Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Modern Market
Recorded: March 21, 2025 Duration: 1:28:58Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic crypto landscape, PumpFun is set to launch its DEX, while Canary Capital's Pengu ETF marks a historic fundraise. The Ton Foundation reports a $400 million investment in Toncoin, and Zero G Labs is building a robust Layer 1 blockchain for AI, achieving impressive growth metrics.
Full Transcription
Everyone welcome to the modern market where every day we discuss everything to do with the modern market
That is the crypto market the NFT market and how to make some and or a lot of money on the internet loaded up for discussion
Today we have pump fun launching their decks
Taking on every other decks on Solana
Attracting all the activity to itself. We'll discuss that in a little bit
We've got canary capital filing is for the first ever ETF with an NFT component via the Pengu ETF. We'll get into those
details in just a little bit and our takes on it. We've also got Telegram focused Ton Foundation
saying that VCs have bought over $400 million worth of Toncoin. We'll give you those details
in a little bit as well as the general price action on crypto and entities plus a general discussion
on market thoughts as usual.
So stay tuned for that.
I've got Legendary and Brad with me in the co-host seats.
We're ready to get into it, but just to remind our friends
before we do nothing that we say here is financial advice.
This market is very risky
and therefore we don't know anything for sure.
Please proceed with caution and exercise your own judgment
with that out of the way.
Legendary, it is Friday.
Finally, it's the 21st of March. How are you doing?
How are you feeling?
GM, GM doing quite well.
I did a little something yesterday as a result of our show.
And that little something was buying a first batch of Tesla stock.
So let's see how that will age over the next year or so I actually had this post up on X like for five
minutes saying Howard Lutnick said to buy a Tesla stock. So
I'm following his financial advice. But then I was like,
nah, better to delete that, especially after I've seen a
couple of reports, I didn't check if they're like true or
not. But of some alleged French people, journalists, whatever
who wanted to travel into the U S and they were stopped from doing that after they had a couple
more critical comments on social media regarding Trump and administration.
So I was like, maybe I shouldn't post that Howard Lutnick is giving
financial advice on, on whatever it was, CNN or CNBC.
I don't know.
Reasonable take. Um, is that from one of his news appearances? Because I was
actually watching the all in interview that they did with him. I think they
only published it yesterday. They published a whole hour long with Scott
Besant. Is it Besant? And then they did did a whole one with Lutnick as well.
So I'm like halfway through that was watching that before the show today.
Where was the advice?
Was it there or was it somewhere else?
No, it was on some sort of TV interview where they showed pictures of burning
Tesla's et cetera, et cetera.
And, uh, he was saying basically stock is so cheap, like this guy's building so,
so much massively undervalued, apparently also holding Tesla stock himself is what some of the
reports did say. I'd be curious to know if you can even do that.
Just, you know, from a legal standpoint, if that is the
correct way to show stocks on TV, but I have no idea.
I don't know, I do think they feel kind of obliged to with Tesla in particular,
because Elon's Elon is so involved, and has been so
helpful to to them. I think they probably feel a little bit
obliged feel a bit bad for him in that, you know, the stock is
almost literally going up in fire at the moment. And although,
as we've been speaking about,
one of the reasons it's kind of got our attention is, forget the cars for a second, which I still
think are pretty cool. I think a lot of people think that the optimus robot aspect of Tesla is
just not being priced in at all. Is that what you're thinking was legendary or you still kind of
bullish on the car side as well?
Now, all I want is exposure to human robotics. And I told you that I watched this.
Let me see if we can actually pull it up on screen real quick.
I think I can this Boston dynamics video.
There we go.
Where you can see that this guy is getting super athletic, even, um, being able, yeah, there you go.
Doing his little, his little judo like role, the Boston dynamics robot
that I'm sharing on screen.
It's getting pretty impressive, but obviously that's not a publicly traded
company and he's also going to do a little handstand, I think.
So the movements for those watching us on screen are looking, there we go.
This is a handstand.
Are looking pretty, uh, and then flipping over,
are looking pretty natural.
That's seriously impressive.
And fortunately, he's break dancing.
Yeah.
This is a very agile robot, arguably more agile.
I mean, we said we need to get back in the gym, Legendary.
You're saying on a scale here,
how is this robot more
agile than you at the moment or less? Definitely more agile than me. I have to admit, you know,
all right. So most of that's like, whatever it's doing the same motions as us. Fine. Cool. Whatever
robot dude you're catching up. Fine. But what scares me in that video is the move, the handstand
move, because he's now doing the robot thing.
I don't know if you guys saw it, but like he goes up into a handstand.
He twists his hips totally around and then lands the other direction.
That's a robot thing, right?
Us humans, we can't twist our torso 180 degrees.
So now we're starting to get in the realm of only robot movements.
And that scares me.
Um, doom is closer than we think, I think.
Sounds like a content creator platform. Only bots. Only robots.
Oh, yeah. My task, all right, so this is going to be kind of weird. My task for like maybe
tests and launches is, hey, hooray, candles. But I had to test one of our applications
for that. And like, I have to only robot. I'm wondering whether I'm excited. There's one of
our apps is an AI AI, like girlfriend platform, right? So it's like, these people are AI companions,
right? So it's not like you it's multimodal. So you can like call them, text them, do whatever.
But I like I have to start testing this shit
to make sure that stuff actually works.
And that means like, I have to have, you know,
my girl here while I'm generating an AI waifu.
And then like, it inherently is kind of like
leaning into the sexual thing.
So it's like, I can do everything I can.
Like, ah, it's a muscular girl doing whatever.
And it's like, man, I, it's like,
I had to defend myself from making AI waifu this weekend and this past week. Yeah, it's coming.
How is that explanation coming across that for research purposes, you need to test an
AI waifu, which is also sexualized?
Yeah, man. We're still figuring that one out.
It's just the test net version. It's going to get real. Like anything.
Yeah. Yeah. Just wait till it lives on Jane. Not that she knows what that means, but
exactly. Interesting stuff. Yeah. Need. It's funny how I think in general on the investing side,
it does. I do feel like I'm in the mode now where new stuff's happening. And because
we've been in this mode for a few years, it's like, as soon as
you see something cool, it's like, well, how do we invest?
How do we invest that we'll see in the snapshot today? There's
like this uranium. There's a uranium piece of news. It's like,
how do we get exposure? Nuclear? How do we get exposure?
Robots? How do we get exposure? I think it's reasonable get exposure? Robots? How do we get exposure?
I think it's reasonable.
Is it reasonable to be thinking about these things because they're kind of in the arena?
I mean, the dream is in the future, like you get permissionless access to it, right?
Like there's some form of stuff.
So like outside like private companies that like do whatever, you know, I listened to
a podcast yesterday where they're talking about how like it's probably going to be tough to
get a lot of these existing stocks to take their like their actual already deployed to
to the stock market, Coinbase, Tesla, whatever to get that actually on chain. They're trying
to do some of that. You're seeing it now, right? Coinbase is there, but they're saying
the thing that we're probably going to see is the primary market come across where you have these small to medium companies start on chain, right?
Where then it's no longer us having to go and try to pull in the assets from traditional markets.
It's on chain becomes the market, right?
It is the thing that then traditional people start doing the ETF style stuff where they're trying to get access to our assets by doing the traditional formation of it again ETF or you know whatever so hopefully the flow if the
flow starts going in that direction like shit gets crazy but you know it's
probably not for the foreseeable future sounds pretty exciting though funky your
hat is raised welcome to the stage my man what is your thought here we're
kind of going off on the tangent what kind of various things we can get
investing in what are your thoughts on this or anything
else?
Just just real quick question about bread's waifu. Her name
Samantha by any chance, because I can't help but think that the
movie, her is actually set in 2025. So it's kind of scary to
think about how quick
all this stuff is coming, right?
AI waifus, what not.
Yeah, so I did everything I could to make it like normal,
quote unquote, literally like personality's normal,
face is normal, normal.
I literally wrote normal in all the descriptions
and still spit out this like pinup girl, like flexy thing.
I guess, yeah, I don't even remember what the name was.
I think it's, I don't know. It was like animey thing. I guess, yeah, I don't even remember what the name was. I think it's, uh, I don't know. It was like anime or something. I'll see if I can find it.
It's going to be a recurring storyline now. I mean, quick, quick comment on that actually,
because it happened just a week ago in the Netherlands. There is a guy who got married
to an AI chatbot in the Netherlands.
And the Dutch data protection authority had to comment on that.
And they were basically, that's like a legit commentary by the
official, you know, data protection agency talking about
the risks of having an AI as a romantic partner.
Official report required for the government.
Interesting.
Bullish on AI moving forward, wondering how we can invest in that as well.
Maybe that's something to consider.
Look, we've got to get into it.
We've got to slightly...
The YouTube comments, someone saying, Marco Polo is saying, imagine your married chatbot
taking half of your crypto in the event of a divorce.
I mean, they would definitely know where it is as well.
They would definitely know where it is.
Talking of crypto, let's get into it starting with the price action as usual, what you need
to hide from your future AI spouses.
Bitcoin is down a percent to 84k.
We've got ETH down a percent at 1.9.
XRP is down almost 4% to 2.4 Solana is down 3% as well to 126
dollars on the meme coin side of things we have Doge down a couple of percent to 16
Pepe is down a couple percent to chumps down 5% to 10 cents. Whiff is one of the only ones it's
kind of stationary Bonk is stationary as well Pengu is down 10% on the news of the Pengu ETF.
That's a bit of a shame, but we'll get into some of the bigger details there along with
the NFT price action. We have Fartcoin down 5%, although that's up 36% on the week. So
that went up quite a lot the other day. And we have any other relevant ones.
Mog is down five percent that's been down for a long time now.
I think that's probably AIXBT is down a few percent as well.
So mostly down today I'd say on the meme coin side of things in terms of the main
headlines we've got Pumpfun launching its decks that's been disastrous for
other decks on Solana. Radium has really suffered
as a consequence. So we're going to dive into that in a bit. We've got Canary Capital filing
the first ever ETF with an NFT component via the Pengu ETF. NFTs did pump briefly and then
kind of settled back down to where they were. I think the, the Pengu token itself is the one
that suffered the most out of that news. Whereas NFTs in general, actually, in this whole downturn
have held relatively strong. Telegram focused Ton Foundation says VCs have bought over $400 million
worth of Toncoin. We'll describe, we'll get into the information you need to know on that legendary.
Is there anything on the NFT side that we need to know? There's actually just one thing to really comment on and that's the Good Vibes Club,
which has seen its first major correction yesterday down more than 30% down 31%
at a 0.28 ETH floor. But with that being said, the volume of the collection is still pretty strong,
still 126 ETH in 24-hour volumes,
which is translating to a total of 260 sales, but it is the first setback in the collections
for price, so they thought it's worthwhile mentioning that.
Fair enough. Well, there's always high volume when lots of people selling in selling, so
that is, I guess the team will still be making their money there and hopefully
getting some good runway to continue building up.
And getting into the rest of the WebD roundup, we've got Meta, a bunch of interesting pieces
here.
MetaPlanet, Japan's biggest corporate Bitcoin holder, adds Eric Trump as an advisor.
I think a few people are asking questions about what is going on there.
But he's been added to the strategic board of advisors to
boost Bitcoin adoption. Total stablecoin market cap has surged past all time high of $230 billion
dollars at the walrus foundation securing 140 billion dollars in fundraising led by standard
crypto as well as participation from a 16 z electric capital and a few other prominent
16z, electric capital and a few other prominent VCs had Salana decks or cut up 100% after its
upbit listing. I think it was actually more than that. In the end, you have a mintify announcing
AI powered trading of on-chain assets. It sounds pretty cool. The founder tweeted. This was Evan,
who said, excited to unveil mint AI soon you'll be able to trade on-chain assets effortlessly with
simple prompts, cover hidden gems through a
personalized discovery feed. I think that's pretty cool. Obviously,
people exploring AI stuff with trading kind of tokens, maybe
generating yield and saying go and park my stablecoin somewhere.
I haven't really heard that for other digital assets. So I wonder if
NFTs will be included there.
DeFi Dungeons pre-sale hit $130 million yesterday,
committed for their game token 24 hours.
So it seemed like people were willing to,
some risk was ready to be put back on yesterday.
And then the thing I mentioned at the top of the show,
Uranium Digital announced a $6.1 million seed round
to accelerate the creation of new market for nuclear energy.
I'm super interested in that.
The thesis for that, which was shared by one of the investors was that this is an incredible, like a huge market, but just not
a good way for people to get access to it at the moment.
So they want to create the new market for the future of nuclear
energy and the modernization of its fuel cycle trading
infrastructure.
And interesting stuff.
That is the WebD roundup. Legendary before we get into the main stuff today.
And we're going to have to go a little bit speedier.
Remember, we've got the interview with our partners, Zero G Lab to a building,
seeking to build the largest L1 for AI a little bit later in the show today.
So that's coming up.
Looking forward to have that conversation. Um, but before we get there,
Ledge, what's, uh, anything catching your attention here?
I've got one thing to bring up in particular.
Yeah, there's two things. I mean,
you can probably guess that they really find the uranium digital news pretty,
pretty interesting. This is the protocol I think that we had mentioned, um,
a while ago and seeing that there's a couple of assets that are typically a bit
harder to trade coming on chain is something that I find interesting. It's actually something
that I want to trade myself as well. And then on the other hand, also just Stefano mentioned
it in the YouTube comments. So I do think we have to bring it up real quick is Zach XBT's post, the thread on the hyper liquid whale. Zach XBT once again did amazing, amazing
work in identifying the guy I think even found his dual lingo
account as part of this. Yeah, as a part of his research. And
it did turn out that this has been someone who's been engaged
in illicit activities.
Years ago was arrested for stealing a million dollars
from two casinos in 2023.
You want to share this, Ledge?
Have you got it on the screen?
Gonna bring it up.
Oopsie, there we go.
Gonna bring it up on screen.
So this William Parker person was also known
as Alistair Pakover before changing his name. Also made headlines in the UK
in the 2010s for fraud charges related to both hacking and gambling and again got arrested in
2023 again and apparently is now using or has been using some of these funds to gamble on
hyperliquid as well. So amazing, amazing research, very interesting thread,
very interesting breakdown by Zach XPT.
That's the depth of his resources is insane.
Like he goes into it a little bit there and just like
the power and what he does is not because he's like
any good at one thing.
It's that he's got like this incredible tool belt
of stuff that he went in when combined like in one stage of
this, he goes in and says like, he like has a resource for Oh,
I got this guy's phone number and then I have contacts at
this other place and then I get their like the phone number dug
back into the actual like, you know, the registry for it and
then I go because I have that like he's talking about going
into get their Duolingo because I have access to the people who
have access to the registry that's tied to the number and then then like, it's just, he's got to contact at all of these
various disparate things that in isolation are probably not like anyone can go cold,
but he has the ability to get through the next thing every single time. And that's why
like in aggregate, his entire reports are crazy.
Yeah, you can see parts of that here where he talks exactly about the phone number.
And then he finds the PayPal, the dual lingo, the chest.com, the medium account,
the Adobe account, the Zapier account, everything related to that as well.
Um, it's a pretty impressive.
It just reminds me, it's kind of tangential, but it reminds me of, I was
listening to podcasts two days ago on Larry Gagosian, who's obviously this
huge, huge art dealer now, probably the biggest
in the world. And they talked about his network as being one of the reasons why he became
so successful. So when he had all these, he worked for some previously really well connected
people who had like placed a lot of high value art with people. And that industry is famously
opaque, right? You don't
know, you don't even know where the work is. Like people don't know who's sold to who, no one knows
where it is. So one of the reasons for his success was that he built up this network over time of
knowing every single, every single like famous piece of work, he would just know who had it,
who sold it to who. And then he became the
person that was selling it from one person to another. There's actually this story where he
sold a piece from one person to another person on a Wednesday, and then by Friday, he'd sold it to a
person beyond the... he'd sold it to the next person before the people he sold you on Wednesday had even taken, had even taken custody.
And each time on each sale, he's taking 30%.
So 30% was the number that he would get on each commission.
But the point being-
Like a Pender's fee?
Yeah, but the point being without that specific network
and build it, he basically built this map of the world
and all the great pieces.
And in aggregate, in isolation, it means nothing, but together it becomes
like this super powerful, super powerful thing.
Now, let me extend that to the crypto market and give some advice to people
in the audience and listening on YouTube and wherever else you are.
Right.
Like the, this is something that it's always been hard for us, like being
transparent, us to even price, right?
Like there is value in the network that you have built up through credibility connections,
like, you know, common interactions.
Like you accumulate friends and confidants, acquaintances throughout all this stuff.
And it's hard to price that.
But there is value in that.
And I think that's a great example of it.
But you see it in other things, right?
Like because, you know, you want to say
your Twitter profile, all this stuff, right? People that follow you back because of something you did
six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, like there is value in that, right? And if you know
those people, if you have a mental model of the person that would be good for X for any other
person, it would be, it would behoove you guys to recognize that and try to do your best to leverage it. I agree.
Great, great advice, I think.
Okay, let's, we've got a bunch of stuff to get into.
Let's get straight into it then, Brad.
First headline for today is PumpFun launching a Dex.
What do we need to know here?
Is it over for the rest of these Solana applications
as PumpFun wants to take it all?
Yeah, it's gonna be tough because they own the user.
So what it is is PumpFun announced yesterday
that they are launching a DEX of their own.
PumpSwap specifically is the name for it.
It's gonna have instant migrations, zero migration fees
down from six of the previous one,
because again, they were using radium previously.
So Pump would launch a coin, they were using radium previously.
So pump would launch a coin, they let them,
they trade it locally and then eventually
it would migrate to radium.
That's why the rate token was pumping.
That's why everyone was kind of bullish on them for a while.
And actually counter to this,
radium is also launching their own launcher, right?
So now you have both of these people
that have verticalized the stack to try to acquire
a hundred percent of the fees the other person was,
the other company was.
So this is natural, it's a progression of any successful application, frankly. But anyways,
in-set migration, zero migration fees down from six, more liquidity, and they're doing a creative
revenue sharing in the future where a portion of the actual fees that are acquired from trading on
the decks will go to creators. Now they have a breakdown of the fees fees that are acquired from trading on the decks will go to creators.
Now, they have a breakdown of the fees as they are set to date, and it's roughly 0.25% fee
on all swaps on the decks, and 0.2% of that goes to the actual pool itself, and then 0.05%
goes back to pump swap or pump themselves. Now, there are,
like to understand the model of pump,
previously, if you guys aren't familiar,
pump actually made money whenever you were trading
on the bonding curve that it had
before the coin actually migrated to the pool.
Now, as a business, they are trading on,
like they're capturing the fees on the bonding curve.
And then now once it migrates to the actual DEX,
where it's an open permissionless thing, it's got a liquidity pool, that and they're now capturing fees over there as
well. So they're just verticalizing the stack of what was value leakage because there's been
millions and millions and millions of dollars that have been earned to Radium because that's
where they sent their coins, but now they earn that. Another few other notes, just the Dex itself is similar to Radium V4,
Uniswap V2, in that it's a constant product AMM,
so it's fairly standard for the industry.
They're doing a $2 million prize pool for auditing the smart contracts to make sure
that people try to find exploits before they actually go live with it,
or not go live with it, but $2 million just to make sure people find exploits.
And then there are a list of,
as part of their initial campaign of tokens
that are migrating to Solana to be traded
for the first time in order to like seed
some initial interest.
So some notable ones in there like say,
Jupiter's in there, Coinbase, the CBBTC is on there,
Tron, Aptos, Pengu's there, Frax.
Yeah, so a lot of interesting ones.
And then last and final note was I saw Athena
actually dropped an announcement
that they are gonna be a core pair asset,
core pair asset on the pump swap decks.
So the USDE can be used, uh, uh, natively.
One final note is that the next speculation for this is everyone goes,
Oh my God, pump chain is next.
Um, exactly what I was about to ask.
What, what, where does this go?
Yeah.
So everyone sees this thing.
Oh my God, pump chains coming, which probably, you know, at some point, because
eventually you like you crush your, your, um, your immediate domain. And then eventually
you want to capture even more revenue. So right now the next thing that it's leaking
revenue to would be, you know, the, the chain itself and paying fees, like whenever someone
tries to do a priority swap, they have to pay to the validators, all that stuff. So
the thought would be like,
oh, well, let's just do pump chain
because then we can capture that little bit of fees.
There's some headwinds with that.
I'm not necessarily sold that they will do it
because they kind of do require a little bit
of like community composability,
a lot of like interactivity with rest of the network.
Jupiter, they get a lot of love from Jupiter
because Jupiter is a good aggregator.
People are gonna go there to trade, even if it's on whichever
pool, it doesn't matter, right? That's why they like Jupiter is because it doesn't matter
which decks it's on. We've seen a uni chain, right? Uni chain is at the point, it's got
like $10 million in total TVL, right? Like people don't go there just to swap coins.
You go there for a bunch of reasons and then because you're there, you swap coins. So I
don't necessarily believe that there will be a pump chain.
I wouldn't surprise me, but that's,
that's the logical next step.
Interesting.
Okay. And one other final thing.
I thought it was kind of interesting.
I don't think this has been done before.
Create a revenue sharing.
I don't know if anyone's necessarily incentivized that
beforehand. Do you think that's an attempt to have coin creators stop dumping all their tokens on
everyone? Maybe they were incentivized to like, no, make it be better. It's hard because the
It's hard because the incentives is so skewed towards just getting rid of this stuff, right?
incentives are so skewed towards just getting rid of this stuff, right?
Yeah, like one, like the incentive is the creator should have a shift in our coins already.
So like the incentives are already there.
What this incentivizes and it's something similar to what we saw with the friend tech
stuff, right?
If you're getting it on swap fees, you're incentivizing volatility, not price go up.
So it's not necessarily aligned incentives.
They didn't have a ton of mechanisms to work with.
So it's not like they can just create something
that's perfect, but yeah, it'll be interesting.
I think it's negligible.
I don't think they'll have any impact.
Okay, yeah.
As we often think, it's just like figuring out
the incentives will probably just will
illuminate what direction it goes in.
And at the moment, as things stand, the incentive is to have a bunch of your own tokens and
probably sell them as the price goes up, but get the revenue share over a period of time. Um, legend, any thoughts on
Go, go on.
So you're technically double dipping, right? If I have a shit on my coins, I know i'm earning on fees
I can hold on to it while it goes up scare everyone with a quick sale and then on the sale scare people which increases volatility
Which makes me earn more and then like oh well now I can buy more then
I I buy some more which gives people confidence which is the price back, which then gives me a little bit more fees because I get, I
get 0.5% on that.
So it's like, yeah, I don't know that's necessarily aligned.
It's kind of like royalties for NFTs, right?
Where people, sometimes teams make huge monies going up, which people think is good, but
then they also absolutely print as the price is going down.
So interesting points.
Ledge, anything to come in on here?
Any thoughts?
Yes, sir.
Two comments on that.
A shout out to just Stefano and the YouTube comments
making the point, if we ever launch pump chain,
people can't take crypto seriously with names like that.
If we have a chain called pump chain.
Most serious comment on the stuff that Brett was saying
regarding Athena though, it's super interesting.
If you read into their announcement,
they're saying it's the altcoin market transition
from BTC pairings to USD.
We expect meme coins will eventually follow the same path
with Athena playing a key role.
So they do wanna see meme coins being denominated
against USD and not against Solana
or not against whatever other token they're trading.
Which then kind of begs the question, if you see on the one hand is positioning themselves
as being this like onboarding infrastructure for ThreatFi institutional capital on the one hand,
and that's the stablecoin infrastructure that the likes of BlackCroc and others will be using.
And then on the other hand, they are also the asset against which your next 10k shitter
is denominated against.
It's a very interesting balance to maintain if you want to play in both like the extremely
degen arena and become the denominated stable coin for meme coins that are trading on the
pump decks.
And you also want to have the stable coin infrastructure for the opposite end of the
spectrum to trade for an institutional capital.
I think Guy is just smart as F. Like the dude, like the creator, if you know, like you hear
him talk about a lot of stuff.
I think he just knows like, and I, this is where I have tried to talk about recently,
where I think the meme of exchange element of the moneyness is where I have tried to talk about recently, where I think the medium of exchange element
of the moneyness is where a lot of things get its value.
And he's trying to seed himself
as the medium of exchange asset
and a lot of asset creation areas, right?
Whether it's on their own chain or now in pump,
I just think he's smart to just inject himself there.
Yeah, I think there's a good point to bring up my thought on that is,
this is what I would say. Um, in a way I take your point, but we wouldn't say the same thing,
because if you think about what their intention is, and I hold no, you know, at the moment,
so I'm similar to, um, similar to overarching the comments at the moment saying, been debating,
taking a big in a position, but that unlocks and token jobs are always sold. So I'm similar to similar to over arch in the comments at the moment saying been debating taking a big E in
a position, but they're unlocks and token jobs are always sold.
So it's like, I'm trying to figure out the token position,
like I would love to get exposure. But I'm still quite
bullish on the team at least and what their vision is. If their
intention is to become money, like we wouldn't say oh, us
circle at USDC or are trying to play in both, both sides, right? They're just trying to become completely
ubiquitous. Yes, we're not exactly a stable coin. But we
are, you know, we are synthetic dollar that can be used for
whatever it might be that you need. Yes, we've got these
institutional connections, but you know, we are basically just
money and you can use us throughout the economy and whatever direction.
So I don't think
I agree.
But the pushback on that would be to say that exactly this is the criticism that's, you know, has been constantly going around.
And yes, it's gotten weaker that all of crypto is used to money laundering, illicit, weird activities, drug pools and scams.
And then if you're like more conservative institution, you would probably have the same
And then if you're like more conservative institution, you would probably have the same
years and like, oh wait, you're also the guys doing that weird meme coin stuff as well.
And not only our side of the business, this is where I still think there's like a bit
of a issue, a bit of a challenge to solve with that narrative.
Yeah.
Okay.
I see what you mean.
I see what you mean.
That that's a fair point.
Funky, you've got something to come in on
this before we head into the next headline.
Yeah, just real quick. I mean, I totally agree with Brett. I met Guy at DOS just a few days
back. I watched him speak on a panel and really that does kind of surprise me considering
what he's talking about on the panel was sort of just making the converge chain all about luring in the
big trad five players to kind of use that as, as the place to do a lot of their
trading and stuff like that.
So it was interesting just hearing all this back and forth, but yes,
completely concur with guy.
He struck me as super, super smart.
And I chatted with him for a couple of minutes after he was done on the panel.
Good stuff.
Reporter on the ground, funky coming in strong.
Appreciate it, man. Look,
we've got about seven to 10 minutes before we get into our big interview for the day.
We're speaking with Michael, CEO of Zero G Labs in just a little bit. Two headlines
to still get through. Let's get into this Canary Capital Pengu ETF one. There's a lot
of excitement on the timeline about this one. This is the news this Canary Capital Pengu ETF one. There's a lot of excitement on the timeline about this one.
This is the news that Canary Capital
have filed for a very unique first of its kind
hybrid NFT and meme coin ETF
with the Pudgy Penguin NFT and Token Pengu included.
It's important because I think it's the first example
where NFT has been included in this type of a filing
and the first time a huge Web3 brand
has managed to demand this type of exposure.
In terms of the specific details, they said in seeking to achieve this investment objective, the trust will invest in a portfolio consisting primarily of Pengu, the official token of the
Pudgy Penguins project and secondly, Pudgy Penguins non-fungible token, so the NFTs.
And the trust will also hold other digital assets like eth and soul, but only to the extent that
they're necessary, or instead of sort to the purchase of Pengu
and the NFTs. Crucially, the crucial detail, which I'm not
sure was even in this headline article that we're sharing on
the screen, which but it's important to know is that the
specific amounts or the ratio between Pengu tokens to NFTs is 80 to 95% Pengu tokens and
five to 15% Pudgy Penguin NFTs. So I think this is pretty historic in some sense, awesome
news for the Pudgy Penguins team and Web3 more broadly. It's also, I think it's pretty
gratifying to see teams that do ship things keep pushing forward. And no, I don't think that necessarily means that it's
immediately a hit with loads of demand and the things just all for all kind of fall into place.
But I think they deserve to be in the arena. They've shipped so much when it comes to real
world stuff that it's nice to see them be in the conversation and push push things forward. Now,
the next challenge will be obviously to compete with all the other ETFs that we're
seeing.
Obviously, you've got the king ETF Bitcoin, which everyone is just starting to wake up
to and starting to allocate to and has done extraordinarily well.
But we are obviously seeing a whole host of other ETFs going through and that trend is
definitely going to continue.
So a lot of competition, but I think it's pretty
cool to see that come through. Ledge, any thoughts here on this? What are your thoughts? What are
your thoughts on the proportion as well? Yeah, honestly, ICO Beast had a pretty
spicy take on that. I'll bring it up on screen real quick. ICO said, I really don't think it
should be a hot take that a Pengu ETF is quite possibly the dumbest fucking thing I've seen in a while.
We don't need ETFs for ghost change, much less sub six months old meme coins.
If the boomers are barely interested in buying ETH, much less soul, why in the
world would they even consider touching something called Pengu?
I tend to agree, honestly, as a, you know, bullish on Pengu, bullish on the, the,
the ecosystem that Luca is building.
And yes, it's cool to kind of prove the concept theoretically that you can push
for a meme coin plus NFTs to be listed as an ETF, but you truly don't need that.
And a few people are making the point that Pachipenguin is not an NFT project.
They have retail stores selling the toy lines, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
ICOB said, yeah, so this is KFC, but they don't have an ETF.
And also I don't think this translation works.
Like if anything, and I said that in a post myself, I'd rather own Pudgy
Penguin stock if that were a publicly traded company at some point in the
future when they're big enough, but I don't see this translation working
that someone buys Pudgy Penguin plushies, toys, and is like, oh, there's
also a Penguin ETF, I might buy that as well. So, you know, no shade thrown. And I
think it's cool to prove the concept that you can have this as a vanished asset,
but I don't really think it's necessary to have a Pingu plus NFT ETF.
Fair enough. I think that's definitely one side of things. Bunky, your hand is raised.
Got to keep it moving quickly here.
What's your hot take here?
I just don't think that people,
these things are going to come,
we're going to see a lot more of these ETFs
because it's probably done the same way
that RecShares did the move ETF.
You just throw in a filing,
the SEC is probably not going to be taking time
to look through a lot of these things.
And it's just on a clock.
So my guess is this was put on the clock months ago, shortly after the PENGU release, and
then it just kicks over.
And if they don't get the stop order from the SEC to actually have them examine these
things, it basically just gets listed.
I think we're going to continue to see a rash of these kinds of ETFs pop up.
I definitely agree with that.
There's going to be a hell of a lot of competition amongst them to, you know, compete with what is probably not a huge amount of capital that's wanting
to get into digital assets yet. And if they do want to, or as they're learning more, it's
probably going to get directed to Bitcoin, right? At least as that the first hurdle that
people need to get through. Having said that, I think my, my, my, my thought still stands,
which is, you know, we want to keep pushing the space forward. And I think I
actually, I don't mind that it's, it's there. I think it's
cool that aiming, aiming high, man, just aiming high,
absolutely going for it. Yes, I think it's gonna be really
challenging. And it will be now it's kind of like the thing
where people do airdrops and people wonder like, is
this worth doing? I think it's a door that is now open that was not open before. It's an opportunity
to win demand. And so that's my optimistic perspective is like, yeah, sure, we can just
say that there isn't the demand now. I think that's, that's probably true. But it's an opportunity
to win demand. And let's see how they go. Good stuff. I take the kind of push
back on that as well. The final headline for the day, let's we
got telegram focused ton foundation, buying selling sorry,
two VCs, a lot of Tom, we've seen this a bunch of times that
times that recently, right? We spoke about Athena selling like a ton of OTC tokens, uh,
recently, right, we spoke about Athena selling like a ton of
kind of resetting the, the, the raise amount in the sense, because it means that everyone's
cost basis is much higher. All the people who are holding, what do we need to know here?
What, why is this important?
It's actually a massive, massive headline that I think has been under the radar for
many people. There's a group of VCs that includes Sequoia Capital,
Ribbit, which recently invested in Privy,
Benchmark, Kingsway, buying more than $400 million worth
of Tone, the cryptocurrency of the Telegram app.
And as you have said, they have been buying that
from the foundation.
Now what we don't know is the exact terms
and structure of the deal.
We don't know if that was discounted
or to what level this was discounted.
However, what we do know is that the Telegram user numbers
have been growing massively.
Telegram has recently surpassed a billion users worldwide.
That is for monthly active users, around 450 million, sorry, about 450 million
daily active users, 10 million being subscribers to Telegram premium.
Not necessarily the most popular app in the US with only 9% of the American
population using that, but 45% for example
of the Indian population using it.
Just to add a couple more stats because I think they're interesting.
Half of the Telegram users are between 25 and 44 years old, so it kind of seems to also
fit well with the core group of crypto users and they do make money not only on the subscriptions,
there is a lot of activity going on on the token side of things as well with 120 million unique
holders of Tonecoin with 40 million blockchain users. I was honestly surprised to learn that
blockchain users. And I feel like I was honestly surprised to learn that because on Telegram,
you have the subscription, you have the Telegram gifts, which are rings, stickers, teddy bears,
like the drop sometimes in limited quantities, which you can buy and with the A key to yourself
or gift to others using in-app purchases. And I did not know that, hence I'm glad that Whale had a thread on that,
that the Telegram NFT gifts are actually
basically ton NFTs and they are seeing
quite a lot of economic activity on that.
Most of them do cost anywhere between two and $50.
And I've also recently seen a purchase by Pavel Durov,
the Telegram founder,
purchasing the most coveted one,
the Golden Plush Pepe for 13,000 US dollars
a couple of days ago.
And they are doing $500,000 in daily volume on that
with 67,000 wallets who have traded gifts
between their Telegram accounts so far.
So it's interesting to see that this is basically, I think one of the more
interesting examples for like blockchain technology that you don't really know
that it's happening in the background while you're using the app, because
me as a web three native, I didn't know that.
Um, and then I can see why you have Kingsway, Sequoia Capital, and some others coming in and purchasing a
very, very large amount of the TON token.
But again, it would be also interesting to know more of the terms of those deals with
the foundation.
The thing that's interesting with this, I was having this debate with Naveen, who's
one of the founders of Atari,
which is a privacy proof of work blockchain. And it's like, it's always the conversation
around distribution and like who owns the user and where the power is with that. It's
kind of similar to what pump was just doing, right? Pump owns the user relationship because
of a lot of the coin launches and stuff, which means they have the power to launch a DEX
and then maintain drive fees, like verticalize.
The same argument was made early on for ton blockchain
because it's like, well,
Telegram is massively distributed, right?
Like it's got a shit ton of users.
And if you can just tack on things after the fact,
like a blockchain, a full on blockchain,
is that a second attempt at it,
you can potentially utilize it
in ways that are valuable, useful,
and can drive a lot of revenue.
Now the counter to that is that I think pretty universally everyone said 10 blockchains is
dog shit.
Frankly, like it's just the coding languages it actually uses is very opaque and different,
right?
So it's hard to bring on developers.
It's not very intuitive.
It's not very performant.
It's just got a lot of things going for it
that just aren't awesome.
And yet you see some of this stuff actually having success
like changing telegram names, actually selling that stuff.
That's something that's very obvious to us as a use case
that is meaningful and we think would be useful
that people are selling them for hundreds of thousands
of dollars.
My question is, I don't know if you've, I noticed the stars thing previously.
I thought that was a good way for a blockchain or a token forward company to issue or have tokens
to be sold without actually having to sell them. Right. So you buy these stars,
which are just like end game currencies. They can actually keep their telegram
app inside of the app stores, right. Without losing a fee, or they can actually just pay
their fee.
But they can bypass a lot of the concerns that typically don't let apps go into the
app store.
And then on the back end, you do the conversion to Tonecoin and then like you buy sell and
have some speculation there.
I don't know, do you need to KYC to buy those stars in the front end?
Because that was kind of know if you buy, I did buy stars before.
So obviously if you buy in the play store or in the app store,
you will have some sort of query card or other like means of purchase
and to use the app or play store, you need to KYC previously.
So if you go via the mobile app, you will be quote unquote soft KYC
with either Android or Apple, but
you don't have to KYC specifically within the Telegram ecosystem, neither on the app
side nor on the blockchain side.
Interesting stuff. Good to dive into the Telegram ecosystem. We don't spend, we always know
that it is relevant and the numbers are extraordinary. We don't spend, we always know that it's relevant and
the numbers are extraordinary. Like the numbers are absolutely extraordinary coming out of
that ecosystem. So good to touch in there. Guys want to keep it moving now delighted
to welcome to the stage our partners at Zero. Gee, Michael, welcome to the stage with us.
Great to have you on the show. I know you've been flying around like crazy
at the moment around the world.
Where have you been recently?
Where are you now?
Yeah, it's been a little bit intense.
I've been to probably eight countries
over the last few weeks.
So it's been super fun. But right now I'm in New York for
I took in the red eye yesterday. So running on fours of sleep or so, but it's exciting.
I think in the same time that we organized the interview, I've been like the time zone thing has
been doing my head in because like the daylight savings has been going, but in that same period of time, I think you've been in three completely different time zones.
So it's just been like very, very difficult to sort it out. But yeah, you're on the move,
obviously, because zero G has a lot going on at the moment. I just want to introduce you properly,
get people up to speed with what you guys are building. So it's pretty interesting. And then
really excited to get into this conversation. So obviously Michael is the founder of Zero G,
who is seeking to build the largest L1 blockchain for AI.
We're gonna talk about what that means a little bit.
Before Zero G, Michael worked as a consultant at Bain
and at Bridgewater during the financial crisis
and built a startup which went from 300K ARR
in its first year to 100 mil in four years.
After the business went through significant upheaval during COVID, Michael met his
technologist co-founders who were the founders of China's largest and only regulatory compliant L1.
And after some back and forth, they decided to build ZeroG together. Interested to dive in there.
They raised $35 million pre-seed from top investors like Alliance, Animoca, Delphi,
Stanford Builders Fund, and a couple of others. And in this conversation, we're going to be
focusing on Michael's journey towards Zero G, the vision behind Zero G and its product,
and how Michael thinks about building the largest blockchain for AI and what that means. So Michael,
as I said, welcome to the show. Maybe let's start back at the beginning of Zero G.
So you met your co-founders
and one of the first things I've read
when I was looking into that was
they were the founders of China's largest
and only regulatory compliant L1 called Conflux.
So how did this happen?
How did that relationship start?
What made you decide that these were the group of people
that you wanted to build ZeroG with? Yeah, one day essentially my classmate from Stanford, Thomas Yao, reached out to me.
And we've done a number of kind of deals together in the blockchain space. We've learned about
Bitcoin together. We listened to Mark Andreessen before, and I was a DFJ fellow.
We listened to Tim Draper before.
Some of our classmates also were talking about Bitcoin at the time.
And essentially, we were getting the message,
hey, we need to really check this thing out.
This was like 2013, 2014 time zone.
We bought some Bitcoin together and then later on we participated in ICOs
kind of 2016-17. Thomas's fund was also very early into Ethereum and Metamask and so on.
So we've kind of approached it from an investment standpoint before. And when he reached out
to me, he essentially said that five years ago, and this was late 2022,
five years ago, I invested in this company called Conflux. Ming and Fan, two of the
co-founders, are some of the best engineers and computer scientists I've ever backed.
I'd like you to meet them. They want to start something more global scale.
And so that was literally the premise. And we got together and after six months of co-founder dating, I came to
the same conclusion. I don't even care what we start, we just have to start something.
So it really started with the team. And Ming, for example, spent 11 years at Microsoft Research,
wrote some of the key research around distributed storage,
distributed compute, wrote some of the first AI algorithms
for Microsoft Bing as well.
Phan was his intern initially, but is a two-time Olympic gold
medalist in informatics, MIT computer science
PhD, University of Toronto professor as well.
And then they started conflicts together.
Wow.
That's an extraordinary set of, I think, achievements.
Just a quick one before we get into more of the details.
When you talk about co-founded dating, I definitely resonate from a business perspective.
Legendry is the person I've been co founded dating for the longest bread has come in a
little bit later. What's like when you're starting things out,
I think we've got a lot of entrepreneurial people in the
audience as well. When you're starting things out from a
business perspective, and I know you've you've done other
businesses before as well, right, you ran a startup called
Garton, your first client was Apple, I believe from the stuff
I didn't you had like extraordinary success before
COVID kind of made things a bit difficult. What are you what are
you how are you trying to set up that company with the people
around you in order to be successful?
Yeah, for Gartner was very interesting because I started
while I was in graduate school, essentially. So I took a class
called the lean Launchpad.
And that was taught by Steve Blank.
I don't know if you know Steve Blank,
but he's kind of the father of the Lean Startup movement.
So if you heard of things like MVP, customer development,
get outside of the building, so he's really
behind a lot of that.
And so he became a mentor to me.
And his first thing is basically,
there's nothing you can do inside the building.
Nobody is going to figure out, or you're not
going to discover customer needs by being inside the building.
So get outside the building, talk to actual customers,
figure out what they want, and then build a business model
that's viable around that.
And so that was the mentality that I approached things with.
And then the next thing he said is,
well, once you figure out a need,
then you have to figure out how to scale it.
Like, who do you know in a particular company
if it's B2B is the buyer, who's the user,
who's the economic decision maker, who's the saboteur,
who's the influencer and different company decisions.
And so he was very systematic.
And so that was the type
of mindset I took to building Garton before. And it was quite fun during the class, we actually
started producing revenue because we started seeing that there was something that customers
really needed. We started out, so it was a B2B well-being company, and we started out with
kind of nutrition needs.
And so just with the thing that was the most process
that we take into our bodies generally, which is snacks.
And we, within two weeks, put up an e-commerce site
just to test a bunch of things out.
And then about a month into the class,
the first order from Apple came in.
And it had like an app at apple.com email associated
with it.
I'm like, oh, really?
Did Apple just buy something from us?
And then I started LinkedIn stalking this person.
And it's like, whoa, this is a real person.
And she works with the VP of design at Apple.
This is so cool.
And then basically hand-delivered stuff
and just asked her a bunch of questions around why
did you do it and so on.
And then just took off from
there. But that first order is just like, I don't know,
mind blowing. It's just
I'm so bullish on on that that interaction that you just had
like, like whenever someone does something that is shows that
they latched on right, whether it's like on to something that
you wrote or something that you're doing something you're
building, and you get immediate feedback from like, what resonated with you? Like, I'm, because I
know from your side, you're like, I'm just trying shit, like, I'm doing something I think is right,
I'm not sure what's resonating. And then it hits with someone, you're like, all right, I need to
distill whatever they saw into like a repeatable, scalable thing. And then that's kind of where
where something can come from. So yeah, you need to have that that intuition to seek out that
feedback from those initial people
to really curate stuff.
And do you remember what she said?
What clicked with her to make the order with you guys?
Yeah, what clicked was that essentially we curated
an experience where she didn't need to think about it.
Because if she goes to other places, she's like,
well, I don't know what's healthy.
I don't know what to order. I don't know what to order.
I don't know if my team's going to like it.
And the way we approach it is basically
like we're going to take away all the nutrition
pieces for you.
We will do that.
And then we will also do a bunch of the taste testing
so that you know you have a great product in front of you.
And so we had maybe 30 different products on the side
at the time that they were all taste tested,
which is a really tough job.
Just kidding.
And it was just a very easy experience.
And so that's what she really enjoyed about that experience.
And we just kept building on top of that.
And then eventually we discovered
that it wasn't just kind of the snack pieces,
but it was overall nutrition.
And then we built a service around that, that scale.
And then beyond nutrition, we figured out
that it's actually billing is a big issue, because usually
people just get a bunch of Excel sheets.
And they're like, wait, did I really
spend $10,000 on gum?
This doesn't seem right.
My entire bill is $50,000, but $10,000 is going to come.
Something is not right here.
And so we built a SaaS platform for that.
And then it just kind of went like this.
And we just built more and more and more services.
So it really became a one-stop shop experience
for all well-being within an office.
That's incredible.
One thing that you mentioned for one of the maybe the professor said is you can't figure out stuff inside, you got to go outside. I don't know if this is the right comparison, but I think, is there any comparison there with when people are building in like one region, and then trying to go outside? Because I know, for example, we were speaking to Legendary before this, actually.
And we noticed that a lot of the zero G traction, for example,
where it may be in the Western bubble, a lot of it
is out in the East.
And as you said, your co-founders
are the founders of China's largest compliant L1.
That's what they were involved in.
How do you see these two hemispheres?
To what extent are you trying to be big in both?
Do you feel like you need to specialize?
How do you attack both angles, or are you just
going for all of it in one go?
Yeah, when I was running Garton, the answer
was very different versus today. So at Garton, the answer was very different versus today.
So at Garton, the way we looked at it is we just wanted to know everything about one segment
so that we could scale very, very rapidly in that segment.
So it was literally very closely defined, 50 to 250 employee companies that are tech-focused
in the Bay Area.
It's super narrow.
Very, very specific, yeah.
Yeah, because I just wanted to know everything about their customer type because they were focused in the Bay Area. It's super narrow. Very, very specific, yeah.
Yeah, because I just wanted to know everything
about their customer type, because they were eventually
paying for our service.
And so scaling was much, much easier
because they had a certain specific set of needs
that we could then meet both on the technology
and on the product side.
And then it made scaling very, very efficient.
Now, with 0G, it's a little bit different
because we have a high performance, essentially
layer one.
We've got a decentralized compute network.
We've got a decentralized storage network.
We have a service marketplace, which is kind of an app store,
if you will, and then AI alignment nodes on top of that.
And so it's a very modular design
where different customer sets can figure out
what they need for their particular platform.
You can use all of it or you can use a part of it.
And so the regional focus is not as useful anymore.
It's more a psychographic focus, if you will.
And so people in the West can use it,
people in the East can use it, People in the East can use it, depending
on the different types of use cases
that they're looking for.
And so it's been less of a geographic focus for us.
And so we want to make sure that the key regions are represented
from both a trading as well as a usage volume
perspective for Zero G. So it's a different approach.
Got it.
I understand.
I think Brad's going to dive in a bit more on the product
side in just a moment.
Talking about more global demand,
though, one thing that is global is the money, I think.
And there's been real demand on the investment side for Zero G.
I think I don't know if I have all the details of all
of the different raises, but there's the $35 million pre-seed from top investors like Alliance, Animoca, Delphi, and a few
others, OKX Ventures as well, is incredibly successful.
I think you did, I think maybe there was a seed round as well and then the node sale
on top of that.
Do you want to speak to the strategy of just raising funds and why you thought your attempt
to do that was so
successful and where you guys stand with that at the moment?
Yeah within the ZeroG ecosystem there's a couple organizations at least one is the ZeroGravity
Labs entity which is the core contributor to the network.
That's what I'm the co-founder and CEO of.
That entity has raised the pre-seed, which is 35 million, plus another seed of 40 million.
And then there's the ZeroG Foundation, which is more kind of like the governance and long-term
kind of grant and investment entity, if you will.
And that entity has conducted a successful note sale of more than 33 million and also
has a liquid token commitment
of 250 million as well.
So each one of the organizations needs
to be capitalized differently.
And the strategy around it was just
to make sure that we have a high performance ecosystem over time.
Got it.
Makes sense.
And Legendry, I think, is going to dive
into some of the tokenomics maybe a little bit later,
because you revealed those not so long ago,
which is pretty exciting.
But Brad, maybe I'll come to you here.
Brad's our technical expert.
So he's going to get into some more of the product
and what maybe the vision is.
Yeah, honestly, so Michael did a little bit
of the heavy lifting for me right there.
But just to summarize, because 0G is not
your typical construction.
And I think you probably have received some headwinds
because of that, right?
There's a user education journey that you have to have.
So like, I'm just gonna do a high level
and then maybe you can bridge the gap
or anything that I didn't cover.
So, you know, just to summarize for,
in ways that people might understand in the audience,
right, it's an L1, it's EVM compatible.
But the thing that you talked about earlier, right, it's modular. So it's not, it's like the extreme modularity, right?
Because we use modularity in a space where it's like, okay, Ethereum is modular because it's got
a bunch of networks, but yours is modular, even within your own network, kind of spinning up a
bunch of different networks, or even use or even use the term networks and chains
separately within your documentation
because it's not necessarily the same thing
with how you guys are comprised.
One thing that's interesting that I think
is worth calling out is how you guys actually
leverage Ethereum, right?
So you're on L1, but to the slashable stake
of your validators actually is on Ethereum mainnet
and you use that to inherit some of the actual properties of Ethereum
and then go on to have your various networks, right?
Your DA network, your storage, your compute networks,
and then all of these other networks and the chains within the zero G network
actually burn zero G to go back to to the consensus network,
which is where the validators are.
Legendary will get into some of that.
But one is there are two questions for you.
One is, is there anything else outside
of that basic high-level architecture
that you would like to call out?
And then two, how has that user education journey
been because you are so unique in this space
when it comes to your specific construction?
Yeah, the key thing to call out is we,
and this is where the name zero gravity actually derives,
or zero G, is this idea that eventually we
want infrastructure to be completely
invisible to the end user.
So on the analogy that I use, if you're using Netflix,
for example, today, you don't think about which AWS server
to choose, or which encoding algorithm to use for the video
or which kind of payment methodology
to use at the end of the day.
As an end user, you just want to use the application
and never have to worry about any outages and so on.
So the infrastructure, the idea behind it
is how do we get something to be infinitely scalable
and how do we get something to remove any of the barriers
to adoption from Web2 to come over?
Because if you come over from Web2, and you're like, wait,
why did my infrastructure costs rise by 10x?
And why am I getting a ton of failed transactions?
Then you don't want to switch.
Or I'm forcing my users to use some type of wallet
application that requires a bunch of seed pass phrases,
and it's very difficult to use.
And so the way we thought about our architecture and design
is to remove all of these barriers
so that there is no friction.
There's a sense of weightlessness.
There's a sense of zero gravity, essentially.
So that was a bit of the design principle.
And so the key thing for infinite scale, for example,
is it happens at multiple levels.
So the first thing that we did is basically say, OK,
we've got a decentralized storage network that's
high throughput for AI workloads.
Because if we solve the AI workload issue,
then we solve all other use cases as well.
And so we built it and tested it.
That's about 2 gigabytes per second in throughput,
which I think is the fastest ever recorded
for decentralized storage.
So now you can actually use it for hot forms of storage.
Then what we said is, OK, we've got this high performance
storage network.
We can actually then use it as a data availability layer
as well.
And because the key insight there is, well,
what if we segment block data into a data storage
and into a data publishing lane.
Because then you're removing the broadcast bottleneck
across the entire network.
Rather than sending block data to 120 or 200 validators,
however many you have on the network, at the same time,
you just store it once.
And then you send KZG commitments across the network,
like very small bits of data, rather than these really
big chunks, essentially.
And so then we're like, oh, this creates paralyzability.
This creates more throughput, because every node you
add to the network now adds to the overall data bandwidth.
And so what we found is that the theoretical maximum for that
is for 5,000 nodes, we should be able to get to about 50
gigabytes per second in throughput.
And that's already enough to start
doing some small scale, fully on-chain training, essentially.
But we didn't stop there, because if you
look at modern data centers, it's not just
50 gigabytes per second.
It's hundreds, maybe even a terabyte per second
in throughput.
So how do we then bridge that gap?
Then we said, well, why don't we take a data sharding approach?
And what we found there is that the consensus
becomes the bottleneck.
But what if you just can spin up an arbitrary number
of consensus networks at the same time
by utilizing like eigenlayers restaking
for economic security or other type of restaking platforms
to do that?
And then we're like, oh, OK, great.
Now we can horizontally scale consensus networks.
And then now you have infinite scale at the data throughput
layer.
So then that then became a key input
to then scale also the execution layer.
So the way we're approaching execution layers
to then say, let's have a n number of arbitrary chains
that we can spin up as long as there is a master chain that
keeps all of the different transaction registers available.
And so then in fact, you get infinite TPS, quote unquote,
through that.
And so then we were able to scale the execution piece
as well.
And then the final piece is latency.
How do you get below 100 milliseconds of latency
on a layer 1 network with a three hop consensus?
It seems impossible because speed of light, that's
the fastest you can get to.
But what if you do kind of localized consensus?
Kind of what AWS does with US West, US East,
and then just make sure that there's global consensus over time. So we basically just went through, you know, one by one by one to remove
barriers to adoption. So that was the kind of key mindset. That's interesting. So like that's
actually, it reminds me of the journey of even Eigenlayer, you referenced them just a moment ago,
like EigenDA was their like key product that they were actually shooting for. They're like,
well, what the hell, how do we secure this thing? And then that's actually
how they came up with eigen layer as a product to then backfill their idea da thing. I'm
hearing you go through that thought process of, you know, you did one thing, which led
to the next thing, which led to the next thing, which led to the next thing. Just that product
flow is really interesting. And just context for people in the crowd, like he's calling
out gigs per second as like a bandwidth thing, like just people in the crowd, like he's calling out gigs per second
as like a bandwidth thing,
like just, and especially in the data availability stuff,
that's something I'm familiar with.
Just relative numbers in the space.
I think Celestia today is doing like 1.5 megabytes per second.
Eigen DA is probably the fastest DA layer we have today.
And there are like 15 megabytes per second
just for relative numbers.
So if you're talking gigs per second
and tens of gigs to hundreds of gigs per second, it's
orders of magnitude bigger as an ambition.
So that's actually really impressive.
So before we drift too far, I noticed in the documentation
you referenced largest chain for AI several times.
So first of all, what does that mean?
And then what is that unlock?
Why is it unique for AI specifically?
Is it these numbers? Is it something else? Can then what is that unlock? Why is it unique for AI specifically? Is it these
numbers? Is it something else? Can you expand on that?
Yeah, absolutely. So we've got more than 300 projects building on top of us. So that's kind
of we're trying to build the largest ecosystem around it. We have a very large community
getting close to 3 million wallets on the test net, half a million smart contracts deployed,
close to 400 million transactions, and so on.
So it's been super fun to build and see that traction.
And it's really focused on use cases that have
some association with AI.
I mean, it could be, for example, a game that's
using a non-playable character that's calling,
let's say, our inference.
That can be part of it all the way to hardcore AI
infrastructure like VectorDB is building
on top of our key value store on the decentralized storage
network.
So that's the spectrum infrastructure, consumer apps,
and so on that's building on our chain.
So feeling really proud of being able to build that.
And then specifically AI use cases are quite important to us because when we got started,
ChatGBT was starting to gain a lot of traction, ChatGBT 3 at that point.
And we basically fast forwarded 10 years into the future
and thought, what does a world look like
with a lot of automation in it?
And essentially, you can start automating even what I call
societal level use cases.
So things like logistic systems, like running an airport,
or manufacturing systems, or administrative and governance
systems.
And how comfortable would we feel as a society to have
a closed AI or black box AI players manage these systems? For these societal level systems,
wouldn't you want to know what went behind the models? Where the data came from? Who labeled
the data? Like how the model was trained? What version of the model am I even getting? How's
the agent behaving in production? Who even owns the agent?
If I create an agent today, do I know that I own it?
No, it's in the terms and conditions.
It's likely not owned by you.
So all of these kind of key questions came up
and we said we have to build an alternative
that's owned by kind of people
that are participating in the network,
that's owned by a community
so that we can make decisions that are participating in the network that's owned by a community so that we can make decisions that
are more for abundance versus extracting value.
Yeah.
You started leaning in towards some specific products
that you were liking as far as concepts.
Do you have any other specific ones
that you're excited about? What pointed builders are you most excited about?
What are you hoping is built on your chain?
What's some of the ambitions for what you have being created?
Yeah, there's quite a bit being built.
Some of the ones that we've highlighted recently are, for example, an AI-driven version of a DEX
where they're using AI algorithms to automatically
rebalance the LP pools, for example.
So that's super cool.
And then likely in the future, they'll
add some type of prompting interface
as well to make it super simple to do swaps or even more
complex type of transactions.
That's a product called Zero.
There's other things that are coming
that are really interesting, like on-chain credit
scores that utilize AI so that you can give larger leverage
loans if you've seen a good actor.
But personally, the thing that I'm most excited about
is utilizing the power of blockchains
to actually align AI models as well.
And to me, AI alignment doesn't just happen in production.
It actually starts with the data itself.
Where did you get the data from?
How do you know this data wasn't poisoned?
And a silly example I use there is
if I'm wearing a Nike sweatshirt,
so nothing against Nike, but let's say
Nike approaches OpenAI and says, I'm wearing a Nike sweatshirt, so nothing against Nike. But let's say Nike approaches OpenAI and says,
I'm going to pay you $10 billion so that you train
your model in such a way that every time somebody asks
something about sports, that Nike comes up.
Feasible to happen.
And the end user would just keep getting
some Nike messaging.
And they're like, I guess Nike's associated with all sports.
But that's a bias introduced into the model.
And it's a bias you may not even be conscious of.
So how do we make sure that we know the types of biases
that these underlying models and agents actually have?
And so I think there's going to be a lot of fundamental
research that we're going to be doing in that area.
Nice. So I'm going to throw out one idea and then just pass it on to Legendary because we're
running the one time. So like, I actually heard a conversation around blockchain solving for the
difference in inference costs, like the market price of an inference cost, right? Because you
have several models. And if I have the same query to three different models, one of them may run
for five minutes and one may run for one minute, right? That means the costs are actually different
on the back end
So you can actually spin up a market around the different inference costs and maybe pay upfront
With like tokens on how much I'm willing to pay on a specific call
There might be some use case there, but I run a little on time
I'm gonna pass over to legendary so that he can see a little bit what's going on with the forward look of
surgery
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Look, you are building a very, very complex
ecosystem and we learned a bit about that in the interview. You're also building that
in a very volatile environment. Like a lot of people go so far to call it a president's
market. Everyone is waiting to see what is Trump saying? What is he posting? What is
he saying at the conference? What's the next move there? And the whole market is trading
this with extreme volatility. And on the other hand, you have quite a similar
picture I would say in AI, there is new tools coming out every day, the attention span is
a very short one every week, we get excited about something new, whether that's bold,
whether that's manners, and the aficionados move on from tool to tool.
So how do you deal with this like as a founder
with the volatility in both the market,
that's very volatile, but also in the attention span,
is that impacting you at all?
The attention span, not so much
because it's kind of this idea of one upmanship,
one day, you know, R1 comes out from DeepSeq, another day Quen comes out, and then
attention shifts, as you mentioned, to Manos and so on. The key thing from our perspective is just
to make sure that we support the latest frontier models that are open source. So as long as we do
that through our inference and soon to be released fine-tuning capabilities on our network,
then it's not as big of a deal.
Because what we're trying to fundamentally do
is not build everything ourselves.
We're not trying to rebuild an open AI, which, ironically,
again, is closed AI.
But we are creating a one-stop shop experience,
utilizing all the best that Web3 and AI has to offer, like all the different types
of builders in this space we want to bring together
so that it is as easy of a user experience
as doing a bunch of API calls on OpenAI.
That's fundamentally our goal.
So as long as we have a complete pulse on the market, what's
happening, where it's moving, we support the best open source
in Web3 AI projects, it's moving. We support the best open source and Web3.ai projects.
It's not too big of a challenge for us
to kind of keep focusing on our long-term vision.
As far as the volatility in the Web3 market,
that's something we're not quite as worried about,
because it's a very long-term journey to make
AI a public good,
which is our mission.
That's not going to happen in one market cycle, for example.
So we really have a built for the long-term type
of perspective, and so not to be shaken
by short-term volatility.
It impacts things more like a token generation event, maybe,
but in the large scheme of things,
from a pure technology and research-based kind
of process and deliverables, it's like, for example, we can't solve decentralized training
in a couple of months. That's a research problem. That's a very long-term problem. And if we
make good headwinds this year, I'd be very happy on that. So not too worried about that
either.
Yeah, you mentioned this long-term perspective
and you mentioned this ultimate vision of the Netflix state.
You're using an app, you're using an ecosystem,
you don't really care, at least 90% of the users
don't about what's going on in the background.
But you also mentioned you're building
so many individual building blocks.
There is the AI Launchpad, which we had talked about, the AI DEX, the
on-chain credit scores, all of those things are happening.
All of them are interesting.
And, you know, we love to nerd about them in our bubble.
So how long do you think will this transition or this journey take until
we quote unquote, like stop getting excited about the individual building
blocks and we will transition into this Netflix state of just using a fully integrated holistic AI ecosystem. Is it years? Is it a decade?
Is it longer than a decade? What would your best guess be? My expectation is a couple years, I would
say, because I would consider that two years as a catch-up phase. As I kind of hinted at that fully on-chain training
for LLMs, it's just not possible today.
State of the art is about 10 billion parameter type
of models.
I think Prime Intellect released something
where they trained between two data centers this 10 billion
parameter model fully decentralized.
But what about a 400 billion parameter model?
And by the time two years is over,
we're likely at a trillion-perimeter model
or more at this point.
So how do we make sure that we have the infrastructure
to support this kind of large-scale state-of-the-art
training, for example?
Or even on the inference side, making sure
that we can have very large scale models that we can actually
then run in a fully decentralized, verifiable,
permissionless way.
So two years of catch up.
And I think at that point, we should
have an environment where the end user doesn't
have to worry too much about the infrastructure.
And builders that are working with us
can, again, use different components.
So for example, if you're building a very large scale and high throughput L2 and you
just want to use, let's say our data availability layer, plus maybe some of our inference and
fine tuning for the agents that are working on there, you know, totally fine.
We want to support all of these use cases.
I just got a quick one there, Michael.
You mentioned all types of different builders who
are working with you. Chains have taken different approaches when it comes to
builders and to what extent people decide to support versus like maybe help, maybe some help
with marketing or maybe just taking a whole bunch of builders and saying that these are maybe more officially sanctioned builders or officially approved.
And we've seen a kind of varying success with both approaches.
I don't think there's one specific approach that people
know to be correct yet.
How do you think about working with the builders
and the apps that are building on top of you?
What's your approach there?
We have two primary modalities.
So we overall have an 88.8 million ecosystem program.
And as part of that, we have two modalities right now.
One is what we call the Guild on Zero G
campaign, which is a kind of lower touch, which somebody
essentially applies through a form.
They tell us here's the application or the infrastructure
that we want to build.
And then we review it and then basically say like this sounds great. Let's give you some type of
investment to have you off and running. And if you have any technical integration questions,
let us know and we can provide some support. So more low touch builder knows what they want to
build. And then there's on the other hand, the accelerator, which is 8 to 10 highly curated companies
that want a lot of support from us on all aspects,
go to market, fundraising, development, product market
fit type of questions.
And so that's a much, much higher touch aspect from us,
where we bring our entire team from Zero G,
as well as our partners like One Piece Labs and Moonhill Capital
to support these builders so that we can make them as successful as possible.
In the first cohort, we had a number of companies that went quite far already.
The one that was the furthest along was Carve,
and they actually launched on centralized exchanges like Upbit and Bybit and so on.
And when the market was still not trading sideways, they were valued at above a billion dollars.
So very proud of the team for being able to accomplish that.
And we definitely want to support other builders on their path, but with a much more kind of high
touch experience. That's interesting. So you're kind of taking a bit of a hybrid approach there.
Interesting to note. Letoju, do you want to get into maybe some of the tokenomics and the token
stuff? Where do you want to take this? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I love talking about the
long-term vision, the long-term focus,
but as you said, the market set of things, if it impacts anything, then it's more the
tokenomics and TGE considerations. And since you've recently did release or the Zero G
Foundation did release the tokenomics, I want to touch on some parts of that. It seems there's
been a bit of a discussion on the timeline going on after this preliminary token distribution has been revised a bit and the timeline has been focusing on the
community bucket set of things.
So just maybe quickly taking a step back for our audience to break down the tokenomics
a bit more before I get into the question.
There's a significant ecosystem growth allocation of 28%, almost half of that being unlocked
to TGE. There is an AI alignment note bucket of 15%, with a third of that being unlocked at TGE.
And then there's the revised 13% of the total allocation, which are being reserved for the
community rewards, 20% of that being available at TGE, which is 2.6% then of the net supply,
and the rest will then be distributed in seasons over 48 months.
And I wanted to give you a chance to speak to the tokenomics and specifically to the
thinking and the reasoning that went into those three different community allocation
buckets.
Fundamentally, our thinking was that essentially community should deserve, first of all, the
largest allocation.
And so that's why you're seeing the community bucket being
56% versus the team advisors, contributors, backers
bucket at 44%.
And oftentimes with major R1s, you actually
end up seeing that the other bucket is significantly larger
because maybe the investors alone have 35%,
and then the team is like 20% and so on.
But for us, we were able to design it in such a way
that there was a kind of community first mentality
from that.
So that was one design principle.
And we were very cautious around how we fundraised as well
from a lab entity standpoint.
We wanted to make sure we had a highly distributed cap table
so that no investor owns.
For example, if it's a 20% allocation of one investor
owns 10%, then all of a sudden, you're
starting to see a little bit more of a centralization
on the cap table.
So that was something that we didn't want as part of that.
So then the next design principle
was one of the things we've observed
is that there is a lot of, so to speak, farming where, you know, test net is really hot, people do all types of things to see if they can, you know, farm some type of airdrop allocation.
But for us, what was in central is more that kind of long term support because our perspective is long term.
We want to build a platform that solves for kind of major societal issues like aligning AI models.
And so we took a long-term approach to that.
And so the way we designed it is to say, okay, how do we create long-term holders that care
about the network fundamentally?
And so our decentralization mechanism primarily was the AI alignment note sale from that perspective.
Because we just fundamentally believe if you're an investor,
if you're a holder of this long-term token,
that you're going to create or make actions or support
with a long-term perspective as well.
So that's why you see a very large allocation for that,
15% for that kind of long-term perspective.
And then the community rewards is
more based around specific actions
that different end users can take,
whether they contribute in social campaigns
or other type of kind of DApp campaigns and testnet campaigns
and so on, where we want to make sure that they are also valued
and rewarded for their contributions.
But really, the biggest bucket there from an analog
perspective was the alignment node holders because
of that long-term perspective.
Then the ecosystem growth perspective
is used for things like the ecosystem program
that I mentioned, the ADA 8.8 million,
to support initiatives like that long- term so that we can attract and
work with the best builders and the AI meets Web3 space long term.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to have this long term incentive alignment.
We only have a couple of minutes left in the interview, but I want to have a quick follow
up question on the tokenomics that is on the community reward side of things.
You said it, you know, you're going to
keep some for campaigns that will be activated in the future. It's the 48 months period that will be
with a seasonal distribution. Is there anything you can share on that? Will it mostly be campaigns?
Will it follow? Because it's a seasonally distributed, will it follow sort of a season logic?
follow sort of a season logic, what can we expect from that to the extent that you can
What can we expect from that to the extent that you can comment on that?
comment on that?
Yeah, we haven't released specific details around that.
And as we've kind of seen new things start popping up, for example, an NFT collection
called One Gravity was built.
So that was super fun.
So we want to make sure that as these things kind of arise, that we have ways of kind of
rewarding contributors to that.
And the seasonal aspect, again, is
the idea of making this a long-term bet for people.
So it's not just like, hey, I'm going to buy an NFT.
I get the reward.
And then, OK, I'm done.
I'm going to just sell that NFT.
But there should actually be useful ecosystem things that
are unlocked by having that particular
NFT. So that was the design principle around it. And the seasons, I think, we'll figure out over
time. One extent, one of the things I've learned in graduate school is if you design something with,
you know, very clear timelines versus having something that's more, what's the word that I'm using
for not off the cuff, but that happens on a non kind of aligned timeline, then there's
a sense of excitement around it as well. So there's a kind of momentary excited happiness.
So you need to make sure there's a long term happiness and the kind of a momentary excited
happiness. And so that's that was the
design principle there too.
Yeah, I completely resonate with that. It's like even for many
for many company, right? Like even for ourselves, we have, we
have like yearly annual goals, but then we break things down
into quarters. And then things change, things change from
quarter to quarter, especially when you're in such a volatile
industry. And this end of this quarter has been
completely different to maybe the end of the previous quarter.
So big changes, and I appreciate that kind of requirement for
some flexibility as you progress. But as as we said, we're kind
of drawing to a conclusion here, Michael just wanted to give you
the chance, I think we've had a really interesting conversation
we've kind of touched on product touch on history touch on the
vision, the funding, the objectives
that you guys really want to achieve.
Is there anything else that you'd like to share
that maybe we've missed, anything
you'd like to call out, spotlight,
just before we close out here?
No, just reiterating this idea that we have a very long-term
focus around making AI a public good.
And the type of world that we see is, well, with any new technology, can have kind of
two dimensions.
One is abundance, the other is weaponizing that technology.
And so we very much want to be on the abundance side so that we can create a world where we potentially, as some of my professors say,
we might not have to work for a living anymore. Where we can truly choose, pursue our passions
and be kind of our holistic self, our best selves. And so, you know, what does a world
like that look like? And that's something that we're really excited about. And so any of the contributors to our network and users
and so on, I want them to have a very long-term perspective
so that we can build this type of mission,
this type of vision together in this space.
And so we're really excited about building
for the long term.
Sounds very exciting.
We joke.
Well, I don't think we joke often.
We're being quite serious when we say one of the reasons or one of the byproducts of creating so much content is that we hope we have this humongous bank of content so that we can train the AI and create different versions of ourselves.
So we don't have to necessarily be running the show every single day. Our very intelligent AI counterparts will be able to take over. So if you have any builders on your chain,
they're able to do that, we'd be delighted to hear.
Let's chat more about that.
There's some approaches.
In the meantime, if people want to follow along on Michael's journey,
his account is at michaelh-underscore-zero-g,
showing on the screen for the people who are watching in.
And just a reminder, if you're new here,
we do this every single day, Monday to Friday,
7 a.m. Eastern time for one hour.
We're live on X, X video, YouTube and Apple
and Spotify podcast too.
Thanks so much for joining us, Michael.
Appreciate your time.
Have a great day.
Bye bye. Thanks for having me. Definitely worth getting up super early. Thanks much for joining us Michael appreciate your time Have a great day. Bye. Bye
Thanks for having me definitely worth getting up super early. It's like 4 a.m. My time's on
Thanks, man, have a great day everyone see you on Monday. Bye. Bye
