mean, these are these are improvements that are necessary to making it
easier to interact on chain. And despite the fact that the incumbent took this long to get here,
whatever, they got here at least. So I think that matters. I still use MetaMask from time to time.
It's not my default wallet, but I don't have the general disdain for it or the brand that it seems most crypto participants actively do.
So I'm all for innovating, adding, even if it does feel later.
Because I think that much like what we've seen with OpenSea, for example, you make these types of things, people may just start using it again just because of their, uh, the habits,
right. The habit forming that,
they've been doing stuff.
I feel like they were kind of like the sleeping giant kind of sitting on,
resting on their laurels,
they've been shipping again.
I still use Meta mask. This is great. resting on their laurels perhaps, but now they've been shipping again. So I like to see that and I'll admit, I
This is like one of the main issues
of onboarding for like people,
to a new chain and it's like, oh god, like
what have I got to do now?
Great. Probably not great for
We're still going down the road of maybe you can pay your gas down in the stables.
I guess that will actually end up being converted to the currency anyway.
But yeah, it's still good.
And they partnered with Revoke Cash.
They've got a Revoke Cash tie-in now directly in the portfolio tab.
So I thought that was good.
And Logan, maybe last quick story here.
There was a surprise airdrop yesterday.
This edge token is doing well.
I think it's up 2x off the bottom.
I don't know a whole lot about this.
Curious if you had a chance to dig in.
Yeah, Definitive is like a – they may use a different word for it,
but more or less like a trading terminal, right?
So you can trade across different chains. I've used it a little bit.
There's some other competing products that I'm actually blanking on the names of
right now. But if you take a look there, Tyler,
like you could click that CBBTC tab and you can swap to, I'm sorry,
I meant to the left, but anyway, you know,
you could trade on a different chain, for example. Um, yeah, as you open that up, uh,
it, it lets you over to the right. Yeah. Um, so you can, you can, uh, toggle from base and
you're good. A toggle from base to salon or whatever. It's just like it consolidates a lot
of the cross chain trading that you may have wanted to do
in a nice little spot to do so.
So yeah, I actually was checking
because the eligibility criteria here
is rewarding on-chain traders,
from things like Hyperliquid,
a lot of Solana meme coins,
there may be some tokens awaiting you. Actually, the few wallets I checked were not eligible. Womp, womp.
But nevertheless, free money, tokens, airdrops, we need them right now more than ever.
Thanks for walking us through that. So folks, if you trade on Hyperliquid or Jupiter,
go check that out if you're interested and you may have some tokens. Breaking news, Mando just mentioned,
I believe is out of Macron here,
urging companies to pause U.S. investments.
So I don't know that that's necessarily
Pause U.S. investments and
to Wednesday's announcement of U.S.
tariffs will be more massive than previous
Not what we wanted there, to say the least.
If this is an art of the deal thing
and all these companies are like,
We don't really need them.
It should make for a fun next couple of weeks,
Fun is an interesting word to choose there. Yeah. Fine. I know. Yeah.
Well, I think we, we went around the horn. I'm sure that we,
there's a few other stories from the day.
Maybe we'll catch up on those tomorrow.
I want to make sure we have enough time to chat with our guests here.
So I want to welcome Kalos and Adrian here from the Parallel Wayfinder team to the show here
this morning. Folks, I think most folks now, if you've been around, you know the Parallel game
and the longest running Web3 games we've had now. They've been going deeper into AI with Wayfinder.
They've got a TGE coming up for prompts.'s a whole lot to unpack adrian kales jim
how you guys doing good morning good thanks for having us yeah thanks for having us excited to
have you guys on um so there's there's a lot of directions i want to go with this conversation
we have a lot to unpack but maybe just for let's just start with some background for any listeners
out there who may not understand the story, the evolution from parallel.
Maybe give us the quick history and maybe describe where the ecosystem is right now.
Yeah, sure. So we started by building a TCG and that TCG is available for download today in the Epic store if you want to play.
That TCG is available for download today in the Epic store if you want to play.
And we kind of designed a number of kind of games based on the assets that the TCG produced.
We have one of them in Alpha today called Colony, which is an AI simulation game where an AI agent is the player and you talk to the agent and everything in the simulation is on chain.
to the agent and everything in the simulation is on chain uh and that game is in its kind of
earliest alpha stage of testing uh with community members and will continue to roll out um and then
we have a third person shooter that we've been working on with our partners at b3 which is like
a gaming layer off of base and that game is called sanctuary and that game's slated to come out in q3
And that game is called Sanctuary.
And that game's slated to come out in Q3.
And kind of a happy accident in all this is, you know, in Colony,
as we built this AI agent that had access to a restricted subset of smart contracts,
you know, be it mining or going to the store and buying something or whatever else,
essentially we created an agent that was able to interact with blockchain networks
in a very limited way um and it begged the question and a lot of that was inspired by the uh similar
stanford google simulacra paper uh which was kind of an ai agent game or simulation i should say
where agents uh kind of be demonstrated emergent behavior and started doing things that were
unexpected like planning a valentine's day. And we wanted to create something like that. And so, you know, when we
stepped back from the creation of that game, we started to realize, okay, well, we've got this
base framework for an AI agent to be able to interact with these limited smart contracts.
What happens if we make it agnostic? What happens if we make it a tool that anyone can use to simplify interacting with everything?
And, you know, I think Adrian and I maybe mulled over that enough times to eventually say, like, hey, there's something really big here.
And we think it's, you know, monumentally ambitious, but very valuable if executed correctly.
So that's kind of how this all happened.
And that became Wayfinder to be clear.
Yes. So I think that's a little bit of the intro for Wayfinders.
Maybe now can we dig into like what Wayfinder is and then kind of exactly where it fits in
Sure. So Wayfinder has, it's kind of a number of things. It has wallets, you know, across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and others as well as Solana.
uh wayfinder utilizes so one of them is a transaction agent to be able to say like hey
like take the you know ether have on mainnet bridge it to solana and buy dog with hat or um
you know reorganize my entire portfolio and optimize for yield um or um just any type of
transaction right and then you have the the smart contract agent where you can say
you know you're maybe a member of some community,
let's use Prime as an example, just because it's close to home. You can say, hey, I want to create
a contract where, and literally you explain it to the agent the same way I'm explaining it to you,
is I want to create a contract where once a week on Fridays, a winner is selected,
use Chainlink RNG to do that. And anyone can deposit Prime, the minimum deposit amount is 50 prime you know put a one percent
rake on any prime deposited and converted to usdc if someone wants to withdraw before the draw
on friday charge a five percent penalty and convert that to usdc and then on the friday
select the winner and they win all the prime in the contract and
repeat the process every week and what it'll do is it'll write the contract edit the contract
deploy the contract and create a front end for the contract for everyone to interact with it
so essentially and like i think people have started to share that we call this code kind
of nicknamed this agent vulcan um vulcan some people have access to it right now. Thousands of people have access
to Midas, which is the transaction agent and a limited subset as we're testing some of the
the smart contract agent functionality. And then there's other stuff like the autonomous agent.
And really that's things like, you know, if the New York Times publishes an article that says the Fed prints, then perform
this transaction, you know, by X amount of whatever token. So things that are conditional
in nature. So like if ETH performs this way, then do this. And so that's like a very small subset of
kind of what we're working on and building. And then like on top of that, there's, you know,
an ecosystem of securing and educating the agent because like the way this all
works is, you know, maybe actually let me step back and say like the,
the world of blockchain and smart contracts is ever expanding.
There's always new something new popping up, a new token, a new network,
a new smart contract that everyone's excited about.
And so how do you expand the graph of knowledge that AI interacts with such
that people are incentivized to educate it on these things and teach it how to interact with them when it hasn't otherwise done so before?
And how do you ensure that that input information that someone provides that educates that AI agent is secure and collateralized?
And really, you know, so Wayfinder fundamentally is, you know, yes, it has wallets.
It's able to build and deploy.
It's able to perform functionality independently based on, you know, conditional environmental inputs.
Kind of like you have, you know, OpenAI would have access to external sources like tools.
And, you know, you'd have Anthropic who have, you know, MCP.
Essentially, they're all just tools that AI agents use to interact with the world outside.
So it's kind of this big new idea of sitting on top of everything and allowing people to do things in extremely simple ways.
And we've always kind of had this ambition as a space of like obfuscating the complexity.
And this does that because it puts almost like an intelligence layer between you and everything.
And that's what people are, I think are excited about because they're starting to see this and use it for the first time. And it is real. I've seen the excitement. I'm friends with Andy 8052.
I've seen like the experiments that, you know, he's starting to run. And I like that.
And I had it up on the screens.
I think I don't have his original tweet, but basically he used the tool.
He used natural language programming to say, okay,
this is what I want to do, generate the code.
And now he's actually like working through the process of, you know,
having developed the code and how debugging it, which is something.
Well, I think, yeah. Like I think he's actually not even debugging it.
He's saying, can anyone see any issue with it? Right.
He also created like a generative art collection and people started using
Wayfinder to mint that art collection, which he used Wayfinder to create.
So I think it's this thing that's incredibly powerful.
It's almost like limited by the creativity of the person.
Like how good are you at prompting?
I think we've heard this like narrative of like prompting is a skill. And we should all be kind of thinking about how
we're going to position ourselves and become good at that. I think this is exactly that case where
it's like, you are limited by your own creativity here. Yeah. What ideas do you have here? The
agents can literally bring them to life for you, which is very exciting.
And I feel like we're just still scratching the surface of this.
I am curious, as you were going through the development, what were the hardest parts?
I feel like we've seen the explosion of ChatGPT and it was limited more on the crypto side.
It felt like the crypto data back end was perhaps one of the reasons why it was lagging behind. I'm curious like what
you ran into, you know, as you've been building this over the last months and years. I'll let
Adrian speak to that. Yeah. Yeah. It's I would say like the data is actually quite good these days.
There's a lot of aggregators that you can leverage, like, you know, flip side and transpose and things like that to be able to give agents like solid context of what's going on on chain.
The hardest piece is more the like vendors, to be totally honest.
It's the like tooling in the Web3 space.
three space. So like a lot of these activities that we were hoping that we didn't have to like
do ourselves, we ended up having to in-house a lot of them. Just because it was either like
very unreliable or very expensive for what it was, we thought at least. So yeah, I mean,
in the short term, it was like
a little bit of pain. But now we've ended up with like a pretty reliable, solid product, we think.
Everyone, please battle hard in your APIs and SDKs if you want to use them, please.
Yeah, we had to put in so many redundancies to make sure that like transactions land to make
sure that you can see like the balances that are in your, like the actual tokens that are in your wallets,
like things that I would have taken for granted as like a Web3 consumer. It's tough.
Can we, can you give me the rundown again of the specific AI agents? So there's Midas and like,
what does Midas do specifically? Yeah. So Midas is the transaction agent, right? So it performs like multi-hop transactions,
simple transactions, bridges, you know,
depositing for, you know,
into different kind of yield earning at, you know, protocols,
whatever else, which is really, really basic as basic transaction,
as well as also like extremely complicated multi-hop transactions.
And then you have Vulcan, which is, again, these are just like nicknames.
We'll probably change all these.
These are just kind of like us being losers when we were creating it,
Yeah, codenames, exactly.
So Vulcan or the smart contract agent is able to write, edit,
and kind of deploy as well as build a front end for smart contracts
that you articulate to it.
And you can use referential information. You can say like, hey, like, you know, let's use the supply
and mechanics based on Bitcoin and it'll do that. And so then there's the autonomous agent. And the
autonomous agent is really about performing transactions that are conditional on events.
And, you know, and these are the ones we're able to share today, right?
These are the ones we can talk about.
And then there is kind of like a yield optimization agent,
which is like, hey, I've got this huge portfolio of tokens.
And this would kind of fall under Midas a bit,
but like I've got this massive portfolio of tokens,
optimize the whole thing for yield,
and it'll swap you in and out of whatever's going to optimize you for the greatest
return. And so those are kind of like the major pieces, but there's also like general, you know,
information availability as well, right? Like you can say like, I don't know, tell me who,
you know, Popcorn Kirby is on CT or tell me who Ansem is. It'll tell you a bit about them.
And so I think like, Adrian,
am I missing anything that we've released today to date?
Yeah, I think just one highlight for the Vulkan agent
is that you can, so you can do smart contracts.
You can use like external sources of information.
We also have some documentation preloaded. So you can,
like, if you say, oh, yeah, I want to use, you know, the Oracle from Chainlink for ETH USDC on
base, it'll know where to pick that up from, because it has like, kind of a sub agent under
the hood that's going to do some research for you, or Moonwell or Aerodrome or PancakeSwap, or I think a few other ones that we've got
It also can, you can also like vibe code paths
So the agent is like capable of not only doing
smart contracts, but also creating like new capabilities
the transaction agent. So sorry, Adrian, I don't think maybe we should just roll back. Can you
explain what paths are? So that everyone understands what that means? Yeah, yeah,
yeah. It's basically just like capabilities within web three for the agents. So if you know,
I wanted to be in like a certain moonwell lending vault, and that's not currently available for
Midas for the transaction agent, I can hop over to Vulcan, give some of the context if it doesn't
have it already. So like add, you know, smart contracts to the context of the agent, and then
create a path. So like create kind of like a macro, basically, that says like, this is the
information in this is what it has to do says like, this is the information in,
this is what it has to do.
And then this is the information out.
So that's very composable.
And then if you want to, once you've created this, this macro, this function, you can say like, okay, it's useful for me.
Maybe it's useful for other people.
So I'd like it to become public.
And if it becomes public, then that becomes like
part of the capability for anybody to use within these other agents. So as people are creating
stuff, all the agents kind of benefit from it. And the person who creates it gets some sort of
reward. Yeah. So essentially, as people teach Wayfinder new things, and there's some like
nuances to how that's collateralized and secured and so on.
It becomes smarter because it becomes capable of interacting with more
contracts and there's an incentive for that.
And everyone gets the upgrade automatically. Right.
So essentially it's this machine that becomes better as a result of people
This is, so i was reading through this
tweet i didn't quite the light bulb hadn't gone off yet now it has i feel like this is a pretty
big differentiator i got is i i want to get your thoughts on the broader crypto ai meta i don't
think we saw that this type of incentive mechanism now all of your users are incentivized to help build out prompt capabilities.
And then the agent gets stronger.
And prompt is the collateral used to secure
But I think like there's a lot of fundamental differences
like major, major differences.
So you all have been working on
this you've had the vision you've been building it meanwhile from november to january we saw
i'll call some slop ai reply bots see nine figure valuations like what did that impact you like what
were your thoughts and takeaways as we had this huge bubble blow up and then deflate here while you guys were all heads down building
i mean it didn't impact us really i think like we were watching um it's not really what we're
doing i think um i'd consider those like social agents really right like they can't really do
any of the stuff that even midas can do at its most basic level.
And that's not to say there isn't really a place for social agents and they don't have some kind of meaningful future.
I just think that Midas nor Vulcan or Wayfinder as a whole is even comparable
because it's not really supposed to be something that's like, Hey,
like everyone can just talk to it as like a social character and you know,
it's funny and says stuff. It's more like your personal banker, right?
It's like, you know, the same way if someone doesn't under,
most people don't understand Swift codes and how wires are sent.
And you just tell your banker, you want to send a wire.
And that's pretty complicated as a process in traditional banking.
You're just like, hey, I just want to send money to this person.
And you're like, okay, and it's done.
Or, you know, you're interested in buying some mutual fund
or whatever, you know, ETF or something at a bank.
Like, you're just like, can you put me into this ETF?
Or if you're self-directed, you can just do it yourself.
Really, this is like a way for people to interact
in a kind of structure and format with
crypto systems, but having
support structure in place so they don't have to know
where the best yield is, or all these different things.
we as a collective educate Wayfinder
doesn't require the consumer to know how to do
It just does what it wants it to do.
I think, yeah, the agents in that November to January time period, I think just did something
totally different. And I feel like for that chunk of time, that's what everyone assumed agents in crypto were. It was just like, is like,
like social conversation thought, which I think were really cool. Like they definitely had utility.
I think the space got a little bit like noisy, to be honest. And I remember going to some meetings
and people were like, Oh, cool, cool, cool. Like doing little demos and and people like yeah that's great that's great but like how do i get it to tweet at people and i'm like oh well when you step back we kind
of built social agents like a year before all this happened right because we built colony and
people were interacting with these social agents that were performatively behaving in certain ways
like sci-fi characters from our world.
We just didn't really think like it was super valuable.
And that's maybe an oversight really, but like,
we didn't really think like it was,
it wasn't a flag we wanted to plant to be like,
we're going to create characters all over the internet with these,
these guys was more like we did that, but for a game.
But people definitely were like, are you going to do something?
Like it's happening. Like, are you gonna do something like it's
happening like are you we're like but we're not building that so um we we think we think we made
the right choices um you know we're we're really focused on building something that's of like
extreme usefulness like i think the last like 10 you know let's say there's 10 million of us or
whatever obviously more but you know in blockchain and crypto today,
like, I think the next hundred million people need a very different support structure than a green and a red button. I think like a green and a red button for buy and sell
is even as simple as you can boil that is very analogous to money. Most people are very confused
by money to begin with and stock trading systems and this type of stuff. So like, it'd be very,
I think we need a new solution.
And the new solution looks a lot like helping people, educating them, making them feel comfortable,
absolving them of having to understand the complexity, allowing them to make decisions
and seeing what's happening and ask questions.
And that's really what Wayfinder is designed to do.
And if you want to be really complicated, you want to run really crazy DeFi strategies,
you want to run portfolio optimizations, you want to build and deploy smart contracts for people to interact with, you can also do those things. But if we need to first service that, you know, next 100 million people, and I think that will look nothing like the last, you know, kind of number of years of products that we built. And we have never seen a different
product. They're all very similar. They're all like, you want to buy Bitcoin, green button,
red button. But it's like, that's about it. This is nothing like that.
Yeah, if I can jump in, this has been really enlightening from my perspective and disclaimer,
disclaimer, prime cacher, and have been following the Wayfinder journey for quite some time now.
Prime Cacher, and I've been following the Wayfinder journey for quite some time now.
I really love what you guys have been sharing here. It's analogous in my head, just because
I've written some stories about the vibe, you know, you're kind of like vibe coding for crypto
participation, you know what I mean? Which is really, really important. And that's an
oversimplification, of course. But I'm generally curious, like, how do you plan, aside from gating
access and stuff to get going here,
how do you plan to onboard people to this and make sure that they're aware that this is possible?
Because as you've alluded to, you have built something different than those other AI agents,
right? And it has just much, much more to it. How do you kind of break that in their head,
that definition of AI agent and AI interaction,
and ensure that they understand just what can be done to get them to onboard and start
interacting with crypto in a different way? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to like
awareness, right? And I think as we put these tools in people's hands, we're starting to see
people share what it's doing and how easy it is. And like, essentially, the consumer,
product or tool is becoming the net promoter, right? But like, they're like, this is ridiculous.
I just bridged and did something that would take me 20 minutes in like two seconds. And so I think
like the Delta is so massive and people underestimate it, you know, and we're still
like not even at optimal speed on the application in terms of compressing the LLM to see kind of optimal
processing times. And so I think a lot of it's going to come down to two things. One, like
putting the correct messaging together to share that message and in that message, demonstrating
it. Like I'd love to see someone sitting at a desk who's like a really, like let's get Logan
sitting at a desk who's, know super capable I'm sure with all
the different tools and tabs he uses to be able to do something and then get Adrian or someone
actually someone who's never touched this stuff with Wayfinder and ask both of them to do the
same thing and I got like 50 bucks it says the person who's never done it will get it done faster
than Logan would do with all of his tools and tabs and so I think like highlighting that like a super
skilled person who knows how to do this stuff,
it would take you longer to do it
than a person who's never done it
and is just retyping the thing that was asked of them.
So I think like demonstrating like that,
almost like an Apple approach,
like Microsoft and Apple side by side
to kind of explain the difference.
And then I think also like,
there's going to be a lot of
interest around the thread that I think Tyler was commenting on which you know we're working
on repackaging this into an iOS and Android app via React Native. So I think like the ability for
people to experience this for the first time there's a lot of curiosity around it. I think there's like a multitude of ways in which this, and then on top of that,
there's the API. Like there's going to be times where you're interacting with
Wayfinder and you don't even know you are. Like a great example is if you run,
if you're out there and you're watching this and you run some informational site
that has, you know, a bunch of token information or crypto information,
and you want to put actionability and share in the value derived from the transactions associated with that information, well, when our API is ready,
we'd love to work with you. And so I think, you know, proliferating that ability beyond just
our application, beyond just our desktop, you know, app and our mobile app, I think making it
available and putting it into everything is the objective.
And I think lastly, it's just like, you know, beyond crypto is like, thinking about how you can create viral moments and allow people to do things that were otherwise very difficult.
And in that, maybe provide additional utility to all crypto like you know still you have to go
hunting down different websites if you're going to go try to book a trip with you know crypto it's
like why couldn't we just be the translation layer between like organizing your trip finding
your places to stay paying for that um like a multi-agent framework so i think there's a lot
of stuff that can go completely gangbusters viral here i think obviously we've seen the beginning of
that excitement um which in you know this release to a couple thousand people i think
once we open it up it's going to be pretty exciting i think that the strategy makes sense
so kind of having your users tell the story and do some of the educating and paint the picture of
what you can do uh as a way to onboard and get message. I think that makes a lot of sense. I guess my,
I had a similar question as Logan, but for me,
I see the vision that on a daily basis,
I'm no longer going to have to click the buttons.
I can use an agent to do this for me. And I want to live in that world.
What's been holding me back to date is the trust issue.
how do you get your average user to trust using
Midas or an AI agent to conduct transactions for it?
So, so I actually, I think that there's like an education opportunity here. Like you still just
have a wallet and a signature, right. And it's simulating the transaction prior to your execution.
So you're looking at the thing you want it. You said like, you know, I want you to take my and it's simulating the transaction prior to your execution.
So you're looking at the thing you wanted.
You said, like, you know, I want you to take my USDC from Binance,
bridge it to Solana, and buy X token or whatever.
You're looking at the transaction that you dictated before you execute it.
So, like, I think a lot of people have this idea in their head that I gave an AI agent access to a wallet and therefore it's going to run wild and throw my tokens all over the internet.
It's completely incorrect.
None of the way Wayfinder works is anything like that.
I think there's obviously an education opportunity there, but I think like, you know, coming back to the growth kind of conversation, initial kind of how these things get traction generally.
Like, you know, I think now we're sitting like over the last two weeks or a week and a half that we've given this to a couple thousand people, there's now 1.3 million wallets across EVM and Solana.
solana um and i think looking at you know uh the example of chat gpt is a great way to think about
it is like what are those really exciting things that you're like i can't believe it's doing this
and it's doing it so well uh like like it does for ghibli images and i think you know those are
the types of things that become uh net promoters and kind of explain you know those people become
uh your your growth levers
themselves and they're the ones who are like you have to try this and so i think our goal is to
create like holy shit moments and like you have to try this moments because it's infinitely better
and i think that kind of points back to that classical adage of like if you're not 10x better
it's not good enough um and that's really what we're aiming for. So I see, I mean, maybe it's just my Twitter feed,
but I see it all the time. Like people doing very complicated transactions, posting their
simulation results and posting the like outcomes and talking about it pretty like aggressively.
So I think the community has been doing an awesome job of showcasing its
capabilities for others. Maybe I need to curate my feed. I see that unless doom posting and
shit posting on a daily basis. But I do think this could be a 10X product. So super excited for this
and what you all have been building. And I feel like some culmination here of years of effort
coming. I guess we could talk for a full hour
we're already seven minutes over i guess i want to give you a chance what do our listeners need
to know what do you want to lead them with how can they you know engage yeah so on the wayfinder
side because we spent so much time on that uh go to app.wayfinder.ai and you can sign up and
register and wallet get your wallet set up so you're kind of in the
initiation pool to get selected for early access so you can be the people who get to try it first
on the parallel side you know definitely follow at parallel tcg on twitter if you haven't you're
welcome to download the game today on at the epic store. I think this year's prize pool, we just held our
first championships in Vegas. I think this year's prize pool is significantly larger, definitely in
the seven-figure range. Shout out to the Echelon Foundation for arranging that and all of our
partners and everyone who made that possible. If you're into trying the AI simulation game,
into trying the ai simulation game um you can follow uh i think it's a parallel colony or uh
on twitter um and uh you know definitely register to play that that's coming out in ios and android
uh you know it's already in test and alpha today and rolling out further in the coming weeks and
months um and then follow uh sanctuary underscore b3 if you want to learn
about our third person shooter um and yeah just thanks for having us tyler and you know logan
appreciate you guys uh and adrian thanks you know for all you do as well um making everything work
because it's a complicated thing to build yeah well. Well, thank you both for coming.
This wasn't a very insightful conversation.
I also love having you on.
I would love to have you guys back on in the future as we've got new agents running around and perhaps we're further out on the adoption curve.
And of course we didn't even talk about the TGE coming up.
I know that's going to be a big one and one of the folks have a lot of eyes
on. So congrats. We'll be rooting for you. Thanks for coming on.
Appreciate you guys. Bye-bye. Thanks for having us.
Awesome. Well, folks, thanks for staying on with us.
That was a hell of an interview.
So love having the parallel wayfinder team on,
but it's your favorite time of every show.
Let's do those roll bit spins.
If we've got the spinner on with us again,
the code is if you haven't
entered last second chance, it is tariffs was the code here for today. Tariffs, of course.
Let me know how our market's doing. Speak up. That's not great. Maybe don't click that refresh
button. All right. Let's go.
We'll give you that thing.
GN, if you're with us, you won.
We've got a punk in the box.
We've got a penguin in the box and a bunch of rec guys.
It's got that nice, shiny green.
Kind of matches the new rec drink.
So congrats, son of Web 3.
Nice prize for tuning in to FOMO Hour here this morning.
So we'll coordinate with you after the show.
Appreciate it. Of course, appreciate you as coordinate with you after the show. Appreciate it.
I want to thank our listeners as always.
I want to thank my co-hosts.
I want to thank our partners.
I want to thank our friends over at parallel for joining the conversation
We'll be back tomorrow at 10 a.m.
Bye. That was fantastic. We'll be back tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern. Until then, go make it a great day. Goodbye. Thank you.