Hey, Sue. Good evening. Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you. How about you?
Yeah, I'm good, man. Carly, are you with us?
I've got my new mic here, and it's feeling fantastic. So let's do this.
Yeah, you can see it in the profile picture. It's beautiful.
I don't know if we want to just give it a quick minute here.
A few more people roll into the spaces and then we'll get going.
In the meantime, Kyle, maybe you can give us an update on how the chicken and oyster restaurants business is going.
Thank you for asking. Yeah.
You know, I mean, in all seriousness, we had a lot of fun with it. We actually saw a lot of locations. We found a nice chef. We found we even found a way to franchise it.
But the reality is, it's bull market right now. So we'll probably do that next bear market.
Got it. Got it. Yeah. Priorities change quickly in crypto. That's for sure.
It's still a good idea. That's the main thing.
Cool. Well, as people are filtering in, I'll just do a quick intro to myself. So for people who don't know me, my name is Ryan.
I spend most of my time in crypto running a Treasury Dow over on over on Terra.
And I'm a lunar crash survivor, just like the other two folks up here on stage.
And between Sue, Kyle and Coach Bruce, they've convinced me to dust off my space is hosting hat as a kind of engaged user of of oxtot fun to come here and do an English AMA with with you folks in the audience.
And we're going to we're going to talk a little bit about the market cycle.
We're going to talk a little bit about oxtot fun and how it comes to fruition and then some road map stuff.
So thanks very much for having me here today, guys.
No, thanks for hosting. I figured we could probably do just pretty informal like Q&A between the three of us for a bit and then we just open it up.
How's that sound? Yeah, exactly. I think I think we've got plenty to cover.
And then if we've got some time at the end, we can invite people to speak and ask any questions that they've got for you guys.
It's probably been a while since people have heard from you.
And I know, I think, Sue, you've done a few kind of Chinese language AMAs and discussions, but a good opportunity for the for the English speaking audience to hear from you today.
So like, why don't we just get into it?
So, you know, I know a lot of people will be wanting to hear from you guys on your thoughts of kind of where we are in the market.
You know, it's been a pretty it's been a pretty good sort of six, nine months as the market starts to recover.
We've had like a number of narratives that have played out over over that time.
You know, we see a lot of points farming protocols spinning up.
We've seen big L1 launches, like Celestia and Dimension.
And we currently got an AI narrative that's playing out right in front of our eyes.
So maybe you guys can give us some thoughts on where we are in the market cycle and any kind of narratives that you guys are keeping your eyes out for.
I think cycle wise, right now, there's there's pretty much no way or anything other than very early because we're pre-having.
So the equivalent would have been, let's say, April 2020. Right.
And 2019 was a reasonable ish bull market where, you know, there was still not not that much media attention on crypto.
But, you know, within it itself, you know, there was a nice rally in Bitcoin from three to fourteen and then a pullback, you know, ether from about one hundred to three fifty.
So I think roughly speaking, if you follow that kind of a trajectory, there's there's for the majors, we're very early still.
I think on all side, these are getting a bit outlandish on some stuff.
So I do think that, you know, there's some stuff that looks a little bit more like April, May 2021.
Like, I think there are some that are sort of more they can't be anything other than distribution.
Right. So I think that that that, you know, is not out of the ordinary.
But I think that, you know, the risk of a shorter term pullback are definitely reasonable now.
But I do think that narrative wise, you know, the narratives that tend to do well early in the cycle are also the ones that will do well later in the cycle.
So the generally like the degree of correlation between month on month on coins is just really high.
So like, you know, like people say, you know, you want to average your winners.
And generally speaking, the coins that do well last month are the coins that do well this month and the coins that do well this month and the coins do all the next month.
So I think, you know, a narrative will continue for sure.
I think that, you know, Solano will have some pullback time, you know, just from the Alameda related flows.
But I think that, you know, it'll probably rally twenty five percent in one day at some point and just, you know, immediately retrace the underperformers where I see pretty quickly.
I think the same is true for a lot of fast one type plays.
So I think, you know, in general, the winners will continue to win.
I think that I think that on the on the overall like new project side, I do think that we're seeing a different ecology now in Logipad coins.
Like, I think that unlike twenty nineteen, where, you know, one of the best plays was just simply long BNB and just do launch pads.
I think that now the tokenomics and the dynamics of team founder exchange structures are such that it's more difficult to have that kind of launch pad pump or to have that listing pump.
Right. Like, I think Jupiter is an example of it almost like, you know, the raise is itself the exit.
And then, you know, it's not a bad thing. It just means that the, you know, people who are used to the 10x pump on exchange listing, that that's kind of over.
So that's kind of my rough summary.
I think I've said it many times, but I think that cycles repeat exactly like not rhyme, but just copy.
And in my opinion, what that means is like.
Each cycle has to be Bitcoin led.
Then, you know, by and large stays stays stays pace, you know, underperforms a little bit here and there.
But then we see the eath rally, then we see the L1 rally, then we see distribution amongst other coins. Right.
And I think that that's what gives me so much confidence in this move because it's 100 percent Bitcoin ETF started. Right.
And arguably, like, what was the biggest innovation that started the last cycle?
I used to say it was the price, like three point seven K Bitcoin.
That was the biggest innovation because that was cheap enough that people could buy it in size and then you could run the market up.
And that it's always just a changing of the hands.
So when I'm looking at like some of the layer one trades, very similar to what we saw last time, too, there has to be a changing of the hands, but it's the same narrative.
So the twenty seventeen narrative that people thought was very, you know, very distant, very pie in the sky, like the Ethereum killer, you know, and it was obviously too early in twenty seventeen eighteen.
Well, guess what? It took two years to build. Those people did build it.
Then you had to have the flush out. That's super important. Right.
At that time, it was all the cliffs. So Polkadot, Solana, all those guys had, you know, big cliffs and new players came in and we happened to be one of those new players.
We were not early in the, you know, seed rounds of those coins, but we were all over the cliff, you know, trades.
There were OTC trades that happened.
I think the one big difference, though, right, is that the cycle is almost like Solana capitulation on the RTX blowup.
That almost was the equivalent of like the three K BBC in early twenty nineteen because it was just such a large supply changing of hands that like, you know, you could almost argue this market is Solana led.
Right. Because because the volumes and just the multiples off the bottom.
So I do think that, you know, in a way, I think like, you know, ether is the Bitcoin of the cycle and then Solana is like the ether of last cycle and that it's just like faster horse.
Right. I think that that's been actually something that's called a lot of natives off guard.
I think there's been two camps, right? There's been the sort of more eth native camp and, you know, has been sort of holding eth, you know, denominated in eth really for some time and been kind of shocked by Solana price action.
I think there's been another camp, you know, that has been like, you know, this is just such a capitulation.
So much supply would get sold in that way because, you know, one of the biggest complaints about Solana always was that it's so concentrated and it's so owned by one dude and owned by one entity and like to have that supply sort of blast out there.
That is actually very similar to like eth ICO, treasury capitulation, right?
Or like, you know, at some point, five million, ten million, eight was held in treasuries that gets all nuked out.
That's actually very bullish, even though it feels very better.
So I think crypto is cool.
Like a lot of times very, very bearish events are, in fact, very, very bullish.
Just depends on the time frame.
And also if you have money to buy it, right.
Solana at nine dollars, eight dollars is very good or very bad, depending on your view.
You know, just like ox at one cent is very good or very bad, depending on your view.
So, you know, it's kind of that's the beauty of crypto.
But then can what becomes like the people that always each cycle or each month or whatever are hunting for the next year.
It's actually the same thing that it was before.
It's just a changing of the guard of holding a point.
I saw a really good tweet the other day, which was like, you know, if you have one hundred dollars, you own a certain number of coins.
And I think the point of it was like at one hundred thousand, you have like thirty coins.
But then at like a million, you have like maybe ten.
And then at ten million, maybe you have like three.
And then at one hundred million, you have one again.
And I think that's really true, actually, because I think at like a certain account size, the temptation to rotate, you know, winner into winner into winner is incredibly high because it's doable from liquidity perspective.
Right. And you can almost imagine yourself every day owning the fastest horse.
Now, in terms of people who have actually done this and then like outperforms, I think the number of people who have done this is low.
I think it's on the order of fewer than a hundred people in the world possibly have massively outperformed through this.
But there are those, you know, last cycle.
We knew some of these kids that were like, you know, they start with five K.
They end up with like, you know, a lot of money.
Now, that definitely happens.
But, you know, I made a tweet today, which is like, you know, for everyone like that, there has to be 99 who have lost money in rotations and who, you know, sell the bottom up, you know, coins because they're not moving.
And then later have popped by the top of them.
So I think that depending on like your skill level, I agree.
Like it's it's very, very dangerous to chase narratives.
It's more important to see that, you know, if you zoom out from last cycle, you don't have to have rotated between like Solana or Avax.
Even even though there were big opportunities in those rotations, you didn't have to.
You could have just helped them also.
So I think, you know, but of course, treating the spreads is also fun.
But I think just risk management there is important.
Like you don't want to get shaken out.
So many people I saw got shaken out of the all one trade because, you know, there are periods where you do not perform and become outperform.
And they're like, OK, I'm going to sell back to Bitcoin.
It's like, no, you if you have that thesis, you want to keep a core bag.
I think that that's like the healthier way to think about it.
We did some of that back in the day.
I mean, I think we calculated we just held our original position, which was largely ETH.
Probably would have done about the same, but or actually, sorry, would have outperformed quite a bit.
But so, yes, I've definitely seen like a mix of strategies from kind of my friend's group, my crypto friend group of people who are chasing around narratives and switched on 24 seven, just kind of rotating around and being very successful in that approach.
And then similarly, people who have just held high conviction bags that have that have recovered significantly.
So definitely seen a mix of success across those strategies.
I think like a lot of people from my perspective, a lot of people who have hung around in this bear market and held high conviction on on on certain ones or certain narratives have been very successful so far.
So certainly over the last, as I say, six to nine months.
One of the things that we were we were talking about earlier, too, is the art of the pump, the art of the pump.
I mean, we talked about, like, what does it take?
You need these flush outs, you need some narratives, whatever.
But like, what else do you need?
You can't just can you do that off a meme?
Like, how do you think about that?
What like what are the if you had to broadly say, what is the what are the characteristics of the beginnings of a big a big pump in this market?
Yeah, I think I think there's obviously we need to separate different types of coins, right?
Like, I think putting majors aside, putting sort of larger caps aside, I think on the on the smaller cap basis.
There's a really important focus, the cycle, I feel, on token distribution and kind of token holder quality.
I think that last cycle was almost like the steroids cycle in some sense, because, you know, you had FTX Alameda, which was incredibly active in primary and secondary.
We were obviously very active in primary and secondary.
So there was this kind of effects where, you know, FTD doesn't matter, right?
And I think now people, the cycle, they're they're definitely more astute.
I think they're also more focused on expandability of narrative.
So there's more, I think, I wouldn't say and I think in a way, that's why points meta has evolved, right?
Because points meta, you don't really like they're really forcing you very hard to not think about that TV because they don't want you to know or they don't want you to calculate it too carefully.
I think that's that's kind of what's allowed some of this big TV to come in because you don't know what it's worth.
And obviously, in some cases, like friend tech, that kind of turned the wrong way.
But, you know, I think that that's a sign of the maturation of markets.
I think that for pumps now, therefore, you know, on on meme coins, especially, I think you're seeing actually incredible rationality in the meme coin market, right?
Where meme coins don't actually grow that big.
They grow to a certain size and then like kind of the story is not really there anymore.
And then it comes off, you know, they get to a certain end cap.
And and so I think to, you know, what coins can really break through that end cap and kind of really explode to, you know, you know, 10 billion MTV range in a bull market.
I think that is going to come down to supply dynamics.
It's going to come down to what I call like the secret of the tribe, right?
Where the the holders of the coin, they believe they hold the secret together on something.
And, you know, we saw that last cycle with Olympus, right?
Where the early Olympus holders, they believe they're on to a secret, right?
And they believe that others will come and, you know, they may not fully understand the secret, but they may come and participate.
And there will be kind of a shelling point where they together believe in, you know, that kind of like the masses will come, build it and they will come.
So I think that there's a really good article written by a crypto called Wulong.
And he talks about like the art of the pump a lot.
And he talks about how, you know, shakeouts are really important in crypto because actually you cannot have pumps without shakeouts.
It's impossible. It's mathematically impossible.
Right. Simply because it's too easy. Right.
And so and that's, again, the beauty of crypto as well.
And he has this great quote where he says, it does not matter how long it takes.
If there are weak hands, they must be shaken out. Right.
So I think, you know, you actually saw that quite a bit in Bitcoin last year, too, where, you know, Bitcoin stuck between this like 20 to 27 26 K range for a shockingly long amount of time.
And that's just how long it took.
And if there were more weekends, it would have taken longer. Right.
So I think, you know, ox is kind of interesting because ox, I think, you know, kind of has had that shakeout process last few months.
And I think that, you know, if you look at, you know, it's kind of holding the one cent base while, you know, it's been a lot of big shakeouts on the open X announcement of shutdown also on like the prison dump.
So I think, you know, that's really healthy to see actually.
And I think that, you know, it's allowed new money to come in.
It's also allowed kind of a rebuilding of the base. Right.
So I think I think that these are kind of the things that, you know, when the when the markets are going up a lot, you think of it.
It was so easy like that. That's what happened. But actually so much work has to go into the building of community, the building of, let's say, core beliefs, core usage, core community, you know, motivation, really.
So I think product fits into that too. But yeah, I agree. It's the secret of the tribe can be roadmap can be product usage can be, you know,
team history or it can be a number of things, but it's super, super important.
And with ox, you have this history that's basically built in the bear market. Right.
Where there's all sorts of these fun kind of weird things that happened and they may come out later or whatever.
But like, oh, geez, we'll know certain certain narratives. Right.
And they'll hang on to them and they'll understand why product is the way it is. Right.
Like people look at, you know, other product and they'll say, you know, I can just copy this, you know, this this model or whatever.
But but how did it actually get there? Because there's also a, you know, a parade of distribution over first first founder. Right.
So if if someone copies another design, it's very hard for them to actually surpass that design or in terms of valuation unless they do some serious innovation on top of it. Right.
If you but if you come to it naturally with the tribe, with the community, that's what commands, you know, the real valuation. Right.
Yeah. I think also you're kind of seeing a conservatism in in tokenomics, ironically, while you're seeing kind of a lot of innovation in farming. Right.
Where there's innovation in obfuscating what is the value of the thing that's going to come to the future.
I think Pendo has been a great Pendo has been a great example of that, like he's done extremely well in a kind of like a bear market revival story.
And they've kind of really seen that, you know, fixed yield, fixed value, forward dated value can can be speculated on itself. Right.
And that kind of that kind of illusion. But I do think if you look at tokenomics broadly of, let's say, even D5 perp coins, these coins don't do anything.
Right. Like they almost have no tokenomics value. And I think that in a way, it's almost a it's almost and it's almost a regression to to like 2017 18 where it's like, this is a utility coin is the governance token of the protocol.
And let's hope that something happened. And obviously, part of that is due to securities regulation and general regulatory risk.
But I do think that, you know, that that is actually a bit different than last cycle where last cycle, you know, you just think about FTT tokenomics, or you just think about some other coin tokenomics like these were like you could use the coin to trade on the venue itself.
I'm not sure if you just went out there, too.
So that I feel, you know, just being able to be a little bit more fun with the way the token creates adoption itself, creates wealth effects. I think that's really important.
Okay, so last cycle, we were more like hedge fund kind of guys, VC kind of guys. This time, we're more on the building side. What's, you know, having coin having community? How is how is that different for you?
I think it's about wanting to see both sides of the coin really as well, right? I think, you know, last thing we backed probably 100 plus projects had a lot of great experiences like watching teams grow from really nothing to getting very big.
We did the access seed, which was like, really just, we thought it was a donation, actually, it was 100k check and ended up being 2000 x, right? But, you know, just like, seeing stuff grow from really nothing and to building huge stuff.
I kind of always had a desire to see it from that side and to have that journey. Obviously, when we first started three arrows, it was it was like that in 2012 2013. But I think as you get too big, as you get bigger, you almost you do have a risk of losing kind of
being out of touch with that. So I find it super rewarding to, you know, get hands on get get really kind of in the weeds of building teams out of getting like a vision, you know, bring people together.
So, I think, I think that that I mean, I mean, that's super fun. I think the aux community has been great. I mean, obviously, a lot of ups and downs first ups and downs.
But, you know, like, I find it to be really, really rewarding to to have been able to, you know, because last year was a difficult time. But at the same time, you know, people were really supportive.
And I found that to be very heartwarming. I think that, you know, the last cycle, there were just so many coins. And I think at some point, we were accused, rightly or wrongly, of like, you know, having such a big portfolio, you know, investing in like every competitor, this, that every L1 or everything.
And I think this cycle, like, I want to almost have like a Puritan style discipline, where it's like, aux, you know, all value accrues to aux, like, for instance, you know, there's some Spain business that we're doing with ATMs that will be announcing because we have a Spain exchange license, right.
And, you know, that is actually going to feed into aux. And I think that's just a really, really cool way to do it. Kind of like a different vibe than last cycle where last cycle, there's like, you know, we basically let every L1 discount around.
Yeah, and that's it. In every perp tax, you know, you know, we were famous for the idea. So we had actually invested in every one invested in perp, invested in dreavidex, invested in future swap, a lot of these names, you guys won't have heard of.
But, you know, there's, there's, I think that approach, you know, we were still well liked for it, even though we had done that, because we were really hands on with teams when trying to use their products and trying to get help, especially in the early days.
But, you know, I think that I think that crypto can be played in so many different ways, it can be it can be enjoyed and it can be experienced in so many different ways. I think that for me personally, like the most rewarding ways as a founder, I think, is as a kind of ideas guy as kind of like an executor for, for, you know, the aux community, like I find that to be, you know, if we're able to pull it off, if we're able to succeed, I find that to be the most beautiful.
That's, yeah, I agree with you. There's a lot of tangential fun stuff in there too, I think, like you mentioned the ATMs. I mean, by and large, aux fun is a gamified derivatives platform, right? What does that have to do with ATMs? Well, it's just kind of a fun thing, fit in, had a license, you know, and if it takes, I mean, there's going to be 10 ATMs on the ground, people can go visit them, they can actually use their aux, they can also just, you know,
use Bitcoin, ETH as well, if they want, but our staples. But it's just such a fun kind of marketing thing, especially, you know, as a licensed product in, you know, in a big, in a big country.
Also, kind of like in another language that, you know, we haven't done anything in Spanish before, but this will be all in Spanish.
And then it just kind of fits together with, with everything else, right? Like the aux fun side is very Asia focused. It's very much like, you know, derivatives, very, very aux collateral based, although we'll be accepting some other collateral soon.
And, and yeah, I think there'll be some other stuff in the roadmap that would be kind of fun. Maybe we shouldn't, we can chat about the roadmap as well. That's an interesting topic.
You guys are, you guys are doing a great job of basically interviewing each other, which is great to sit back and listen to you guys in full flow.
I guess like just, just stripping it back a little bit. So I mean, like, you know, part of the reason why I'm up here is that, you know, I, I, I've been part of the box community for probably, probably over a year now, since kind of,
start hearing that you guys were, you know, getting involved with the coin flex, which then rotated to open X. And now we've got this kind of separate thing going on with box.fun.
I guess it's quite an unusual journey that you guys have taken to, to get to this point. So maybe like you could give us like a little bit of like the history of like how we, how we got here and what the, you know, what the path forward is.
Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, I think, you know, in the early days, there was, I still remember, it was basically the GTX deck week, right? There was that deck week in January, 2023. And then, you know, people got really excited.
And there was, I think flex started off at two cents. And by the end of the week, it was at like 40 cents. And then by the end of the next week, it was a dollar. And then I think it went to a high of $3 before we had launched anything. But actually, it was, it was actually quite shocking to see how much buying there was because it was still a bear market at the time, it was just January 2023, like a month after the, the RTX collapse. So,
Yeah, so, so I was, I was really impressed by the community showing. And I think that I think that at the time, the focus is more going to be on claims, right? And really to leverage your claim to be able to trade perps using your claim. And we had set up, you know, we had helped kind of set up that whole idea in the sense of almost being like, you know, I think what we're going to do is we're going to be able to do that. We're going to be able to do that.
Set up that whole idea in the sense of almost being like, you know, I think when we first thought about it and conceived it, it was going to be more like an almost like a vampire kind of liquidity on FTX where, you know, you have a claim, you're, you're a trader, you can move your claim over and then you can keep trading. Obviously, very ambitious vision and a lot of moving parts.
You know, that actually got into fruition, right? It came to fruition. I think there are a few things I realized, though, in that process. I think the first was that a lot of people were willing to buy my coin, you know, to buy odds on chain and punt with it, but they were less willing, let's say, to deposit together to the exchange because they're like, well, what happens if this goes to zero again, right? Because I think after FTX and obviously after our blow up as well, you know, the space kind of became, you know,
much lower trust than it was before. And I think an exchange, especially a CFI exchange, it requires a higher level of trust. So I think, you know, even though we had built everything and there was a strong community supporting it, there was just not enough adoption, I think, on the actual claims product.
And all, you know, people depositing tether to the exchange or USDC to the exchange to trade derivatives. So I think that, I mean, that was kind of an overall, I guess you call it like a learning lesson last year. So I think like what I was really struck by was just how diverse and how enthusiastic the community was, right?
I think that was something that I mean, I was quite heartened by and I felt like, you know, that's kind of what I realized, like, I want to make Ox the play of this cycle, right? Where I think the seeds are in place, it's about the migration of community and about the formation of very strong community going toward a big vision.
And so what is that vision, right? Like, I think Ox are fun, in the name is fun. So it's something that's going to be more gamified experience. I think that the decision to start out with Ox Cloud or Ome is really important because, you know, unlike something like GUIDX early days where you can farm it and just dump the coin, here you cannot farm Ox without having Ox.
So it's more like Olympus in that sense, right? Where the only way to earn the yield of Ox is to own Ox. You can't come in as an outsider and say, I want to earn that 200% mission yield without actually owning it.
So, you know, since Ox launched, I think about half of, you know, I think about a billion and a half Ox has gone over there, which is quite a large percentage of circulating supply.
And so, you know, on-chain volumes have dropped a bit on Ox spot, but, you know, the volumes on exchange are good. And I think that we've kind of stepped the tone, I think, for a really nice, you know, community driven push, right?
Where, look, the reality is that the meta in 2018 was that you're supposed to have your coins in cold storage and then you use 5% of your coins to trade purpose with, to gamble with, to punt with, so on and so forth, right? Or to hedge with.
That was the meta. At some point, I think FTX, you know, created this idea of portfolio margin, which is that actually your entire crypto net worth should be on the exchange, right?
You get yield, you can use every coin under the sun as collateral and all that stuff. And so, you know, that created the illusion or the idea that you should use the exchange as a bank, you know, and they even push that illusion to the extreme by being like you can exchange stable coins between each other very easily.
You can, you can do fiat, you can do all this stuff. So I think that, you know, what we're trying to do here is very opposite to that. It's bringing it back to like a 2018 style thing where it's like, this is a gamified trading exchange.
This is at its core a competition, this is at its core, you know, kind of trading as a sport, right? And I think that what that means is that, you know, because it's ox denominated P&L and because it's ox collateral P&L, you know, when you lose money, we give you a second token milk, which is earned by realized losses.
I think that this kind of two token model is very unique and it supports this idea that you should not be losing all your money on a perfect exchange. This should just never happen, right? While some exchanges may want to subtly push you in that direction of saying put all your money on a single perfect exchange, you shouldn't do so.
You should actually be taking the money that you buy a altcoin with and using that itself as the money to trade purpose with. And then if you make a bunch, it's great. If you lose, it's okay also, you still have your core spot holding. So I think that's one aspect that I think is, that I feel really strongly about actually.
I think the second aspect is this idea that, you know, when you lose all your money on, let's say, a perfect exchange, like a buy bid or something, you know, you're not given anything for it. You're just kind of asked to redeposit, right? And that's it. I think that that's also like a quite extreme way that the space is.
So the sad thing from that is that a lot of people have been encrypted many years, but then because of, you know, leverage liquidations, they may not have anything to show for it, right? You know, you could be in space since 2018 and still have nothing.
So I think that a token model where, you know, when you lose, you still getting a piece of the house. I think that that's cool. I think also what's cool is that when you win, you're stacking the coin itself.
And then even if you lost some money, but the coin went up, you're still up a lot of money, right? If you think about, you know, how many clients on Binance actually outperformed holding BNB, probably zero, very, very close to zero, right?
If you look at the actual leaderboard, because we are the number one of all, pretty much like every leaderboard that's ever existed in crypto trading, like we, you know, on the rise up, you tend to know how much money you need to be number 10.
And what we found actually that it's just a shockingly low number. I mean, not shockingly low in terms of, you know, ordinary spending, you know, it's still, you know, maybe 5 million, 10 million dollars, but it's shockingly low relative to how much the exchange makes, right?
And so from that thinking, I realized that what's much more beautiful, first of all, is an exchange that is owned by losing on it. I believe that hyper liquid points also works this way.
So, you know, if you if you lose on hyper liquid, you will get more points, that's part of the formula. I think that's really cool, because I think that that's part of the point of tokenomics.
It's not to give, you know, savvy farmers the way to farm it more, it's more to give the community back the thing itself, right? It's like a poker game where the rake is owned by the people that lose the most in the game, right?
And that's, I think, really, really important as a core primitive, as a core kind of ethos, right? Because that's very different than the extractive mentality of highly leveraged exchanges where, you know, the constant thing about how does the entire open interest get liquidated, there's pure internalization against clients.
I think all that is, you know, it was a model that worked before, but it's not a model that can be, let's say, creating very powerful community, right? If you think about Bitmex at the time, if they had a token, and they had done a different community, that could, you know, they could have kept users, right?
But, you know, what happened in March 2020 was that 95% of open interest was liquidated, and then as a result, like everyone's dead, right? There's kind of no ability to revive after that.
So I think that these are the core concepts that we lead with.
Yeah, I like that. I can, I mean, I can add a little bit, I think for any of these, I did a, you know, a tweet about this the other day too, but for any of these projects that, you know, you're looking at, I put them into a couple categories of important kind of
attributes that you should be looking for. And for me, like, one of those is ease of onboarding. The reality is, if you want to bring on a lot of users and token holders or whatever, it just needs to be easy.
It needs to be, regardless of what they're doing, whether they're staking or trading or playing some game, it just needs to be easy for them. So that's, that's super important. And that's one of the things in, you know, if I make the analogy back to Oxfun,
the way we're thinking about it now is actually, we have the secret of the tribe because people got into Ox through very esoteric kind of ways.
We need to make it easier. The way to make it easier is to offer an OTC convert or multi collateral kind of function, where people can deposit any kind of collateral. Obviously, the main P&L, the main, you know, utility on the exchange will be in Ox, but you can deposit any kind of currency, or any kind of collateral.
And if you happen to get liquidated, it gets liquidated back into Ox, as it should be. Right. And then if I think about like exchanges in general, like more specifically, you kind of end up with these distributions where there's a few, like a handful of market makers.
Those are the liquidity providers, making all the quotes, they're pretty sophisticated, but it's just a handful of them. And then you have this group of active traders tend to be more manual, sometimes a little bit automated.
But they're kind of like the main takers, let's say, on the exchange. And some of them can be very profitable, by the way. But basically, those are the guys that are in there logging in every day trading, that might be like 5% of your users.
But then there's like the 95%, which are the the rest of everybody else that are here for the fun, right? They're here to stake, they're here to, you know, go for the ride.
They might, you know, put into various pools from time to time, but they're not gonna, they don't want to like trade their stack every day. And the current state of Ox fun is that it's kind of built for the 5% right now.
There's actually very healthy rewards for active traders, like 200% APY. If you do put on various OI, do some trades, it's called Ox rewards on the platform.
And there's, you know, around 100 people that do that every day and do very well. But that's the 5%, right? The 95% doesn't want to do that, they just want to hold the coin, they just want a passive thing.
And so we're looking to launch soon a something called a fee vault, where the fees of the exchange, as they're earned, will go into that vault.
There'll be some subsidies from Treasury as well and various staking, you know, returns for various durations. But the whole point is that the 95% that just want to do things passively, they'll have something to do.
And it will be, you know, hopefully this kind of circular kind of process where, you know, people can come in and, you know, they can trade, they can, you know, passively stake and they can, they can hopefully do well through that process.
Yeah, I've been, I've been having a lot of fun on the on the site. I think, I think, like, I'm not all over the perps market, but, but, but I've definitely enjoyed doing the doing the daily emissions.
I think I'm on a on a 25 day streak. And I think, to me, it feels quite innovative, in the sense that, you know, it's kind of like trade to earn model, where, as Sue says, you're, you're rewarding active traders on the on the platform, whether they're kind of winning trades or losing trades, there's, you know, you're getting, you're getting payouts from the farming missions, you're getting payouts from just holding the token on the, on the platform.
And then, and then you're also, if you do lose trades, you're, you're getting your payouts in milk, which, you know, who knows what battle that'll turn into in the future, I think is a bit of a meme coin at the minute, but maybe you guys have got, have got bigger plans for that.
So, yeah, I'm kind of like, I'm not typically in that 5% that you just mentioned, Kyle, but, but I guess I have been recently, when it comes to ocs.fun.
Oh, sorry, I didn't want to catch up there, Ryan.
No, no, I was gonna say, like, the thing that I've been struggling with is, like, I'm really surprised that, that, I mean, I think it's been seems to have been relatively successful since launch.
You know, I think Sue mentioned something like 1.5 billion ocs has been deposited to the platform, the, the, the trade volume has been growing.
The, it's been, it's been interesting to see, I've seen the, like, analytics going out on which coins have been traded and you've seen, like, growth outside of just kind of Bitcoin and ETH trades to, you know, there's a lot of activity on world coin, a lot of activity on some of the
ETHL2 coins as well. So people are kind of like, seems people are like starting to get a feel for, feel for the site. But yeah, I was, I was kind of surprised that there's, there's not more attention and not more people on here kind of actively, actively trading given the kind of narrative of people chasing points where you've got like a real, a real yields product right here in this kind of trade to earn model.
But, but yeah, maybe, maybe volts will, will kind of bring that mass market appeal and allow everyone to participate.
I very much feel that that's the way, like, if you think about, you know, even FTX and how big it was, how many actual daily active traders were on it? Like, probably less than a couple percent of the users, right?
So, and I actually, we do have this nice analytics page right at the top of the Oxfam website. And on it, you can kind of see that, you know, the open interest, the daily volume, we can also see the breakdown.
And like you were saying, like, at first, it was mainly Bitcoin, ETH, very denominated there. But, but now those are less than 40% of the volumes. Actually, the majority is, I think the top ones are Worldcoin, Optimism, Arbitrum, Avax, Aptos, you know, a good distribution here, Zeta is another one.
There's actually quite a distribution. There's like 40 coins listed on here. And one of the concerns, if you have 40 coins listed, is do people trade them, right? Well, what we're seeing is maybe that I don't know if they're trading all of them every day, but they're trading actually a pretty good distribution, like way more than, you know, that I would have expected at first anyways.
Yeah, for sure. And I guess in terms of, in terms of roadmap, you mentioned, you mentioned sort of copy trading and vaults. I don't know if you want to go into that in a little bit more detail and any other kind of roadmap items that you guys have got coming down, coming down the pipe.
Yeah, sure. So copy trading, obviously, other exchanges have as well, to different degrees, but we plan to have just a really clean product, where you put your ox with other people who are running these vaults, and then they trade it for you, right? So, and unlike some copy trading where you're copying, let's say the fill, but you, you know, the guy running the vault may close his position with you, right?
The guy running the vault may close his position while you still have an open position, because, you know, there's a mismatch. Here, it's more seamless, where we really try to make it a simple experience.
I think Hyperliquid is really kind of the, from what I can tell, it's the market leader in PerpDEX in this space right now, in terms of growth, in terms of innovation. I really like their HLP, especially, which is like the, essentially their internal market maker product.
We will have something similar as well, but, you know, I think one cool thing that Ox can have is that, you know, people always want to know, you know, are we bullish? Are we bearish? Is Bitcoin going to outperform Ether? Is long outperform, you know, so I think Colin and I running vaults will be cool, because people can, you know, we'll try to have a weekly podcast with Lucas, where we're kind of debating positions, we're debating markets, we're debating what's happened in the past week in crypto.
I think, you know, that kind of a product, I think is something that most exchanges cannot have. I think also, again, because it's in Ox, you know, when people join your vault, if you run a vault, let's say, you also know that that will help the Ox community grow, right?
That will help expand how many people own the coin. So what I'm really imagining is just tokenomics that are 100% geared toward the coin, not kind of a token as an afterthought to get you to, you know, trade and farm or, you know, a token, which is kind of use that you pay cash now for it, right?
If you think about airdrop farming, you know, the, the friends, in the friend side case, what happened was that he gives you the allure of the token in the future to get you to use dollars to do things now. And then if token never comes, then you just give it in the dollars now, right?
So that, that model, in my opinion, is, is dangerous, I think I much prefer a model where you are, you are participating directly now, you know how the token will benefit from your activity, you know that when you, you know, you'll say you run a vault and your friend wants to join your positions, he buys Ox and he puts in your vault, you know that he's joining the herd, he's joining the Ox ecosystem, right?
You know that the token will benefit from that. He cannot invest in your vault with tether. He cannot invest in it with either. So, like, I, I want Ox on fund to be the most radically like Ox focus, like the token focused exchanges.
If you think about GMX, right, like part of the issue for GMX now why the token has not really performed in, you know, since, since mid last year is because, you know, with GMX v2, you have the GM as well and you have this kind of like a, you know, you have the GLP holders who are essentially backing the liquid, you know, backing the liquidity.
And, you know, obviously, GM holders get some of the fees, but and then GLP gets some of the fees. But what tends to happen is that, you know, the users are just coming in with the, and they're, or dollars and they're just buying and they're selling, they're leaving, right?
So essentially the user, yes, there's no, let's say token friction, but from my point of view, part of the point of crypto is tokenomics that expands community.
And so I feel that that's where we have an edge. That's where we historically understand the best. And I think that that's something that from a trading experience perspective, in my view, that is what allowed Binance to succeed in 2019.
It's that BNB gave you massive wealth. So you told all your friends about it. You open 20 accounts to get the launch pads and did everything you could to stack your BNB. I think that that, that energy is the, is the fuel for all starting exchanges.
Did I catch some alpha in there that you and Kyle are going to be running copy trading vaults on nox.fun?
And, and, and I think like the audience might want to know like, who's, who's going to win? Who should they back?
Well, they can, they can, they can, they can do that. They can watch. You can actually, anyone can see the positions too. The way that copy trading will be designed is anyone can open a vault.
And we will have two of the first ones, obviously, but there'll be a number of other people as well that have committed to doing vaults. Anyone else can do one as well. And, you know, stakers can stake in and follow positions.
Or they can, you know, if you don't want to, you can just, you can just watch the positions. I don't know, trade them yourself. See who's the better trader.
How are you feeling about trading in public?
I mean, I feel good about it, but we've talked about our positions for so long that, but I mean that the main thing is if everyone's watching it every day, they'll critique every single move every single day, right? Whereas, you know, if you're, if you're really trading, you're, you're trying to, you're trying to make it over a longer period of time, right?
I think it's good in a way. I think it's good. It keeps you disciplined, right? Because there's a Paul Trevor Jones documentary where he talks about like, you know, the market is, is great on a curve in some ways, but at the same time, in the sense that against other people, but it's also absolute in the sense that everyone might lose money.
So even though you lost the least, you still lost money. I think what's cool about, you know, vaults and these kinds of concepts is that, you know, larks can never run vaults because they'll be like, well, now people will know that I'm larping. I'm actually not very good, right?
Like one of my favorite newer kind of main character accounts I've seen is SmartestMoney.E because he's just like, everyone is larping. Here are my positions on Binance. I screenshot them for you. Enjoy, right?
And all the larks are like, no, you can't do that. But he just doesn't. And I think he doesn't make any money on it. He doesn't care. He's just like, I'm not larping. And I'm doing this just to prove that I'm, you know, some of you are larping. I think, I mean, if we went back to 2019, 2020, one of the reasons why we got so big was because we also had a similar brand mentality.
It was like, you know, I'm bullish eat, so bought a bunch of youth calls, and here they are. If we lose money, so be it. If we make money, great. You know, and we would, we would share these kind of positions and these kind of ideas.
And I think that, I think that, yeah, so one of the things I noticed about Hyperliquid is that, like, there are almost no user vaults that have made that much money, whereas there have been a lot of blowups in the vaults. So I think that one of the cool things about that product is it makes everyone more relaxed because, you know, in a frenetic market, you're hearing about your friends all, he made money here, he made money there, and you see the vaults in the markets. It's natural to tend to think that, okay, everyone's making money besides me
because the beauty is you go on Hyperliquid, you see, and it's like, actually, they're not making that much money. In fact, they're all losing money. So that's, I think, a funny thing about vaults. I think that you will get to see, like, what's actually working. Who's actually making money? How are they making it? You know, is it actually possible to buy every bottom, sell every top? Is it actually possible to, like, I see it as a very educational thing. One of the things that a lot of, like, trading, like, scam
is, you know, they actually bought every bottom, sold every top, or they actually, like, you know, caught every move. Now, if you look at, like, one of the only vaults that's successful on Hyperliquid, the guy bought it at $2,500, bag held it to $2,100, and then finally sold it out at $2,900. And, you know, like, and he has the best, and he has the highest performing vault. So it's like, real trading is slower, real trading is more sitting and waiting. But that's how the money is made
smartestmoney.ed recently talked about it. But he said the real money is in the waiting, in the sitting, not in the doing, not, not in the rotating and the trading. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about opening a vault as well when it's, when it's available. Maybe I fall into the laughter category, although I've never claimed to be a very good trader at all. But I think it'll be a bit of fun for people to, to be able to kind
of trade along and, and see how we can do. Yeah, there's ox perps as well. You can long ox with your ox if you wanted to.
We just, we will have the highest performing vault just along in ox and, and hold, and hold it right. Yeah, okay.
Cool. I mean, I guess like we're, we're coming to the end of the top of the hour. I guess an opportunity, if anyone in the audience, like maybe wants to jump up and ask you guys a question. Now would be a good time to request and we'll see if we get any, any requests in. But while we're giving people a minute or so to request, is there anything else you guys want us to call out for today?
I think we covered a little bunch of stuff. Let's let some people talk.
I mean, it's usually this point in the, in the spaces where people go super shy. So I've got one person who's requested, I'll, I'll let them up and see, see if they want to speak.
We've got Hindu with Doc up on the stage. So did you, did you have a question for Cal and Sue?
I guess not. Okay. I don't see any, oh, we got Grin. Grin, long-term ops community member, Grin Spicket is coming up on stage. Let's see what he's going to say.
Hey, Grin, how's it going?
Classic. I have, I have a Grin speak on like many other spaces, so I don't know if he's, if he's just got shy now.
Grin, I have to say is one of our most loyal community members. Like if I, if I tweet a banger,
he likes it. If I tweet something with like 10 likes, he still likes it. Incredible.
Oh, it looks like he's, he's missed his chance. Okay. Well, guys, thanks so much for, for the spaces today. It's been fun. It's been, it's been good catching up with you guys and hearing your thoughts on the market as well as like how things are going with,
with OxDockFun. I think we're planning on maybe doing this semi-regularly. So folks can tune in next week, and we'll, we'll, we'll do, we'll do the same again, maybe a bit more market focused. I'm not sure when, when the copy trading vaults alive, but I know you said you'll do that on, on YouTube with, with Lucas. I think we're all still eagerly anticipating the, the release of the
first podcast. So maybe we'll do a bit of that as well. Sounds great. Let's do it.
All right, guys, have a good rest of your day and we'll speak soon. Thanks everyone for joining.