All right, let's run it people will come through everyone is oh I'm late I'm late
Well, we'll figure it out as we go
Sweet guys, are we let's just do a quick mic check. Are you guys with us Josh Alex?
Hey, hey, what's going on?
Josh to what up in let's go twice one day. Let's go
Haven't heard you in for two. I know
And fun G our second space, too
Hilarious, I don't know if you're just running the bat. Yeah. Yeah all day
Awesome. Well, I'm excited to kick this sort of miniseries back off
Misfits of just kind of gathering people I like to chat with in crypto land
And we're in theory gonna chat about mobile when a couple of extra people come through
But I'm sure we'll we'll talk about a bunch of other different topics and things
Curious maybe just for an update
From Alex Josh and fund you like what how would have the year how has the year kicked off for you guys?
What are you spending time thinking about? Maybe we'll do that as our version of an intro
And Alex if you want to go first, that would be great
Yeah, definitely feels like it's really been a strong gonna start to the year in terms of like overall activity
What we're seeing in space in particular on the venture side, you know as it pertains to deal flow things are picking up
You know rounds are starting to get more crowded and lots of new teams are you know coming to market?
I think one thing area I've been spending a lot more time in and as we'll be talking about too is really just
distribution distribution distribution, right
What are you know the right avenues through which a lot of these apps can scale this upcoming cycle and in focusing across you more
So like the app layer and reading it a bit into like web 2 behaviors that are working and what are ways to?
incentivize that behavior with web 3
Awesome and for Sean just tuning in we're just doing quick intros
But instead of like an intro but your bio just how the year has been and what you've been spending time on
Let's go Josh first and then Sean
Yeah, the big themes that started year so far has been
Yeah, we're kicking off our next accelerator cohort imminently actually applications open up tomorrow. So I think is
You know as soon as we put that out into the universe
I think and open our doors just the you know, the number of
Projects and founders that you know come knocking, you know wanting to talk and get get more
You know information on what we're building and and and the cohort and I think the you know, the big theme
That I'm feeling right now is just like how much like the volume of experimentation
We're seeing in consumer crypto now even compared to like, you know
Six months ago when we when we ran our last cohort is it's just crazy. Like I think we've you know, we've hit this
infrastructural and cultural tipping point where it you know
It's cheap and easy to you know run these experiments and quickly iterate on consumer crypto products
You know, there's more and more excitement
I think in this space and we're seeing new waves of
you know founders and entrepreneurs coming in who are maybe more like socially and culturally motivated and
You know didn't come in a year ago or you had to care a lot about the you know tech behind the scenes
But now you can you know, come in just caring about you know
What what this tech unlocks and and build really interesting interesting products
So excited excited for what that's gonna mean throughout the year
I think just the speed that you know learnings and new unlocks can compound now is crazy
So just really really excited about what we're seeing and the cohort we're gonna be able to put together
For sure, man, it's fun to see you guys like have your moment in the spotlight
It's you guys and collab just sort of running up the consumer score
So it's just like exciting to to see people sort of pivot to that and have the spotlight come your way
Go against the bad in the cohort and stuff later, but over to Sean. What's up, man?
So just intros about what we've been paying attention to this year and what we're seeing a lead to consumer
Yeah, how's the year started off and yeah, what have you been spending time on? Yeah. Yeah, true. It's only 23 days in
For me, I mean, I've been spending one my day today on the DeFi side, of course
But I'm still a lover of all things consumer and something that's been fun for me is it's really an awareness
Game right for the consumer trends that we see in the same way that you know, I see consumer very similar to social
And when you see your friends do something you're interested in something
That piques their interest and it brings like some levels legitimacy. Like I'll tell you right now
I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. There's almost like no web 3 presence here and I'm thinking about putting together a
Group to meet up. We're doing our first meetup with two other folks here that are web 3 native
But there aren't many on Thursday this week, but it's gonna be like a slow grind where I want to get us together
In small groups first and then I eventually expand it out because I have so much conviction that people will become interested over time
Too as they see more headlines, etc
But one of my favorite things has been when I've had people over my place. I have like for example
Brian Brickman's digital art piece on my wall. And so I'll show them. Hey, this is a tea now
It's a physical print and also it's a are compatible and then I'll jump over to like my 90 CC hat and like explain the luxury
Chip and like provenance of that and then the provable scarcity that come with that those areas of consumer like pull out the shirt
But like seeing and feeling things it's really fun to see like that light bulb moment click for people
Like I've got a friend here consulting people just aren't in web 3 and even if they don't go off and start doing consume like anything
With it or start experiment experimenting themselves those little moments like that over time like form grassroots awareness
Improvement and an interest and you know, it's cliche. We're still so early. But um, yeah, those are just things
I'm paying attention to and I think also to the points meta has been really interesting
With you know consumer crypto
How do you like again, it's it's attention and awareness and there's there's marketing
Let's say campaigns people do on social networks on Instagram or tick-tock and points are almost their own marketing and attention game
To drive attention somewhere and then ultimately the substance of what is dry. It's driven attention to it's that way to bootstrap it
to like bootstrap the product
That it is and so that's something else I'm paying attention to because I know we're gonna get into it
I don't want to front-run it. But anyways, yeah, those are just some things on my mind in the consumer space
Yeah, dude, one way I'm thinking about it is it's the easiest time so far to be a crypto bro
Because you can actually explain real stuff to people like your art examples the 90cc stuff
When you have fashion or games or consumer stuff that you can actually be like hey like you can throw money around on the internet
It just clicks for people better
and so that's partly why I just wanted to chat and get this group together because
You can only keep track of so much at a time and I feel like you just have
You know, there's some leverage in hearing a little bit about what you guys have all been tracking with
Yeah, exactly the the talents quote of we've been doing too much explaining
We need to do more demonstrating really sticks with me and that's what I've been thinking about a lot
Awesome. Well fun. Do if you want to go you can go next and then just for Ronan
We're doing kind of intros but more from the perspective of what have you been up to this year so far and kind of what's on your mind
Yeah, thanks for the reminder and thanks for having me
With some folks coming in so down to help on the co-hosting and would love to listen to your intelligent human beings chat
Yeah, I think what I've been noticing a lot of is just probably since honestly early last year the quality of
Clients and inbound that we've been getting at Schiller, you know, we do marketing consulting
Has just been much much stronger. The the products have been getting much stronger
There's a lot of excitement in building towards mobile products
There's a lot of people getting really interested in, you know
How are are we going to aggregate all of these experiences and all of these?
communities in some way that makes sense
Which I think is a really tricky problem
As yeah, everything presents friction
Despite how how'd you see the point, you know might might seem
and it's just been really interesting from I guess like a participant and
Supporter side of things not on the investment
Side as some of the others here, but yeah, just just really really exciting start to the year
And I'll just leave it at that
Sweet man, Ronan are you with us? Yes, sir. I'll go quick
Yep, I'm Ronan on the investment team. I club currency
In terms of kind of what I've seen to start the year
I think it's I think it's been like super positive. I think you've seen like a lot of these
Kind of different ecosystems have to really pop off whether that be Solana kind of having its own meme corn season
Whether that's Bitcoin or no doing its thing
I don't know if you guys saw that game that just air dropped kind of these dynamic kind of tease to
existing ordinal holders, but
Honestly, I've been having trouble keeping up just like across across all these different ecosystems
So that's always like a good feeling to have to know that there's like more stuff going on than that. Uh-huh. You can actually keep track of so
Just overwhelmingly excited. I think it's been a great start even though the F ETF was a little hairy
So real awesome guys. No, it's just one of these things where crypto has become too intense to keep track of everything
So it's fun just to gather people and kind of swap notes
We had said we would hit mobile as a theme
I think it would be fun to do telegram and then maybe we get to Solana
I know why don't we start with Alex and then maybe Josh for someone who doesn't know the telegram is doing anything in crypto
What are they doing? And then maybe we can just start there and then go to more of the specifics
Yeah, sure thing so telegram
It's one of the largest social networks in the world been around for around ten years at this point
And you know the past couple of years. They've had a crypto initiative where they recently, you know rolled out their ton network
Basically think of it as just know the blockchain the interesting here
Interesting thing here relative to other chains is this is basically the largest
You know what the largest distribution place so to set the tone they have like 700 million users
55 million day use so this sheer scale is not something that crypto is used to and
This also ties into like the mobile first trend of you know
How they could bootstrap their ecosystem, you know in a different way relative to other other
Chains that are out there. So just to kind of touch a bit more on that
Their go-to-market is entirely different where natively within the telegram application. You have apps that you can play within their
custodial self custodial wallets all baked in and they've kicked off a really strong go-to-market with this one app called not coin
Think of it at the very simplest level is like an idle game where you click a coin to earn points
These in-app not coins that are not transferable and it creates, you know
this interesting element of not only earning points but a competition where
Anybody that doesn't know anything about crypto can automatically onboard it to it with zero cost
So, you know, you're under you earned your way into the space versus buying and the level of gamification they've done here
It's pretty nuts in terms of like how they've scaled right? So they kicked off in January
Today, they're up to around 19 mil
playable users granted some of this is farming but this this level of like growth at this pace is is truly interesting because
Not only did they do this but with the coins that you earn they then incentivize actions to make the ecosystem grow
So, you know how we have quests in about three you can redeem your coins for
To try new games you can you can connect to other social social teams and projects and earn points that way you can join
Community groups, let's say, you know the Binance group versus an okay X group to compete to see who can earn the most coins and
The really interesting thing here is ultimately how there's been zero knowledge of crypto needed to participate
and this is a reason why you know, it's spread so globally I was actually checking to talk prior to this and because
Telegram has a global population
It's really done a good job, you know in Russia other places as well. And just the final point before I hand it off to Josh is
an interesting thing to note also is
self-custodial wallet excludes US users and initially, you know, I was a little disappointed about this but
US users actually only make up 2% of telegrams, you know entire user base
So there is a potential here for you know
An ecosystem like this to kind of be like a blind spot for crypto Twitter in this sense where you know
But you know, there's a much more global audience that is, you know onboarding and the next step will be and Josh can touch on it
Gradually introducing them to crypto
Yeah, I think you know great intro
yeah, one of the the most interesting things about baton ecosystem is just yeah the like embedded distribution of telegram and
Think just how huge it is, right? Like I think we're usually confined to like our little group chats
But you know, they're the the usage numbers are absurd
and I think yeah not coin is just this great example of of like abstracting everything away and optimizing just for like ease of use and
Enjoyment and and fun and literally it's just like the core of the game is just opening this telegram app and tapping a coin
And you know, you don't need a wallet
you don't need gas tokens for literally anything anything up front and I think what's really interesting about that and also a big reason I'm actually
interested in in a lot of deep in applications is you know, if you can
If you can onboard people into crypto by just like having value in a wallet that they are heavily incentivized to go figure out
What to do with I think that's just gonna be be the path in for a lot of people and you know high mapper
you know helium some of these, you know, you can product that also just like naturally fit into people's lives and can
Can kind of gracefully onboard them into crypto by you know depositing ownership or tokens into a wallet
I think I think it's it's powerful and you know, I think a lot of us forget
But you know airdrop air drops early on in our crypto journeys
We're I think a big a big reason so many of us had had play money and we're incentivized to come in
So I think yeah not coins a really good example of this I think
You know also squarely sitting on kind of the meme coin narrative, you know, they're going broad distribution
I think if it if it ends up, you know onboarding a ton of people on on baton kind of has that really powerful story arc
You know potentially has like strong ongoing gameplay that millions of people are playing
I think it could you know be a meaningful, you know meme coin potentially in the ecosystem and just you know
Into crypto. I think now if you shared earlier that I think not coin specifically drove like a million signups for for telegram premium
So just you know beam coins as distribution
I think you're incredibly powerful and same with abstracting crypto and just you know putting putting fun and
Enjoyment upfront and you know, gracefully onboarding people that way
Yeah, I wanted to add on to that with two more things too
So also interesting was looking at animoka the onboarded as one of the largest validators to time late last year
and there's an interesting play here where they have like a pretty big portfolio, you know gaming project and
There's an opportunity to basically launch them, you know within telegram and easily access like a huge distribution
Not to mention like all the ways to kind of monetize an app and then going back to like the web to side
You know looking at comparable, you know social networks
Let's say whatsapp and you know all the you know millions of organizations that that use them, you know to communicate with businesses and users
There's some parallels here and how you know products can communicate with users there and ultimately, you know monetize being closest, you know
Mobile first, you know payments we have you know, the bot trading agents meta
So lots of things that could be brewing within this ecosystem. So definitely
Quite cool to check it out
Now I think why I wrestle with this is I mean Josh Josh said this I guess both you
Josh and Alex have said this telegram has like whatever 800 million daily active users. It's insanely massive
And so if there is any natural funnel of any like sort of fraction of those people towards a blockchain
It's just going to be an incredibly like probably the biggest thing in crypto immediately, right?
And that's why it's interesting. We hang out in this sort of little crypto Twitter bubble
And telegram stuff can be happening completely separate from that and yet may actually be the biggest
you know application pretty imminently if something like that takes off and
Yeah, I don't know. I I wish I knew more about aetherium and mobile
Like I wish there was in the same way that Solana has a phone and more of like a strategy around this
I'm not sure if you guys have dug into any of any of that sort of aetherium related mobile stuff, but I'll find you go for it
The Solana saga largely onboarded me to Solana
Just very late like in a much more active way
And posting about it led to someone tagging me or tagging underneath saying you should really talk to the aetherium phone people
So recently so the Solana saga
Brought me to the aetherium phone
Which was a very grassroots
inspired operating system by a pretty Chad team of young founders
From Europe who have I think they're in the process of shipping
Pre-loaded on to pixel 7a's in partnership with announced now
Release and they actually just received a
They'll be doing some more kind of physical
releases in the coming months
I it'd be worthwhile having them on some of the technical sides of things have kind of gone
Over my head, but a very very sharp team is working on that and I haven't seen any competitors
I'm sure there's some you know behind the scenes, but
Really really interesting and I think they're there
Their app is like aetherium phone or something simple like that if you want to check it out
Sweet man, that's so helpful
I just think like everything that I do on a daily basis happens through my phone
Basically other than random complex crypto transactions where it's like, okay. I need to sit and read what the hell is going on here and
So if you think about the industry on a five plus year time horizon even like three years
I think most of it or is oriented towards mobile
And so whether that's from the salon or perspective the telegram perspective. It's like where the puck is going quote unquote, you know
Yeah, I think we're very unique in the sense that we're sitting on our computer all day
You know clicking buttons in crypto, like that's not that's not how the majority of the world are gonna interact with this stuff
Right, like could you imagine building a consumer product in web 2 and you know not starting on mobile like that would be absurd
Information overload on Twitter to like Elon's algo isn't really helping us
But I found one one tip that's been helpful is with a lot of the mobile apps that are you know
Basically block explorers and also tracking activity, you know finding, you know
I'm Shane crypto users in the space, you know, you can you can type those lots and get you know notifications of you know
Who's trying new protocols and whatnot. That's been an interesting way to discover new projects in addition to Twitter. I
Think to you like the majority of new consumer crypto projects
I I play with today are actually mobile first like I think with you know
What privies build some of the other you know embedded wallet and and just you know tooling providers
Have unlocked in the last six months and you know, obviously it takes time for people to actually build
Build stuff integrating those but you know
I think we've we've hit a tipping point where mobile first is, you know, the core strategy for a lot of these teams
Awesome guys. Yeah, I feel very resonant with it
It's interesting like even just as a basic behavior with people who are new to crypto
Usually like friends or whatever family I'll get them to download, you know
A rainbow wallet and you bounce some money back and forth to make it the make it click moment, you know
And so it really is like what Josh is saying
You're kind of meeting people where they are most people aren't sitting there with seven browser extensions trying to figure out what the hell like
L2 they're sitting on right
So makes sense. I'm curious. Oh, go ahead
No, I was just gonna say is made me think about I wonder how
Like where this leads which is always the question
But like in the same way like Twitter's I think about Twitter how it started with actually SMS and texting before there was even an app store
Are we seeing is like is there a thing on the horizon whether it's like a crypto native OS?
Like Solano s with the Solana phones, etc. That will become an unlock for
Let's say crypto consumer mobile that we just don't even know yet
And there's great ideas are like are emerging
But do is there like some big unlock that is yet to happen that we don't even know about yet
And that's just happy thinking about it
Not really much to contribute but
It's like yeah, no worries, man. Okay makes sense
No, I just wanted mobile as a starting point. We can go in a different in some different directions, too
But let's linger on the Solana side of things. I know fungible was an active enjoyer of the saga phone
What what's the lineup who has a slot who has a Solana phone of this crew?
Josh is not gonna make it a
Public broadcast also Ronan. Okay, so we're half half makes sense. We can still talk about it. I think my
Intuition around this like I had a smart friend
Kind of pick up right at the beginning of that hype cycle be like you need to buy one of these and it's like
One of the very few people who I just sort of buy whatever they say
and so I bought a phone and
Immediately like the idea of an NFT like gated super user
Became really interesting to me like you have this like short whatever whatever there is 20,000 phones
However, many people that ends up being people can drop things to you
You have like a new economic component to a phone
And that's like a unique reason for why I might actually pick this thing out versus my normal iPhone
So I thought about it more from the perspective of incentives and that being interesting, but I'm curious what guys think
Mean, it's just like a hardware version of
Of like crypto punks or some some like high profile and if the right like you just know
You know believers and you know hardcore users are the ones with it. So having a direct distribution channel to them super interesting
I'm sure I'm sure they're you know, some pretty interesting
you know hardware unlocks of having a
phone specifically built to be a wallet but
Pretty pretty ignorant on those right now
it makes a lot of sense to me like what like I guess these projects and like
Specifically projects when within this line of eco kind of get out of having this kind of like known user base
But from like the actual user standpoint I
Heard someone on a podcast described as their kale phone
So they kind of just do certain interactions with that
They like wouldn't normally do on the normal phone or like hey
I know this phone is specifically for XYZ activities probably much more secure. It's like kind of this
Touch screen hardware while in a lot of ways. I'm curious though for the phone users
How has your experience been and kind of how are you using it so far?
The first time a paperweight has ever delivered me money on on a daily basis is kind of
The left curve take there but also the real take I yeah, I'm not really using
The device to like make calls I have no need for that
I have yeah perfectly working
$2,000 iPhone that has has never paid me in any direct ways. I'll just say that
But in terms of just like as as a wallet and as a means of
Receiving and transacting value and assets. It's it's been it's been good. I would say I
Like free money is basically the TLDR
Alex drops of the nice initially when I purchased obviously was more just for like
Research purposes to kind of see, you know, what's happening there, you know, who's building for it didn't have too much expectations
And it was more so around like
You know, even if this phone were to not be successful
There's still probably a lot for the ecosystem to learn from it and going back to like examples with like the Amazon
You know a fire phone and how ultimately we had Alexa smart speakers
So that kind of evolution so however, this ends up, you know
Maybe different from you know, the current state and then you know since then my usage of it has been a little limited
Outside of you know typical interactions and you know claiming tokens and whatnot
but I think that there's going to be some kind of lagging effect of you know developer interested in building on top of these because
You know we had in the past few days
There are more saga phones sold and like the past year and you know, ultimately from a developer's perspective
Let's say in the year out, you know, if you're working to get quick feedback, you know
You have a strong user base there and it could be a really nice, you know distribution play
You know first, you know 50k to 100 users on that side
Yeah, going back to the original point
I feel like the use cases have been a little limited so far, but that's you know, totally understandable
Just given you know, Jen Jen one phone, but I'm excited for you know, what developers come up with and how funds were not
I almost feel like the salon of phones more of a dev kit than a consumer product in its current form granted though
There's the incentive to buy it. So it's a little bit of both
It's almost like the I'd wonder I'd be curious to see like the Venn diagram of how many folks who bought it
Like want to play around with it from a developer tinkering standpoint versus how many people who bought it have done it for the monetary incentive
Yeah, I feel like initially a lot of the hype run is around with the financialization of it of oh man
Okay, this is gonna retire me my Solana saga retirement strategy basically right of all of these people
And teams theoretically dropping to saga Genesis and a tea holders
But I think what's more interesting to me is when you actually scale that out like sure that's fun
People can make money. That's a forcing function for them to go buy the phone or to use it
But if you get you know, even a hundred thousand people to buy a phone
I forget how many they just sold out in their batch to maybe thirty thousand something like that
One of you can correct me then it starts to get interesting right?
Like if you're building apps for a hundred thousand people that may not be like millions
But that's enough to be interesting for new developers to come and build stuff
10,000 is kind of whatever
So I'm yeah, I'm more interested in like okay
We speculated the crop the crap out of this phone and that's hopefully gonna bootstrap enough
Interest and attention for them to sell a hundred thousand phones, which then hopefully gets enough developers interested to build stuff
Which then you know makes a dent in the kind of duopoly between Android and Apple
That's like the best bull case I can give you who knows if that happens, but that's sort of how I'm thinking about it
Yeah, initially one of the main reasons why I thought it made sense on paper at least was just that like it was just like
A really easy way to bypass like like the very restrictive economics like the Apple and Google Store allow you for and just generally getting
Natural crypto apps through those is like extremely difficult. So like this is like a neat way to just kind of like
totally kind of bypass this but
Again, the long run I do think like the apples and googles of the world will kind of let these crypto apps come into play
so like in that end state, I
Do feel like like something about like the security or like underlying encryption of like your wallet
built within the phone would kind of be the main shelling point, but
Makes sense guys cool. Why don't we pivot away from mobile mobile stuff?
When I was chatting with Josh earlier
One of the things we were talking about today was like this idea of what is gonna push more transactions on chain
And it's an interesting little metric in terms of it
Just like plugs into a lot of consumer things like what actually makes you do a transaction on a blockchain whether you're aware of that
And I look at it today and it's kind of like well, there's some games. There's some art stuff
There's some trading but there's still no real like aha like I'm doing something interesting. That's whatever consumer even means on chain
So, how do you think about like what you're spending your transactions on maybe that's my question for each of you
Like what are you doing on chain?
At this point maybe anyone feel free to jump in
Love the the synchronized unmute and me again
Yeah, I think honestly a lot of a lot of my activity recently has been meme coin related
Less on you know successful the successful speculation side and more
I just I just think there's like these really incredible
Primitives for social products that you know have pretty clear product market fit
I think like there's this very strong desire to participate in that I think the like, you know community formation
That takes place in like these early early meme coin communities. The like narrative discovery is just super interesting. But
Very consumer friendly has been built on top of this like it's the giant kids experience of all time to actually
Participate in this in this ecosystem
So I just see I see like so much opportunity to use meme coins as primitive for social products and kind of more like vertical ways
So I've just been been going pretty pretty deep in the ecosystem just to get a good sense of what's happening there
So, you know probably 90% of my transactions today or our meme coin related
Yeah, we'll leave it there
I've also been pretty excited too about like, you know accessibility is a big trend, you know for the cycle ultimately bringing in the long-tailed users
and what I mean by that is
You know user habits and web to that we're already accustomed to but making the experience simple enough where it's translatable
So for example, you know, I see an article, you know in paragraph, you know, I like it
I collect it have it on entities in the back end. This creates, you know adds to my social graph
Maybe if somebody's following me they get a notification. Oh Alex collected this article
Let me see who else is interested in this piece
So it's like these types of like small transactions that are more
Sustainable throughout cycles and kind of repeatable that you know
If the price goes down 90% that doesn't change my behavior of like wanting to collect and appreciate things on chain
additionally one has just been around really just
search and discovery to just kind of going back to
Every every every crypto transaction basically is a form of UGC one way or another
So who is doing the best job of abstracting this with abstracting this away and just adding context for people to follow keep up
You know be recommended things based on the wall history and whatnot
So starting to see a lot more, you know, what their social plays and other apps doing a great job of that
Realistically for me my on-chain activity is usually they're prompted by
communities I'm already a part of that are doing something that I find fun or I want to participate in whether it's like a
I mean, this is an as recent so it's a little bit of a dated example
But like forgotten runes tends to do things around like certain holidays and they'll either be a claim like they did an advent calendar
For like in December and you got to burn two things and claim like you got to burn two items and claim an item from the advent
Calendar based on the day you wanted and that was just fun
And then even honestly, I mean this isn't as much consumer
But I do do a lot of on-chain transactions for paying vendors on the operation side
like there actually are like business transactions that get done where people accept coins for
You know first goods and services or I should just say services
But yeah, it's an interesting thought or claiming the shout out to glitch Marfa claiming the exit from the gift shop on the first of
Every calendar month. I had got my calendar reminder set for that
Derek is smiling in the audience
Yeah, I've also been in the mean coin arena trying things I
Would say that it's been been research-based, but it absolutely has not
Aside from researching if I can be any good at training them
Collecting art mostly and just trying new protocols and platforms out
That excitement and willingness to put in the extra, you know bit of effort to like try a new chain out
Or set up an account on some platform
Or learn about something that involves signing just a couple of transactions maybe writing down a seed phrase
That used to be in abundance I feel like when I got in this space and as soon as I got comfortable with you
know a decent size handful of things I
Felt like I was getting a little complacent. So just trying to try a lot of stuff these days
And report back to the group
Yeah plus one kind of fun juice point I think at this point I feel like I'm so spread out and
just doing so many things that like
Losing a little bit of money everywhere just to try it and you kind of know that in the long run like
One of these will kind of air drop you some governance at some point and it will kind of make it worth in the end
So you're literally getting like paid to try out these apps, which is like
When you think about it's like an insane value prop
You just get to like mess around and try cool shit and eventually get paid for it. But
Yeah, I think does I think the timeline has not
Given enough way to like what's happening in the salon a meme coin ecosystem like the top
four eth memes are kind of
Each individual top five like salon a meme coins, which is insane and like I really don't see it on my timeline as much
so I do think that is a kind of a good bellwether for what Alex was saying earlier how this like
This cycle is about accessibility and so on offers that so
As we kind of ramp up you should probably see that continue. I want to say but yeah
Yeah, I think just to build off what what Alex is saying, I think this gets a lot more interesting once, you know
I just like on-chain media
distribution ecosystem gets a bit more developed and you know
I think what Zora is kind of pioneered with protocol rewards is really like handed, you know projects like interface or daylight or
You know mint dot fun or countless others and business model and really incentivize them to you know
Distribute great on-chain media that you know people want to collect
so I think as as that continue gets getting developed and you know projects and networks and people recognize the value of
You know putting more on chain and having and creating more meaning around it and having the people who are there and caring
You know collect it to benefit from the distribution that you know, these projects give I think well
We're gonna get a ton more transactions on chain and a lot more a lot more interesting stuff to do
I think even just like the network legibility you get from
You know putting interactions on chain and you know
releasing cultural ephemera anytime something interesting happens and you know
maybe rewarding it and you know recognizing the value of that attention and the broader distribution that comes from it, I think is
Still pretty nascent, but we'll be we'll be a big thing this year
Yeah, it's been great to see that build up and I've also been thinking about to like with each incremental wave of users
You know potentially, you know, they still care about the primary, you know principles behind crypto
But there may be other reasons, you know
why they're drawn to the space, you know, maybe more for entertainment whatnot and broadly just notice like a big up uptick in
apps that you know focus on distribution by you know
Basically building upon, you know web to apps that already exist but adding a you know crypto incentive layer to you know
Better, you know line sense is not with not just with users, but stakeholders
So things like, you know yoga pets was actually looking at that the other day and like some of these sheer numbers
I mean even if you slice half from Bob farming like 500k total
and these are the types of products that you know, you can see friends and family onboarding to and then this second element of
With UGC becoming, you know, so so prominent
What is distribution value capture look like for products that are you know, AI native with crypto layered as a secondary element?
Granted it doesn't you know capture as much, you know, the benefits there
but in terms of like sheer user base and numbers like a lot of these products have scaled, you know, pretty significantly and
That's just an important, you know tool that they've used to kind of grow
Beyond like the crypto Twitter angle
So there's like multiple ways to go about it, but notice just like kind of more of the web to crowd adopting different things first
Alex are you more are you more excited about like like your on-chain transactions on chain history, whatever like
Being surfaced and like that's that UGC that you're talking about and like that being surfaced in an interesting manner
Or you saying that like people's normal whatever UGC whether just be like their social signaling Instagram pictures
Whatever being represented in some sort of crypto format because I feel like it's it kind of goes both ways
Yeah, there's two elements to where it's like it's hard to yeah, so basically on that side
I think I'm more excited about more of like, you know on chain you like own transactions
You know being surfaced on that in like creative ways to build products there, right?
Like all the transactions we do that's UGC and then there's all other element where I'm I may not be as excited about it from a
Principal's perspective, but this is something that you know
The broader market is how they're like onboarding to it not because like I'm gonna get a token
They're onboarding because you know, they like spending time, you know, we either like prompting creating new assets, you know
Developing storylines things like that and then they'll gradually be introduced to crypto
So like that that second use case is what I've noticed is just like skilled a lot faster
But in terms of running to your point around value capture
I think you know value capture is very different for like a web 3 audience versus you know web 2 in terms of you know
average user profile all that
Awesome guys, I feel like I love just like listen, it's so funny
I'd like to like hosting these spaces mostly so I can just listen to you guys talk
It's fun to hear a little bit of what you guys are all up to and what the thoughts are of the day
I'd love to yeah, I'd love to pose a question. I'd wonder
If anybody on the stage is any thoughts but are there any like crypto apps you would like to see or haven't seen someone?
Try it because you know, I'm not a BC myself. I know you guys live and breathe like
Listing the pitches figuring out what's there? Is there anything that you've thought of?
That you haven't seen yet or tried in a way that's interesting interesting enough yet that you think would be interesting
Yeah, I've an endless list of those I think a few that are top of mind I
Guess maybe going back to like meme coins is as primitives for social products. I think
Like one, you know one example of a product I've been thinking a lot about is like, you know, you could build
You could build like a sport social product where you know teams and players on those teams each have like associated meme coins
And you know players and fans are basically competing to have
You know the highest market cap players or or or team and and just kind of like socializing and forming community around that
I think you know, they're kind of examples of that that same idea, you know in music like music discovery where like, you know
Artist meme coins are kind of like a core discovery mechanism and and like consensus mechanism
So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I think one other
Whether category I'm really interested in is this idea of like everything apps and
What I mean by that is like branded bundled protocols for specific audiences. So, you know, we have this like growing
List of protocols in defy, you know growing list of protocols and social basically, you know in every crypto category and you know, we have these very
Specific categories of audiences. Let's say I think you know, let's use boys club as an example, right this like
clear kind of, you know social group with a
You know ways of speaking and vibes like what if you know boys club kind of just bundled
defy protocols and social protocols into a product that was just purpose-built for their audience and you know
You have the kind of vibes intact you have, you know
The trust of it being curated by this, you know, this community and brand that you care about
So I think there's there's kind of lots of opportunity of that
You know with existing communities, but also, you know for people to just like really understand where there's a big
Like persona and and kind of just you know bundle all these emerging protocols together in a in like a trusted need for the consumer way
You have one I think I'm excited about two and I think in a quick KZ is doing a great job here
You know, I'm not an investor but you know fan of the team and what they're doing and to further explain
They're what they're building is basically like a draft things for social media
So think of it as you know, social media we consume, you know far more than sports. However, it's much more difficult to
Kind of financialize these markets and not even just financialized but kind of curate and discover
Folks better. So like let's say there's an opportunity where this product was live and you know
People wanted to bet on early creators or discover new and emerging talent. Let's say on the tick-tock side, right?
I can follow to talk greater. I can shoot them alike. There's no way to kind of support or kind of prove
You know your provenance of like being a good curator on that and you know
There's two elements who have one is kind of unlike, you know curation and discovery and having you know good
Creators be recognized another element is you know
How they could potentially have some you know better revenue sharing like monetization features
Open-ended at the moment in terms of like how something like this can develop a long story short
We have financialized, you know, most markets I think
Over financialization is bad
But there's something to be said on you know rewarding, you know early creators that are talented and need better discovery channels
Like it's not even like betting on like Oh, mr. Beast like how many views will his video get you know?
Next time we post it. I don't care as much about that
It's more of like if you saw for like the long tail back. It's really interesting, but it's also really tough because
it's much easier to bot, you know social metrics versus established creators, but but that general concept and
Your focus there is pretty exciting
Getting kind of any oh, sorry. Go ahead Ron. I was just gonna go bad. That was literally gonna be my answer
it's like the ability for like
you this is a crude kind of descriptor, but you can come like culture creators like people who are like
Who like it's the person who sends you like the SoundCloud song with 5,000 likes and then you know a year and a half later
it's right again, right like those people have never been able to monetize off like a
Tangible skill which is like the ability and I for like early talent and like it's it's an extremely hard problem to solve
And we have a couple porkos working on this
But like because you have to have like a the buy-in from the actual long tail of creators who are looking at
Kind of find different monetization routes
And you have to have like kind of this whole user bootstrap demand side, which is really difficult
I think a nice example is some I don't know if you guys know turbos and like it's like
Friend tech chat and he was like best
Best song post best person to share a song. I'll send like point winnies or whatever
I'll give them one of my keys and I shared a song that my buddy sent me and then after I won
I made him download rainbow and I like sent him half of the winnings for like sharing song with me
If there was like a way for that to happen without like this whole
Multistep process where like he doesn't even know what's happening. I think that'd be like super interesting
I think it scales really nicely. But like yeah, I just love to see that
Yeah, that'd be really interesting
It's almost like just yeah, just rewarding good taste in a way in an early in an early environment
Yeah, I think a lot of this kind of falls under like
You know the unbundling of prediction markets
Almost like I feel like they you know prediction markets are
You know, they're growing clearly. There's something like very compelling about being able to bet on anything
but I think they're different implementation is just like way too broad for it to be appealing to
kind of mass consumer audiences, but I think if you
If you kind of like break that down and verticalize it and you know, make it a bit more social
I think there's there's kind of like endless opportunity within
Within that I gotta give you a great example really just like, you know prediction markets on social content
You know, I think you could if you just built like a politics specific prediction market with like social and like reputation
Games, I think that gets way more interesting then then something that's like explicitly calling itself prediction market
Yeah, I'm almost thinking like could there be a way to create a framework that's replicable like almost like subreddits for prediction markets
That can then be self-governed
But that like core framework would have to be defined
Well, and like you said, it's like a very very difficult problem to solve, but I can imagine something like that really doing well
Building there and Josh, I think you'd mentioned this before too
But also really excited about you know ephemeral apps and basically more types of you know
Lower-lipped games that can encourage people to be more of like a DAU versus somebody that's like a weekly user
You know if you're buying a specific NFT, I think there's a number of teams that are you know building along these lines like, you know
Base pain and encrypted the game which is like HQ trivia and survivor coming up
But ultimately like more multiplayer coordination games that you know may not require as much capital
But kind of leverage the benefits of crypto rights like pull together even right going way back
I actually think that's one of the most interesting, you know primitives
although one thing that may be unsolved was like how you bootstrap, you know the reward side where
You know makes up for the opportunity cost of like not having your capital parked elsewhere
But really excited to just see more like experimentation around, you know daily games that you know
People can participate in mass and that scale with you know, transparent rules that they know won't be wrong
Yeah, I think a couple of things that come to mind for this the other product yeah
I'll say like the couple of things that come to mind for this. I think joke race is a really interesting platform
I could see there being longer form uses of it where a lot of the
Activations or games or contests are ephemeral they have end dates
But there's no reason why kind of economies couldn't spring out out of this or series of games that are interconnected
Maybe inclusive of prediction market qualities
could be interesting and then another we've been working with nifty island for the past few months on on their go-to-market and
Kinds of economies that are already starting to form off of that are super interesting
Where you have people finding, you know, not only ways in which they can
Distribute and sell goods that can be used in app
Or in-game, but also ways in which you can
Creatively farm and expand your farming capabilities
by either virtue of adding delegated wallets where you're essentially a
testing to ownership of you know, all of the top baskets of goods that have premium for the farm rate or
You're galvanizing like a community of either a solo content creator
Some kind of influencer or a PFP or kind of asset based community
Which has been super interesting to see I think there's already someone with like a ten thousand dollar prize pool
Where they're just taking it off of, you know
Performers of their speed race game or speed run game that's on their island and they'll be distributing prizes, you know on a weekly basis
I'm not sure if it's sponsored which be interesting but
Net result of that could be very interesting
depending on how the token price and release goes when it comes to farming as the
Farming is augmented by the assets you hold
currency known as balloons that you
frequented your island is
By others and there's there's a couple of other things, but those are the the main components
So there are a lot of very social
components to this and it doesn't feel as
Farming for the sake of farming you're not just like smashing transactions and changing wallets rapidly
which has been really interesting to see so kind of curious to see how that evolves over time and
after their initial airdrop
Awesome guys, I feel like I don't even need to babysit this conversation, which is great
Just natural questions popping up natural like interaction across all five of you
This is like a dream space to be honest so so much of the time. It's like and now the next question is
So thank you so much for this
I'm curious maybe a final question because I want to keep it tight
Sometimes the the biggest error that you can make with a space is just running it too long
So I think we'll wrap in five minutes
But a forward-looking question for each of you just for the quarter. So I guess we have two two months and a bit left
What do you think causes the most transactions on-chain that is not mean coins?
Curious for people's kind of prediction essentially just so forward-looking prediction here
And you can't take you can't steal mean coins from us man, that's the answer
That would be everyone's answer
Give me like a remix on meme coins like a subcategory of meme coins if you get that no for sure
Yeah, I think it's gonna be I
Would probably place my bet on yeah on like a viral ephemeral experience
I think to you know what Alex was talked before whether that's you know
maybe the next thing the world's largest releases or really excited for crypto the game which he mentioned and I think this thing that just like
aggregates a ton of attention for a short period of time has transactions as you know, a core part of participating in this experience and
I'd say this is more like a cluster bet but I'd say
blast ecosystem in terms of aggregate transactions because it's like the sum of the parts of all the different types of
Absolutely launching there, you know paired with what pac-man is shown in terms of like his chops for gamification incentive
The silence shant what are we thinking?
Yeah, meme coins is an obvious answer, I could imagine
In the same way like coinbase released base, I think blast is a great answer
Yeah, I don't have a strong answer of like what it could be it have to be some sort of I mean with telegram
Like we were just talking about about their massive, you know user base and even just having something on chain if
Beyond not coin whatever they might release beyond not coin could be something that has a lot of transactions in q1
Yeah, that's like meme claim adjacent
I'd probably go with either blast and that kind of incentive kind of just push and maybe something weird and cool
It spins out of that or and maybe this is too early this kind of
More open access to private market meta
I'm kind of lifting off and I think I think we're messing about this earlier, but basically I
Think you'd see retail like quote-unquote retail. We're all retail, but like retail
Put capital to work at the app layer at a much higher rate than your traditional kind of private market investor who?
Is looking for more de-risked infrastructure, and I think if if you do give retail the ability to like
Participate in the earlier stages. You'll get I think just generally weirder and more experimental stuff which
Maybe maybe the dark horse are Bitcoin purchases from trad 5 via the ETF
Billions tens of billions I
Feel like my answer is gonna be gaming of some kind I look at
Something like it's sort of a gaming barbell, right?
There's the indie game style with something like Cambria
Becoming d5 kingdoms 2.0 like when they launched their the main game soon
I could see that drawing in a lot of crypto and a lot of just out of bringing in that new people as well
Ronin and other different spots where I think I am ready to be surprised to hear like what like 20,000 people did what?
Because there's just too many things to keep track of right?
But also something like parallel. I think if you shift out of beta and start to go into more like full-on gaming territory
Something like that just the reps of people who play games
It's hard to compete with so I could see like blast maybe performing at a similar
Amount of transactions if we're really getting granular on that
But yeah in terms of people I think there's gonna be some some surprises in the next couple months on the gaming side
Yeah, just one more quick thing about as you mentioned gaming results to think in a bangle of this answer isn't necessarily on change transactions
But you know some apps that take more of the approach where you know a good amount of it will be off chain
So like you know off chain transactions, you know it at things like that may just go, you know pretty tremendously
You know, I don't know what specific apps but that could be another one where because that requires potentially, you know
No capital and put in no blog creation and I guess technically it's like a Trojan horse to eventually having crypto transactions
But yeah interested in that side, too
Yeah, maybe just like two quick others over rolling here. Yeah, then I think gaming's probably also the right answer here
But I think to other is what I want to just call out is farcast or like it's not gonna compete on
transaction numbers and I don't even know what counts as a transaction over there
But I think just it it's kind of popping off right now
I would say and I think really like, you know flip the
You know hit like a tipping point from you know being this like decentralized
Twitter to you know, very much is like being its own world with like a unique feature set and you know culture
That's pretty distinct from Twitter and blossoming ecosystem of you know
People who now see reason to like build unique things on top of it
And I think we're gonna start just to see the power of like up having a you know
Permissionless social social based protocol over there. So I think that's one
Second I don't know I hear friend tech me too. It's gonna be wild. So maybe if that comes out soon
While didn't even know that I had a v2
Fungi have you gone yet? I would love nothing more than a friend tech redemption arc
Was literally just going to say
Far caster would be curious to see the transactions from that
But I think everyone else covered anything else I might have might have thought of
Awesome guys front deck one is real interesting because it's like race your base got two two hits already
Like let's say they you know reduce some of the fees Josh's point to
Just becomes way more accessible to actually do transaction. So yeah, I wouldn't sleep on it as well
Sweet. Well, let's wrap it up there. Just big
Thank you to everyone for listening in encouragement to follow each of these guys Spongebob Alex Shawn Josh and Ronan
In the quest of trying to keep up with crypto information flow. These are good curators of things
And yeah, thanks so much guys for coming through
I think it's just fun even if it's casual to chat about these sorts of things and do it in public. So, thank you
Thanks, man, go get some rest man. Take care guys