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Prediction Markets: Gambling or Truth? ๐ค The Aggregated Ep. 127
Recorded: Aug. 29, 2025 Duration: 4:11:15Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. The End . Thank you. Music Thank you. . Thank you. Good morning.
Good morning.
Darren needs to put on better music.
Putting everyone asleep
I was expecting like
ah bikini bottom
yeah that would have been nice
I can't do the
Spongebob song
I still know all the words
yeah I think we can use AI
to like tweak it a bit
so that it would be like
our version.
No, no.
Vanilla is good for me.
Are you ready, kids?
Dude, you could probably
do it yourself.
I don't know, Captain.
I could do it all by myself.
Good times, man.
Prediction
Markets. Gambling or Truth.
Episode 127.
That's pretty cool.
Well, guys, I'm ready to dive into this conversation.
Thank you, everyone that has joined us today.
Thank you to everyone that makes this show possible.
Thank you to QuickSwap, Polygon, Lunar Digital Assets,
and Darren here behind the QuickSwap account.
Very instrumental making the show happen.
We have Two Cent Timmy, speaker here on the panel.
Very instrumental.
And then there's the BD team at LDA.
And I just want to say thank you to everyone.
Jeez, what are these numbers?
We already have 250 people listening.
Is this a popular topic or what's going on?
Everyone likes prediction markets.
That's what's happening.
And AI.
Let's go. Let's do this guys good morning good morning or wherever you're at in the world so yeah rock uh it seems like gambling is uh is super uh popular these days and i i want one of
the questions i have from beginning is, is kind of,
you know, about betting markets and is it gambling? Is it not? So I want to dive into that in a second.
But first, I think we should introduce everyone. Rock, do you want to say anything before we jump in?
No, let's go for it. Let's go. All right, guys, I just go from left to right on my screen, no particular order.
So, Azura, please take 30 seconds to introduce yourself and let us know what you're doing
in this space.
Hey, so today it's me, Phil, on behalf of Azura.
So we are prediction layer on Polygon.
So what we actually do, we provide a protocol
where everyone can easily create their own sports prediction application app.
Well, it's pretty much like a traditional Web2 bookmaker,
but on-chain 100%.
So yeah, that's pretty much it.
That's awesome.
So it's fully decentralized and anyone can just
basically create their own prediction market without saying.
So it works like we receive information from our data provider which is a kind of like
web 2 data provider they they send us information regarding all the sports events and resolutions
and we put it on chain also we have liquidity pool where retail investor can put their money and this
retail investor can put their money and this pool it is used to fund the winnings of people who win
and also if they lose the liquidity pool earns and then there are applications who connect to
data providers under the liquidity pool and they can they can have users bet on their end
makes sense got it awesome well thank you for being on the show today and have users bet on their end. Makes sense.
Got it.
Awesome. Well, thank you for being on the show today.
Can't wait to pick your brain.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Lingo.
Hi, Jamie everyone.
Alex here from Lingo Rewards.
So our product is very simple. you stake lingo tokens and in exchange
you can win some big prizes starting from like steam gift cards and ending with rolex
we have a prolex raffle by the way in few days if anyone want to join
and it's the best time to do it and uh like i i really like uh I really thank you for inviting us for this topic because I think
it's very interesting.
I like as we see, the market has actually.
Definitely.
It's our pleasure to have you here.
Thank you for being here. I think you probably piqued some people's interest with some of the rewards there.
So it sounds awesome.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to jpeg.flow.
Sure, sure.
Hi, everyone.
Good evening from my side.
It's 11 p.m. for me. So not good morning.
But yeah, first of all, thanks for the invite on QuickSwap and Polygon. I'm Flo. I'm part of the core team at PRDT.
We are actually start back in 2021. Yeah. So when we first saw like prediction games on PancakeSwap and
thought to ourselves like, wow
brilliant idea, so
but we can do it like much
bigger and so from there
PRDT grows step by step
and to what is today like
we are price prediction platform on
Web3, so more than a half
million users offering
both like classic and for fun, more just fun and short stuff and pro markets depending on the style of the community.
Yeah, right now I'm traveling with some of the team in Asia.
We are on a Korean blockchain week taiwan and meeting some projects and yeah happy to be here thanks
for having me and talk about some gabbling or throughs yeah and prediction markets
awesome great to have you here and it sounds like you're on a nice trip there
um but can we speak your brain as well let's go ahead and uh
we'll introduce uh pass the mic over to bet mode
hey guys happy to be here felix ceo of bet modes uh we're actually building the world's most
transparent casino have managed to put all of these traditional game providers on chain
to put all of these traditional game providers on chain utilizing our public bankroll contracts so
all that's happening on chain rewards distribution etc is also reliable on chain so happy to be
be here and talk more on this topic
perfect perfect i think we have a great panel here full of and people that really will understand
this topic and that's uh it's great great to have you here pass the mic on over to two cent timmy
what's up brother gm everyone yes i am two cent timmy i am on the Polygon marketing team. Thanks for the thumbs down, Darren.
Polygon actually is huge on prediction markets.
Recently came out that we had 79% of decentralized prediction markets live on Polygon.
So it's really cool.
It's, I would say, probably the hotbed of prediction markets and really, really excited to start talking about them.
That's really cool. Polygon has some really great stats.
I also seen recently that most of all of the stable coins outside of USD stable coins
also live on Polygon so I'm interesting but yeah you guys
are crushing it thank you for being here to send to me and thanks for everything you do for the show
uh we'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to Sidra hi everyone uh you'relav here. Cidra is a layer one blockchain.
It's the first community on blockchain on move a language.
So if you're looking for a great platform to build gambling or prediction markets,
it's a great place to do it now.
place to do it now.
Awesome.
Awesome.
And it's pretty cool that you guys are using Move.
Great to have you here.
And let's go ahead and move over to Phil.
Do I have your name right? Is it Phil TSA?
Yeah, yeah. It's just first letters of name and the second name. So yeah, I'm actually
we're speaking about Polygon. I really enjoyed it. They were quite active lately. I see a lot of Polygon on socials. So great
here. And
regarding predictions, like my
initial thought, actually I'm going to
share a short story that when we started
doing Azura
and I'm a core team member
from day one.
So we had actually one general
feeling that
predictions, it's funny, but sports betting is where the actual money is.
So which now I see it's not exactly true.
But back then numbers said that, you know, sports, thousands of different events daily.
And like we look at what Polymarket did back then and we thought, okay, but how are they going to survive when it's like five, ten markets daily?
But now I think that with the development of crypto, people started to understand that they don't just want to bet on sports.
They want to learn probabilities of everything and they want to put their money on every piece of information they see.
uh they see and uh that's why i think it's not a coincidence that uh uh like you know the rise
of of creep and the rise of prediction markets uh come together it's just because uh uh crypto
makes it possible for people from all over the world to join one platform to make this prediction
yeah i find that very very interesting and i think i introduced everyone
here so i'd love to just dive right into the conversation if you're new to the show
you don't have to raise your hand it's just like all of us are around a big table we're all friends and we just jump in dynamic conversation and all that uh rock likes
to say it's like a big roman bath house and we're all just taking a bath together and talking about
philosophy and drinking wine and and all that so please feel comfortable to just jump in piggyback
off each other and talk about this topic now my question for all of you guys because i can see that
um on the panel currently we have you know many people building in the prediction markets
category i guess you could say um early on uh maybe like around 2017 i remember auger and this idea that prediction markets could become
uh kind of like a a bit of that but i
also see a lot of the betting so in your guys's opinion um do you see prediction markets as a form of gambling or like a serious forecasting
tool or both what's your guys thoughts on this i guess we can start there anyone can jump in
i definitely think it's both i think it like
prediction markets it depends on the market because for some markets like let's say the
presidential election i feel like that's more like forecasting with uh events like uh let's say
global warming temperature change or something like that uh those could be more forecasting than
actually betting but obviously sports betting is huge on prediction markets. I just think they make traditional gambling better, even if people want to gamble.
So like for me, one of the coolest aspects of prediction markets, especially decentralized prediction markets, is you can exit your positions before the resolution. So if I'm watching a game, I can go, oh, I like, let's say last year,
Superbowl at Eagles and chiefs, you could be watching it and go, okay, I think the Eagles
are going to win. Oh, now I think the chiefs and maybe I was wrong about one, but I could exit my
position and recover some of my money. It's almost like you have a gambling with take profit and
stop losses built in, which I think is a really really interesting element but i think
it it's both and that's totally fine it's just a better form of gambling for people who want to use
it as gambling um so um i'm agree and i think the way i see it is prediction markets are much closer to forecasting than gambling
because gambling is pure luck, like a coin toss,
like when you play soccer and choose the site or something like this.
But I think with prediction markets, you're actually pricing in real information
you get from every resource you get like for example if
thousands of people put like money on whether bitcoin will be above or below like a certain
price and like the next 10 minutes that market gives you like a really like strong signal of
what the crowd believes and i think very often it's more like accurate than any signal analyst doing and
i think what this makes cool um on this side and web3 and the the part um
the one talks before me the central left part is the results are transparent and payouts are instant. And so it's not no middleman can change the outcome
or something like this.
And it's like turning the collective knowledge
into the market you can actually trust.
Everyone is trusting the Web3 market.
So, yeah.
Let me jump in here. So I actually think it's, it is gambling, but more like sports betting type gambling.
So it's not pure luck because the best sports betting clients are people who think that
they know better about sports.
Well, actually the worst clients who just check the odds and bet when the odds are good,
but still like these guys, they think they know some football very good.
And for prediction, just people know things and it's just wider market for them.
There are more people who think that they know about politics.
So that's why I think that prediction is going to develop a lot in the future.
Here.
Hey guys, I'm actually going to take the different direction. I kind of see it more as news instead of gambling.
I kind of see it as bottom up where the prices from people gambling have this positive externality
of a reflection of what people think is actually going to happen.
As opposed to other casinos or even sports betting. If you're found to be, you know, an insider or something, you know,
you can get your bet voided or, you know,
you can get all these other, you know, negative things.
In prediction markets, it might even be seen as a positive.
It's like the market is paying for someone that's on the inside to come in
and tell us, you know, what's happening.
And I find that side of it is like the information markets you know pretty
compelling that's a really interesting take on it information markets or news and now I I want to
continue with this question so if anyone wants to jump in about what we've been talking about, please do after me. But I'm also just wondering if anyone has thoughts on why these prediction markets seem to work when a bunch of people around the world guess or have a hypothesis about an outcome and uh and it it usually indicates
truth but the the thing is is that uh so many times in life i noticed that when the herd
or you know the the masses or the largest group of people is shouting one thing,
many times it's the opposite. So I've always been
a bit of a contrarian, but for some reason
it's not with prediction markets. There's so many
things where the masses were right.
And so what do you think causes this?
That's really something I've never been able to figure out.
Well, interestingly, these prediction markets, they're not exactly the masses.
They are, but it's different than like polling, for example.
When you do polling for presidential elections,
they're wrong.
They're like really wrong very often.
And the reason I think is,
I guess maybe the masses are,
like you said, aren't so accurate.
But the difference with the prediction market
is that you're putting weighted bets.
And so people who are sophisticated,
their vote doesn't just count as one. They can come in if they have special information or
they've studied this for a long time. Maybe they have, as Ben said, and this is a really good point, it's a whole topic in itself, but they may have inside information.
And so because of all this and because people are placing outsized bets, if they really think they're right, it's just more accurate than polling.
I also...
Go ahead.
I was going to say, I also think in a poll, there's literally no cost for being wrong. So like, I think there are two things going on. One is a poll says, who are you, a political poll says, who are you voting for? Where a prediction market says, who do you think will win? But even if the poll said, who do you think will win? And I say, I think Kamala Harris is going to win. If I'm wrong, it doesn't matter.
And you're counting on people in polls to tell the truth.
And people can literally fuck with numbers at no cost.
There's no actual financial cost at stake for being wrong.
Or when you have these prediction markets, you don't want to be wrong because you actually literally lose something. And I think that's a huge difference that happens when people have skin in the game, so to speak, for the prediction market.
So there's two things.
Hold on a second.
Just to throw this in, Rog, and I wonder what your take is here because um i thought that polling uh poll was uh polling i should say uh was uh
sometimes inaccurate because people were going uh they were looking for the people that would
you know choose what they wanted and so like you know that that gives it uh gives the poll a a bias
uh but but but you guys think it's like that's like maybe one one thing is just that uh there's no there's no weight behind
the vote
but I think
it could be other things as well
but for these
markets with
prediction markets it's
a big
thing that it has over polling
is that people are having
to put up capital to to make the vote i
think i think this is what you guys are saying but but uh i think polling can sometimes be
inaccurate for like a couple other reasons as well right um hi thank you guys for letting me
up here i it was an interesting conversation that i just had to jump in and um i feel based on this
topic gambling or through i feel it's all gambling at the end of the day right until it becomes truth
and if we're talking about like um you know deciding on who's gonna win a poll or whatever
right it's the same when it comes down to like sports bets and when you're like would you think
is gonna win right and if you're placing bets on that, then it becomes gambling. Right. And the same way with
prediction market and, you know, coming back to your decision being like, would you think is going
to win a poll, whatever. Right. And you're choosing is still gambling. If you're actually
placing like bets or it's kind of like financial in a way that you feel like you're gonna get
benefits after it and one truth that maybe people don't really talk about is behind prediction
markets there's still a little bit of like information to happening behind the scenes
and those information kind of like comes down to like the percentage of um the returns you're
gonna get on your you know your whatever amount you're placing on it right so there's still
the possibility of like a little bit of manipulation to go in between like
on the psychological level that kind of like affects your thinking being that oh yeah this
is actually starting with way lower odds so it's likely to happen and let me just try to like roll
with this one right than the other option so i feel like either way at the end of the day it's
still gambling and there's still information going around behind the scenes for the prediction markets itself
and some insiders, if we're trying to be honest.
I mean, I totally agree on that.
I mean, it's the same things happening in sports betting.
You have fixed betting.
You have something that's happening behind the scenes that you have no control over.
And I mean, that's like the thing that we don't really can disclose
and really see what's happening.
And I mean, there didn't need to be like systems for that
to like find syndicates that sits on all the information
and then they can put the betting in their favor
if there's like low traction, et cetera,
on these like prediction markets
they're actually betting on.
So yeah, huge problem on that side i
would say what what timmy said i just want to echo what timmy said earlier
that when you're polling there was two things you said to me one was when you're polling you're asking them basically who do you want to win or
maybe more specifically who are you voting for um but in a predictions market you're asking a
totally different question you're asking who do you think is gonna win right in a poll someone
may answer you know i wanted to vote for trump or i wanted to vote for biden um
even if they think the other person's gonna win so that was one thing in the and the second thing
what was the second thing timmy now we got we went off on a couple other tangents here
oh i was saying uh you don't have skin in the game on a poll like if i have someone knock on
my door yeah yeah who do you think is going to win and i just give a name like okay like it doesn't
mean anything basically until i say like i will give you a hundred dollars and you will give me
two hundred dollars if i am right and if i am wrong, I lose $100. Like, that's a very different mindset than just saying whatever.
Yeah, because even if you were, like,
there may be someone who's relatively confident in their candidate
or that they think they know who's going to win,
and they're, like, sort of confident,
but they may still not be confident
enough to put money on it right like when you put money on it you might you're you're automatically
you take up a thousand people and if you if you go up to them in a public square let's say you're
going to go in time square or something um which wouldn't be accurate, right? Because it's a biased,
you know, one area, but to Aztec's point, right? You need to go to lots of areas. You got to get
proper sample size. But anyways, let's just say you go to one area and you ask a thousand people,
either, you know, who are you voting for? Or better yet, let's ask them who's going to win.
Let's ask them, uh, who's going to win.
Uh, and all thousand people, or maybe call it 900 and maybe some are busy and they walk
off and they're like, I don't have time to answer this, but maybe 900, let's say 900
answer.
They say, you know, I think this is who's going to win.
Then you say, okay, well, I've got a bookie right here.
You want to put a hundred bucks on that? And out of those 900,
how many are going to go with your bookie or whatever, even if they trusted them?
20? 50? Some small number, right? And so the point is, once you get money involved,
most people aren't going to jump in. So now the people who do jump in,
they're either very confident or they have some privileged information.
And then that gets me to what Ben was saying earlier.
And this is a topic I've been interested in for a while.
And with the betting markets is should insider trading or insider predicting, should that be illegal or should that be legal?
And should that be discouraged or should it be encouraged? Because, okay, if you have insider
prediction, predicting in this case, if you have that against the rules, then you get more fairness.
If you make it so that you can have insider prediction and you have special privileged
information and you're able to bet, even though you have an advantage, an edge over everyone else,
then you get more accurate prediction markets. So do you want more fair prediction markets or do you want more accurate
prediction markets? Right? Because for, let's use an, an, an example.
Um, you're betting on a sports game and, um,
you are like the sports trainer of,
of the quarterback and you're with him on the field, and he breaks his ankle, right?
But like nobody knows.
Only you, maybe a few other people on the team saw it.
So the question is, should you be able to bet with that information?
You know the result.
They're going to lose.
They just lost their QB.
So do you,
should that be allowed or not? Now, maybe in that case, I think people's minds might go more to,
no, that's messed up. He's got this special information and it's just a sports game. So we don't need accuracy. We need fairness. But what about something else, you know, a terrorist attack or, or, uh,
or maybe a presidential election and you're an investor. And as the investor, you want to know
which way this election is going. You don't care if there's like insider trading or not. So you're,
you're actually, maybe there's better, someone can help me with better examples here. It's,
it's early in the morning for me. But the point is, in some of
these predictions markets, you're not using the prediction market just to bet. In some cases,
by the way, for me, most of the time, I'm not using these predictions markets as speculation.
I'm using these in my life to know what my investments are going to do,
right? Watching the Fed rate. And there's all kinds of times where I'm not even making a bet.
I'm just looking at the prediction markets to get the information. And so to me, I guess my
kind of opinion there is I want the markets to be as accurate as possible because I think they're
really interesting for the world for like yeah but you someone mentioned weather events the fed rate
um is is there like you know does does Iraq or Afghanistan have weapons of mass destruction that
would have been an interesting one.
I'll pause there.
Go ahead.
If anyone wants to jump in.
I would mention the point that how prediction market could manipulate the event result
itself for election, any other.
Yeah, it's a great point because with a huge huge amount of liquidity for some candidate we
could have a change we could change people opinion about the result and their voting
result would be a way different than before so i would say besides gambling or any other point of prediction market, it's first of all information that spread all around the world.
And from day to day, it's bigger and bigger.
It's so true.
I mean, these things can become self-fulfilling prophecies.
You know, humans are very much followers, right?
I see this every day in every, like, aspect of life.
People do what other people do or what they think other people, in this case, it might
be bullshit. So let's say, for example, if you made it completely legal,
would on the last presidential election, how much was spent on each side?
It was a lot of money.
It was in the billions, right?
Would it make sense if it was legal to do that,
to come in with some of your, you know,
let's say you have a billion dollars for a presidential campaign or whatever,
Senate, whatever.
Would it make sense to take a hundred million of that and throw it onto the
election, onto the prediction markets to sway public opinion?
I think what's interesting about that.
She's going to go all in.
What I was going to say too, to that point, Brock,
is like, I think that's why prediction markets on chain
are actually super powerful.
Because if it was, if you couldn't see who,
where the hundred million came from, like your guess would be like, oh, wow, that's a lot of money.
And I'm going to ignore ZK Tech and privacy and all of that. But you can basically trace back.
If it's on-chain and there's one address that sends $100 million to say so-and-so is going to win the election then it's like okay well that's what
one person really heavily oh man imagine zach you know like this this is gonna happen man my brain's
going so many yeah you're going to see all these bundled addresses spending money and then it's
like oh at least you know like it's still you still can't hide it you're gonna have zach xbt
and like on-chain sleuths coming in and like look look, it was, you know, like Nancy Pelosi or it was like one of Trump's guys.
And they're going to find like the and the people are going to think they did it, you know, cleverly.
But someone's going to like, you know, use some chain analysis and you're going to see these headlines someday.
someday.
Yeah, it'll be crazy.
Yeah, it'll be crazy.
And you know, the other thing that might happen is maybe it gets more nuanced.
And this is where I hope this doesn't happen.
I hope I'm personally as a libertarian, I hope the government stays the hell out of
these things.
I think they'll fuck it all up if they come in, as they do most things. But I wouldn't be surprised if you start having, if these markets
get big enough and they start affecting elections. And I think they did in this last election. I
think they did have an effect. I mean, I was watching them every day. I'm sure many other
people were. The news was reporting on it, right. And as we said, some of these things can become self-fulfilling prophecies because humans are such followers,
but I imagine there will be a time where they will come in with regulations. Um, and, and those
regulations might be that, okay, for, um, for like kind of public good events, it'll be like the securities versus commodity, you know,
argument of like cryptos. Is it a security? Is it, what is it? Uh, they might try to come in
and start saying, well, if it's a prediction market that is, that, um, affects, you know,
um, national security, or if it's a predictions market that is, um, that has like, um, political,
um, you know, effects, then it has to, then you can't have insider trading, or then you can't
do this, or you can't, you can't manipulate the markets. Then there are already, we already know
there's a precedent for that, right? In trading, manipulation is illegal.
If you try to paint the chart, if you try to, like, scare people out of positions or, like, liquidate people and these kind of things, it's already illegal.
So in prediction markets, wouldn't be surprised if the government tries to come in and start regulating either some of the markets or all of the markets.
some of the markets or all of the markets.
I hope they don't.
I hope they don't. I just generally
think even if they have good intentions
and even if we all stood here today and said
yeah, that might be a good regulation,
they'll still screw it up.
They'll do that and then they'll go too far.
They'll do, you know.
But anyways,
they'll start KYC-ing all the bets
right now.
Now they just surveil us
more. But anyways. right now uh now they just surveil us more but anyways but either way kyc isn't a bad thing
per se but like um going back to your main question right i feel whoa whoa whoa you can't
just uh we can't just leave that so expand on why KYC is not a bad thing.
Because obviously it's going to be more regulated.
You could avoid like things like that, such as the side of trading and all that whatnot.
It's like the same way you're seeing with Web2 betting platforms right now.
So right now you're just bringing that over to Web3.
So I know I might be sounding like a fed
right now being that oh yeah kyc is cool but i think well you said it's uh no you didn't just
say it's cool you said it's obviously you said obviously it's a good thing yeah i don't know
about that man you used the word obviously i i'm to have to push back a little there, friend. I'm telling Alex.
Okay, let me say why I feel it's a good thing, right?
Because obviously with the way the space is currently, there's a whole lot of bad actors.
And the same way we're talking about prediction market right now.
And, you know, I could be saying it from a personal point of view, which I might not want to talk too much about.
from a personal point of view which i might not want to like talk too much about even prediction
markets are having like insider trading back talks and things like that that they're using to actually
like tweak a little bit on the percentage of things and whatever but you know it is what it is
but if those kind of things actually start like coming into the space with kycs you know it could
be actually regulated and things might seem a little bit fair but the main truth is whether in web 2 or web 3
i feel like fear being fear isn't really a thing right we just love the idea of things being fear
we love the idea of things being like really um straightforward and being balanced for everybody.
Never is that way.
Things are always going to be like,
people are always going to have like information to stay ahead of other people.
That's why they say knowledge is power, right?
And information can be put to like good use or the other way all around, right? So at the end of the day, there's nothing,
there's never going to be anything like being fair.
So, yeah, even with KYC, right?
And you think taking people's IDs and watching everything they do,
that's a good way to make things fair?
I feel it could be a good way to actually make it limited in some kind of way.
But, you know, you can't still stop it right but it could just make it better than what it is currently
so just about some censorship with kyc with uh your wallet freezing and etc because of you doing something wrong
expand kyc i believe it's the kyc it's not a silver bullet for regulation uh obviously it could be a great point to regulate it but at the same time you deliver a huge amount of control to the governance to
to regulators and you could lose your like a way how you could lose your sense of a blockchain
of the distributed system at all so obviously it's like a 50 50 as for me what i'm gonna say is this right i i guess
right now you're talking about like freedom of the space being that oh yeah you're blockchain
you're being free if the government is trying freedom and privacy and there's you could there's
more reasons but yeah go ahead now the point i going to make here is that if the government is actually trying to come for all these things, they would get it regardless.
That's just the point, right?
Because right now, everybody's using AI.
You're putting your pictures in there.
You're playing with that.
So if they wanted to get your picture of that, what you look like, they definitely have that right now.
If they're trying to get your name, all they need to do is just tie in your information from the pictures you've kind of like pissed in with them with maybe your mobile network, what you've registered with.
And there they have your name.
If they're trying to link it up with your bank account or whatever, there they have it.
So I don't think that privacy, freedom, whatever it is, is actually the problem in this case.
You know, actually, you're right.
I agree with you.
Because the government, they could just do whatever they want, and our opinions don't
matter.
We should just bend over and lube up, right?
Yes.
Yes.
That is it.
Yeah.
That.
By the way, I'm concerned that you said fed you're pro kyc and look at
his picture guys this bear he looks like a fed he's got he's got the glasses on he's got the
that's bad juju
what do i tell you about making fun of people on the panel, bro?
Here I am, bro.
And I was up here trying to feed in, bro.
I guess I need to change my PFP back to the little project.
Yeah.
You have to join us again on the show, man.
Don't worry, man.
We'll be nicer next time.
Oh, yeah.
I know.
I know.
I'm always funny. You know, for the audience
There's actually some truth to this
I may have used some harsh wording in the past
With some panelists
And the team said
Maybe be a little
Be a little nicer
Good times But yeah Be a little nicer.
Good times.
But yeah, I'm joking. Being fair, the worst one was a Solana magazine.
So we should have just expected it.
I might have used the R word one time.
It's not confession time, bro.
You don't have to let us know but uh yeah this has been an
interesting combo uh rock i gotta head out in like 11 minutes uh i love i have uh best recall
okay um yeah no worries man um cool so i guess i i do want to just like maybe there's other people
opinions on the on the kyc i mean the problem is there's there's a bunch of problems with kyc i
mean besides the fact that these are invasive and they take our our privacy away and then they
they go farther and farther and farther and farther with these laws.
Besides that, they would make the markets less accurate, probably.
Or I guess in some ways it'll make the markets more accurate, though, right?
So, okay, on one hand, if you can bet without, like, okay, for example,
if you were either, call it a pro-Trump person or an anti-Trump person,
and you made a bet,
let's say you were a pro-Trump person and you made a bet that you thought Trump would win the election.
Well,
and then you were KYC,
then depending on if that's public info or not.
And by the way,
KYC,
these things have been leaked a million times.
So even if it's private and it's like, oh, only the KYC-er will know.
Well, I mean, in reality, like these things get leaked all the time, right?
But let's say you're pro-Trump and you bet now your work fires you, your friends don't want to talk to you, your family don't want to talk to you. Your family doesn't
want to talk to you. Now let's say it's the other way. Let's say you're, uh, you're, you hate Trump,
but you think he's going to win and you bet on him because you, you either have some information
or some conviction or whatever that, you know, he's going to win. And so you would bet on him,
but then you're, everybody's going to think you actually wanted him to win and they're going to disown you also.
Um, so like having anonymity, when you bet on these things in one way, we'll make it
more accurate.
Uh, but also I guess, um, if you had, if you had KYC, there's another way that would
make it, uh, more accurate, I guess, which is that
if there was someone coming in to try to manipulate the vote, they probably wouldn't do it,
or they'd be less likely to do it if they were KYC. So I guess there's arguments on the accuracy
of these things being, you know, both a plus and a minus having KYC. I've never heard you give any benefits to KYC.
Maybe I'm young, but I don't think this is the first time
in the whole history of 127 episodes
that you said something nice about KYC.
Well, let me be clear.
I mean, yeah, you're probably right.
But no, KYC is like most regulations.
They're made with good intent.
Well, sometimes, sometimes not.
But often they're made with, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt, the politicians, they make these with good intent.
And they do have positives.
I'm very pro-
Does this have to do with you going to Jackson Hole and hanging
out with all these politicians?
You want to be a politician
in the future?
Yeah, guys. Maybe
KYC's not so bad.
What happened in Jackson Hole?
What happened in Jackson Hole, bro?
Last Friday, you were hanging out with
all these
world leaders.
And then you come here and you start talking positive about KYC.
I don't know what's going on, man. I did spend a week with a bunch of top politicians.
Yeah, maybe it's influencing me.
No, I'm kidding.
But yeah, that was actually an incredible conference.
I highly recommend any of the SALT events.
But this was the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium, and it was happening at the same time as the Fed meeting. So it was pretty
incredible. Got to hang out with Paul Atkins, the head of the SEC, for many hours. We had
amazing conversations over a couple nights and a little bit during the day one of the days and it was it was pretty
crazy drinking wine uh the first night and then having scotch while he was drinking wine the
second night and we talked about some incredible policy stuff actually we might want to get into
later in the show um we might have come up with a new policy for stable coins that could help get
the yield to the consumer uh which is pretty cool and by the
way i discussed kyc with him actually i told him uh i knew it that is that wait that's actually
funny i just realized i did discuss kyc with him one thing that's very funny if you listen to the
show for a while when rock talks about meeting politicians he says oh yeah at night we were
drinking wine and then when he's at crypto conference, he's like, yeah, everyone was shit-faced plastered sharing all types of alphas.
So I don't know what that means.
Well, there's definitely a lesson.
I mean, I think, look, Paul is either a very down-to-earth person.
I mean, this is the head of the SEC.
This is like, I can't even believe I was in the same city with him,
let alone, you know, drinking wine with him. But, uh, yeah, maybe that's why he was a little more
open and was like, we were coming up with policy possibly. I mean, so like my, I'll, I'll give what
the KYC question was. So, uh, the first night that I hung out with him, we were talking for, I don't know, maybe an hour or so.
And we were, we talked about lots of things, libertarianism, Javier Millet, of course, I had to bring up and he was supportive of him, but didn't know a lot about him.
So I had to fill him in a little bit.
The coolest topic, and I think the most impactful topic, was that I told them, hey, with this
Genius Act, one of the negatives of it is that it didn't allow us to give the yields
to the consumer of the treasuries that the stablecoins are backed by.
And I said, this is a huge loss.
Why would we not allow the companies to give consumers yields? That was clearly
something lobbied by either banks that didn't want competition or something, but I think it's
more lobbied by the actual stable coins themselves because they don't want to share the yield. They
don't want to have their margins compressed. And he completely agreed. He said, yeah, it's, you know, it's, it wasn't ideal, but, um, you know, we, we
do need to find a way to, to solve that.
He agreed.
And we were talking about it for a while and out of kind of, he had an aha moment
and he's like, okay, what if, what if we took the stable coins?
Cause we don't want them to be securities cause then they can't be used as money.
But what if we took this, the stable coins and we, we allowed people, the companies or anyone to put them into an ETF wrapper.
And then you could give people the yield through the ETF wrapper because that is a security.
And basically, generally, when you give treasury yields to people, you do it through like money markets.
And there's other vehicles in there. They're generally all securities because they're investment contracts and you're promising someone a yield.
And so he said, yeah, what if we allow people to put it in an ETF?
Then the stablecoin is not a security, but then you can get people the yield now, which currently you can't.
And I said, Paul, that's genius.
Like, yeah, we should do that.
Can you do that?
And he said, I don't know.
Yeah, maybe.
Let me think on it some more.
So that was pretty cool.
And then I thought about it all night when I went home.
And I was like, but it doesn't solve the problem of getting these yields to people who can't KYC,
the problem of getting these yields to people who can't KYC, who don't have bank accounts,
who don't have access to like Fidelity, right? Someone in Nigeria with $5 to their name,
if they want to get a treasury yield, we should try to give them access. I mean, we went as the
US, I'm a US citizen. We want everyone in
the world to have access to U S dollars and U S treasuries as you know, in our own self-interest.
Right. Um, so why wouldn't we create some way that everybody could get access to the yields?
You would, I mean, if you could give everyone access to treasury yields through stable coins,
oh my gosh, you might, you might completely blow the lid off of
treasuries, right? Like, and the U S needs that because people aren't buying countries,
aren't buying our treasuries. They're dumping our treasuries. Um, if that's the trend for the last,
you know, 10 years or whatever, but anyways, so the next day, saw him again, was talking again.
And I brought this, I thought all night about it. I thought a lot during the day about it. I was like
doing some research and I told him, okay, what if, Paul,
I got a chance to hang out with him again
the next night?
I have to hop real quick.
I know you're right in the middle. I think
Darren should change the title of
the show to Rocks of Fed.
Just kidding.
I was going to go for
Trojan Horse, but yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah. That's way more positive.
But rock, there's a list of questions in the aggregated chat.
Cause we're going to everyone, just so you know, rock is going to,
this is how he masterfully does it. He, he segues,
but then he gets right back on, on a topic. So when it,
whenever you go back to prediction markets, brother, there's a list there.
But I'll try to go back as soon as I can.
Darren, do you want to ask some questions from the list in a bit?
But thanks, Aztec.
You're the man.
I'm bummed that you got to go.
But yeah, thanks for being here, brother.
Yeah, I can pretend that I can read.
Cool.
He's the first Panda to be able to read.
It's a phenomenon. Okay. So anyway,
so I see Paul the next night and, uh, I get a chance to hang out with him again. Um, again,
testament to, to both Jackson hole in the, in the salt conference, you know, shout out to Anthony
Scaramucci, but, uh, for putting it all together. But, um, so I'm talking to him again and I tell
him, Hey, you know, I was thinking about what we were talking about last night.
And, you know, I just couldn't stop thinking about the fact that, you know, this only benefits like institutions and people with investment accounts and people who have access to securities.
And over half the world does not.
And we want to get these bonds out to the world. And so I told him, what if, I was trying to think of other ideas, and the best I came up with was, what if we created a carve-out that said stablecoins are different than money markets in that we can give the yield through staking contracts, through smart contracts?
And because there's no custody, I mean, we've let DEXs go without KYC.
custody. I mean, we've let DEXs go without KYC. So maybe we can let, if you put your stable coin
into a staking contract, it's a smart contract and there's no custody, um, that maybe you can
allow the, the circle and tether and others to give the yield, uh, through those staking contracts.
And, and he said, ah, rock, I think that that kind of sounds like an investment contract to me.
And I was like, ah, damn it.
And he was like, I'll think more on it, though.
So clearly it's on his mind, and he wants to find a way to solve this.
And he agreed that it is a problem, and we do want to get these treasuries,
these bonds out to the world, and that it would be cool if people could do it
in a DeFi, non-KYC way.
That's not his words there. He didn't say in a Dey, you know, non KYC, uh, wait, he did, that's not his words there.
Then he didn't say in a define on KYC way, but that's what I said to him and he acknowledged.
So, um, yeah, I mean, the whole point of this is that circle and tether are making money hand over
fist right now, right? Circle, uh, or let's use tether. Um, they only have like, how many employees, guys? I've heard numbers, I think
it's like 30 employees or 70 employees, some small amount of employees, and they're making more money
than like Goldman Sachs because they're getting all of the yield on these treasury bonds. They
have 100 and whatever, I don't know what the number is, it's like $170 billion in Tether or
something, and they're getting like four and a quarter percent or whatever, or whatever the, the one
day, the short term. And, you know, cause they're only using mostly short term treasuries, but, um,
it's still good. You know, it's still high. It's like what it's gotta be at least three and a half
or 4% or something. Right. But anyway, so they're making all this money, but in a normal business,
you're supposed to, the margins in normal competition, margins get compressed, profits get compressed. Like look at quick swap.
When we started our, we were charging 30 basis points on a swap or even more, uh, in some cases.
Um, and now we have some pools that are charging less than one basis point,
like a 10th of a basis point. We've dropped the cost down a hundred X in some cases,
and that's good for the consumer. Yeah. The business is in a, you know, or the project or
business or decentralized decks or company I'm talking about in the real world as well.
The point is margins are supposed to compress over time through competition
and the consumer wins. And so the problem though, with these stable coins is in Circle and Tether is we're just putting this regulatory moat that they can make whatever they, you know, there's no, they don't have to give up any of the profit.
They just take all the profit for themselves and the consumer gets jacked diddly.
And so I think it is really important that we solve this.
And it was pretty cool that Paul was so open to talk about this stuff.
And he gave me his number to continue talking about it. So pretty cool stuff. Yeah,
Jackson Hole was incredible. There was only like 300 people at this conference. It was a very,
it's kind of like Satoshi Roundtable style, like very intimate. I was hanging out with Caitlin Long, Cynthia Loomis, Mark Gordon, the governor of Wyoming,
Eric Trump.
I didn't get to talk to Eric, but I got to shake his hand and stuff.
Yeah, it was pretty cool.
It was really cool.
I mean, there was like a ton of great people there.
Yeah.
And I loved it because Wyoming is pretty libertarian.
But anyways, if anyone has any questions or comments on that, we can go there or we could go back to either KYC or other prediction market topics.
I want to talk about one thing that I think is emerging right now, and it's actually a project building on Polygon called Gondor.
It's so one thing when we talk about these super liquid prediction markets,
right?
So talk about who wins the Superbowl,
who wins the presidential election.
All of these markets have a lot of money in them.
And they,
with the dollar amount assigned to that,
they have some value.
But right now you basically just have to hold your position until the resolution.
And it's funny, you were talking about stable coin yields
because some prediction markets are actually paying yield out on those.
But the Project Gondor is actually taking those,
like your shares on Polymarket, let's say. i know they adhere to the erc 1155 standard
so those are nfts and you can take that nft and use it as collateral to get other loans and use
it in d5 so it's almost like this weird blend of i don't know if it's even like an RWA because it's kind of like a real world asset in the sense of like, you have this position, but you're able to take.
So you bet, let's say, $100,000 on Politician X to win the election and they have 20% odds.
Those odds jump to 40%. And you go, hey, I'm actually going to hedge my bets, but instead of actually exiting the position or doing that,
I'm going to take out a loan on that whatever $200,000 now that I have.
So I get my $100,000 liquid.
I can do what I want with it and then use it that way.
And I think that's like a really interesting way for prediction markets to go,
where it could actually unlock a lot more potential. You could even like in theory,
leverage your conviction. So let's say I only had a hundred thousand dollars.
I bought the position. I had the shares. I use it as collateral. Then I bought more shares.
Like you can actually start looping. I'm not saying anyone should do this. And if you
do it, I hope and pray that you actually understand the risk that you're taking on.
So like, let's say that it's not financial advice. It's speaking purely hypothetically here
and theoretically, but it could actually unlock like this huge percentage of money
in the prediction market. And then you like really get these interesting dynamics at play.
Gosh, damn. I love crypto. Wow. That's really cool to me. So this is like one of those things
where when I'm talking to other like TradFi people, I try to come up with examples and I'm
probably going to use this one now. But I try to come up with examples of things that our industry unlocks
that weren't possible previously in TradFi.
So, you know, a lot of people talk about,
well, this is slower or more expensive or whatever.
But one, I think someday we could even be faster
through things like ZK roll-ups, which Polygon are the pioneers in.
So we could actually get things cheaper and faster in our industry.
But then, two, there's things we can do in this industry that you could never do in TradFi, uh, or, or didn't exist, or we just maybe creatively invented and maybe there's
a way they can mimic it, but probably not.
Um, like one example is flash loans, you know, flash loans are this really crazy, you know,
concept where I don't know how many people here, probably half the people or
so know, but just a quick recap on flash loans. So you could, if you see, uh, one of the most
common places they're used is in arbitrage. So if you see that on one, um, one decks or one lending
pool, you know, uh, we'll just use decks as easier. You see that the price of an asset is higher on one and lower on another.
Well, you can, the traditional way in TradFi and all of history that you would arbitrage
is you would go buy the asset on the market where it's cheap,
and then you would sell it on the market where it's expensive.
And that would pull the prices, it would bring them back into, um, you know, it would equal out the prices. Um, well with flash loans, you don't need
the capital because in that it could be very expensive to arbitrage. It's very hard. I mean,
there was like, you know, the kimchi arbitrage of, of, uh, Korea where people, it was hard to move money in and out. And it was like, it took
major machinery to achieve this kimchi arbitrage. And, um, I mean, I was, I was a little involved
in that. That was in like what, 2017 or 18. And then there was other people that, uh, really
cracked the nut. Like, for example, this was how, uh, SPF actually made a lot of his early money
was he was able to create kind of accounts,
business accounts in both sides. And he, you know, this takes time and he was able to solve
that pretty quickly. And it kind of showed he was a, he was a bright young man, a fraudulent later
on, but bright young man nonetheless. But in, if you could use flash loans for all this, you don't
need the money upfront. You could just say, I'm going to do a transaction or a block of transactions.
I'm not sure exactly technically how it works, but basically you do a multi-part transaction where you say, I'm going to, I want to buy on this exchange.
I want to, and then I want to take it over.
I want to sell it on this exchange.
I want to, no, I want to borrow money from the flash market platform. I want to buy on this exchange. Then I
want to sell on this exchange. And then I want to pay back the loan all in one instantaneous
transaction. So there's no duration. So the money never, um, you, they never give you custody of
the money. So you don't need a KYC on that, by the way, you don't need to have any trust or credit
score and you could borrow a billion dollars.
Why?
Because you're not taking the money.
You're putting it through a series of smart contracts that all execute.
So anyways, now, uh, going back to your, your example, um, that's pretty cool.
You could use, this is something that we never saw before, uh, is you can use your, um, you could use your,
your betting position as collateral and you could, you could either go get a yield on it somewhere.
You can, you can leverage up by, um, just betting, You know, you take collateral or you put the bet as collateral.
You take out a loan against it and then you put more, you add more onto the bet.
And it's a way of looping or leveraging.
But there's more simple ways to leverage a bet.
I'm sure they could just build that natively into the platforms too.
I'm sure people are doing that.
It looks like Timmy has actually managed to summon gondor
it's uh just like them on stage oh he got them here nice yep hey everyone yeah glad you're
discussing gondor thanks for mentioning yeah tell us uh tell us a little more about what you guys do
Yeah, tell us a little more about what you guys do.
Yeah, sure. So as you can see, we're the defi layer on top of prediction markets.
So we're essentially building financial primitives, which let people do more to their shares than just buy and sell them on Polymarket and other platforms.
And yeah, as you were mentioning, our first product is a lending and borrowing protocol on top of Polymarket, which enables you to borrow against the shares you have currently already bought in, which Polymarket's been recently rolling out,
including the 2028 election ones
and more of the long-term ones we see popping up.
I definitely think it's super interesting.
I mean, like, I think it's funny.
I think the market for, I don't, I say this with affection, but like, it's the perfect product for DeFi DGens, of financializing as much as they could all the time.
And then we were missing it from the prediction market idea,
because it really is when you consider like, what is your assets?
Like, I think it's your, the number of shares you have in a prediction market,
especially a liquid prediction market is an asset you own.
So why can't you do more with those assets?
And I think that's really like kind of a heart of DeFi in general.
Like it isn't especially where we're going.
I think we're like,
when you talk about DeFi with real estate,
like RWAs,
like there's a whole section there there but you didn't have it in
prediction markets but it's like oh this is one of the most native like you hear it and it just
makes sense so i know personally i'm like super excited about what you guys are building
i mean this is what like sophisticated so regular people don't don't do this so much you do do
there are some areas where people do it but there it's just so common they they don't they don't do this so much. There are some areas where people do it, but it's just so common.
They don't know how to use this stuff more creatively.
And rich people, they're using this kind of stuff.
Not this, but using their assets as collateral all day long.
Like all real estate people do it.
The one place we use, the two places I could think of off the top of my head where we use collateral as regular people is our mortgage and car, you know, an auto loan.
Where the house is the collateral, right?
Or the car is the collateral for the loan.
But, you know, rich people, they're using their collateral all the time to get cheap access to money.
I mean, you know, Elon, for example, he doesn't want to sell shares of Tesla.
So he goes and borrows against it. Or if you have high conviction and, you know, Bitcoin,
Ether, or Pol, you can, instead of selling it to pay taxes or things like that, which I'm actually
thinking about doing right now is just, do I want to pay my tax bill? Do I want to
sell my assets to pay my tax bill? Or do I want to just borrow? If I believe that I can borrow
and that crypto is going to keep going up depending on, of course, the volatility,
then you could just take a loan and you can pay your taxes that way and then you don't have to sell your crypto and you still get access to you know you still get exposure
to the the gains um so yeah sophisticated investors are always looking for new creative
ways to use collateral and this is a pretty cool one gondor yep thanks a lot and that's exactly our
reasoning we also see a lot of institutional money being ready to come into the space. We see some of the teams forming funds to trade on Polymarket.
We see institutions like Susquehanna market making on Kalshi and plenty of others which are only yet to be rebuilt.
So partially Gondor is a product for institutions and sophisticated investors who come in with track fight capital
and look for maximizing the capital efficiency on their bets we obviously keep in mind that for a
retail trader it doesn't really make sense to borrow against like a thousand dollars worth of
their position there is a different use case to it uh but i won't reveal it quite now we we got some
more stuff prepared so also feel free to follow it.
We go on their page.
Leak it right here live.
Nah, I'll keep some alpha for the later.
But yeah.
Pure pressure.
Now come back on the show when you're ready
and we'll, if Timmy likes you, we like you.
So come on the show and you can announce it here.
More to come. Thanks.
I wish Ben was here from OK Bets.
We didn't get into what they do, but like, I think there's going to be massive,
all kinds of different markets, including derivatives markets.
And there's just going to
be like, um, uh, what else is there? Um, copy trading. Um, you can have, you can have aggregators
and I think, okay, bets is doing that aggregators. So there's, if there's lots of predictions
markets in the world, um, and some have different odds than others, you know, um, you'll want to arbitrage
those. Uh, that's a way that you can make the markets more accurate. Um, and people can make
money by making them more accurate. So like some people think arbitrage is a bad thing, but generally
arbitrage is a good thing. It makes more efficient markets, but there's all kinds of stuff that is
going to be built around these predictions markets there could be hundreds of applications it seems like we have like six or
seven building in this uh right now does anyone else want to maybe jump in go ahead timmy and then
if anyone else wants to jump in and talk about what they're building on these i was actually
going to ask a question for the builders in the space like if that's all right but like
i to your point of arbitrage like how are they
to me you're you're honorary co-host man you're you're you're you're unofficial honorary co-host
you can ask anything you want like interrupt anytime you want how are they thinking about so
like all of the different prediction markets right like people are making a ton of money
off arbitrage but how are they thinking about like setting the price and
what our market are, the prediction markets actually going to build something to make their
themselves more efficient, I guess, because I feel like if, if I'm running a prediction market,
I'm thinking as a prediction market owner, like, and business, like if people are making money
off arbitrage and that means that our product in and of itself is not as efficient as it should be um because i don't know call it
pvp if you want but like people are taking money that we could be having ourselves uh because our
markets aren't as efficient like how do you think about i mean yes in a way but also i mean there's
many dexes in the world something i I know a little more about it.
For those who don't know, I'm the co-founder of Quickswap.
But there's many DEXs in the world that, like, especially on less active chains, that a lot of their revenue comes from arbitrage.
I mean, there's some DEXs in the world where probably 80% of their revenue is coming from arbitrage. That's not a healthy DEX, by the way, but
that does happen. And then, you know, it's usually not super profitable. And then they're
using inflation rewards to like prop up the DEX basically. And the arbitragers are kind of
extracting value, but generally arbitrage brings lots of volume to DEXs.
extracting value. But generally, arbitrage brings lots of volume to DEXs.
So, I mean, what would you do as a DEX? I guess you could say, hey, how do we make our DEX more
efficient in the first place? Because there are people who would argue, and there is a fair
argument, that arbitrage can be, I guess, extractive in some ways if you're being nuanced.
But generally, I would say arbitrage is a healthy part of markets.
Does anyone else have thoughts on this?
And then we brought Drew Roberts up on stage as well, who has his hand up.
You could jump in.
Go ahead.
Yeah, GM friends.
Yeah, I think I definitely see what you're saying.
I think the benefit of arbitrage is it just creates a lot more liquidity and volume.
So it does have a role as far as creating and fostering a healthy ecosystem
where there are, especially when there's, you know, multiple pool setups,
there is the ability to absorb a spot sale.
Yeah, I guess the best market, maybe another way of looking at it is the best market would be a market that didn't need arbitrage because then all the benefits are going to the trader or to the platform, I suppose.
Whereas arbitrage are coming in, they're making a profit.
But I think they're generally serving a good function.
You don't want to have asymmetric markets.
You don't want to have the price of Bitcoin on one exchange at $112K and on another exchange $104K.
And in the beginning, before you have arbitrageurs coming, that's what happens.
before you have arbitrage come in, that's what happens. Um, before markets get more efficient
and sophisticated and, and more liquid, you have these big differences in prices. Uh, so like,
you know, in the world, like bond markets, gold markets, you know, uh, it publicly traded equities,
uh, at least the top 500 are super efficient, right? It's the same price on one exchange is,
is on another within like, you know,
even a hundredth of a penny or something,
or at least in crypto, it's like that.
But yeah, anyways.
And it's mainly automated
and, you know, kind of micro flash bots now.
I tried my first and only arbitrage I ever tried
was moving from a centralized exchange Coinbase
in January of 14 to a centralized exchange Mt. Gox because it was $350 of BTC higher and
never got out. You know, so you could have situations where, yeah, but in a decentralized
exchange, especially one that's as quality as quick swap, you know, you've got
You do need rebalancing of pools
And I think it's healthy to have pools rebalancing automatically where your end user especially your unsophisticated user has
rebalanced pools
as they're coming in
Yeah, makes sense.
Timmy, what was your question to the builders?
I forget.
Basically, exactly that,
what you were saying Dex's do with arbitrage.
Like, are they thinking about arbitraging
between different prediction markets, right?
So like, Azorro's the first prediction market
I see on Sage Hall.
Are they thinking about their market and also reading poly markets api and making sure that they're not
basically giving away money to other bots or people who come in to arbitrage yeah actually
you're making me think this is something that actually does happen so um okay so you could have external arbitrageers come in and try to um make more
efficient markets or sometimes platforms do this um we tried this with quick swap not for arbitrage
but for mev it's kind of a like a little bit of a tangential example, and I think Darren will remember better because Darren's just smarter than me.
But we tried to build some community-owned MEV that we could get slightly more in front of the MEVV people that were doing the sandwich attacks and stuff.
Um, so we tried to build a MEV bot that would be kind of owned by the, the quick holders that had,
I, if I remember correctly, it might've had some kind of slight advantage or something. Maybe it
was just milliseconds cause we had access to the data, but I don't know.
I don't remember exactly.
And that sounds kind of like, that sounds like the order flow.
What is it called?
Pay for deal or order flow of Robinhood, how they make money.
But this was the, but the difference was this was like a community thing.
So it would get like, yeah, it was with, it was with wall chain before they done like
the social FI stuff.
They effectively saw your trade, saw the price impact of the trade,
and then used some of that to arbitrage the different DEXs on the chain.
And then the profits just got shared to the user.
No, but this was MEV.
I thought we were doing the MEV protection stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
So we actually still do that with ORBS, with the MEV protection stuff Yeah, so we actually still do that with orbs
with the MEV protection stuff
but with wallchain
it basically knew what was going to happen
with the trade
simulated, I think it just went through
like a private RPC
But did it have an advantage over the public?
Yeah
because what it then let
you do is
arbitrage the other pools
that are maybe on like, maybe SushiSwap
or something else. But anyone could do that.
What's the advantage to the
platform? Well, it's done that all in one transaction.
And then I think the profit got
shared with the user and the,
so it got the user a better trade.
And then some of those
arbitrage profits just went to like buy and burn quick, I think.
That's so crazy.
I mean, this is another example of what you could do in crypto, but not in TradFi that I know of.
You could build these things where Robinhood makes money from getting advantaged insights over trades.
So they sell that to Citadel and whatever whatever and that's how they give you three
trades yeah go ahead really how citadel and virtue make all of their money and then they call
themselves like brilliant because they're they're like look at how smart we are about uh you know
our trades and it's like well but you have all the inside information i'd be brilliant too if i had
all the inside information on trading can you too if i had all the inside information
on trading can you break that down more alex like from the beginning of how that works i don't i i've
looked at this so many times and i never fully understand or i always forget but yeah it's come
in with your big brain to blockchain nice i hated how these guys operated so much uh but that's
literally how they how they get into,
that's how they make their money.
So explain like we're five,
how does this all work with Robinhood?
So, well, Robinhood's just an order book.
And so what they do is they basically give all their orders
to Virtue or Citadel, right?
So Virtue does their crypto stuff
and Citadel does their regular TradFi
stuff. And Citadel, when I was at the SEC, I literally went all the way as far as I could
up the chain trying to regulate Citadel and Knight and a bunch of other people who were doing exactly the same thing because they should
be regulated in a different way, like as market, in terms of how they're, they have asymmetric
information and they're not regulated as holders of asymmetric information. It seems like it should
be illegal. I mean, as a guy who, you know, I don't love
regulation, but that seems shady. So here's the deal. So what they do is they get information
on all the trades. So they see all the buys and sells, and then they execute on them.
But they're also allowed to, not only do they execute on them, but they're allowed
to take their own positions on those trades. So what ends up happening is instead of just saying,
I'm going to match the person who wants to buy at this price with the person who wants to sell at that price, they say,
what is the range that a buyer and seller are willing to have?
I'm going to say, okay, the person, I'm going to buy from someone at their, whatever the
lowest possible price someone's willing to sell at, and then I'm going to sell to somebody
at the highest price that they're willing to sell at, taking on no risk themselves,
and then they make the spread. That's how Citadel is rich. That's how they make their money, right?
They're maximizing their own spreads. They should not be able to execute the trades in those manners, right?
They can make a piece of money off of the trade itself,
but they should not be able to make money by executing on the spread.
So you're saying they should make money as either a flat fee,
upfront and transparent flat fee or percentage.
It started moving to flat fees. It used to be
percentages, I guess, right? And on most of the platform. Flat fee would be better. Agreed.
But this is that, that they shouldn't be able to do that. Cause what are they doing? They're
basically, um, giving everyone else the worst possible trade without, without everybody knowing
they're like, Oh, okay, well at least I got the trade, but you know, I guess that's what the buyer, you know, every seller is like, well, I guess that's what the buyer was willing to accept.
And the sellers are like, well, I guess that's what, you know, the buyers are willing to accept.
Not knowing that it's actually Citadel or Virtu in the background who see everything and are executing not at the buyer or seller's best wishes.
They're executing on their own best spreads.
So they're taking the spread.
Because they're maximizing their own gains.
And that's because they have this asymmetric information.
Everybody would be rich if you could see all the buys and sells and you immediately could buy for the lowest price and then sell to the highest price.
And you're just maximizing this constantly.
It kills me that, you know, the CEO walks around like he's a genius.
And I'm like, everybody's a genius.
If you can see all the trades and just.
Well, it was kind of genius.
It seems a little diabolical or illegal even and and nobody's
done anything about it but it is it is smart because the a lot of consumers even if they know
this and i think most people kind of well not most people but a lot of people know this but they still
use robin hood because they like not paying any fees and they like not paying any subscription
so they're like fees that's the thing yeah yeah they just don't realize that they're like, eh. That's the thing. They don't realize it. They just don't
realize that they're paying this stuff. That's the thing is that they don't realize they're
losing money because they're losing the best trade fee. They are paying for this stuff.
They just don't see it up front. And that's the problem i mean that's i took it literally as far as i could in the sec and i just hit a brick wall and then when i what was the brick wall why like why so
why is it a lot of people agree with this it seems what's the argument it's just grandfathered in you
can't do anything i was like how is it legal though how is it legal though like how do they
because it's grandfathered in they just basically turn a blind eye to it but how is it legal, though? Like, how do they, because it's grandfathered in,
they just basically turn a blind eye to it,
but how is it actually legal?
I was literally in the SEC.
I was an internal person.
I'm a lawyer there.
And I was like, why do we let these people do this?
This doesn't seem fair or legal, right?
These people should not be doing these kinds of transactions.
This seems illegal.
And why did they get this asymmetric information at
the expense of the retail shareholders, right? Because these are the people, the retail traders,
even brokers, right? They're trading against everyone else. Why do we let them do that? They
shouldn't be able to do that. And so I took, I took it as far as I could. And then
eventually I was just told, well, you know, they got grandfathered in. That's basically, you know,
how that that's just basically. So is what they're doing to break it down a little further,
what they're doing, it sounds like is let's say there's a buyer that wants to pay a hundred
dollars for a share. And then there's a seller that wants to sell for $101 a share.
Now there's a dollar spread.
And they're coming in and saying, okay, we'll buy it.
Or no, the other way.
No, no, no. So there's a seller that says we're willing to sell this between $100 and $150.
$100 and $150. And then someone who's a buyer who says that will buy it between, you know, $125 and $200, right? price at the most advantaged part, like where they would meet for the buyer and the seller
would meet at, you know, the whatever it is, $125, then instead the buyer, what is it called?
Citadel would buy it at $100,, right? From the, from the seller,
because that's the lowest price that they'll take. And then for the buyer, then they'll, they'll,
they'll sell it to them at $200, right? So that person made, so Citadel then made a hundred
dollars in profit instead of executing it at the best price for those two parties, right?
So instead of executing at best price for the two parties, they're basically ripping
off.
Executing at the worst edges of what-
Exactly.
If that makes sense.
Now, the numbers are not that crazy, right?
I mean, generally, they're probably more like pennies off each trade, I would assume.
It's not actually pennies. I mean, it depends on because they're always looking for the for the the edge, the the the widest cases like that's that's what all of their algorithms do is search.
Trade closed first if you're an edge case than if you are right in the middle, because what they're looking for is their biggest spread, not your best case, right?
So they're looking for the kind of stupidest trader in a way.
Yeah.
You know, in blockchain, if you say that you'll pay the most to the miner, like originally, right?
If you were going to pay the most to a miner or validator, then you get moved up in line so that you get closed, your transaction closes first.
It's like that.
Like if you have, if you offer, you know, the craziest deal, like if you want to sell at the cheapest possible price, it's you're getting your your
transaction moves up, not because a buyer is getting that deal, because Citadel is getting
that deal. Right. You're not giving a buyer that deal. So that's that's the thing is that
the that's why it's completely unfair. And so that's when I originally came into blockchain. The thing that I was making was a financial marketplace that excluded all of those those back end dealers.
Right. So it was a pure financial marketplace that had no interference and no, no, no back end closure.
The problem was I did it in 2016 when there were no layer twos or anything,
and it was going to take like nine hours to close a financial transaction.
And my team and I were like, well, that's not going to work. I was going to wait nine hours
to close a financial transaction. So we were like, well, this isn't the right time to do this. And I
ended up being an advisor to companies instead but that was originally that
literally the thing that brought me to blockchain was like I need a technology that's going to allow
me to do these you know to create a marketplace because literally the the technology that belongs
in markets working with markets like the the stock market itself should be on blockchain. Like all of this should be on blockchain. All of these
transactions should be on blockchain. All of these market transactions, the opening, the closing,
the stock itself, everything should be on blockchain. It's a natural fit. The faster
blockchain is, the more likely it is a fit for it. And back then I was like, this is the perfect technology
for this, right? I mean, it had to be faster, which it is now. So we have lots of things that
make it faster. But even then I was like, this whole idea that other people are essentially
manipulating pricing. So people are getting worse pricing because someone else needs to maximize
their profit by maximizing the spread. That should be illegal, but wasn't. So if I couldn't make it
illegal, I wanted to make it impossible, which is what the marketplace was about.
Or just out-compete it, so provide a better product in parallel. So this
is interesting. This is where like, you know, Eric Voorhees, you know, joking about earlier
that I'm a Fed, you missed that part, Alex, but, um, and that being in Jackson Hole made me like,
uh, whatever, more pro regulation. You were a Fed? That's hysterical fed that's hysterical that's hysterical oh my god did you
like that person should like break out in hives immediately like yeah i mean it was the joke was
that uh you know i was giving some i was basically saying i i hate kyc but that aztec was saying wow
i've never heard rock say something positive about KYC. Because I was just saying in predictions markets that KYC could have some benefits.
I still think it's net negative for sure.
But Aztec was like, man, you were hanging out in Jackson Hole.
What happened?
Did Rock get infiltrated?
Anyways, I had an example to get.
But anyways, I forget what it was.
Getting old.
It's affecting me.
But thanks for coming on, Alex.
It's great to have your insights on this stuff.
And especially as someone who was actually on the inside trying to work on this stuff.
Yeah, I was so young, trying so hard. I was so young trying so hard I was so earnest I look back at myself at the end in
those days and I was like I was so naive I was like well I'll just tell them it's an oversight
and it seems like common sense but unfortunately in politics common sense doesn't always work
there's there's lobby money and all. I remember what my example was now.
So it was that, you know, basically your idea is if we can't stop this in the traditional markets because they're too entrenched and there's too much corruption, lobbying, and too much money being thrown around, then what we can do is build parallel systems.
systems. And that's what our whole industry is, right? So like I told Eric Voorhees, you know,
And that's what our whole industry is, right?
I was talking to Eric Voorhees about, who's one of my idols about, you know, that I want to go
into politics as a libertarian to reduce the size of government. And he's like, Rock, don't do that.
It's going to be bad for your life. And it's just not really doable. You can have a much better
impact building parallel systems like Bitcoin, et cetera. And, you know, respectfully, I'm not
going to take his advice. I'm not going to take his advice.
I'm still going to go into politics. I think someone has to do it. But the point is that
there is a really good argument for if you can't fix these very broken and very old systems that
are, there's so much money just entrenched in this crony capitalism of politics and business,
that maybe our best bet is just building parallel systems,
like what you're talking about with the exchange you wanted to do, Alex, is we just build these
parallel systems and we force the market to come to us, right? For example, I think one of the
greatest, people ask me, what's one of the greatest risks for Bitcoin? And one of the risks to Bitcoin is that the Fed and the Treasury and that the US and other countries just start being responsible and stop having so much spending and inflation.
you know, not inflationary because they were competing, they saw that everybody was moving to
Bitcoin because it, you know, or other cryptocurrencies because they don't have
that irresponsible inflation or, you know, let's use a more corrupt, you know, or a more
hyperinflation country, Argentina or Venezuela or something. If all of their people start just
holding Bitcoin or even stable coins for that matter, instead of
holding their national currency because they're irresponsible and printing too much money, which
is always the reason for inflation, in my opinion, then maybe the country would be like, shoot, guys,
we can't keep printing money like this. These guys are just not going to use our currency anymore.
We got to be a little more responsible. So maybe if, like, Alex, you could build that platform, maybe Robinhood would be like, uh-oh, we're losing all of our users to this decentralized platform that's not screwing everyone.
Maybe we should stop screwing people so hard.
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I have a lot of basically an alternate financial system that needs to be done.
And I truly believe there should be a competing system, not a replacement system, because
that's basically how you build a safeguard.
If something doesn't work in one system, then you shift your assets to the other system.
And that's what protects economies, right?
And that's what protects economies, right?
Every economy should have a safeguard so that they can experiment, so that they can actually,
you know, function and not be frozen where all economies right now are stuck.
They can't do anything different than they've been doing because if they're wrong, they
fail.
There's nowhere to put their money in case they fail. They basically
have no alternative than to do whatever it is that they're doing right now because everything
is vested in the dollar. So essentially, nobody has an alternative. There's nothing to do except
be in the dollar, right? And so that's why we need a safeguard, because if something
fails, we need a safe place to put assets in case of failure. And that's really why this whole
alternative system, you know, Bitcoin and having an alternative financial structure that is not based on fiat. These dollar alternatives,
that stable coins that are dollar alternatives are not part of an alternative system.
They are just masks. They're basically what you have in an ATM before you take your dollar out.
you take your dollar out, right? They're not alternatives. They're not part of this system
that really creates a safety net and an alternative structure that provides strength
to an economy, right? An economy has to have something that is not focused on the dollar, that that is actually that this is the problem is that
pegged economies don't work. So we have so many things that are pegged to some other fiat.
And the problem is we have like literally more than a thousand years of data that shows us pegged economies always fail. And we see why. But there's this
insistence that the dollar is somehow going to be different. And if we peg everything to this dollar,
then those won't fail. The dollar is just our current, you know, whatever, you know,
the Roman talon or the whatever that we have right now. But there's no principle that tells us
that pegging everything to this one current currency
is somehow going to work.
We have so much data that says
every time a currency has pegged itself
to another currency,
even El Salvador, who took the actual dollar
as its currency.
The problem is another economy doesn't make decisions. It just suffers the results of the
decisions that the larger economy is making. The larger economy is making decisions for the larger economy. The smaller economy is just getting whiplashed
from the results of the decisions that the larger economy is making. It cannot make the decisions,
it cannot react to the decisions of the larger economy, and eventually it breaks every single
time. Look at Cuba, look at Italy. Look at Argentina.
Look at every single country that this has happened to.
The pegged currencies break.
And it will happen faster now that we have these rules from the Genius Act that say that all of these have to have 100% reserves up to seven-day treasuries.
reserves up to seven-day treasuries. That is going to be insanely expensive, which means these
economies are going to be either ridiculously small or they're going to cheat, right? And if
they're ridiculously small, as soon as they grow, they're going to break. And if they, otherwise,
they're going to cheat. That's one of the two things are going to happen.
It's kind of weird that the government, they kind of talk out of both sides of their mouth here. So on one hand, you have, like I was hanging out with
Caitlin Long in Jackson Hole, and she's doing custodia bank. And they got denied from their
banking license because they were doing full reserve banking. Now, all the banks in the United
States do fractional reserve, right? And fractional reserve means you put your money in, you put a
hundred bucks in the bank, you think the money's there. It's not there. They're lending it out and they're
leveraging, rehypothecating and taking on risk. That's partially how money is made depending on
who you ask. But anyways, so she got X'd out because she was trying to do full reserve.
And they said, look, we're not going to lend your money out. You put your money here.
We're just going to hold it. We'll charge you a fee instead of rehypothecating and taking risk with your money and trading that for storing your money.
We're just going to hold your money. We're not going to touch it. And we're going to just charge
you a fee for the service. And they got denied. And they said it was partially because of crypto
or because they were also wanting to custody Bitcoin i think and but um but i think the real reason is what it seems
like is they didn't they saw this as potentially a threat to all the other banks because if there's
banks that do full reserve then the fractional reserve banks people might stop using them as
much um so in that case they they want they don't want full reserve. But in the case that in stable coins, they're pushing for full reserve because it benefits them because then more people buy treasuries.
Because you mentioned this a lot. So it's clearly something you're very passionate about. And if you could give maybe some examples of these pegged, you know, thousands of years of pegged currencies failing, I'd love to hear that too. like Circle, the new Circle Bank and the XRP Bank, that's what all of these banks are doing now is opening up something that's more like a trust company, which is very different from a bank.
That is.
So if you think about it.
There's basically like if you've heard of a savings and loan.
Right.
Those old savings and loan companies where you could basically make an account, you could you could have a deposit and you could get a loan.
Right. And then there are trust companies that hold accounts in assets.
They hold assets that they can't they can't hold.
They don't hold deposits,
they don't have like deposit accounts,
they can't do loans,
but essentially they hold assets in reserve.
So essentially what they do is take your money and grow it, right?
So they hold asset accounts and grow it.
So think of like a trust account
is like basically a giant growth savings account, right?
So something that holds your money and makes it grow substantially, right?
So you take a trust company and a savings and loan company together and you get a modern
retail bank, right?
That's what those two things together really are.
You could split them apart or you could put them together and make a modern retail bank. So what she wants to do is hold 100% reserve. The issue I think may have been that
is it generating... But she's not trying to grow it. And I don't understand when you say you put
those together and you make... That's modern banks, but banks aren't growing your money at all. They're not giving you the
yields. I mean, most savings accounts, they're growing money. They they're growing your money
for the, uh, they're moving money into the economy. Right. And they can grow, they're
growing money for their own sake. Not for you. They can grow your money. If you put your money
in an interest bearing account, right? If you? If you basically, if you have enough money, you put your money into
something that basically allows you to partake of the activity that they're doing to make themselves
profits, right? So banks are making money with your money. If you have enough money or want to put your money, lock your money up,
then you can partake of some of the activities that they're doing that make money and you get
some of the profits of what they're making. So they are growing assets and they're circulating
money. But out of like a thousand regular people, like maybe one of,
but out of like a thousand regular people, only maybe one of them is participating in anything.
Most people, you're not getting anything. Oh, is my reception back? Can you guys hear me?
Anything out of it, right? Because also the amount of participation that you're getting
is extremely small relative to what they're getting, right?
That's the other thing, is that the amount of growth, the amount of participation that you get
relative to what they get is ridiculously small. And it's based on, you know, the interest rate,
right? So what you get based on what versus what they get is very small. What you get is basically risk null growth,
right? So the whole idea of what you get from the bank is that you get some amount of their benefit
without the risk that they take on, right? So that's their whole thing
is that you get to take on some of the growth that they get.
What benefit?
In a checking account, you get nothing.
In a savings account, you get like 0.01 or 0.1%.
They're not giving you any of it.
That's the thing is because you don't take on their risk.
So what they give you is risk null, right?
No risk, but you get a little piece of it based on the interest.
How is there no risk?
I mean, I think you're making the argument from their voice.
I'm making the argument that it's a good thing.
I'm not making an argument that banks are doing anything this year.
But no, but you're saying it's risk-free, and it's not risk-free.
It's not risk-free because these banks go under.
Like a thousand of them went under in the last couple of years. And a lot of people lose a lot of money on these things. And so it's not
risk-free. So in reality, what's like, you're saying how it's supposed to work or what they
say to the public, but in reality, what's really happening is they're taking your money. They are
putting you at risk and they're not giving you any of the juice. That is, that is what they're,
that's what they're offering. But yes, that is the truth. The other thing risk and they're not giving you any of the juice. That is what they're offering.
But yes, that is the truth. The other thing is that they are not advising the people that have
$250,001 that there's additional insurance available that they need to purchase in their
accounts, right? So like, for example, I don't really know why the F, like,
I don't know why there was any recovery from any of the people who were in Silicon Valley Bank. So
the average balance, bank balance of Silicon Valley Bank was a million dollars. The average bank balance in the U.S. is $40,000, right? So they clearly had
a far higher bank balance than anyone else, which is why it's weird that they asked for an exception
because they were like, from the regulations, they were like, we're too small. Clearly,
that was not the case. However, most of those accounts were uninsured above the $250,000 FDIC limit.
Those people, most of them apparently did not know that there was additional insurance that they could get above $250,001, right?
There's additional insurance that you need to get in order to protect your deposits above that amount of money, right?
So what should have happened, there should not have been a taxpayer bailout of those payments,
right? That bank should have gone under and those people that had $250,000 and below should have gotten the FDIC money.
$250,000 and one and over should have formed together as a class action and sued the bank
for failing to inform them that there was additional insurance that they should have gotten, right?
that they should have gotten, right?
They all had private bankers.
They all had private bankers.
They all, those bankers failed to perform the duty
to inform them that they should have had additional insurance.
That is, you know, failing to meet their basic duties.
I mean, is that really, I mean, is that really fair though
to say that the bank should tell them that every,
even the stupid, even the most, sorry, not stupid,
the least sophisticated people in the, okay, maybe i'm being too extreme on this but a lot know that 250k is
the limit on fdic insurance right i knew that well before i got into finance so so these and
those people at silicon valley bank are very sophisticated the reason they had such high
deposits right why didn't they have additional insurance they if like the minimum thing that the bank should have done to cover its own ass
would have been you need to get additional insurance to cover this if you don't want it
sign this paper that's the minimum thing they should have done to cover their own asses i guess
if you could make that argument but also no that's i mean then you're just putting everything
you're putting it
all on the bank and by the way the banks they didn't they didn't take a they didn't take that
much risk to be fair to them also the reason that they got so i guess they okay i guess they did
take risk by taking too long of treasuries they should have been shorter dated or whatever um
but like isn't they they were told the banks were told by the,
by the government that this was the risk-free rate. And it turned out it wasn't the risk-free
rate because the government changed the rates so fast. But okay, go ahead.
Okay. So I'm just going to say that that is how banks make money, right? Banks make money really
one is in the money that gets, you know, the interest that gets returned from all of their investments in loans and things like that.
And in trading those loans and getting, you know, you know, the the payments that they get in in the collection of assets that they sell. Right.
So that's like our CDOs, the collection of debt and things like that. That's what they make money that way. The other way that they make money is not in the creation of money, because really,
every time for as much as they make, right, every time they create a loan or something like that,
what people don't remember in this fractional reserve is that every time someone pays off a loan, right, it's the opposite, right, that closes
out money. So this idea of creating money every time they loan out money, it's reversed every time
money is paid off. So there isn't really, that's not a net creation of money. That's not really an issue. The real way that they make money
is by buying and selling debt maturity. That is how they make their money. And the whole thing
is basically figuring out how to buy debt at lower rates than they're selling it, right? So
they're selling loans and things like that, And they're trying to price these loans out, but they're all, Hey Alex. Yeah. Um, I'm, I'm realizing,
and it, cause Aztec's not here to keep us on track. Darren was supposed to keep us on the
prediction markets with the questions. Oh, oops. Yeah. I know we're having a really interesting
conversation. I would love to continue. This is like very cool stuff.
But I'll, I'll leave one last note on that. And then, and then,
and then Darren put us back on track with predictions markets.
Cause we still have some,
some of the best builders of predictions market stuff on the panel.
So sorry guys. Thanks for taking that little detour with us. But I will say the
Silicon Valley Bank users, the customers were mostly very sophisticated, very wealthy Silicon
Valley businesses. And what happened was Silicon Valley Bank and I think Silvergate too, were
basically, they were used to give loans to businesses that when you get an investment from like Sequoia or A16Z or SoftBank, when you get an investment from them, these banks would almost automatically give you access to credit lines and loans and things.
And so a lot of people, these Silicon Valley tech companies would open their accounts there because they got special,
like access to loans and stuff. And, but the problem is as they got really big,
a lot of them didn't move on to a bigger bank or to, or put protection on their,
on their over 250K deposits, like you said, Alex. And so they just stayed with the bank,
just kind of out of complacency and comfort because they've been with that bank for a while.
They just stayed with the bank.
Those banks really, from my understanding, weren't really designed to be really huge business banks.
Over time, they started growing into that.
But a lot of it was complacency that they, like you said, they didn't get these loans.
I don't know if it's on the bank for not notifying them.
Hey, you should get this insurance.
I'm in the UK, and I know that like the FDIC
only goes up to 250K.
Yeah, but here's the thing is that the bank
still has responsibilities and a lot of those founders
are idiots.
So I'm not kidding.
Like, look, man, they're founders.
They're scrambling.
They don't know.
They've got like, that's, they basically put
all of their working capital in their, in their account.
And they don't know like what they need to do.
They need to be counseled.
And they weren't counseled on how they're, on how to deal with their working capital.
And the truth is that-
You could split it up into multiple banks and other things. And the failure of the bank really was because they didn't properly account for the interest rates and bank maturity.
They bought too much debt.
They were basically too high.
But they raised the rates.
I mean, yes, I agree.
You could argue that by definition they took too much risk because they defaulted, but that's not actually always fair.
Like in a poker game, you might play a hand and.
Sorry, you might make a.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, you might make a bet in poker and you lose the hand, but it doesn't mean you made the wrong bet.
You still made the statistically right bet.
They made the statistically right bet probably, but nobody anticipated that the government was going to hike rates up so rapidly.
It hadn't been done in a long time, decades, right?
That's their job.
And the other thing is that their team actually knew that it was likely that rates were going up, but nobody wanted to inform anyone because they had this culture of shoot the messenger.
So they had this really terrible culture.
Yeah, and you could create a bank run. have not failed had they actually gone through, had they actually been subject to the reforms
that the guy who ran the Silicon Valley Bank was head of the lobby that actually got himself
excused from the regulations, right? So had he been subject to the regulations that he got himself
excused from, he would have known they would have had a check required on his buying. And so he
would have known that he was actually buying too much of the debt that was actually coming in like
higher and higher and higher yield. So anyway, that was a problem with the way that they were actually running their business.
But with the deposit holders, it's absolutely on the bank that they need to inform their deposit holders.
It's not just on signs and things like that.
They do need to inform their deposit holders if you choose to hold more than $250,000 in this.
And I don't think I've ever been informed of that.
It is absolutely not on taxpayers to pay off people who have a million dollars or who have
$250,001.
I am not here to bail out people.
Well, then what about FDIC?
Okay, we really got to move to the next topic.
But last question, what about FDIC insurance in general? Then why should the term be on the hook
for 250K, but not 1 million? No, the FDIC is actually paid by the banks. So the FDIC insurance
is actually a collaboration of banks where they actually put money into that FDIC insurance. So
that's not actually a taxpayer thing. It's fine for them
to say we're going to pay all that stuff. But I don't think that any bailout, I don't care what
they do with the people who ended up failing from that bank or whatever, whether they knew or didn't
know. I don't care about, you know, I wasn't in that bank, right? But I don't think whatever
happens with that bank, I personally think banks are responsible for their depositors.
They are responsible for making sure that their depositors are aware of the risks and the benefits of putting money into that account.
And if there are different levels of risks at different amounts of money, they need to make their depositors aware of those different amounts of risk. But regardless, taxpayers should not be bailing out depositors that have too much money.
But if it's commonly known knowledge, I mean, that's like, I can make the argument that,
you know, the CEO or like Ford, the company, they're giving you a vehicle that could kill
people. They should notify you that you can't run red lights. But everybody knows, and it's law, so shouldn't it be...
No, because that's not endemic to the car, right?
This is something that they're required to notify people,
but they assume that the signs and common knowledge are enough.
You can't assume that signs and common knowledge are enough.
I mean, I bet you 99% of those people with those deposits at Silicon Valley Bank knew that $250K was not the limit. They have the duty to inform.
There is a duty to inform. Okay. So let's get back to predictions. But good conversation,
Alex. Always love to have your insights. And I feel like I've heard this before and I kind of
feel stupid for not knowing, but this is why it's great to have big brains on the show is that taxpayers
aren't on the hook for FDIC. I mean, aren't they in some way though?
Okay. No. Okay. We're not doing it. We're not doing it.
I know. I know. I know. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank, bank, bank.
Who wants to talk about bank suck?
That can be next week. We'll just call this basis bank suck.
That can be next week.
We'll just call the spaces banks suck.
Yeah, pivoting back to predictions.
I actually had a thought after one of Timmy's last questions,
and obviously we talked about the spreads
and making predictions markets more efficient in general.
But we never talked about the place that AI has in a lot of this
because it will make things more efficient.
Obviously, even different, maybe betting sites or predictions markets will have arbitrage opportunities, and AI makes things more efficient just inherently anyway.
So I did bring Ivan on.
Oh, can I ask a question, though, about prediction markets?
Somebody must have won something when Taylor taylor and kelsey when they
got engaged i actually hear anything and um yeah i actually seen one thing so a guy called like
lover boy paul which is like the name of taylor's like guitarist was betting really big
on on polymarket just before the announcement um which was which was interesting but yeah i mean that goes i think you were getting
like that goes to the whole insider trading thing is do you want fairness or do you want accuracy
in markets and if the guitar player just happens to know that you know or sees them cuddling really
hard or or did the the who was i don't even know who these people are, but the person who got married or
was going to marry, maybe he already told him, Hey, come to, come to my engagement. I'm going to,
I'm going to ask her on this day. I want you to be there. Is, should that be legal or illegal?
But yeah, continue on Darren. Did you just pretend that you weren't a Swifty?
I'm not a Swifty. Sorry. I listened to some of her music. She's okay. She's okay.
I like her.
She's nice or whatever.
It's not super my thing.
But yeah, Cindy and I did a night where she sat me down and we listened to a bunch of Taylor Swift songs.
But I don't know.
It was good.
It was nothing like I'm not a Swifty, I don't think, no.
Okay, yeah.
So I'll pivot over to Ivan.
And then, yeah, I mean, obviously,
I think he's sort of somewhat representing Polypix,
which can't make it for technical issues.
But they are a predictions market that's sort of on Polygon,
and they're actually coming through the Quicksop launchpad.
So it wouldn't be a Quicksop spaces
if we can't do a small show.
So yeah, take it away, Ivan.
And did, no, that wasn't Alex.
That was you, Darren.
You were just prompting them because they are using AI.
OK, go ahead, Ivan.
Hi, guys.
Nice to meet you. My name is Ivan. I, go ahead, Ivan. IVAN KUZAKAVANIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIENIEN It's heavily oversubscribed. So people are just sending funds right now. So I'm very happy to see that.
And it's, as Darren mentioned, it's in the prediction markets.
And as we all know here, Polygon is by far the market leader when it comes to prediction markets.
And what Polypix is actually doing is, by using AI, they managed to find a better way than the overall
centralized market is currently doing is to predict the game
outcomes. So like, as we all know, like the prediction
markets, especially the ones which are managed by centralized
entities, they basically want to maximize their profits. So
basically, if you have two uh two sports teams
that are like playing against each other there's a lot of emotional bad things the the usually the
the team that has the most fans uh are having a slight uh mismatch in terms of like the odds and
the the percentages of the outcome of of the games and uh what they are they're doing is basically they're looking at all the
the bookkeepings uh and the the odds and they're calculating their all own probabilities of the
teams winning and uh they're like adding like thousands of parameters things like uh weather
conditions uh conditions of the team uh of of the team members of the sports teams, injuries.
Altitude.
Exactly, like a lot of these things.
And then they come back and you say,
for those of you guys that are unaware of how odds work,
so you have usually odds from one point something
to it can be up to 100 or 1,000.
So basically that means that if you have an odd of two, you multiply the result by two.
So that basically means that you have a 50-50% chance.
Obviously, bookkeepers, they have a spread.
So usually if you have a 50-50% chance, you have one player that has, or team, that has 1.95, and then another team,
1.95, which is like the 5% spread that the bookkeepers take. And yeah, then PolyMarkets
is basically calculating and saying, oh, we don't think it's a 50-50 chance. We think that one of
the players has a chance to a 70 chance so then they will place a
bet on that and the higher discrepancy polymarket i think you missed polypix oh okay yeah polypix
then sets a bet on the on the difference and the higher the difference is the larger the bet
because the higher the higher the the the price arbitrage and And yeah, I mean, obviously by this, if the size is big enough,
if the people that are betting are big enough, they should influence the odds to the real outcome
of what they should be and not what the market value is based on like emotional value and other factors.
So where do they bet these guys?
So they bet on, I'm not sure if that's even announced yet,
but they will announce next week.
They have a partnership with one of the larger crypto betting sites.
And they obviously do a lot of these things OTC.
So there is interesting love.
I didn't know that before.
But why would it be interesting for the betting site to have them?
Because the betting side doesn't lose.
They win on spreads.
So they obviously hedge everything.
And that's what
I'm saying is the betting sites
are not taking sides so if
you have team A and team B
and the real output is
50-50 but you have 75%
of the people betting on team A
then the odds will not be
50-50 they will be
adapted to the
to the
one side
because the betting teams,
they want to win no matter what.
That's how polymarket works,
but that's actually not how betting sites work
because betting sites,
they're more based on probabilities,
not based on how people bet because people can bet on
like brazil because they like brazil but they don't care that brazil has their
worst squad at the point and then that you know germany is much better yes but what betting
sides do is they hatch their bets by betting on other markets.
If you have, for example, if you're BWIN and you have 70% of the people betting on one team and the odds are 2-2, you will not take the hedge, even if you believe that that's the right move.
Because if Brazil loses for whatever reasons, you will have to pay millions of dollars. So what happens in the background is you have OTC markets
between the different platforms, and they adapt the bad things
and they hedge themselves with other platforms.
So Bwin trades with Bet365, for example, they exchange bets
so that they uh, they
hedge their positions in order to not lose money.
Um, and that's.
Wait, so I, I, okay.
Help me understand that.
Uh, and for the audience.
So I thought these, I thought poly market and all these, it was just user versus user.
I didn't know that the house is taking a risk.
And so it sounds, and the way you're talking about how they hedge,
it sounds just like perps, where if there's too many bets one way,
the house can take risk.
And so then they hedge using other platforms or other hedging tools.
Is that what's happening here?
So it's not just user versus user.
The house can lose also in prediction markets, I guess.
And maybe it's different for... No no like there's a difference between decentralized prediction
markets and centralized uh betting platforms so the way how betting platforms work is you know
obviously like the the casino or the house they decide if they want to hedge the position or not
like basically if you have.
So they are.
So in a traditional, you're saying they are taking the risk.
They are.
You are.
When you go bet with a betting platform or casino or whatever, they're taking the counter
bet and that's, and then they're giving the odds.
Exactly.
They're giving the odds.
Exactly.
In decentralized prediction markets on poly markets,
you have player versus player, right?
And the odds are adapting depending on supply and demand.
But in centralized markets, if you go on bwin.com, 365, William Hill,
whatever platform you look at, you play against the casino.
So you say, I'm betting on Brazil to win.
And if Brazil wins, you get the money.
Obviously, you have people that bet on the other side as well.
Similar like on exchanges, right?
So you have people that short Bitcoin and people that long Bitcoin.
And if you have the same amount of Bitcoin long and short,
in theory, the exchange does not have to hold Bitcoin, right? Because they're totally market neutral. But if you have more people buying Bitcoin and shorting Bitcoin, in order for a platform like Binance to not risk anything or take any counterparty risk, they need to hold more Bitcoin in order to hedge themselves.
So that's basically for the futures markets.
It's pretty similar.
They could do that through various, they could just, let's say the rates, the perps rates,
the lending rates are different on different platforms.
They can just take the opposite position on another platform.
Or they could just buy insurance and there's a bunch of other tools that they used to hedge.
But you're saying, so this is, so is this, did we just uncover, I didn't know this, but
another benefit of these decentralized prediction markets is that because the house doesn't have to
take a risk because it's just the players versus
the players, they can now charge a lower fee, I'm assuming. Because if the house is taking risk,
it makes, because when you said 5%, I was like, Jesus Christ, why would you charge?
5% is a crazy, you know, a crazy charge. But I guess if they're taking this risk and if a bet
blows up, they could go bankrupt, you know, hypothetically, then I guess it makes sense to charge a higher fee, maybe.
But in predictions markets, do they charge lower fees because they're not taking that risk?
They're just taking they're just building smart contracts and stuff.
Let me intervene here.
So how are I'm sorry, just so I'm understanding this.
How is the market taking a risk if it's player versus player?
I mean, that's what I'm saying.
They're not taking the risk.
Polymarket just takes a percentage.
They make money on the data.
You know, I mean, Polymarket, it's pretty clear how Polymarket, for example, makes money, right?
But yeah, that's what we're saying.
They make money.
They don't take the risk.
They basically make a transaction fee and they make
money on the data and that's, that's basically it. But how are they getting a risk? Like,
even if it's one sided, like, you know, everybody's betting one side of the market,
they still only make a, they make a percentage of the transaction. They're not taking a risk.
That's what we're saying is they're not in, this is a benefit of the, that's what it sounds like.
I'm just learning this, but it sounds like i'm just learning this but
it sounds like the decentralized markets the house is not taking a risk we're comparing
decentralized to centralized and they're saying in centralized markets the house does take a risk
and then i'm i'm just assuming that's probably part of the reason they charge the higher fee
and then in decentralized markets now my question is if they're not taking the risk, which they just said they are not taking a house risk or whatever, because it's just player versus player.
So can they charge lower fees is the question.
And then someone was trying to jump in.
Who was that?
Yeah, it was me.
Let me explain.
So with the centralized prediction style markets like Polymarket, et cetera, they really they have very low fees.
I guess it's 2% of the winning
so it's actually even lower than 2%
right
but the problem with this for
sports betting
you can take a look at sports betting
on Polymarket
it's just not good because
there are some very hyped events
like Super Bowl winner
you can go there and bet.
But if you want to bet on, let's say, second league of Spain,
then you just will not have liquidity because you always have to,
you always need some people to bet against.
And as these markets are not that popular there,
then you just don't have people to bet against.
But for centralized, however, like our model in Azura,
it's decentralized, but still we have a house, as I said,
like we have liquidity providers who are the house
and they earn while other loses.
So do they jump in only when there's not enough liquidity
from the the players so like if there's enough liquidity the players might be good enough for
each other but it just like in perps that that's how purpose works is if there's equal buys uh
sells you know long and short interest then you know they don't have to jump in with hedges
or these things but yeah go ahead well for us specifically it works like we initially provide
like we have our one liquidity pool and it distributes equity among all the markets created
on azura uh well we have some you know categories some better like more hype markets. They receive a bit more liquidity, some worse, a bit lower liquidity,
but still it's distributed all over the market.
So even if the market is, even if you're the only one better,
you still can bet, right?
And if there are some players, their bets,
they also go to the liquidity pool and then they are distributed uh
once the once the event is resolved however this leads to another problem we faced a lot
in the beginning of this year and we still continue fighting it's uh like this type of uh
structure with the house and with the uh you know players it actually doesn't work well if it is
permissionless like even though i'm like you know against kyc and i'm a pro decentralization and so
on i just see that in particular in sports betting which is a player against the pool it doesn't work because there are sharp players and
sometimes more more rare thing but sometimes there are also insiders which just always beat
the odds provided by a new data provider because the strippers like they always appear to be smarter than the odds. And then it leads to us.
We have to give worse odds.
And then casual players, they become not interested.
So yeah, what I'm saying is this.
Two different models, but like, you know,
this polymarket model is good when the market is hype.
Our model is good because you can do any event,
but you have to fight with the sharp players.
And we just updated the whole engine,
so it gives us an option to actually cancel bets,
which appeared to be the only way we can provide the best experience
for casual players who play because they like sports.
players who play because they like sports.
Doesn't that, when you start doing this, like a collective pool, I'm trying to think of
examples where this has failed in DeFi, because I know there are some, but when you have these
collective pools and now who's deciding the weight of each event?
Because now you're taking the free market partially out of the decision of this pool that covers the bets and could go bankrupt. And now you have, if you decide wrong and someone in the free market decides correctly, they can maybe manipulate the pool.
Can they manipulate the pool? I'm kind of, yeah, what do you think about?
I'm kind of, yeah, what do you think about?
They cannot manipulate the pool because, like, after all, the pool, it receives information from the data provider regarding how the game finished.
So, like, they actually bet before the game and the results of the actions of the pool, they depend on the data provider.
But what about the weighting of the pool they depend on the data provider not but what about the weighting of the pool because you said you're putting different weights to different events and an event that's not liquid you're
having to come in and almost like artificially subsidized to give liquidity to that event
well that's just a part of the risk which this liquidity pool takes. But as events and markets, they usually have like 5%, 7% margin.
And then on long-term, it should work if only these sharp players do not get too wild. But one thing which I don't understand
is for
decentralized platforms, right?
So if you say like sharp players
push the
odds into one direction,
I mean, then in a perfect
decentralized world, if
one odd goes down,
the other odds need to go up, and
you can then you have like a space for arbitrage.
And someone could say, okay, I see that, I don't know,
Djokovic against Nadal, old game.
Everyone is betting on Djokovic.
People can actually bet on Nadal on your platform
and hedge with the other platform and have risk-free bets. So actually in an ideal world, decentralized platforms
should not have odds that are completely off from the centralized platforms.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
Obviously for smaller games, even on centralized exchanges, there's not enough liquidity.
Not exchanges, betting platforms.
So, yeah, actually, what we do here,
what we did, because before May,
we were 100% like Uniswap, but for sports betting.
Now we're more like Hyperliquid, but for sports betting now we're more like hyper liquid but for sports betting
so what we did we what we did we had special bots which see if which see if the odds are
inefficient and they kind of place bets on a different side so the odds are what displays the real probabilities and so
kind of these bots they earn not letting users take advantage of us because all
this advantage they kind of drain the pool which is but for us that's what I
was kind of thinking wait so are you wait that was phil talking wait
you're yeah you're from azuro okay got it yeah yeah that's i mean i'm trying to think of examples
from defy maybe darren has some memory of some of these like there were definitely some pools where
they did this kind of it's not cross i guess it's kind of but it's just a central pool
god where was this done darren help me there's there were some things we were exploring potentially building
maybe where people could yeah maybe yeah that's yeah actually that's that's a good example i think
is like uh when you have like yeah uh glp and it there are ways that people could kind of drain the pool slightly.
I'm also trying to think of, did something like this happen with OVIX?
You know, something like this happened with the Hyperliquid.
Maybe you remember this. there was a big thread regarding how they just cancelled
one guy because he manipulated
the market with
buying too much of one token
and liquidating all the
other guys.
And then it appeared that this
price only moved that much
up on Hyperliquid.
Yeah, I remember something like that
so but you're saying you have ways to address this or that just the margin takes care of the risk
and that you hope because saying i hope sharp traders don't come in enough well if people
start building leverage on this stuff one sharp trader can change completely change a market if he's sharp enough, right?
That's the idea of the efficient market hypothesis, kind of.
So what we do...
It's interesting.
Yeah, what we started doing is we introduced categories.
This is like our internal thing.
And this means that every...
Like we're very pessimistic now.
Like every new wallet is potentially a value
better a sharp guy and then if we call it a value better you said yeah yeah it's just an industry
standard it's called a value better so these are the players who only play when they see that the
odds are nice and the casual players are people who
just you know like to play and
We only like we actually only need a second one because with the first ones the business doesn't work
It's like it sounds a lot like casinos where if someone wins too much they ban them
Well, I... So I found, like, four examples
of what you were looking for, ROC.
So Synthetix actually had this in 2019.
They had, like, a single liquidity pool.
Price feed glitch changed the Korean won
to, like, the wrong price.
And then basically the whole one collateral pool
just got drained.
I mean, similar thing kind of happened to uh inverse finance like the lend and borrowing market in 2022
um price oracle again uh drained 15 million um yeah a lot of oracle attacks with that kind of stuff
yeah i don't know if you remember mango Markets as well. I mean, it seems to just be London Markets to get the hardest here.
But effectively, the attacker manipulated the Mango price.
It was like a flash loan attack.
I think they ended up buying like 51% of the supply,
then a 51% of the deck,
and then gave themselves just like,'ve done a doubt vote and then just
voted for everything for themselves um yeah they drained 100 million um just one single liquidity
pool for the whole lending market and then uh yeah gone someone had put that much of the supply on a flash protocol yeah well i mean it just wasn't
super liquid at the time i think um so they managed to just buy like effectively what would
be a 51 attack do it vote vote for themselves to receive all the all the assets well and you
yeah yeah but you don't even need full 51 because in most of defy
you're only getting one to three percent of the tokens are actually voting so you really only
need call it you know seven it depends on how fast the vote is you know like that yeah the longer
the longer the duration of the vote then the harder it is because then the community will rally
and they'll post tweets like, hey, someone's attacking this vote. We need people to vote
against this exploiter. But if it's like a fast vote, if they're voting in 12 hours or something,
it's possible nobody even notices and they can win the vote with only, you know, yeah, 5% or
something. But yeah, I mean, it's happened. It doesn't seem super
prevalent. Maybe that's just because
a lot of people tend to have, like, the
multi-liquidity pool approach.
But yeah, I mean, it's happened a few times with
pretty large liquidity pools getting drained.
I mean, it's not, it's, but it's not a totally
inherently flawed model, because there's definitely people using these central liquidity pools in many
parts of the industry to this day.
Right.
Maybe that's the next thing you could find.
What it, who's using this now where it is.
Hyper liquid are a great example.
Phil said.
Yeah.
Interesting.
I mean, that's the cool thing about this industry is we're going to try all kinds of things. We have this, you know, Cambrian explosion of different types of protocols
and some will win and some will fail. And at the end of the day, through enough attacking,
actually, the attacking is actually part of the health of the system. Through enough attacking, just like in biology, you know, kids are exposed to, you know, germs
and their immune system strengthens over time.
Our industry's protocols and our industry will strengthen over time through just robust
like attacks and Lindy effect.
Eventually become immune to North Korea.
It is interesting.
I mean, that mango attack was actually kind of an interesting thing
because it was kind of pure, right?
You know, that guy's, Eisenberg's conviction was overturned,
but not because of, you know, the merits.
It was really, it was overturned because of a flawed venue.
But...
What's that?
The guy who did the mango markets, you know, the...
He did another attack as well, I think.
I don't know about that one, but I know he did actually,
that one he ended up getting away with.
But it was kind of a, I mean, all he did is exploit a flaw in the system.
That's something that, you know, he was borrowing against
his own holdings, which increased in value because of the demand, right? So, and then,
you know, he's basically taking out loans he doesn't intend to repay. But that's just a flaw
in the nature of the system. And that's one of those things where like for people who are for people who are creating protocols, I think these things and this is one of the things that Rock is saying, like we're supposed to get better as we're as we keep getting it, you know, as we get attacks.
That only works if everybody who's creating protocols studies the protocols that have previously existed and the attacks that have broken.
Not true though. Not true. Look at biology. Biology doesn't study the past history and go,
did three eyes work or did three eyes not work? No, it's just a bunch of people try a bunch of
stuff, the things in survival of the fittest, the things that work survive and the things that don't,
don't. So if builders go out there and don't study the past
then their thing won't survive and so you i mean you only need some people to study the past and
actually arguably like in evolution you don't need anyone to study the past you just need random
mutations or random uh random protocols being built you could just build a million protocols
and the ones that survive whether they were intelligent by designing these things properly or not it's just this is the
nature of evolution and action of business and the issue with mango especially though is that
mango allowed their own token to be used as collateral and it just wasn't massively liquid
so effectively the the guy just kept buying mango tokens using his collateral borrowing
against it buying more mango tokens and i just moon in the mango price eventually just had
a bunch of mango chucked that in as collateral and then just loaned everything out um and i got
all the money okay how did he get the money i i'm not fully sure. He deposited the mango.
No, he traded it out into stable coins.
And that's how he basically liquidated his own holdings.
When was this?
Like 2021?
22-ish?
I don't know.
But, I mean, it was a couple of years ago. He used the now massively inflated mango as collateral and then just borrowed against it.
Is this a little bit like what FTX?
Not exactly, but like...
No, FTX is different.
FTX actually...
I mean, there's a lot of stuff that FTX did.
But for his own token, what he did is when he got, when people invested in FTX,
Sam required part of the investment to go into the native token of FTX.
So that was why you would get those statements statements by, what's his name?
The guy who runs the SALT conference.
Scaramucci.
Anthony Scaramucci.
He would say, yeah, I got a bunch of the token.
I don't know how much, but I got a bunch of it when I invested in FTX.
That is because he invested and then he was required to convert some of it.
So people had these holdings, but it was not based on demand.
A bunch of it was held by Alameda in Alameda's books. But because they're related companies, it wasn't like innate demand.
So that's the thing is that it looked like a lot of people held this token and there was all this demand for this. So what would they do, are you saying?
They would tell them if you want to invest in FTX equity, then you have to buy this on the open market or OTC?
I don't even know if it was on the open market, but yeah, you have to buy this token.
You're going to convert this much into the token and then hold it. So that's what they did. They had all these people that wanted to invest in FTX.
If you were to have like a company, because people do like a, you know, a token warrant with, you know, safe with token warrant and these things.
And most of the time they don't execute on the equity.
But if you had a company that was equity in tokens, wouldn't it kind of make sense to tell people, hey, if you want to invest, we want you to also participate in the token?
No, it's because that token was the collateral that was being used for like margins and stuff like that that's the
big problem is that so it was that they were doing other bad things but that idea in itself isn't so
bad that FTT was um was actually uh being it was being valued for other things right if it was just
an internal token who the hell cares right then it's a token kicker but that's because that thing
was being you know it was their collateral token It was the token that they did financing with and things like that.
And part of the value of that token was because it looked like there was extraordinary demand
for that token, but it wasn't, there wasn't market demand for that token.
Well, in a way, I mean, if, if they bought, if the investor decided to invest in the equity and
they had to invest in the token and it's part of the
deal then in a way you could say there was demand even if it wasn't like their primary goal.
No the vast majority of it was being held by Alameda. That is what um what what's his name uh
CZ blew up when he blew up the um the the when he when he blew up FTX that's what he blew up FTX. That's what he blew up.
Are you saying that Scaramucci and them didn't,
and I was just hanging out with him last week at Salt.
Look at you.
My foot hurts from all the names you're dropping, man.
Yeah, then he came to the spaces today,
and he was pro KYC.
No, no, no, no, no.
You changed, man.
They got me.
They got me, boys. You changed, man. They got me. They got me, boys.
You don't know where you're from.
Oh, man.
So are you saying that when Scaramucci was, he wasn't actually physically holding the tokens?
It was that Alameda would say, here, give us your $10 million investment, and we are going to convert it to tokens and hold it for you?
No, no, no. He held tokens. Other people held tokens. But there was this idea that there was
huge market demand for these tokens. And so they had value when they were being used as collateral
and being used for financing, and they had a market price on them. But the truth was that
the vast majority of those tokens were being held internally at Alameda.
And it looked like Alameda was like this third party or whatever.
It wasn't a third party.
It was his own company.
But they were being falsely listed as being held by a whole bunch of other parties.
They were actually just being held at Alameda.
Nobody wanted these tokens.
I mean, unless Alameda were doing stuff like lending them out on platforms.
We have no idea what they were doing.
They had a whole bunch of other crap that was going on, including not separating out.
From the beginning, they hadn't separated out stuff that was held by clients versus stuff that was held by the company.
So they were lending out assets that were customer assets instead of
their assets. They had tokens that were backed by, that were supposed to be stock tokens that
didn't actually have stock attached to them. So they were selling these, you know, like
basically synthetic stock tokens that were basically just empty.
So you're supposed to have like, essentially, if you sell like a Tesla stock token, right,
you've got a drawer that has like one Tesla stock share attached to each Tesla stock token.
And so they would sell these Tesla stock tokens, but there's no drawer with
Tesla stock shares attached to them. So there's just these empty tokens that say Tesla stock
that have nothing attached to them that they were selling and pretending they actually had
stuff attached to them. So there were just, I mean, so many of these problems that it was just, it was insane.
It was like a kindergartner was running this.
And I blame the investors.
I mean, they didn't have a board, you know.
I mean, for all of these people saying, oh, we do all this diligence.
They did none.
Who invests in a company that has-
Didn't they like not have a CFO or something?
They didn't.
I mean, the CFO didn't know anything about finance. They had, they had
basically a CTO who admitted he was crap at coding. You know, they, it was, it was a mess.
Basically they had like, you know, basically their, their finances done in crayon. Like it was,
they didn't keep Alameda and, and CTX separate for a long time. And it was basically just one giant
thing all run together. Uh, it was, it was just a giant, a giant mess. They were trading with
user funds, all kinds of stuff. It was, it was a huge, huge mess. And, uh, and then, and nobody
wanted to say anything, uh, you know, that SBF was, you know, a problem or anything because everybody was scared because everybody thought, you know, people were like, he's amazing.
You know, how could you possibly say that?
Look at all the stuff that he's done.
Well, he had donated.
He was the largest or largest or second largest donator to the Biden administration, right?
Well, he donated to Trump too.
He donated to both sides.
That's what everybody does, right?
That is what every tech company has donated to both sides.
Every company donates to both sides.
They all don't.
And he did too.
It was in his records.
Everybody loves pointing out that he donated to Biden.
He donated to Trump too.
That's what they all do, right? That's how they get a say is they donate to both sides.
Nobody just donates to one party. That's a Peter Thiel thing, right? I love one side. No,
everybody donates to both sides because they're like, look, I need an in from whoever's there.
I don't really care, right? But for him, I worry about that stuff like Elon Musk, right, where I'm sure there's a ton of people saying something's not not right.
But nobody wants to say anything because they're so scared of backlash.
You should never have a culture where no one can tell you something's wrong because of backlash.
That's exactly. And I'm just bringing it back for one second. That's what happened with the banks, right? That's what happened with the SVB,
and that is what happens right before these big, giant institutions fail,
because nobody wants to tell them something major is wrong, because they're afraid of
shoot-the-messenger culture, and they're afraid of shoot the messenger culture and they're
afraid of other people saying you don't get it you don't understand like you're the stupid one and
and nobody wants to say anything but something is clearly wrong and everybody wants to you know
they don't want everyone to to to on them, so they say nothing.
And then what happens?
Something terrible has to go wrong, right?
Something terrible has to go wrong before finally everybody sees what afterwards you
get all these people saying, I knew that Sam was crazy.
He was on drugs all the time. He didn't do anything. He didn't know what he was doing. That that Sam was crazy. He was on drugs all the time.
He didn't do anything.
He didn't know, you know,
he didn't know what he was doing.
That whole crowd was crazy.
Everybody's saying that now.
He came, he came and pitched.
He came and pitched radium to, uh, this Dow.
I was in karma Dow.
He came and pitched radium on Solana, um, to his boxers that's freaking crazy i mean i can't believe
that people are giving adam newman money for flow what the fuck is flow no one knows it's changed
uh business identities like a billion times no one knows what it is right but people are giving
him money all right let's get back to
predictions we're we're getting off topic again and also a case here i want him to introduce
but i will give a quick i will give a quick little fun story about sbf uh uh i'll do it in 30 seconds
i was at a vibrato jazz club in la i was uh, uh, having dinner and, and watching this jazz with, uh,
the ambassador to the Bahamas. And, uh, I won't say the gender because I don't want to get this
specific person and people could figure out timelines, whatever, but, uh, actually, Hey,
Kay, I broke this on, on Mario's show. Uh, and I, I didn't, you know, I, I said this and, uh,
there was a bunch of people on the show that were like, oh, that makes a lot of sense.
Okay, I'll say what it was.
Basically, to get him to come back from the Bahamas to the U.S., they basically, the government was saying, give him whatever he wants.
We need him to come to the U.S. to face trial.
We don't want him in the Bahamas.
I'm pretty sure it was Bahamas, not Bermuda.
Yeah, I think Bahamas.
And so, yeah, because I also know the Bermuda ambassador, but anyways, uh, so they
wanted him to come back. So he, the person that I was at dinner with, uh, said, no, I'm not going
to give him anything he wants. I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to make his life hell.
And he's going to want to get out of this prison. He's going to want to go to the U S. And so he or she said, basically he was a vegetarian. So they were only giving him, um,
meat basically. And they put him in a, in a, in a wing of the prison that had no running water.
So he was having to poop in buckets. And, uh, yeah, he went, he went home to poop in buckets and uh yeah he went he went home to the u.s and stood trial
fun story uh this this ambassador was pretty drunk when he or she told me this so uh but anyways
kind of funny stuff how politicians get stuff done i guess okay back to predictions uh darren
do you have any questions for us or does anyone have anything they want to go back to? We're going to go to AK first.
Okay, yeah, AK.
What's up, man?
Hey, guys.
Thanks for having me.
Great show, as always.
Rock is a superstar pillar, as always.
Quick Swap, Polygon.
Happy to be here with everybody.
And interesting stories.
You know, myself, I wasn't very much so involved with the crypto bureaucracy at the time of the FTX collapse. But it seems like some really, really interesting stories in his underwear.
And, you know, I looked at a lot of the culprits there, like, you know, part of their team in Almada.
It just seemed like a bunch of kids, you know, it seemed like a bunch of kids with no real world experience.
bunch of kids you know it seemed like a bunch of kids with no real world experience they uh figured
a couple of things out and were able to garner uh you know the support of the market that was being
onboarded at the time um but i just recall you know the likes of uh kevin o'leary and uh all
these big personalities that were going up on tv and on on on all the news channels and they were was the football guy Someone's at mark, you know, I don't know someone the famous football guy Jesus. It's like he's like Brady
Yeah, yeah, yeah
And you know all these guys got the big deals they on boarded all their audiences and then everybody got screwed right there
They were given they were given SPF hugs that vice was doing a thing on the most charitable person in the world and he was doing
his um what was it called um all uh altruistic capital what not that it was some other name but
it was like altruistic capitalism it seemed like the real the real real wild west like like right
now with the governments and regulatory bodies being more involved,
obviously there's a lot more tightening around the compliance and around the delivery of
distribution. But at that time, I mean, it was way wilder west. I know, Rock, you've been in crypto
since day one. So you actually, you guys were the ones who laid down the sand in the desert.
But around the time FTX was collapsing, I would say that's the true, true Wild West of just really the legitimacy of crypto happening and not or not, in my opinion.
Other than that, happy to be here, guys.
Myself, private equity background, work, family office work.
We have many, many different businesses. For the sake of crypto, I'm involved a lot more with the acceleration, incubation sides, do a lot of work with Rock and the team and community here. And if anybody has any thriving stories, solutions, things that really help the breadth of this market, always open to learning about it, participating, or doing some more work on the acceleration side.
Yeah, you've not been in the industry as long as I have,
as you mentioned, but you are rising fast for sure.
Thanks.
Well, having friends like you and allies in the industry
points us always in the right direction.
So I will double down and say this is one of the best
spaces that I attend. It's definitely a pillar of the crypto community and there's virtually
no chills that happen here that don't belong. And that's really the beauty of being around
such a strong tight-knit community. So I know everything i've worked with you on has led me in the right direction thanks man appreciate that and uh you know we can give us a soft a teaser
we're still preparing but uh for we're gonna be uh we're building a show a shark tank style twitter
spaces uh that'll that'll come out soon and uh can we say who the main uh hosts are yet or should we wait yeah yeah
well i think i think we should wait but you know it's it's gonna be pretty star-streaded and the
reason we had to wait a little bit of time was because we had to clear a lot of these names to
be on a lot of a lot of legal clauses and non-compete clauses with other shows is yeah i
mean we're battling with amazon shows let's just say that so some of the Amazon show stars
that are in and out of the cryptos are gonna be in and out of ours as well so
actually we mentioned Scaramucci earlier he was he was on the list but I don't
know where that's the legal stuff but anyways as well Scott is as well we can
think we can give that one out so it's gonna be oh yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so Scott I guess we are gonna leak some stuff so Scott Melker will be uh
one of the hosts with me yeah we're gonna have that I know that's why everybody comes into these
shows as to you know a lot of the times even on Shark Tank when you go on there you don't get it
you don't get a deal you get a little bit of exposure but you don't actually walk away with a deal i think
something like 40 of uh all of the closed deals on air actually go through um the difference that
we're trying to implement although it is uh um it's not massive checks it's to stimulate the
live economy and to really have people tuned in hyped and kind of you don't want to miss these shows because if you miss it,
it could mean a check for your community.
Yeah, so we'll be writing checks live show,
and we'll be having different chains come on the show,
different VCs, angels, and funds that will be coming on,
and we're going to be highly encouraging people to write checks there live, but a lot of the checks will probably come after, but we, we will be writing for sure
some checks live and we've already allocated a budget for that. I think, I think Alex, uh, here
as one of the panel, you know, I know she's a regular on your show. I know her name is one of
the guest names, so hopefully we can get Alex. I put Alex on the list.
Definitely would love to have you come as a judge, Alex.
I've mentioned this to you in the past.
So everybody looking at the prices.
I mean, you guys are talking about predictions, gambling.
I mean, I think the ethos or the stem of the prediction market really is based on probability, right?
And probability at a high degree could be more of a sure thing.
Probability at a low degree could be more of a non-sure thing, which maybe constitutes gambling.
You know, very interesting topic here.
But I think we gamble every day of our lives. I think when you step out of your you're you're taking a gamble depending on what the weather looks like oh yeah everything you do that's humans are
literally like we're basically prediction machines we're literally all we're doing all day long
every single thing we do we are betting on is this the right choice or the wrong choice is it
going to get me further or am i going to go? Am I going to get eaten by the lion if I go out of my cave? Or am I going to starve to death if I stay in my
cave? Absolutely. And I think that the markets are going to give everybody a very, very big
probability of success in this next leg up, in my opinion.
I know that the markets are red today and for a little bit of last week or so.
But I think things are going to start looking up very, very soon.
If there's one very, very key thing I'm tracking, it's actually the Bitcoin dominance.
Keep an eye on that, guys, because, you know, as it stays below
59, 58, I think, and goes below a little bit more, you want to be positioned in the alts,
in my opinion. I want Bitcoin to go down, down, Bitcoin down. Woo, woo, woo.
Down Bitcoin, because why? Because then it's cheaper to buy who doesn't want bitcoin to go down
like we all want bitcoin to go down it's cheaper but we put we put all our money in bitcoin already
why would we want it to go down that's kind of where i'm like doesn't everybody like don't we
all want it to go down so it's cheaper i mean mean, I do. I'm like, what? I guess it depends how far into your accumulation you are.
If you're in the first year or two, maybe.
You're going to need to send it, AK.
Alex is left on the sidelines.
She'll form one.
I what?
The what?
You're left on the sidelines.
She wants the price to go down.
I do.
If the price starts going up, she's going to form one.
I want to buy more cheaper.
Who doesn't want a deal? Yeah, I mean, I have to go down. I want to buy more cheaper. Who doesn't want to deal?
Yeah, I mean, I have a question for Rod. I guess if I'm going to the grocery store,
I don't want the prices to go up. I want the price to go up. Wait, go down. So I guess you're
numb to it now. But I mean, how does it feel like to have your net worth move every single day by
a couple of points? I don't look at it that way. I mean, see, I don't look at it that way. I don't
worry about it in terms of like the long term in the long term.
It's it's all going up. But in the short term, if I can get a short term deal.
Yay. Right. I mean, don't you guys look at it as like if I can get a short term deal like it's nice.
It's never going to go back down to like 19. Oh, my God.
Wouldn't that be awesome? But like I look at those deals that I got that I'm like, yeah, that was great.
But if I can get like a short term deal now, you know, any short term deal I can get, hooray.
But overall, it's going up.
Like I don't, everybody in this industry, not everybody, but most people in this industry
tend to think so short term, like they look at it minute to minute
or day to day, like look at long term trends. It's going up. It's fine. But when I see the when I
when I look at, you know, OK, in the short term, if I can get a nice deal, that's great. That's
that's why that's the only I'm a long term investor, right? So the only reason I look at short-term pricing is because I think I can get a deal for something that overall in the long term I really like, right?
That's why I look at pricing.
But otherwise, I look at something as an overall value, not because I look at it as like I can buy and sell it quickly and sell it quickly for, you know, like a spread.
That's not how I'm looking at this.
I guess it depends if you're more, if people are more in accumulation mode or if they've
already like gotten most of their bags and now they're just like DCAing or even just
sitting on it or diversifying.
I'm probably, I mean, I've been accumulating Bitcoin for 10 years.
Are you done?
I mean, are you done buying your Bitcoin?
No, definitely not.
But I will say I've been slowing down a little bit recently just to diversify more.
Because I'm pretty damn heavy in Bitcoin, as most people here probably know.
So now I'm more at a phase in my life where I'm starting to diversify a little bit.
So now I'm more at a phase in my life where I'm starting to diversify a little bit.
But I'm still like 80 plus percent in Bitcoin and ETH.
You and AK still have a better time.
In my whole life.
Like everything I have in my whole life.
That's good.
I mean, if I see Bitcoin go down to 40,000, I'll probably shift a huge majority of my net worth up to probably more exposure.
Right now, actually, the funny part is when I first met you, Rock, I was probably at 10% of my net worth.
I'm now at probably 17 or 18% in crypto.
So I am inching higher.
Now, if I see 40K, I'm way more inclined to switch dollars for crypto for bitcoin at this point
uh obviously given its mainstream adoption and you know seeing guys like larry fink say everything
is going to be tokenized i mean that's prophecy for you that's like somebody telling you in 98 and
99 hey just get into the internet and and i know i know so many guys that just made dot-com websites that retired in their early 20s and 30s just being in this field.
And what are we seeing in this, again, in this day and age right now in our decade?
We're seeing the exact same thing happen.
There's a lot of young people that have either innovated or were at the right place at the right time, you know, making that dot-com website or buying that meme coin.
And actually, you know, really, it's rarely even the meme coin in the last decade.
I mean, a lot of people made very well returns just believing in the right rails of the industry.
For example, why did I get involved more heavily around 2017, 2018 was not just because of
the price of Bitcoin shooting up and, you know, kind of creating
more of a buzz.
It's actually the word DeFi.
Once I saw the word DeFi start getting thrown around and I said, oh, my God, you can start
offering this stuff directly through these coins and people are going to build these
rails.
That's what got me in.
And I bought all of the early DeFi protocols that like the bottom floor prices rock.
You're probably building a lot of them
I didn't have access to people so I just kind of bought and it ended up being tremendous and why
did I do that it's because I just believed in the industry and I saw that there's some rail finance
that I understood the same way right now today you know it's not that difficult for you to
get onboarded and you don't have to have a whole lot of money to actually find a place for yourself in crypto and in blockchain.
And I find that if you actually embody your skills around to working in this field and understanding the breadth of this field, you have such an early mover advantage on like the whole world.
Because think about it. It's like the year 2000 and you're the first guy on the internet
and you have a couple of years or one or two years on the internet
and you're ahead of everybody that got onboarded in 2005 and 2007
when they started getting out of dial-up and they had fast speed internet
and more people got accessibility.
So just like that, you're witnessing this happen today live in real time.
So I hope you take advantage of it i
know we all are on this panel i'm sure and um there's a lot more to do i see oh i thought that
was stellar lumen in your audience well as for like so if you're to your point to alex's point
if you're earlier in your accumulation you want prices to go down or if you're earlier in your
crypto career too you also you don't want it to grow too fast because you want prices to go down. Or if you're earlier in your crypto career too,
you also, you don't want it to grow too fast because you want to get to the top of the industry
before it grows too fast. But, you know, I mean, it depends where you're at, I guess.
Even if you've been in the industry a long time, I've, you know, been in a long time, but I
also feel like I'm, I'm way behind some people, right? Like, you know, in a long time but i also feel like i'm i'm way behind some people
right like you know when i talked to tim draper or dan moorhead from pantera um or you know like
a michael saylor uh i'm like damn man these guys are fucking you know top of the world how do i
get there you know that's because yeah but that's because also they can put a chunk of money into the table at one time.
That's the thing is how much can you put in at one time?
It's not about making the decision to invest.
It's about, well, if you can make a decision to invest and then put $5 million in at one time, depending on the price point, it's a very different game for you.
But none of us are really done putting
money into Bitcoin yet. So the slower the growth right now, it actually works to everyone's
advantage. It's true. In the short term, we want to see it go up so much, but you're right. If
you're still accumulating at all, you're actually better off that it goes up slower, it goes down.
You're right. Mathematically, you can't argue with it. And it's still going up. Like overall, it's an undeniable curve. So just don't think,
don't think short term. Everybody needs to start thinking long term with these things. Look at,
look at all, anything you're looking at, look long term, right? Look at the long term growth.
Don't stop looking at those like five-hour curves or those
like this is like a next level of delayed gratification right now you're this is actually
i don't know why like yes i know guys when you first said it i'm like yeah you're right but you
know i do want to see the price but when you think about it wait no we really almost shouldn't if you
have any plans to buy any more Bitcoin ever, mathematically,
you're actually better off that it doesn't go up right now and that it goes up slower.
You can't argue. It's just math. I think the biggest problem with the rat race, though,
is in the real world, everybody is fighting against the inflation of the dollar and they're
earning diminishing rates against the inflation of the dollar. So eventually, their money is also going down, in my opinion,
by a faster rate than what the Bitcoin or the crypto markets are going up.
So long term, I think, means that you just need to be able to withstand the wait,
or the time rather, until you can use those rails that are going to become the future.
So I remember, I'll give a funny personal story.
How long can you wait to eat the marshmallow?
I'll give a funny personal story, okay?
So my background is Lebanese.
So my father grew up in Lebanon, him and his family, they used to have business,
and they used to try to do trade and some manufacturing, et cetera.
But the value of the Lebanese lira or lebanese dollar back in the 70s
was weak it was very much weak than weaker than globally what the value of the u.s dollar was
but you know their their family was a little bit more um um they were a little bit more open to
globalization because they were you know dealing with more trade as opposed to the local person
so what they devised as a plan is that every time they made
money in lira in lebanese lira which they knew globally didn't have as much value as the dollar
back in the 70s that they would turn that money into dollars so every time they made liras they
turned them into dollars so locally okay locally they were just at par if not maybe sometimes
losing to the power of the dollar because of the local change but they were kind of trying to prepare for the future seven eight years in the future overnight
okay the banks decide to make a deal some governments involved and the u.s dollar pegs
to the lebanese lira one-to-one instantly overnight they became very wealthy because
everybody that had lira at the time got an insane discount on
their value to the US dollar while they were holding US dollars while still living in that
local economy. So I learned that. Obviously, I'm not old enough to employ that to the maximum level,
but this is how I would be scaling into crypto is that I want to own as much of it as I can
until the rails are actually available for me to use it as a currency. And hopefully by that time, it appreciates a lot
more against the current local currencies, whether that's US dollar, Canadian dollar,
Zimbabwe dollar, you name it. And that ends up being a higher measure of value for you.
That's really the economics behind it. So the only thing I would say, and I, and I totally appreciate that.
The only thing that I would say is just that,
is that people have to have to go in at the rate that they have disposable
income.
So I don't think that people are necessarily going in and I'm,
I'm almost at the gym, so I gotta to hop off. But I don't think people are not going in because they don't necessarily want to have a large enough holding because they're not interested in it.
I think that they're holding off because they don't have enough disposable income to put into it yet. So the reason why
the lower, the lower, slower rate works is because it will take time for people to convert
the smaller amounts of disposable income that they have into something like Bitcoin. So for
everybody accumulating a significant amount of wealth, it does work better at a slower
rate of growth, right? It works better for everyone. If it actually goes at a slower slope,
even though the overall curve, like everybody wants it to shoot right up, but if it does,
it actually hurts people, right? So it helps more people. The slower rate actually helps more people.
So just go at the rate. Interesting point. Yeah. So it helps more people. The slower rate actually helps more people. So
just go at the rate. Interesting point. Yeah. So it's a good point. So go at the rate that you can
go. And, and, you know, whatever rate it, you know, whatever rate that you can put in, go at
the rate that you can go in. So just put in what you can and, and just continue to try and access
it. And don't worry about the rate that it's increasing.
And am I on the right spot on the curve?
You're on the spot that you're on.
Just keep going.
And I got to go to the gym and I will see you guys.
This is an awesome conversation as always.
And I'll see you guys next week.
See you, Alex.
Let's catch up soon.
We should have a call soon.
For sure.
Take care.
Cool.
Bye.
All right.
See ya.
Yeah. I mean, I generally, yeah, i think everybody should be holding some of this stuff and generally for new people that i meet on the
street you know uber drivers whoever i basically i tell them you know be careful with all everything
else and this might offend people but be careful with everything else if you don't understand
crypto at all and they're like but i want to put some in, but I don't know what to do.
And I'm like, okay, well, first learn about it, right?
Study it for at least a few hours, preferably 100 or more hours.
But if you're really antsy to get in and you just want a very basic prescription of investment, and this is not financial advice, but I uh, I just basically tell people like it's,
if they're not, if they're not saving at all, cause most people you talk to, right?
Regular people, they don't have any kind of investment.
So I just tell them, look, put half of your money in S and P 500 and half in Bitcoin of
all your, of, of all your savings.
So like every month you should be putting away at least 10 or 20% of your income, at
least 10 or 20% of your income, at least 10 or 20% of your income.
What's that?
Say again.
Darren,
am I audible guys?
Okay.
Okay.
Can you hear him?
Okay.
Yep.
I hear him.
Okay. Darren having issues.
So anyways, yeah, I would say at least 10% or 20% of your income as in savings.
Anyone out there who has no savings or investments, for my first, I don't know, even still to this day, I mean, I, I probably only spend, you know, 10% of my income. Uh,
the other 90% I'm saving or I'm investing and you, anyone can do this. I really, this is going to
sound harsh, but I don't care what you say. I don't care what anyone says. Everyone can do this
unless you are in some crazy position, like you're terminally ill or something.
But any regular person, you can save at least 10% or 20%.
You could probably even get it to 50% if you were aggressive.
How do you do that?
People will say, well, I live in LA and it's so hard and it's too expensive.
And yeah, we all struggle.
I grew up very poor on food stamps.
Father died early.
We had no money.
But there's a way.
You can always find a way.
Like when I found Bitcoin, how did I start investing in it?
I moved home with my parents, dropped out of my medical school career path, sold everything I had, sold my truck, cashed in my coins, cashed in my cans.
Like anything I could do to get my hands on more
Bitcoin. I did it. Um, I wore shoes with holes in them. Like, and this is, I had already made
a lot of money in life. I mean, and I was doing every little thing I could to, to just accumulate
more Bitcoin. And that just goes for any investment. Like if you say, well, I got, you know, when you
have kids, it does become harder. I'll, you know, clearly, but if you like, for example, don't order
Uber Eats. If you are poor and you don't have enough money to, if your argument is I, I don't
have any money to put in investments, well then don't order the damn Uber Eats. Go buy a 10 pound
bag. Like what I did in college and I had
money, but what I did in college, uh, was I would go to Costco and buy a 10 pound bag of rice
for like four bucks or something. You can make like 30 meals from that. Uh, you get some rice,
you get some chicken for a dollar 27 or 67 a pound, whatever it was back then. And you still
see those deals today. If you look hard enough, enough. And you just eat chicken and rice and maybe throw some veggies in and you can eat super
cheap. You don't need to eat out. You don't need to do, never do Uber Eats if you're trying to save
for investment. And just be super frugal. If you're a single person and you're like, oh, well,
the cheapest apartment I could find in LA is $2,000 a month for a one bedroom.
Okay, then don't live in a one bedroom by yourself.
Go rent a room somewhere.
I had already made millions.
I was already well in, I think I was in seven figures.
I might have been in eight figures.
And I was living in a garage at my childhood best friend's house, Matt, that you know, Darren.
I was living in his garage.
Actually, my interview with Mark Cuban, with the fish tank in the background, if anyone
wants to look up Rock Saccharide and Mark Cuban, that was in a garage.
I was living in a garage.
I was worth somewhere between one or more than 10 million.
And I was living in my friend's garage for $900 a month in Pomona,
which is not the nicest area in California.
So my point is you can be frugal.
There are always ways to do it.
And you're going to be a lot happier later on in life.
Little side rant there.
No, that's legendary.
That's actually a better come up story than a lot
of come up stories. So you've, I think you've done a pretty stellar job, man. Kudos. But I've
always been frugal. That's how I, that is how I've gotten so far in life is how by being incredibly
frugal. I agree with you. Me and Rock like to share stories about how we don't throw away our
boxers unless like they literally just fall off your legs.
All right, man.
Now you're taking it too far, bro.
We said we wouldn't say that publicly.
No, I'm joking.
I just have to check mine right now for the holes.
Make sure there's none.
Cindy has thrown away my boxers when they've had holes in them.
This is a true story also.
I know.
Okay.
Anyways. boxers when they've had holes in them. This is a true story also. I know. Okay. Anyways,
but the point is seriously, this is something like if you work with me or you're at any of
our portfolio companies or you're a founder that we invest in, you'll hear this speech
at least once every few months. Be frugal. When I see investor, when I see like,
I've been to some of my co-founder like my my portfolio company founders or people we invest in through bid angels or, you know, LDA or give grants to from Polygon and all these things.
And I've been to some of their houses and I watch how they live.
You know, like if a founder and this happened recently, a founder told me he was like out of money and, but he, and I told him, well, what's going on?
You just, you, you've raised like $7 million.
Where's the money?
You know, what are you doing?
Are you, are you like blowing the money?
And he's like, no, I'm living super frugally and this and that.
And then I go to his house and he's got like, I'm not going to name cause people might be
able to put two and two together, but he has all the best toys.
You know, that concerns me, you know, um,
elaborate on times. Funds. I can't because then people can figure out who it is. It's one of our
portfolio companies, but anyways, um, but I will say the guy at the same time, the meticulousness
of this guy's house and how he obsessed over the minor details of things really gave me more confidence in investing in him, actually.
But, yeah, if you go to someone's house and see how they live, you can learn a lot about a person from the investment standpoint.
But, yeah, I like to see people who are frugal.
Like me, I've neverโฆ
Hey, Rock.
They were giving you money while you were in the garage.
Yeah.
Mark Cuban invested in QuickSwap
and I was living in a garage.
But do you think he would have done that
if he knew that you were in a garage?
If he knew the full story
and I explained all of this,
I think I would invest...
I would double down on an investor.
That's right.
You know, like,
I don't want to be investing in people who
waste money. That's a very dangerous thing as a founder or CEO of a company. Um, like at my
company or at one of our, at Lunar Digital Assets, our venture studio, um, you know, company pays for
plane tickets to go to conferences and stuff. I've never flown first class. I've never flown
business. Even with my personal money, I've never flown first class or business. I've had first class or business as either a gift or as the airline
upgraded me and stuff like that. But I've never paid for first class or business. And I might
never do it. Even if I'm worth 20 billion, 100 billion, I might still never fly just out of
principle. I think it's a bad example to your team.
I think LDA and Quickswap and all of our portcos
see that I'm frugal.
At most of our companies, I don't take pay.
At LDA, there's at least 10, 13, 15 people
that make more than I do as the CEO
because I take such little pay.
I've never taken $1 from Quickswap,
even though we generated 100 million revenue
in our first year.
I've never sold a single QuickToken.
And so I think that's the kind of founder or CEO you want
is someone who's really frugal
and who's going to look out for the project
or the company or the team
over their own interest in buying stupid watches and shit.
Anyways, a little bit of a sidetrack there,
but I think it's important. This is something that like, that's pure alpha for everybody here
listening. Of all things I, I think are like the most important lessons in life that someone should
know is be frugal and have delayed gratification and you're going to get so much farther in life.
paid gratification and you're going to get so much farther in life.
Yeah. I told my team this, uh, at LDA in 20, I want to say it was like 20, it was 2018.
Um, and ETH had crashed. It was like $83 or something or $85. And I told all of our team
members this exact story. I told them, you know, don't waste your money. Here's how I did it. And
yada, yada, yada. This was way before quick swap. I was much poor. Um, but, uh, I told them, you know, don't waste your money. Here's how I did it. And yada, yada, yada. This was way before quick swap. I was much poor. Um, but, uh, I told everyone, Hey, don't, if you are
thinking about going out to a sushi dinner, how much is a sushi sushi dinner? A hundred bucks,
80, $80. That's one ETH. I literally told them if you can have one sushi dinner now,
or in the future, you could have 10, 100, or 1,000 sushi dinners.
And what are we at now? And some of those people listened to that advice. I was at a wedding,
and one of my employees told this to someone else like five, six years later. I was like,
whoa, you remembered that? It was kind of cool. But I said, because ETH was at $85, I said,
if you're making 30 bucks an hour or 50 bucks an hour, consider that you're actually making, if you put it away instead of spending,
you're not making 30 or 50 an hour. You're making, let's use 30 for simple. You're not
making $30 an hour. You're making 300, 3000 or 30,000 an hour, depending on if ETH, 10,
100 or 1000 Xs. And where are we at from that day? We're at about a 50 X.
or thousand X's. And where are we at from that day? We're at about a 50 X. So that $30 an hour
is now what? 1500 an hour. If they saved the money instead of going and buying that
sushi dinner or that watch, that's just the magic of compound interest.
Einstein once said compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.
Those who understand it, earn it.
Those who don't, pay it.
So if you're racking up credit card debt, you're the person who doesn't understand compound interest.
The banks are compounding interest on you.
You should be compounding interest by investing or saving.
Every time I listen to you speak, I just want to shift more money into crypto
i can't hang out with you because i'll be 100 all the time i gotta keep doing spurts here but
man you're right now i'm telling you i i need these prices to give me a little bit of a break
based on the charts here i'm just this is my opinion i think we're gonna have a
one more flush down uh and i think then bitcoin is gonna hit that target i put out uh almost nine months ago uh which is 140 000. i think we're gonna hit 93 maybe 96 if they really want to be
nasty and then guys it's all clear sale so if you learned anything from this call or from this spaces,
it's to position yourself accordingly.
And it really makes sense to guys.
You know, back when I was, I beat myself a lot about this back in 2013.
I was a young guy, so I was very afraid of putting money into Bitcoin
and because it was, you know, it had the whole, you know,
dark web and black markets and this whole, you know,
I thought I was a criminal.
And I didn't really know how to even buy it.
I didn't even know how to onboard to buy it.
So, but the one thing that's one of my very, very oldest friends that was the first guy that really discovered this with me, told me, he said, man, we just have to stack sats.
We just have to stack satoshis.
That's all we, he's like, forget about everything else have to stack satoshis that's all he's like forget about everything else
just stack satoshis and i'll tell you i'm not in contact with him as much because he really did
stack a lot of satoshis um and he's just he's a private guy he doesn't he's not in the space he's
not on twitter he doesn't care he just learned the tech from day one and kept stacking satoshis
um you know and i i got involved with a whole lot
of other worlds uh and then i started stock well you've done you've done very well in in
you know private equity and your other businesses i mean you've done really well you're you're one
of you know my friends that i i i actually learn a lot from because i grew up in this industry
basically i mean i was i was an account executive for a mortgage bank in from 2003 or so to 2008. So that was my one stint in finance and
all this kind of stuff. But then I left that when the financial crisis happened. And then I went to
school to be a doctor. And I spent the next seven or eight years on that. And then I went to school to be a doctor. And I spent the
next like, I don't know, seven or eight years on that. But then I came to crypto. And, you know,
so my whole, everything I know is crypto for the most part. And so when I talked to you,
and you're explaining like these, you know, like T-Rise, you know, one of the companies you guys
invested in, and that we're kind of working on together um it's like these real estate bonds and how you
can create a bond on top of these uh these lending like bar or bar i guess debt instruments like real
estate debt instruments and stuff so i love learning from you on on all that stuff no and
and you know the the person that uh actually brings that to life is you because you've been
involved in the rails and that's why it's a beauty of merging well i'm just good at the crypto side i guess you're good at the the the the real
estate side that and that's all real world ideas right it's all real rails that we have we
unfortunately have dinosaur uh industries uh managing dinosaur technologies and with the
advancement of everything i mean elon's going to get to the friggin'
to Mars. He's going to have robots on Mars doing things for humanity.
The least that the other part of the human race could do
is build the technology out. And I think we're all headed that way. I mean, AI now
is just magnificent. AI. I looked at this thing yesterday called
Nana something from Microsoft, I think think or not sure who released it banana something
yeah everyone's talking about my goodness man you can just fucking do everything
with that now I mean nothing is real anymore so I think the blockchain probably
solves a lot of that those problems with its proof of stakes and proof of, you know,
completion type of smart contracts as opposed to our traditional ways.
And with the increases of hacks, of global, you know, I heard somebody actually, I can't quote who,
but I heard them mention that almost all of the world's governments right now have this massive cloud of network infrastructure right on top of them.
And they have a lot of the information not secure.
It's very susceptible to hacks.
It's very susceptible to when quantum computers are going to come out.
You know, they're going to start breaking a lot of this industry potentially even in Jackson hole in Jackson hall. I was with a bunch of, again,
it was politicians and also some of the biggest businesses in crypto. You know, uh, I was there
with Anatoly, the Solana CEO. He had actually, it's kind of funny. He had actually heard a quote
by me. Uh, that was interesting. Uh, I've never met him before then, but, uh, I was with, you
know, all these all these anyways the point
is some of these people that were building a lot of this ai stuff were talking about there's a
concept i'd never heard of uh which is quite scary um i think it's what is it store sd
dl or something it's store or sndl it's basically it's store now decrypt later.
So what that is,
is they,
they're taking all of the encrypted information that's available publicly or
even privately and they are storing it and they can't,
you can't read it now because it's encrypted.
But in the future,
when quantum comes,
even if you upgrade the systems to be quantum resistant, it's only for the new information. So just like Satoshi's coins
could be subject to a quantum attack, even if we upgrade the network, he would have to upgrade his
coins to the new network. But it depends on which way we do it. And I'm working with David Chalm on
one of these solutions. But anyways, the point is, just like Satoshi's coins or anyone else's coins will have to be moved to a new quantum-resistant wallet, most likely.
The same happens with all of your personal messages and information.
If you were sending messages over the open internet using even PGP, pretty good privacy, or these kind of protocols,
or other encryption, and you're like,
well, nobody can read it because they don't have the encryption key.
Well, yeah, they can't read it now,
but in the future they may be able to read it.
And this is going to definitely get used against politicians,
against all of us probably to some extent,
because all this information is being saved now
and will be decrypted later. That's incredibly scary. against all of us probably to some extent because all this information is being saved now
and will be decrypted later that's uh incredibly scary but hopefully uh moves in the right direction and outside the hands of uh privatization and the biggest problem that i have with big big
everything is once it goes privatized and that's where a lot of the government has to eventually use third-party contractors
or sell off this information
or have them be the ones that harvest it and manage it.
And then their private organizations
or their publicly traded companies.
It's like, what the fuck?
And yeah, this is another reason why, you know...
How did we get here?
How did we get here? I wasn't scared of quantum.
I mean, look, think about when we first started doing cryptology, I think, which is the act, not cryptography, but is the act of deciphering cryptography.
I believe that's what it is.
But, you know, with the Enigma machine, I always forget.
Was that World War I, World War II know, with the Enigma machine, I forgot, I always forget, was that world
war one, world war two, it was the Germans anyways.
Okay.
So the Enigma machine, you know, they were sending private messages and then we cracked
them with the Enigma machine.
Right.
And so like they were private at one point and then they weren't.
So you should probably just assume that everything you say, every message you send, everything that you do is being logged in the world.
And just act and behave well because it's very likely that someday all these things get exposed.
They did this on South Park, actually.
Do you guys remember they released everyone's internet history and all the husbands were freaking out because the the wives were gonna see all this weird stuff they watched on porn so like the whole world was burning and
everyone's going crazy because everyone was so worried that they were gonna see their porn search
history uh but anyways that's what that that's that's essentially how um the old tactics of control always have been, right?
Black male is the oldest thing in the game.
That's Epstein, right?
Epstein was created just for that purpose, basically, by the government, it feels like.
I don't know the story, but who knows?
Yeah, I don't know any of the story.
You know what?
If you hurt your head up about it too much, you forget about what the future could hold for us, which is this big, huge quantum threat.
And hopefully the good prevention of quantum threats.
I mean, that would destroy this whole trillion dollar industry that we're all in.
Well, it won't because there's already, I mean, if worse came to worse, there's quantum resistant chains already.
But they're not. You can't move the liquidity into that fast enough.
How much liquidity do you think is in all of crypto?
300 billion?
Like real dollars?
400 billion?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I guess it depends how you look at it.
It's either in the low trillions or the mid hundred billions.
Okay.
If everything just puts zero in one hit, what do you think?
Oh, yeah.
Well, all the liquidity would dry up too quickly.
And this will happen at some point.
There'll be some quantum attacks.
I mean, already it's baked into the price of Bitcoin, I'm sure.
The current belief in quantum or the risk of quantum is partially baked into Bitcoin. I don't
know if it's like, has Bitcoin taken a 10% hit because of the quantum risk or has it taken a
0.0001% hit because of the quantum risk? We don't know, but it is technically priced in because
all of us on this show know that quantum is some, maybe very little risk to Bitcoin. So,
you know, there are people out there that were going to buy Bitcoin that didn't because of quantum. But anyways, there's so many
people working on this. I'm not really worried, but it is interesting that David Chom kind of
opened my eyes and he's like one of the earliest cypherpunks, but he really opened my eyes to
the risk of quantum. And that's why I'm helping him with his quantum project
now for Bitcoin to make
and to make Litecoin also quantum resistant.
But anyways, what he
was saying is basically the government is always
so far ahead of what we are because
he used to host the biggest cypherpunk or the
biggest cryptography conference in the world
and then there was next to his there was the government
cryptography conference and they would
come to his conference and tell him stuff.
And he would tell them stuff.
And they weren't even impressed.
Like, they were so far ahead.
And so he says, here's one of the ways you know that they're probably pretty far ahead.
And they're never going to tell anyone that they are, right?
China and the U.S. and Russia are never going to tell people that they're ahead of IBM or these private companies that are doing it.
Because they want to be able to see the other side's messages. and they want to be able to do cyber warfare if needed or whatever. But one of
the reasons he says, you know, that it is a risk now and that we should be ready for it now is when
Biden's administration put out an executive order that said all government messaging has to be
upgraded to quantum resistance now. I don't know what the date they gave,
but it was either like now or it was just a guidance. But basically they were like, hey,
guys, upgrade to quantum resistance, please. Why would they say that? Because they probably are
getting pretty close to cracking it on their end, right? That's what Chomp thinks. That's what
Chomp thinks. But hey, so we've had a zero Philsta on here patiently waiting,
and we got away from prediction markets again.
This is what happens when Aztec isn't here.
I just go off on tangents, and Alex Damsker does too,
and you too.
I'm blaming you, AK.
I don't do spaces, so I just kind of want to share as much as I can
and help as many audiences as I can.
Yeah, and always great to have you, man.
And then so what we're going to do here,
we're already three and a half hours in and this,
and it was only supposed to go two hours.
and so what we're going to do is I'm going to read some audience comments.
I'm going to let anyone from the audience who wants to come up on stage and
ask a question,
either to a zero from the prediction market sides.
We got Phil's to here.
You want to ask Darren a question,
AKA a question, uh, or just make a statement or topic or whatever. We're just going
to let people from the audience come up. So go ahead and request. Um, if you're in the audience
and you have young children around, we don't know what these people will say. Cause I'm not screening
them. Um, so be warned, uh, some wacky stuff may happen, but I'm going to read some comments here
and then while we're letting people come up
and while I'm reading
and then I'll go to comments and stuff
Filsta, Azuro
do you want to say anything about what you guys are doing
where people can find you
anything else about prediction markets
yeah go ahead
I would just hint that Azuro actually
it is initially a sports prediction layer but now we're going far beyond this.
And we're going to introduce the new product very soon, which will be very interesting, I guess, for the wider audience, because it will kind of combine InfoFi and prediction.
But like InfoFi now is...
What is InfoFi?
Like just analytics and data?
Well, InfoFi became as analytics and data,
actually primarily KITO.
But then it became a tool, you know,
became a marketing tool mostly, like how I see it now.
And yeah, the idea is that it captures the mindshare of a specific topic, and it also captures how much mindshare is brought by different Twitter profiles.
And that's how they make rewards based on that. So that's how
they work and what we are going to introduce is like our own like a kite is
only for crypto Twitter and we're gonna introduce one thing which is more you
know general thing and we going to introduce predictions on whether
this general mindshare goes up and down with leverage. So that's going to be introduced
very soon. I'm just giving you like some pretty much a leak for just those who stayed up late.
leak for for just those who stayed up late
Awesome, yeah give Phil's to hear a follow give a zero follow and
Let's see. Do you want to pin something in the jumbotron? I
Think go find a tweet and pin it. I think I don't if you don't have anything unfortunately, I didn't know
Next time I just have one one. Darren, do you want to...
Darren will cover you.
Darren, can you go to Azuro and find a good tweet
and we can pin it to the Jumbotron so people can see what they're doing?
Yeah, it's easy.
For those in the audience who don't know, you just go to share.
You find any tweet, you go to share, and then you click the space
and it'll go right to the Jumbotron real easy um all right i put their pin tweet up there all right if anyone else uh
yeah just i had a bunch of requests earlier but they i don't know if they got scared and dropped
off can i can ask a rock so why did we have a hollywood actor actress on our space that was
We have a Hollywood actress on our space.
That was a bit of a surprise for me.
Did you notice?
That we had a Hollywood actress on our space?
Like, it was from Tim Burton's Big Fish movie, The Girl.
I'm not sure if you watched, but it was just...
Was it the girl from Anchor?
She comes on often.
I didn't see.
Darcy, maybe?
I think her name was Alison Lockman.
She was from Anchor.
Oh, I don't know.
Yeah, funny.
Yeah.
Was she a speaker or a listener?
A listener, yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, we get a lot of big listeners.
One of the guys from Breaking Bad come in.
Like, one of the Salamanca brothers comes in quite regularly. Yeah, I was
supposed to have a call with him,
but then I had to take a last minute
plane, so I was in the airport, and I just talked to him.
It was so funny. Actually, Cindy's
definitely going to get mad at me, but
she's casting...
God damn, I hope I don't get in trouble for this.
Cindy's an associate casting director
for Zelda, and
a new Zelda live action they're doing uh
for sony sony and nintendo i guess but um i was looking over i hope i don't get her in trouble i
was looking over her shoulder at her list of like um people they were considering uh for
some role or whatever, or maybe it was just her generalist. I don't know the details, but I saw
some role or whatever or maybe it was just her generalist i don't know the details but i saw
that guy's name, the, one of the Breaking Bad, the brothers, the Salamanca, whatever twins or
whatever. I saw his name. I was like, oh shit, I'm supposed to get on a call with that guy tomorrow.
Uh, that was pretty funny. Uh, he was laughing when I told him when we got on the call, but, um,
yeah, anyways, uh, Breaking Bad's one of the best shows of all time, by the way, if you haven't seen
it. Okay. So we had a bunch of requests
I don't know what happened they like got scared or something
or now they don't want to come up we have one here
Muhammad
do you want to say anything
it's a parody account so I
we'll see what we get here
Muhammad
you requested to come up.
I brought you up.
What's up, Mohamed?
Is that the king of Bangladesh?
That's the king of Bangladesh, apparently.
Yeah.
Okay, we have Dark Wolf here.
Dark Wolf, do you want to say something?
Dark Wolf, do you want to say something?
Earth to Dark Wolf. I see another request, but I can't see what it is. We've got Rachel.
Hey, what's going on you guys? Can you hear me? Okay, no. Yes. Yes, we can like
Why don't we let Dark Wolf go first since he was called first?
Can you hear me?
Yep.
Okay.
My question was, how much time do we have before quantum computer will become a problem by encrypting messages?
Nobody knows. But I mean, okay, so from the publicly available information, we are probably still five to 20 years out.
I don't know.
But like if you go further, like David Chalm was saying, and we're putting out executive orders saying upgrade to quantum resistance.
because david chom is one of the smartest cryptographers i know and literally invented like
npcs and wrote his 1982 dissertation on um it's a long name that has to do with networks and yada
but it was basically like anonymous digital e-cash like you know this was um like a long time you
know 1982 uh he was already writing about this stuff you know before we even knew well before
some of us were born and before any of most of us knew what computers or the internet was.
Um, but anyways, he says we really should be worried about this.
So my normal take, uh, and I feel bad for like, you know, Richard on our team writer, a lot of you guys know, uh, you know, he was, he brought this up, I think on a team call or something.
And I had just explained this to a few people.
So I was like maybe just a little short and irritated and like, OK, I don't want to hear
any more about quantum.
This is fucking fun.
Stop wasting time.
It's not coming for five to 20 years or whatever.
And then, you know, I talked to David Chom deeply about it and he kind of scared me.
And I went back and apologized to Richard and to other people who I said it wasn't a
apologize to to richard and to other people who i said it wasn't a concern i still don't think it's
concern.
like the biggest concern but i i'm guessing it's it's still five to ten years you know away but
it makes sense to start building the stuff now because um preventing you know you don't want to
wait you don't want to wait until the attack happens but and then also like the thing we were
saying the store now decrypt later stuff, you should start, you kind of need to start transitioning people way before it happens
actually.
So, but I don't think we're going to see any quantum attacks anytime soon.
And the big reason for that is the only people who are actually getting far in quantum is
either governments or the biggest companies in the world, because it takes billions and
billions of billions of dollars and has no payoff in the immediate future.
So you have to have a massive bankroll to bet on this because your payout is some people
have been trying to work on quantum for 30 years and they've not gotten a payout.
Many companies went bankrupt with this, right?
So the people that are doing it, it's not like some hacker in a garage who's going to
hacker in a garage who's going to come hack your Bitcoin. These are like IBM and, you know,
come hack your Bitcoin.
Google and, you know, the American government and maybe the North Koreans. But most of these,
I guess North Korea is one that's just known for hacking and doesn't care what the world thinks and
doesn't follow the rest of the world's kind of like norms or rules. So I guess, you know,
you could worry about that. But like like for the most part, I think
most of the actors involved in this are not going to like, for example, they'll probably break
their, the other governments, you know, messages first is intelligence operations, right? They're
not going to come hack your Bitcoin wallet. I don't think, maybe I'm totally wrong, but you know, and, and the
other thing is there as Bitcoin gets so, so much stronger in our crypto, our whole industry gets
stronger, everybody has a stake in it. So nobody wants to attack the network because, you know,
at some point I think, you know, everybody, if the whole world is using Bitcoin as a savings
instrument, now what government would attack it? Actually, if a government attacked it, maybe the other governments will go to war with that country.
At some point, Bitcoin and our industry will get so big, we will be the incumbents, and we will be too big to fail.
And there will be countries that will threaten war over these kind of attacks because the whole system will be built on blockchain in the future.
We're not there yet, but I'm pretty confident we get there someday.
Yeah. Thank you very much for the amazing answer.
What do you think though? Do you have any insights on this?
Yeah. My only worry is if the quantum computer became more easy to build,
like more accessible for everybody.
I don't know.
I have so much thought about that.
It's too much powerful and we don't know enough to protect.
Well, that's like AI, right? You know, I guess the way you think about, I think about it is the way I think about
it is as long as there's not just one group who has the AI or the quantum, if everybody has it, then it becomes just like an arms race.
Like that's what hacking is, right?
It's a constant arms race.
The hackers get better.
The defenders get better.
The white hat hackers get better.
The black hat hackers get better.
It's an arms race constantly, right?
And it's the same thing with encryption.
Once we break, like we've broken old encryptions, right? Like the Enigma machine did. We, and there's been lots of times
we break encryptions because we only make encryption to be strong enough to last a certain
amount of time. in brute forcing,
or you could also make it a thousand times harder to crack than what it is now, which
already it's incredibly hard. You can make it quantum resistant now, but why don't we do it now?
Because it comes with a lot of extra bandwidth, a lot of computational resources.
It's like, you don't, if, if in your home, you only have $20, you do not build, you know,
you don't put like cameras and laser beams and a moat around your house.
and laser beams and a moat around your house, right?
Right.
But if you have the Mona Lisa in your house or your museum,
you're building some crazy security.
Well, if we don't,
so you only build the cryptographic defense that you need for at the time,
because every layer you add on top of that,
every, you know, you make it, you know, many times harder to attack you.
Then you also make it many times harder to attack you, then you also make it many
times harder to just run the software and it just costs too much. So we're always thinking,
you know, ahead by like, okay, let's make this so that it'll be cryptographically secure for 10,
20, 30, 50 years or whatever. But like that, which is not the same, by the way, it's like,
if you took all the energy on the whole earth and every supercomputer on earth and tried to break one Bitcoin private key, it would take you 57 million years.
And, but that is not the same because that it's just infinitely random. Like it's a really big
number basically. And we can't, we don't have any way to factor prime numbers and that's what
quantum can do in the future. But anyways, so it, it taking 57 million years to crack a Bitcoin, um, private key is not the
same as in 20 years, we'll just have technology that can crack it right away. Right. So they're
two different things, but, um, yeah. Thank you for the question though question though um we got some more requests coming in i'll add some
more people up and then uh rachel on rachel on chain wait you're uh wait did we just do
hey how you doing dude i'm doing great um you know i heard the conversation i just wanted to
pop in and listen and then i just started really loving the conversation.
I wanted to show you guys some love.
Rock, I absolutely loved hosting you for our live stream.
If it's okay, I can throw that in the Jumbotron if folks want to go watch the recent live stream that we did and short clip.
Yes, I didn't even know it was live i was in um i was in jackson hole and
i uh i haven't had time to like catch up on all my messages and stuff darren did we start uh
sharing that out to the world and getting uh some engagement is that did you know that's live
yep it's somewhere yeah i think we posted it yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna find it i'll throw all
the things in the jumbotron so you can catch up.
And, dude, I totally relate.
Like, a lot of us in the base community are coming back from OnChain Summit.
And, man, like, I drove up to San Francisco for this, drove back down to Southern California.
And I feel like jet lag, like, this whole week has been kind of wild just coming back from Summit.
That's funny.
Even just staying in the
same time zone i get it's like it's it's not just jelly it's like travel yeah yeah that's and
talking to people lag it's like you go to these conferences and you're talking to people and
you're putting on a smile and you're keeping your energy high for eight hours and you're just melted
afterwards even for me and i do a lot of talking. I'm sitting in a media room. I interviewed people.
If anybody was at some, okay, Cali Crypto out there.
I see my friend Cali Crypto that came and worked the event.
Helped me with my OnChain Media crew.
He knows from the morning till night I was talking, interviewing, back to back to back.
So, yeah, still recovering from that.
But it's all love.
I feel a lot of gratitude, you know, for the community.
I have so much cool merch from OnChain Summit,
connected with a lot of folks in the base community.
And now I just found out,
this is actually the first time I'm sharing this,
but I was just approved for Basecamp in Vermont next month
with the base and Coinbase team.
So very excited about that.
And yeah, I would love to see QuickSwap.
I don't know if you guys have any like base events on your roadmap,
but would love to help get you guys just more involved in the community.
Another thing, quick side note, I actually messaged,
one of the reasons I wanted to come up too is, you know,
we started talking a little bit about film and entertainment.
I saw Goya being here from the Black Mirror team as well.
I had a call with Black Mirror this morning because they're looking to come on to base.
And you mentioned Daniel Moncada, and that's actually someone I know.
I pinged him to see if he can come on this space.
One of the Salamanca twins from Breaking Bad.
I actually interviewed him and signed a waiver with Netflix for this documentary they're working on.
So we'll see if that ever sees the light of day but
uh yeah i pinged uh daniel to see if he can hop on here awesome sorry i know yeah the one i know is
wait i think i think the one i know is daniel yeah he's the one that's in the crypto he's the
brother that's like uh yeah he's uh he he was doing an nft project i think
he's doing something with streaming too so that would probably be the one you know i've seen him
at crypto conferences for like i want to say six years or more like something he's been coming to
crypto conferences for a long time he's such a humble guy man like i had a call with him after
i met him i did an event at usc with like uh y3k wendy o was there
and i ended up talking to him love wendy o wendy's awesome fun fact she was one of the first people
i lined her up to interview sandeep and i think anarog from uh you know founders of mattock or
polygon uh at the e3 gaming uh so we the E3 is the biggest gaming thing in the world.
And we had the first ever with Justin Wu and some others,
the first ever blockchain gaming stage at E3.
And Wendy O, we lined her up to interview.
This was before Matic had really taken off
and she was very interested in their tech.
So she's been a longtime Polygon Mmatic supporter and interviewed them in person there.
But yeah, sorry, go ahead.
And by the way, I see my friend Callie Crypto out there throwing up parts.
I'm pretty sure he does some, he works at some capacity with Wendy O.
So we got some of our Wendy O fam out there too.
But yeah, just wanted to chime in.
And basically the thing that kind of piqued my interest in this conversation is the discussion around film and entertainment coming into the on-chain space.
You guys, I do feel like that's currently happening.
Like, one of the biggest Netflix IPs, Black Mirror, is now looking to come onto base and do a TGE.
Like, how crazy is that, right?
And I just think it's a very cool moment for film, for entertainment.
Whoa, expand.
You can't leave us on the edge of our seat.
What are they doing?
Oh, well, shoot.
I feel like Goya Bean was in here.
Okay, from what I'm gathering at a high level,
they're launching this NFT pass thing, TGE.
I'm not going to be the best person to explain it
because I'm just learning about it.
Feels like Black Mirror episode.
Like that Netflix show, Black Mirror, yeah.
And yeah, I think they're doing a play
on some of the episodes and the lore
and doing a smile pass for their NFTs.
And you know that episode where it's like,
you have that reputation score,
everyone can see your points or whatever?
That was a good one yeah yeah so there's like it's like the china it's like the china social credit score thing yeah yeah like the same again i'm still
learning about it i'm not the best person to explain it but that's kind of the gist and
yeah they're they're launching on base so i think think that's pretty cool. You know, one of the biggest Netflix IPs is coming to base.
Very cool.
Anyway, sorry, I've been rambling up here, but much love to you guys.
I would love to get, because I don't think I've talked to base about this, but I've been
talking to Optimism, Arbitrum, Ethereum Foundation.
Actually, we talked a little bit about it with Ethereum Foundation on the show once a few weeks ago. But I'm trying to push this initiative I call declustering. And what that is, is, you know, the Optimism OP stack chains have their stack that operates on super chain bridging. And then you have Arbitrum with orbit and polygon with ag layer.
and you have ZK sync with their stack.
And I'm really trying to get us to unite all of these and bring them all
together.
That's part of the reason for this show.
Actually,
one of the original concepts of this show,
it used to be called all roads lead to polygon.
And then we changed the name to the aggregated because we wanted to make it more...
I've been on that show several times.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, I remember that.
Way back in the day.
This is that show.
It's just a new iteration of the show.
Aztec was on earlier, actually.
But yeah, we've been doing this show for...
Yeah, this is episode 127, so 127 weeks.
But yeah, the point was to make it more uh inclusive because we should be
bringing all of the chains together and having less kind of tribalism and so my thing with this
declustering is a little bit going off of something vitalik said like maybe 10 months ago something
like that where he said you know having these walled gardens or clusters is what people are
calling them like op stack is a cluster um and ag layer is ag layer is not really a cluster because it's, it's open source
and it's trying to include other chains too, but we got to get all the chains to work together on
this. And I, maybe base would be interested in this as well. Um, there, cause mostly we're
talking to the stack providers, but base is such a big chain on, on OP that it might, uh, you know, it might make sense
for them to get involved too. Uh, like we're talking about, you know, potentially co-funding
this where, you know, cause I, I serve on the Polygon grants board. And so we could,
if we help fund it and Optimism helps fund it and, and Arbitrum and ZK Sync and ETH Foundation,
if we all go in together, we could solve this. If we each put a couple million in each, we can solve this. But the point, I guess, maybe I didn't describe the point
well enough, is that instead of having a bunch of bridges that operate independently,
we can kind of unite them under certain standards and then make it so that all of the different, uh, all of the different OP stack orbit, you know, super chain orbits and ag layer, they all combine, they work together and they have interoperability between them.
Cause right now they don't.
Uh, but it would be so cool.
Like instead of competing for these things, let's just find a way to all work together.
Because if we, cause in reality, we're, we shouldn't be competing with ourselves.
In reality, we shouldn't be competing with ourselves.
We have enough people to compete with.
We have enough people to compete with.
Let's talk about, you know, whatever, Solana or other competitors to the Ethereum ecosystem or Avalanche or whatever.
But let's not even โ let's go a step further.
We're competing against banks and governments and countries.
And so it really doesn't make sense for us to be competing internally as all like Ethereum community.
Totally. And a rising tide lifts all ships.
I feel like in this space, we really got to find a way to work together to support one another and to uplift one another.
So I totally love what you're saying.
By the way, I see a wild Daniel Moncada just jumped in.
I don't know if you saw my DM on Instagram.
But you guys, we got one of the Salamanca twins here from Breaking Bad.
So, shout out to Daniel.
We were just showing you some love, Daniel,
before you jumped in.
I just invited him to come
on stage, so hopefully he can hop up.
And then if...
Let's see. I've let this
Pakani Didan up on stage several times.
I don't know what keeps happening.
Maybe he's having a buggy issue or something.
But right now, yeah, we're just letting audience members up on the stage, guys,
and we'll read some comments and then we'll wrap up.
We've been going a long time.
We're on like four hours.
So let's see here.
But yeah, really happy you came on, Rachel.
We had a really incredible talk today about a lot of kind of, I don't know, game theory of these predictions markets.
I think, Darren, how many and tooling and all the different like leverage and,
and all the iterations that are happening or like the arbitrage between them,
all the different platforms. But yeah, it's, it's pretty cool to see.
I think this is going to become massive.
It's actually really easy to invite them all because every single one of them
just has the word bets in their name.
So I just went on Telegram and then searched the word bets.
And I just, yeah, I found like eight and I was like, okay, yeah, this is.
No way.
That's how you got them.
Well, like, we had.
I don't think I've ever heard you say that technique before.
Normally it's we know someone who knows someone or whatever.
Well, no, we had, we had groups with them all.
Like, okay, that's.
And then it was like.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's pitch. Pitch for me at bit angels Puerto Rico really like what
they're doing but yeah go ahead yeah then there was like that swirl and then
there's like that folio and then there's back this but that yeah it was it took
two minutes oh that's funny nice that. That's producer Darren, folks.
Phil, you should definitely
get like a zero bets
in there somewhere.
So that makes my life easier
when we invite you next time.
Okay.
I will.
They're going to.
They're going to change
the name of the protocol
now to zero bets.
That was actually
an idea at some point.
Um, I bet I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people though left that out of their name
for regulatory fears early on, because I mean, in the last administration, it was quite scary
to be in this industry.
Well, Azure is a protocol.
So like our applications and they're sometimes anonymous sometimes
But as an infrastructure we're fine
Okay, we got Pekani I brought you up on stage is the last time it's like five times
I don't know what keeps happening there, but we got crypto
Kali crypto 714 That's where Io, Cali Crypto 714.
That's where I grew up, man.
What is 714?
Do you know where that's from, Rob?
Is that like Buena Park or Fullerton or La Marada?
You know, bro.
You know, dog.
I love that.
Are you an Orange County boy, too?
I am in Orange County right now visiting my parents.
Yeah.
I live in Puerto Rico now.
I think I'm in Orange County as well.
I don't know if Cali Crypto is.
Bro, I graduated from Fullerton High, dude.
What?
Yes.
I got kicked out of Sunny Hills.
My man is a DJ to the max.
Look at him.
I've never said that publicly, but there you go.
That'll be used against me in my political career for sure.
Oh my goodness. Don't they always know?
But man, thank you so much for having me, Darren. Nice to meet you.
Thank you so much.
Just so everyone knows, this might make it in some eyes better and might make it in some eyes worse.
But I had pot at school.
I might have gotten suspended in high school too.
We won't bring that up though
Those are the old times Rob
We don't talk about the old times
We're moving forward bro
But I did go to
I went to Fullerton Junior College
Before I transferred to Loyola Marymount University
Bro my daughter just started this year
My middle child
She's 18
Just started at JC
And she's doing her thing bro
So it's just like a crazy full circle.
She graduated from Fullerton High as well, and my older son did, which is 24.
And, you know, my younger one is going to be going there too.
And, boy, she's fifth grade, so another few years.
You know, so just kind of appealing the alumni and going.
But, you know, thanks for having me.
It's a great place to start, man.
It's a great school.
The teachers care. I had a great experience and,
you know, um, I talked to everyone earlier about being frugal. I mean, at, at the time when I
started there, I didn't have a ton of money. My family didn't have a ton of money. Uh, but it was
a great jumping off point. I went there. It's like, and so like, like I said, I got kicked out
of high school. And so I didn't have the best resume going into college. I had a good GPA, but then I went to a FJC Fullerton junior college and I got like a, I think it was like a
3.8 GPA or something. So then I got into, you know, an amazing, you know, private university,
Loyola Marymount where I went. Um, uh, so the point is, even if you don't have a lot of money
and even if you didn't do like amazingly in high school, you weren't like, you know, valedictorian or something, you can just, you can go to college, you could go to a
junior college. And if you just try really hard, improve yourself, you there's, it's actually a
higher, except like if you have a three from, from my understanding, what the, the Dean of
admissions at LMU told me is that if you have like a 3.8 GPA from high school, um, you're not going to get into the best colleges as easy as
if you have a 3.8 GPA from a, uh, junior college, because, uh, high school doesn't always carry over
to college. So, but college carries over to college better. So they'd like, they see it as,
okay, you're an adult. You were able to handle getting a good GPA in college. Um, you didn't
have your parents breathing over your
neck or whatever, but anyways. Rock, you said one key word, two key words, try harder. And that,
for me, that's for anything, bro. I mean, I didn't go to college, honestly. So the fact that my
daughter's going, absolutely, I'm super proud of her, but trying harder, no matter what you're
doing in life, that's the thing you need to do. You need to lock in your skill.
You need to do the best you can and show up every single day.
And let me tell you, this girl to the right of me, Rachel, bro, she is kicking freaking ass, bro.
The way she worked, bro, I've seen her work, bro.
Busting her ass from 11 to like 7 p.m. with like five-minute breaks here and there.
And guess what?
She leaves to go take a break and she's getting stopped by somebody else.
You know, so she is doing her thing.
Oh, at the on-chain conference?
At the on-chain summit, bro.
It was absolutely epic to see her just cook.
There was not a single dull moment at that event.
There were way more people there
that I knew that I could talk to.
It was actually a challenge.
Like I wanted to vibe with everyone.
I wanted to talk to everyone. I'm really happy got to see jesse and cali crypto you got
to meet jesse as well but man i i have so much love for everyone in the bigs community and it
was like it was hard i was like oh i want to talk to all of you but i can't yeah so that's one of
the highlights for me rocking rocking real quick i got jesse a signature on the the custom-made
shoes that they were giving away over there, bro.
No way.
Yep, I sure did, bro.
A 101, bro.
Sick.
Where in California are you, Rachel?
I'm actually in Laguna Beach.
Laguna Beach.
Nice.
Where are you at?
I'm in Yorba Linda.
Yorba Linda.
I probably shouldn't be doxing.
We should get lunch sometime, man.
Hell yeah.
Yeah, that would be great.
And where are you?
Are you Cali Crypt?
Are you still in Fullerton?
So I moved to Buena Park, but I'm recently going through a separation.
I went to Beatty Elementary in Buena Park Junior High.
No way, bro.
No, that's crazy.
We're fully doxing.
We're going to go through the sea phrases next year.
Oh, God.
Let's not go that far, Rachel.
Come on.
Yeah, you're right.
This is that stuff they use against you.
Are they like when you're trying to log into a bank, it's like, what?
What?
Elementary school did you go to?
We're screwed.
I'm screwed.
Wait a minute.
What was your mother's maiden name?
What's the name of your first pet?
Nice.
Good stuff, guys.
Right.
But yeah, Cali Crypto, I love what you said there about try harder.
I've been saying that more recently.
I've just been like.
I feel bad because I know people struggle and life is hard, you know, and.
But, you know, and there's, there's systemic problems.
Like there are, you know, the government with their inflation and, um, you know, over- straight, whatever you are. If you work really, really hard and shine at anything and everything you do, you will get somewhere in life. I look at it. So I think we've gotten into this place where everyone is kind of feeling like victims all the time. And there's maybe there's good reason for that. Like there are, we are
victims of some things, but I think if we spend all of our time focusing on that, we're not going
to get anywhere instead, you know, try, yes, we should try to change the system and we should
complain about the, the, the problems in the system. For me, it's too big of government.
Other people have different reasons, but, um, instead, but we should spend most of our time focusing on actually getting shit done and
going harder, you know, because if you're like, even if you're, if I'm working at a burger place,
right, I'm going to be the best burger flipper there's ever been. I'm going to be like the,
when my boss says, you know, jump, I'm going to say how high when I, you know, when I, when I
greet a customer, I'm going to have a smile on my face. Even if I'm having a bad day, I'm going to be
as nice to that customer as I can be. Um, anyways, uh, yeah, just work hard and you'll get far.
Like I just, uh, I, I really believe that I, I, if you have one arm, you could probably get
really far in life still by just working really hard. I agree. So one arm, you could probably get really far in life still
by just working really hard. I agree. So I loved what you said there when you said try harder.
If somebody would have told me back then that I would have nine jobs and by the ninth job after
that, I would be where my dreams have been. Bro, I would have been going through those jobs like
crazy. You know, I would have just failed and failed until I learned my lessons.
And then you get to where you're at after you've learned and grown as a person, as a human, as an individual, right?
And, man, it's just sky's the limit once you can just learn from those mistakes or lessons, grow, and then you'll get to where you need to be quicker, guys.
So hard work.
Don't fade it.
Do it.
And as Rock said, just show up every single day and go as hard as you can
in everything like your your
Your health your what you eat you're working out you're taking care of your body you're educating yourself your friendships
Your relationships be the best
boyfriend husband father
Wife whatever be the best you can be, father, wife, whatever.
Be the best you can be.
Read as many books as you could read.
Use AI to learn as much as you can learn.
If you're an employee, be the best employee you can be.
If you're an executive, be the best executive you can be.
Take care of your team.
Study harder, work harder.
Just be the best you you can be. You only get one life. I mean,
the way I look at it is like every day you live is, is one page in the book of your life. And,
and I want to, I want to, when I die, I want my book to be a pretty, pretty epic book to read.
Let's fucking go, Rock. That's what I'm talking about.
Well, cool guys. Um, okay. Pakhani, I'm'm gonna bring you up one more time but i don't know what is
going on man you want to leave a comment and tell us why i keep bringing you up but it's never
working uh and then muhammad did you ever you never said anything you said you're the future
king of bangladesh but you gotta you to man up here and say something then.
He's farming followers first.
He needs the audience before he tries for the throne.
All right, guys.
Muhammad says 10 followers and he'll speak.
Just kidding.
I don't know who he is, by the way.
All right.
I'm going to bring up one more person.
We got Jason.
I'm losing my voice, guys. This. We got Jason. I'm losing my
voice guys. This has been four hours. Jason Roy, uh, requested. We're going to bring you up.
I've tried to bring, uh, Daniel up, but no, uh, he hasn't come up yet. Um,
Banksy, I'm going to bring you up. Um, Jason, you have something you want to want to say there
i guess people saying nothing maybe is better than what we've had sometimes in the past where people just come on and like curse or something
Hey, Pakhani is giving 100 emoji.
Pakhani, click mic on.
Click unmute and say, there you go.
That's it.
You, you, you.
I'm active.
I'm listening.
There you go.
Hey, Pakhani.
We've been bringing you up for a while.
Do you work in this space?
Are you just here learning?
Yeah, I'm just here learning.
All right, cool.
I hope you enjoyed the show.
You, for sure.
All right.
Jason Roy, if you want to unmute and say something,
something. Otherwise we're going to call it quits here. And while we're waiting on that,
otherwise we're going to call it quits here.
uh, try quick swap guys on both polygon and base quick swap is live on base. Oh, there's
the interview. I see it. I was waiting for you to see it. I was waiting for you to see
it. Uh, I was doing a little work in the background, finding the clip, getting the YouTube video.
Uh, so yeah, you guys can check out a short clip up there uh with me and rocky from the live
stream and then i also linked out to youtube um as well so you can watch the full interview
very cool awesome yeah it was a great interview i had a lot of fun with you guys i think we were
we went way over time i think on it but it was a lot of fun yeah that tends to be how
it gets when we're vibing you know it's hard to end a space or like a like an interview when the
vibes are high so we do we do our yeah it's really good yeah i mean you're you're saying that as we're
four hours ten minutes into two hours you guys this space is normally super early for me in
california so like the fact that it's noon right
now you guys have been going for four hours over four yeah oh my god okay damn that's commitment
right there yeah or maybe it's commitment to not wanting to work right now maybe it's productive
it's my it's my exactly it's my excuse it's my excuse not to work because once I get off the show, I got to get to real work.
Don't do it, Rob.
I've literally had to cycle my AirPods twice.
This is the fun work.
This is the productive procrastination here.
Yeah.
All right, guys.
I think we'll call it there.
Thank you so much, Rachel.
Thanks, CaliCrypto.
It was great getting to know you. I gave you a follower. I might have been following you already. I think we'll call it there. Thank you so much, Rachel. Thanks, Cali Crypto. It was great
getting to know you. I gave you a follower. I might have been following you already. I'm not
sure. Oh, you're a mod for Wendy. Oh, nice. Love Wendy. I've known her forever. Very cool.
Very cool. All right. Well, let's do it again soon, guys.
Sounds good. Happy Friday, everybody.
And try Quick Swap on base, base guys there's some rewards over there
we're bootstrapping juicing it up and uh if you're oh and if you're a project on base and you want
some good community support that is what quick swap does best we built the polygon community
basically from the ground up from quick swap and lunar digital assets our venture studio
um we actually built the original ambassador program for Polygon called the Matic Mitra.
People remember it was pretty big with the Link Marines and the XRP Army.
They were the top three ambassador programs.
We built that and brought over a thousand projects to Polygon.
And now, as I'm saying, we need especially all the ETH chains and L2s to,
to be friendly and get along.
And so we're trying to bring that same magic to base and, you know,
help projects get real community support on base.
So if you're a project on base and you're getting ignored by the,
the bigger decks is maybe, or, or whatever, no, no heat on them.
But if you want more support that's
what we really pride ourselves in at quick swap is is being uh uh there for the community like i
said i've never sold a single quick token and i've been working on quick swap for like i don't know
six years now five six years and uh never taken one dollar from quick swap and we just give it all to the community so cheers guys bye bye
Speaker
azuro ๐
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