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PROTECTING YOUR CRYPTO
Recorded: April 8, 2025 Duration: 1:55:45Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Tesla enthusiasts shared insights on the company's advancements in self-driving technology, the upcoming launch of affordable models, and the strategic partnerships that are shaping its future. With rising user satisfaction and expectations for increased deliveries, Tesla is poised for significant growth in the evolving automotive landscape.
Full Transcription
What what now we got the rug pulled right out from under us there sorry about that let me get
my wonderful speakers right back up on stage here and we'll pick off we'll pick up right
where we left off that was always fun now you hear my voice behind this account. You know, technical difficulties, they always tend to happen. But hey, we're still here. Landon, I see that you made it back up here. I would love to say hello to you while we get the rest of our speakers back up. Landon, you always bring energy. I love when you bring energy to these spaces. Kick us off with some energy here. Tell us what's on your mind.
these spaces. Kick us off with some energy here. Tell us what's on your mind.
Thanks very much. Well, I am so excited to be a Tesla owner, a Tesla investor, and a Tesla
consumer. Boy, I invest for that old reason that Elon said, Warren Buffett has talked about this
before. Invest in companies that make products, that bring you real joy in your life, that make
your life better, that make the lives better of the people around you that you see using them.
So this week, I tried to put my money where my mouth was. When it comes to Tesla full self-driving, you know, I'm mostly a hardware 4 user.
I've got a Cybertruck with hardware 4.
I've got a relatively new Tesla Model Y that has hardware 4.
And so it's really easy to be lulled into the complacency of the idea that, hey, this hardware for is the whole world. But Tesla has
a really innovative history in the hardware that it's put in their vehicles. Now, I'm not talking
about the main screen. When you get into a Tesla for the first time, it's really common to see that
that big main screen in the middle, people used to say, oh, it looks like the Tesla's running,
you know, a giant iPad. And we had these stories of state patrol pulling over early Tesla saying,
you can't mount a computer to your dashboard. You can't do that. And now, of course, it's from the
factory. So I've pinned a post up at the top there about what I've done for the last 15 days.
And that is I got out of my hardware four car.
I borrowed a hardware three car from 2021 and I drove it across the country.
I drove from the mountains of Telluride, Colorado to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the hills and valleys of the Tennessee River.
And I did it in a Model X pla Plaid. So it's no slouch.
You don't have to feel sorry for me driving this old Hardware 3 car because it just happens to go
zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds, you know, with a full family and luggage in there, if you like.
But back to Hardware 3. I drove 1,800 miles out, 1,800 miles back. I drove on interstate highways. I drove on
county roads, state roads, dirt roads, gravel roads, and in and out of small towns all across
America. And I was rather surprised. I do have a hardware three car, a Tesla car. I've got a 2020 Model Y performance with paid in full, full self-driving.
And that is a hardware three car.
So when I jumped in this, I had a familiarity with hardware three, but my experience was very different.
It was very different this time.
time. My hardware three car was average. And I've got a couple of friends that have challenged me
My hardware three car was average.
to take this drive because they say their hardware three cars perform very poorly. And so here I am
in the Model X driving hardware three. And I don't know if you want to call it A-B testing or
different programs or just being in different parts of the country, but I could not make this hardware three Model X perform badly.
It's just remarkable to me that this hardware, when Tesla moved away from NVIDIA hardware
in hardware two and 2.5 into their own Samsung produced silicon, they made this major move and
it made our cars so incredibly drivable they
couldn't have possibly imagined the future where we're still driving on these cars so check out
my post for some of the details i'm going to pepper it in with some photos of my trip if you
have any questions about driving tesla full self-driving on hardware three or hardware four for that matter. Please
don't be afraid to ask. Put questions in the comments there. I'm really happy to have had
this 4,000 mile experience in a very old hardware from Tesla, and it made my drives comfortable,
easy, and safe. Thanks for having me here. I love talking about Tesla. And the reason I invest in
Tesla is because of what it does for my life and my family's lives. It protects us. It keeps us
safe. It keeps us running down the road. Thanks very much for having me out. It's interesting.
You went the opposite way from hardware four to hardware three, Lenin, and had such a good
experience. I'm actually not surprised at all. I was spending some time recently thinking about how I can't identify any regular problems with
my hardware three drives anymore. For the longest time, there was a list of things and you know,
there were several FSD testers that had maintained lists as well. And now I just can't find anything
that it does wrong regularly. That's not to say that there are never any problems, but it's phenomenal.
I probably put like 500 miles on it this weekend and I didn't intervene.
In 500 miles in Southern California, in and out of different types of traffic, on and
off of different types of road, you just hit it and it goes.
Even on hardware three, on my two-year-old uh model you know and
i know hardware three was around for a couple years before that so this is really amazing i
mean if you think about buying like a four-year-old laptop you think like automatically
it's going to be super slow it's not going to perform you won't be able to play the new games
whatever but here i am in a four-year-old uh you know hardware version of a car or maybe it's even
five or more than that and it just it just works and it just keeps getting better. It's really phenomenal. I took
a test drive in two different Teslas this weekend. I was bringing my oldest daughter on a date and I
had to kill some time at the mall. So me and my youngest two daughters took out a Cybertruck
and we also took out a Model S Plaid. The Plaid did not have FSD in it,
but the Cybertruck did. So it wasn't my first time driving a Cybertruck, but it was my first
time using FSD in a Cybertruck. It was my first time using hardware for FSD behind the wheel.
I've been in the passenger seat before. And it's amazing. It definitely felt different because I was in a huge truck,
but I couldn't really tell the difference in terms of capabilities, which I think is
really, really telling that I'm going from a hardware three to a hardware four version car.
And the hardware three already works so good. I couldn't even tell the difference. So I mean,
man, did I have fun in that plaid? Let me tell you. And the Cybertruck was just so fun.
I couldn't even believe the power in the Plaid.
I had heard it.
I've driven fast cars my whole life.
I've always been a bit of a car guy.
But man, 1.9, zero to 60, it's like next level.
You don't really understand it until you try it.
You hit that pedal.
And I was trying to film myself.
I was holding the camera, uh, you know, near the center console pointed at my face. As I hit the
accelerator, I couldn't even keep myself in frame because it threw my hand, right? Like my, my,
my camera went way out of the way. Uh, and you could just see like, as it recaptures my face,
I mean, it's almost like you're
on a roller coaster it was just absolutely insane so yeah the hardware 3 has come so far and these
cars are just absolutely incredible meta go ahead yeah i was gonna say could i jump in here you said
the magic words hardware 3 the device of hardware 3 is overstated i'm just gonna repeat that
everybody keeps thinking hardware 3 is going to be obsolete.
I've been having a thread with Green, the only, which I think has been one of the big sources of this misinformation, quite frankly.
And as we're having the conversation, it's still early.
We're still having a conversation.
But I feel comfortable sharing.
I think there's clear misunderstandings.
He thought the only way the two trip chips could talk to each other was over an Ethernet
cable and that
they had to use TCP IP, which is just factually wrong. As we continue the discussion, he's starting
to realize, okay, now maybe there's other ways they can talk to each other. But let's say,
even if he's right, in a really, really, really bizarre way, Tesla decided to put two things on
the same board, but not connect them, which would be really ridiculous. But even if they did that,
they would just be able to
replace that board with another board that does have a connection between each other. So the cars
could, at the very worst case, receive another chip that's exactly the same, what's already in
the car, same specs, except the trip chips have access to shared memory. If they do that, or if
it's already done, which is what I suspect, the way to think about this is hardware three was capable of running the older models and a shadow model. Hardware four is twice as large,
and it can run a model that's twice as large or even larger and a shadow model. And one day,
once hardware four is working great, theoretically, we have enough cars on the road. We don't need to
run shadow mode in hardware three anymore. You could just run one model. So as they continue to get better and better and better on hardware four,
what they're running on hardware three doesn't need to collect data. It doesn't need to do a
bunch of things that hardware three does. Maybe later down the road, they say, Hey, you know what?
We're not going to give you a 10 minute buffer of video. When you hit the horn, you only get
autopilot. We need that ram for our operational control okay
there are a lot of trade-offs they can do so like i know they're saying they'll swap the cars out
for hardware four and i think that's very fair for elon to like say but in my opinion still
from an engineering standpoint i don't think they have to do that they could choose to do that
yeah like i said i mean I went 500 miles or so
this weekend and didn't have to intervene. So even if they leave it as it is, even if it's
only using one of the trip computers, like, man, it's not like I'm ready to fall asleep in the car
yet, but I'll tell you it's tempting. I just, I just push the button and keep going. Go ahead.
I was just going to say, I think it's mathematically unlikely as we continue working through the math, I've already done the math, right?
Like if you take all the cameras that are being pulled in by FSD and you just compute
the 300 frame buffer, it's kind of obvious that the RAM is shared across chips.
Thank you, Meta.
K10, you want to step in?
What's going on?
Yeah, it's good to hear everybody.
I haven't heard everybody for a few weeks here.
Just got back from Spain yesterday, and I'm up early this morning looking for an orange juicer online.
I'm like, I want fresh orange juice all the time.
Yeah, it's interesting to hear about the hardware three to hardware four.
I know people have different drives.
I've got a hardware three vehicle.
I've got actually a few hardware three vehicles, and I don have a hardware four so i'm looking forward to that thinking of maybe getting
a hardware four soon but i'm not sure we'll have to see about that um curious if wolf ever gotten
wolf did you ever get your uh tesla in puerto rico did that ever happen
well gav is not here with us but he did not buy a tes Tesla yet that I'm aware of. He bought a Toyota.
Boo, that guy.
Boo, that guy.
I do want to know, what part of Spain were you in?
We need to hear that before we go further.
I was with my sister for a work event.
It was a quick fly-in.
We flew into Malaga, and we went to Granada and stayed there for two nights,
and then quickly over to Zivia for a night or two,
and then down to Ronda and back to Marbella in Malaga and hung out there at a resort for a little bit. But it was beautiful,
except for, you know, it did storm a little bit. I was a little bummed, wanted to sit on the beach
chairs, a little bit more sunshine, but it was still beautiful. Absolutely love the food. People
were wonderful. Fresh orange juice, absolutely great. I had to ask, when I was younger younger I spent some time in Granada
I was actually just outside of Granada for three months
and absolutely loved that part of the country
the orange trees on the side of the road
you're bringing back memories here
so sorry to derail but
continue on the Tesla talk
but I did have to ask what part of Spain you were in
yeah yeah
the orange blossoms were blooming
just to quickly quip
it was beautiful smelling everywhere because they've got those orange trees planted down in the boulevards and the plazas.
I did have a friend with me, though, that found out she's allergic to orange blossoms.
She was having anaphylactic shock.
Her throat started closing, which was wild.
But it's a bitter orange, not one that they're juicing in the squares and everywhere on the corners.
But, yeah, just with Tesla, just watching the different colors that came out. I think we had that black diamond color that came out and
then there's that deep blue that's coming out. So that's fun to watch Tesla put out more paint
colors. I think all of us want to twist on the different paint colors there. So it's exciting to
see some new choices. I'm excited for the new black for sure i saw my first new model y on the road this weekend and
then i proceeded to see like four more within the next day so they are popping up quickly in the
southern california area i haven't seen any of the new colors but i expect it won't be too long
meta did you have something you want to throw in uh none of this topic i was just gonna say on the
hardware three four front another fun thing that we have seen is green only has pointed out that v13 on the uh updates right now is looking like it's three times larger for hardware
four which kind of bodes well because we haven't seen ashok and team say they've shipped the three
three x larger model yet it would we would expect it to show up in shadow mode before it shows up
on the car combined with Chuck seeing cars
driving around I think this bodes well for maybe someday soon Omar getting a release I think Omar
just needs to tell him he's willing to drive a death trap and see what happens
are you thinking that that's a new hardware 4 version that you're talking about right now yeah
I think we'll start in hardware 4 I think going forward we will always see the largest models show up in
hardware four first yeah yeah looking forward to that man uh with my car driving as good as it is
i expect very soon that you know the hardware four cars are just going to be flawless it is something
no incentive right like harder three is driving good enough like leave it be until until harder four is absolutely crushing harder three and then distill down yeah it's it's uh like i said it's
gonna be hard to crush it 500 miles with no mistakes that's a lot and and i'm not this is
not easy driving right like i was going in and out of a lot of different tricky situations and
i'm just floored with how good hardware three is doing, especially if you go back
only like six months, there were still a lot of problems. You know, it was getting good at that
point, but there were still like issues getting on and off of freeways and, uh, you know, coming up
the stop signs and, and making right turns and, you know, all sorts of different, you know, small
things that were happening. And I, like I can't, I said, I can't think of anything
anymore. It's, it's really amazing. Ryan, what do you got going on today?
Hey, Benny. Um, thanks for, thanks for having me on. Um, so I was thinking about a road trip that
my mom and I did about two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, from Southern California up to Edmonton, Canada, which I was trying to see on a map about how long that is.
If you were to go horizontally in the United States, I think it's approximately from Southern California to Louisiana.
Southern California to Louisiana. So it's a pretty far drive. Um, and one of the things that came out
So it's a pretty far drive.
of that road trip was, I mean, there were some great memories, but then also my mom felt so
comfortable riding in the Tesla and also driving half of the time, uh, where, or I say, I guess I
say driving, but really it's the car was onsd and it convinced her that the full self-driving
was good enough for her next car to be a tesla like she was already kind of on the fence like
she was thinking about getting one um especially because i had been pushing for it so much and i
had been telling her that it's the safest vehicle on the road
and anyway she she she knew that i was a big fan uh but after having that first-hand experience
this was a year and a half ago um she felt like it was necessary that her her next car be a Tesla. So, uh, she, it hasn't been time to get the next car yet, but, uh, it
definitely will be, you know, the next car will be. And I think, I think it's telling that if
somebody goes on a road trip, then for them to be convinced, I think that's, you know, that's huge
for, it's huge for the brand. It's, it's, it's huge for the technology, and as more and more people have that first-hand experience where they're sitting in the vehicle and they're getting used to where the software might go wrong, and then see that go away after some software updates,
the tech is going to sell itself.
And I think as the Robotaxi and other self-driving services come online,
people are going to have more recognition that this technology is going to be everywhere. It's not like it's not like it's going to be this
oddball thing to be jumping in these self-driving vehicles. I also kind of have this experience
living here in Scottsdale, Arizona, like the greater Phoenix area in Scottsdale and Chandler,
Gilbert, all of these cities have access to these Waymos and we've had them for a
little while and now locals are not doing double takes whenever they see nobody in in the driver's
seat in these Waymos obviously there are some tourists that come into town and they see that this is
remarkable and they'll whip out their phone and take a video, but the locals are totally
accustomed to it. So I think as Tesla starts to roll out their robo-taxi or their self-driving
vehicle that's dedicated to being self-driving.
People are going to take a little bit of time to get used to it.
They'll be whipping out their phones and taking videos.
And then maybe a year or two later,
it's going to become normalized.
And gosh, when I took my first Waymo drive,
I thought, okay, this could be good.
I've heard good things.
And it just felt so comfortable.
And afterwards, I was thinking, yeah, this is for sure going to be the future. Like we're in 2025.
Like we're in 2025, how is this not, how, how is not every car this way?
How is this not, how is not every car this way?
And obviously in my, in my model Y, I feel very comfortable, but it's, it's a different
experience to be riding in the back of a vehicle, like a, like a Waymo today and nobody in the
driver's seat and you know that you have to just let it do its thing um it's a different feeling
driver's seat.
And you know that you have to just let it do its thing.
than being in the driver's seat of a tesla and and letting it do it letting it do its thing so
i'm looking forward to tesla rolling out the robotaxi i i think it's it's fun and um important
that people get their firsthand experience riding in the vehicle with FSD.
The more road trips that we can have people do, the more firsthand experience people can have.
And it's just big for Tesla and the technology.
So I'm excited to continue being an investor despite, you know, weather through these ups and downs.
And I'll let somebody else take the floor thanks guys
dude those birds are amazing where the heck are you hanging out i'm like sitting over here feeling
a sense of peace in you know at my i thought it was one of those i thought it was one of those
youtube tv like enjoy the zen while we you know while we return to programming. That was beautiful.
Oh, man.
I didn't realize the birds were so loud.
I have my earbuds in.
It has me excited for Earth Day.
I'm in Arizona.
I'm just near my apartment complex.
I love Arizona.
Right now, the weather's great.
Summer is pretty brutal,
but I'm happy that there's some nice background noise.
Well, it's certainly beautiful.
Omar, we haven't heard from you yet on this space.
We'd love to get your thoughts
of what's going on in Tesla world.
Have you trolled anyone lately? I always enjoy those posts,
but on the serious note, what are you seeing out there?
We did get the delivery numbers recently.
We've seen a lot of comments from Elon. What's on your mind today?
Well, honestly, it's been a fucking crazy week.
And I can't believe that with everything that's going on,
we're having a 20
minute hardware three versus hardware four discussion. Nobody gives a shit about this
anymore. Okay. So, you know, AI four, I think, um, it's just doing every drive perfectly for me.
It's fucking insane. And of course they're about to launch the unsupervised service in June. But I mean, you know, so you've got the trade war, which is just kind of crazy.
Elon has kind of come out and, you know, made some comments that he thinks some of this is, you know, Tesla's the most American made car.
American made car. They have the highest American made parts content. Every car sold in the U.S.
They have the highest American made parts content.
is made in the U.S., is assembled in the U.S. So you think, you know, they're actually doing
pretty well comparatively, but even for them, they're still going to get hit by this.
You would think, you know, companies like that should do very well, but it's an evolving situation.
I think markets are coming to the realization that we don't know what the end situation is here.
They may be negotiating. They may end up sort of making trade deals that lower the barrier significantly. So, you know, I think it's
kind of a wait and see thing. As it stands, yes, these could be, you know, devastating for the
auto industry, legacy auto in particular. But it does seem like one of those things where,
you know, that old meme about the guys passing the ball and there's a gorilla walking through and nobody sees it.
That gorilla is the scaling up of unsupervised FSD, the launch of the rideshare service in June.
And I think that's really the high order bit here.
The tariff situation, I think, will resolve itself one way or another.
It's unpredictable.
It's crazy.
You know, you've seen the markets jumping up and down, um, unpredictably, but I think
it'll resolve itself one way or another.
Um, it's good to see that Elon is using his influence in the administration to kind of highlight some of the dangers to American manufacturers.
We also got Tesla's delivery numbers.
And in two weeks, we're going to get the earnings call and a company update.
So I'm thinking that this company update, it's a little bit different language from their typical earnings call.
I'm thinking they're finally going to show us what these new, more affordable vehicles are that are supposed to start production in the first half of the year.
So that's going to be very exciting.
Probably get some more commentary on the RoboTaxi release.
We've had production and delivery numbers that were pretty low. I think you've
seen a lot of the narrative after those numbers suggest that people not liking Elon or political
factors led to lower deliveries. But if you dig in a little bit, I think you actually see that production was down 97,000 units from the fourth
quarter. So there was a big hit related to the introduction of the new Model Y in four factories
at the same time. But now that this is ramped up, it's going to lead to, I think, higher delivery
volumes at higher prices.
And I think what you're going to see in the second quarter is well over 400,000 deliveries.
So there will be a big bounce from the first quarter. And I think people will see that demand is really not as much of a consideration as they expected.
They're now starting to do non-launch series Model Y.
They're ramping up. They're going to introduce the rear wheel drive, the performance.
They're introducing new, more affordable models. All of this should be, I think, driving
deliveries to record volumes as we go through the year. So that's pretty exciting to see.
as we go through the year. So that's pretty exciting to see. But yeah, I think the high
order bit is really AI and automation. As Ryan said, I mean, self-driving cars are getting pretty
normal now. If you live in a city where they're available, you don't really bat an eye seeing
them. It's just normal to see a car driving around without a driver now.
But there's a huge amount of cars that are still being driven manually. So we now have one of the biggest economic tasks ahead of us, which is essentially just replacing
all of the manually driven cars with self-driving cars.
And Tesla is going to be the company to do that.
When they launch their driverless service in June, it'll be the first time that you
have a pure vision driverless service.
And this will allow autonomy to scale much faster because they're capable of making millions
of cars a year that have this
technology built in, whereas others have to manufacture the car and remanufacture it.
So I think it's easy to get distracted by everything that's going on, all the chaos in
the markets, and few people are paying attention to the dancing gorilla walking
through the room, which is Tesla FSD. And I completely agree with Ryan and everyone else's
stories who's been talking about road trips. I had to go to my cousin's wedding, which is,
you know, just an hour away, but an hour away through a big traffic jam in LA. And man, it's just so nice
to get in the car, push a button, and it just handles it all for you. And it takes you there
and just parks and you get out of the car. You can't really explain it. But you know,
once you get used to it, you just can't live without it. And I think the whole world is just going to
start viewing this technology as something that's as essential as a smartphone for getting around.
Yeah. And, you know, they introduced a new paint color that's probably lower on the news. They
introduced Diamond Black. But yeah, I'm really excited for the company
update in two weeks. I think it's going to be big. I think it's going to catch people by surprise.
And I think a lot of the, I mean, this is just a huge, huge year for Tesla. This,
I think, is probably the biggest year in Tesla's history. You wouldn't know it from reading the news,
but a lot of technologies that they've been working for years and years on
are coming to fruition in 2025.
I mean, we've heard for years about the 4680 cell,
Tesla's in-house battery cell.
Tesla now believes it's the lowest cost cell in the world.
Possibly, you know, when you include the tax credit, I don't know.
But not only that, but they have their dry electrode coating process
really ironed out so they can do it at volume.
This is something they first started talking about five years ago.
Now it's actually being produced in volume and scaling up.
With FSD, it's now doing almost every drive flawlessly on AI4.
They're going to launch the unsupervised service, the driverless ride share service in Austin in June.
That, you know, they've been dreaming of launching for...
...since they started FSD beta in 2020.
So this is really a year where a lot of things come together.
We're also going to see the start of production of their next-gen platform,
which the CyberCab will be built on,
and some elements of that coming to the more affordable vehicles.
So, yeah, despite the chaos,
I think this is going to be a really pivotal year for Tesla
and possibly the most important year in the company's history.
Omar, you said you thought that the company update would surprise people.
Do you expect them to do product updates
or why do you expect people to get surprised?
Yeah, so
yeah, so, you know, they have been saying for the last few
quarters on their earnings deck that we're going to start production of some
new, more affordable models in the first half of 2025.
Well, here we are. It's April 2025. The first half is going to be
over in a couple months. So some new vehicles are about to start production. And there's been some
debate about, is this an entirely new model? Is it sort of a variant of the Model Y? But in any case,
we're going to have a new, most affordable Tesla.
And the last time Tesla's introduced a new product that brought their entry price down was 2017, eight years ago.
So this is kind of the next step after the Model 3.
And not only, I think, will it be huge in China,
where they want a smaller vehicle,
huge in Europe, where they want a smaller vehicle, huge in Europe, where they want a smaller vehicle,
huge in the US, where affordability
is a huge concern in new vehicles.
But I think it's going to open up new markets,
markets like Mexico, South America, India, where the cars
were just too expensive before.
So if you've been listening to what they've been saying
about this next-gen vehicle platform, where they're really making the vehicle cheaper, not by cheapening it
or cutting out features, but by actually redesigning the production process to be cheaper,
redesigning some of the parts to be cheaper. You know, the new motors don't use any rare earth metals um they're moving to 48 volt
all of that i think is something they've been working on for years now they've been insanely
secretive about it to prevent osborne-ing uh but two weeks from today we're gonna find out what it is.
It definitely will be interesting to see what comes out.
I mean, the last earnings call, we saw a very chipper Elon, and then obviously you've gone through a lot since then.
I wonder how much, Omar, do you think he addresses the rest of the stuff that's going on
in the political landscape of things and all the news back and forth about, well, he's leaving
Doge, he's not leaving Doge. Where do you think we sit with that right now?
Well, I mean, I think he's only got a certain amount of time as a special government employee,
about 130 days. So around May or June, I think his focus is going to be more on his businesses,
but he's going to remain a senior advisor to the president. I think his advice is really
appreciated by the team there. And, you know, frankly, I think they could need it,
by the team there. And, you know, frankly, I think they could need it. But this was never
supposed to be a permanent thing. I think the work of Doge will go on. There's a lot of people
working there besides Elon, or looking through things, they have Doge representatives in every
government department. So that work is going to go on. But, you know, given all the craziness happening at Tesla, the attacks, production and delivery numbers we saw in Q1, I think it's going to be great to have Elon's focus on this pivotal moment for the company, launching the rideshare service, launching these new vehicles. And I think people are going to be surprised by Tesla's growth this
year, provided that tariffs and trade negotiations don't create an unfavorable environment for
automotive sales growth. What do you think the RoboTaxi unveil in Austin is going to look like?
You think they're going to have
a ton of cars, a few cars?
Is it going to be an event, or are they going to
open it up for the rest of the month? Do you have any speculation
in terms of what that's going to look like?
Yeah, I have no idea,
but I imagine they would
just launch an update to the Tesla app,
and if you're in Austin, you can
just use it like Uber
and call a driverless car starting this summer.
It will definitely be interesting to see.
We did just have some news come out.
The White House press secretary said that 104% additional tariffs went into effect at noon Eastern because China had not removed its retaliation.
So you're seeing the market pull back.
You're seeing a lot of names with China exposure pull back right now.
Pretty much everything.
So it's hot off the wire.
Tesla just went red on the day slightly reacting to this news.
But I did want to call that out for everyone.
We knew it was a possibility, right? And the saga continues on the tariff side of things.
Penny, have you been keeping track of the tariffs and this whole
mess that's going on? Or are you just kind of more staying in your lane?
Well, you know, my lane is wherever my attention gets drawn and fickle that way. And
whatever I think is important, I pay attention to. I'm watching the tariffs to some extent,
not necessarily the way that they affect the market because I'm not selling and, you know,
I don't really care about the prices today. I'm much more of a long-term investor and I consider myself
more of an owner than a trader, right? But I do care a lot about how they affect the long-term
of America and the long-term of building products in the United States. There's a lot of, I would
say, friction to doing that. Our employees cost a lot more,
but we're also sort of edging into the age of automation.
You know, we had the industrial revolution some time ago,
been working on, you know,
building out robot manufacturing for decades at this point,
but we're now at a point where I think like
we're reaching near full automation
for a lot of these companies.
So many different things are gonna be able
to go end-to-end robots.
And hopefully that makes it easier
for us to manufacture in the United States.
For national security reasons,
I think it's really important
that we do things like manufacture drones,
critical components for those drones,
like batteries and chips,
even propellers, whatever.
Even little things like screws
that we don't manufacture in
the United States. And if it ever came down to a national security situation where we needed to
manufacture tons of something to do war, you know, getting cut off the supply lines for things like
screws that are made, you know, almost exclusively in China would be very, very bad. So I think that what we're seeing
right now is, you know, the United States standing up for itself in the sense that we've been a bit
picked on in trade negotiations, you know, like we are the rich uncle that everyone asks for money.
And, you know, we've sort of always felt like, okay, well, we can afford it, so we'll do it.
And now we're realizing that like, we're digging ourselves deeper and deeper in a hole. Maybe some people have always known that,
but the general public is starting to open their eyes to it. And I'm just glad that we're doing
something about it. So personally, all of this bleeding is somewhat like ripping off the Band-Aid
in my point of view. I don want uh the tariffs to be the end
answer i do want to manufacture in the united states but i know that there are a lot of benefits
of free trade what i don't want is the united states to get walked all over and i feel like we
finally have a negotiator in the white house obviously things can go uh bad or good when
you're playing high stakes poker and that's exactly exactly what this is. I mean, we are in a literal trade war with China right now. And they said they're going to fight to the
end and they're not going to back down. So, you know, I think I'm not an expert in economics.
I'm not an expert in China. I've heard some things that, you know, their economy is weaker
than ours. And if we push it long enough and hard enough that they will probably cave or collapse before we do. But that means a lot of pain for both parties. So I'm hopeful
that at some point soon, both parties realize that it's in all of our best interests to figure
out a mutually beneficial trade agreement. I mean, ultimately, when both parties benefit,
that's what makes the world go
round. That's what raises quality of life for everyone. And in balance trade just breeds
resentment. So that's been slowly brewing over time. And as we dig ourselves deeper and deeper
in debt and our kids, the next generation have to pay for things, mistakes that they had nothing to do with. I think that bitterness
would only increase. So I'm glad to be facing it now. It is, I mean, it's ultra painful. It's not
fun at all. And especially if you're near retirement, I can imagine folks that only
have a year or so left to work, or maybe they just recently retired and they're watching
their portfolios crash. I definitely have sympathy for them.
It's not fun, and I hope it ends soon.
Meta, did you want to jump in?
Yeah, I just want to say I respectfully disagree.
I think Elon, Kimball, Rand Paul all came out today talking about basically how Peter Navarro is wrong on this policy.
Trade is a two-sided deal every single time.
In an economy where you only have one good, say it's guns, that every country is exporting,
you want to be a net importer, not exporter.
It's not obviously clear that exports are good and imports are bad.
If you have a full economy, you have full employment, everybody's happy.
Having more goods come into the country is a good thing. And the thing about American debt,
unlike every other country, is it's held by foreigners more than any other country has
foreigners holding their debt. So I think, unfortunately, on this one, it may be a mistake,
but it is good to see this this administration has shown the ability
to change its mind when presented facts and there are people within the administration and leadership
that are starting to speak out against it so betta don't you think there's something you go ahead go
ahead yeah so you know when you see these kinds of moves, like, okay, we're going to slap a tariff on China.
And China goes, well, we're going to slap a tariff on you.
And Trump goes, oh, yeah, well, we're going to slap an even bigger tariff on you.
There's a lot of panic in the markets.
But the question is really, what is the endgame?
What is the long-term situation?
Do tariffs just go infinitely higher?
Or do they negotiate some type of trade deal?
And I think the latter is far more likely.
There are forces that are going to lead them to make a decision that doesn't devastate their constituents. Ultimately,
they do have to get elected. They can even be impeached. They have midterm elections.
These things are all sort of constraints on what they can do. I think that the long run situation is going to be something that is,
you know, tenable for American businesses. And if you just sort of put a tariff on everything,
you can say, okay, well, this is going to be great for our manufacturers. But
if our manufacturers all see their supply costs go up and prices go up, and then their goods become
more expensive relative to foreign
competition, then it could actually be bad for American manufacturers. So I think the really
key thing you hear is, you know, people are going to say a lot of things. They're going to announce
a lot of riffs. What is the end goal after all of this? And we don't really know. We don't really
know where this all
ends up and that's why sort of the market is panicking there's some good situations there's
some bad situations but i have faith especially hearing elon you know sort of chime in on this
more vocally and um seeing how these negotiations are evolving,
that I don't think we're going to end up with a situation that has long-term prohibitively high trade barriers.
It's getting crazy out there.
By the way, thank you, Penny,
for trying to help the beginning of that space.
I don't know why.
I opened it and it rugged immediately.
Shout out to Ryan for hopping behind the Wolf account and opening it up.
I think it's because I put Elon fighting with the White House in the title and Elon just
was like, shut that down.
And they just rugged me immediately.
And so then it was gone.
But yeah, it's crazy freaking times out here all over the goddamn place.
Tesla still holding on for dear life to green here today.
We were up freaking 7% earlier today, back up to 250.
So yeah, I think it's really interesting.
I think Omar outlined this tariff war and trade war really well as well.
And so there's just a ton of uncertainty at the moment.
And it's funny how it feeds into Tesla.
Obviously, Tesla makes all their cars in the United States.
So you think, hey, maybe don't drop 11% this week.
This is potentially bullish for you. But obviously, there's hey, maybe don't drop 11% this week. This is
potentially bullish for you. But obviously, there's a whole lot of other complications
that come into it. And then Elon taking it out on the timeline. Can we get that one pinned,
Omar? I'm surprised that we don't have the comment earlier. There we go. Let's pin this
one up about Peter. Put that up in the top. I thought that one was quite interesting as well.
So yeah, I think it's, I can imagine we have a lot of people in the audience that are just super curious as to
everything that's happening with Tesla right now, how this is going to affect it, what's happening
with Elon. For those, by the way, that haven't watched it yet, I believe our latest episode of
the Gigacast went up and we discussed pretty extensively Doge and Elon's role, kind of
tuning down with the government and what that's going to allow
for and open up to.
And that's coming pretty quick.
So I would recommend listening to that as well, because I think it had a lot of good
information that we covered inside there.
But yeah, I just got that comment from Elon pinned up top today.
I thought that was pretty hilarious.
So yeah, really interesting stuff.
But great thoughts here from the whole panel.
Always bringing insights from the Tesla side.
If you're not following everyone that's up here yet and you are a Tesla fan, you're really
missing out.
I mean, this is the panel to hit.
Amazing co-hosts every single week with Penny and Omar.
Great speakers across the board with Landon and Ryan, K10, Meta.
We have so many others that come into these.
I see Ani here, TechAU.
It's just a great crew.
So yeah, super excited.
We'll roll for another 10 or so on this, but I'm here.
I mean, this is, by the way, funny enough, I was talking about it last year.
I mean, we're down right around that 40, 43%.
That was a low last year, was down 43% before we resurged.
Maybe in the long term, you look back and you go, damn, could have bought Tesla at 230,
240.
What could have been?
And so we'll see where it continues to go.
Obviously, I think the deliveries, you know,
could have come in differently than people thought.
They could have come in a little bit higher,
but maybe that was the bottom for deliveries
and we just see a surge back.
So I think it's really interesting thoughts.
Ryan, I'll turn it back over to you,
but just wanted to pop in there with a few items.
Sorry, I know there's two Ryans on stage.
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think Musk is, you know, an independent thinker.
He's not somebody who's just going to sort of go along with whatever, even if it hurts his
businesses. I think he's a reasonable person at the table. And honestly, if you're a Democrat,
you should be excited about Musk's involvement in the Trump administration
just to have somebody, you know, that competent there. I mean, I think his criticism of Peter
Retardo is he says, look, you've never run a real manufacturer. And if you want to pick a trade
policy that's great for US manufacturers, well, I think you're ignoring some of the realities of
what we have to do dealing with these tariffs. So I'm hopeful that he can be a, you know,
a calming voice in the room. I think he's great strategically. He's great at negotiations.
You know, there's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of dust. It's hard to know where the dust settles.
But compared to sort of the panic you saw over the weekend,
and the panic when the pre-market opened,
oh my god, it's going to be Black Monday.
And, you know, what actually happens,
sometimes people's emotions do sort of get the best of them.
And it's hard to see it when people are just slapping bigger
and bigger tariffs on each other every hour. But I think when the dust settles, it'll be okay.
And it won't be sort of an economic Armageddon, as some have predicted.
I think it's very likely that the China-Us tariff uh negotiation stays difficult but as we've seen
i think with canada mexico and all other trading partners around the world hopefully even europe
things might get better sooner and i think that's probably the best outcome here that we can hope
for there are other popular voices like even mr beast is coming out and pointing out that
due to these tariffs,
it's actually more profitable for them now to manufacture the chocolates outside of the United States than inside the United States because they only have to pay the tariffs once as opposed to
all their goods. So it's just like the irony of not doing the math properly, not talking to
business owners, not understanding how economics work and that goods don't come
off a tree fully made. There are many, many parts to a thing. And Elon posted Richard Feynman
a few days ago with no context. And I think it's really telling when Elon starts dropping those
little hints, he's dropping those for a reason. You can be a detective and kind of understand
where he's coming from. But now he's being very very very clear about his position he's definitely clear uh
you know about the tariffs but at the same time he's reposting things about how if you don't
manufacture drones domestically that you're a vassal state so i think that he has a nuanced
opinion here in terms of we do need to bring some
manufacturing of important things to the United States, but maybe tariffs isn't the right way to
do it. I completely agree with that. I'm just happy that we're at the table talking about these
things. I think that's really important. Yeah. I think that the strong opinion generally is
don't outsource your defense and your survival needs. Those are the two things you don't have. I mean, I think everyone
agrees that we want strong US manufacturers. We want certain things to be manufactured here.
But if you have an unpredictable regulatory environment, hey, where should I set up my new
factory? Hey, how about the place where they just, you know, keep announcing crazy tariffs every day?
Yeah, that'd be a great place to invest billions in a new factory.
So, you know, I think the goal is actually the same between Musk and Trump.
But, you know, how you sort of affect that, that's where a little bit of the disagreement is.
And, you know, I think it's just kind of untenable to have tariffs that high on China for that long.
I have to think, you know, I have to assume, hopefully, that they're announcing a tariff that's so crazy you can't ignore it, that they have to come to the negotiation table with urgency. And that long term, you know, maybe the tariff rate
won't be completely back to where it was, but I think it'll be at a much more manageable level
with likely, you know, trade concessions from partners to enable better access for American
exporters.
orders.
Ani, I saw you joined us up here on stage.
I would love to get any Tesla thoughts on your mind into the mix here.
Thanks for joining.
Hey, no problem.
Oh my God, I've been here the whole time.
I thought, I think my space glitched out.
Oh, have you?
I showed you as a listener the last like little bit.
I was like, well, maybe she'll come up and talk to us today.
Wow, that's crazy.
No, I've been really enjoying watching Tesla stocks.
I've been an investor for a very, very long time and accumulate anytime there's a dip.
And I've been slowly accumulating a lot more recently, especially with the news and everything going on.
But yeah, I'm super excited to see what Tesla is going to be
doing. All the models look amazing. I'm actually getting super, I'm actually getting ready to
hopefully get a Model X very soon. Let's see. Let's see what happens. I'm going to try, but
definitely want to own a Tesla one day. It's my dream car. And right now I'm just having fun
watching the markets, well, the stocks.
Absolutely.
Landon, go ahead.
As we finish off the Tesla space, I just like to also unabashedly break my own arm, patting us Tesla investors on
our own backs.
Because if you look at this tariff situation, it's almost like it's so frightening and scary
to the world that we forget that Tesla has seen this coming.
seen this coming. They've planned for this. Even with a hostile former administration,
They've planned for this.
it's almost like Tesla actually listened to the homework assignment, built manufacturing
facilities in the United States, paid American workers to build supercharger cabinets, solar
panels, and electric vehicles, along with almost all of the components that
goes into those vehicles.
And we had the opportunity to expand into what seemed like a very tempting, cheap environment.
Hey, let's build a gigafactory in Mexico.
Let's buy this land.
Let's negotiate some things.
Oh, wait a minute.
We don't have to actually go through with that because there might
be some trade headwinds going. I mean, I think Tesla has done a phenomenal job getting us as
investors to where we are now. Looking at the day-to-day stock price is not the answer to
whether Tesla has planned appropriately for this climate. The other thing that I'd like to remind us is that about three
years ago, Elon predicted this almost exact path. He said the next three years are going to be a
time for Tesla to be in between major product ramps, and we will be building and preparing
for our future during that time frame. So it's painful to come on to a Tesla show week in and week out and
say, oh, we're barely above this or we're somewhere above that, when the news internally shows us
that their planning is coming to fruition. And as we see the new lower cost vehicles from Tesla,
we see maybe an additional vehicle we haven't heard about yet. We see plans for the RoboTaxi and the RoboVan
22-passenger people mover. This is the time. You've waded through the pain. Get in now. It's almost
too late, and here we go. Really well put there, y'all. We're right at the top of the hour. We are
going to rotate into
another chat here i wanted to give another just big thank you to everyone that's been on i love
the passion and i think that it's important for the community to have places like this where they
can hear from different folks and get a variety of thoughts in a single place so big thank you again
shout out to omar and penny um i do shows with both of them by the way the giga cast that omar's
on tech and tea with penny we'll be recording those tomorrow and Thursday.
So those will be fun.
Make sure that you're tuning in and watching.
And a big thank you as well to Kristen and Ani, Metaphor, Ryan, Landon, as always, for being on these spaces.
Big fans of all of y'all.
Appreciate all of you.
And looking forward to more great conversations.
With that being said, going to roll us into this next chat.
We've got Brandon up here. I believe that Drew and a couple of others may be joining up with us to roll us into this next chat we've got Brandon up here I believe that
Drew and a couple of others may be joining up with us as we get into this it's a very important
conversation right now really around I think the concept of hacking scamming some of these pieces
I've had a lot of people close to me that unfortunately this has happened to and so
we're going to share some insights and knowledge here for this next hour just on how to one you
know prevent some of this,
and then two, you know, how to take precautionary measures to make sure that you are protected in these areas.
I've seen people lose, you know, a quarter million dollars overnight in some cases,
and I think that it's really important to just be aware of how to protect yourself here.
So, Brandon, can you hear us on stage?
Yeah, I can hear you great. Thanks for having me again.
Yeah, pleasure to have you on.
Excited.
I think that, you know, these spaces just make sense.
They're one of your one of the easiest products, I think, in the crypto world for people to
understand, because there's a lot of obviously crossover comparisons and just really does
make a lot of sense as to what you're doing.
I know Oscar is requesting up as well here and Zet's coming in and a few others.
Ryan, if you want to or Emp, if you want to drop me co-host, that would be great as well. And then we can in and a few others um ryan if you want to or emp if you
want to drop me co-host that would be great as well and then we can i can help get some people
up here but brandon if you want to kick us off with just like a quick introduction of yourself
that'd be great yeah so brandon one of the co-founders of fairside what we do is wall
theft coverage for self-custody assets. So think phishing, social engineering, malware,
all the things that threaten people in a self-custody position today.
That's what we cover.
We do it on all EVMs.
Well, I should say the mass majority of viable EVM chains,
Solana, Bitcoin.
Product is relatively simple.
Users sign up directly through our DApp, and they choose the cover amount that they want, pay the premium, which is relatively low.
Just to give you an example, to cover $10,000 of assets would roughly cost you 50 cents a day.
And you're covered for all sorts of events that affect users today. So not only is it across these EVM chains, so like I said, we cover all these EVM chains,
but you get to choose up to 10 total wallets that you want covered under a single membership.
So if you choose $10,000 of coverage and you choose 10 different wallets to roll up underneath your membership,
all 10 of those wallets would be covered for $10,000.
And it's more of an aggregate. It's not individually $10,000.
So if you had a loss to one of them
and you used your entire limit,
then those other ones would be out of coverage,
but you could always buy another membership at that point.
And you can choose coverage higher than $10,000,
just an example.
Yeah, that's perfect.
I mean, you kind of hit it right off the bat
with what people are able to do here.
And I would love to take them through
a little bit of the process of understanding
we can post a couple of items from Fairside to the top of the space
so that people can truly understand exactly just some of the pieces
and how easy and straightforward this is to do.
But I do see that we also got Oscar up on stage.
Oscar, do you want to give a quick intro for yourself too?
If you're able to hear me, I know he said he was having some troubles.
There you go.
Can you hear me? Yeah yeah we got you now yeah yeah so yeah um my name is asgar i'm part of the djn's i'm sorry the veriside team um i used to be a co-founder of djn's nft analytics platform
and then recently as we kind of uh pivoted away from that and gave it away to Rug Radio. I was kind of looking for some teams to
join that I felt like had a high ROI in this space. And after, it took a while, after four
or five months of talking with Fairside, I eventually started to join them because I was
very hesitant on a lot of their products because I was understanding like in order to have coverage
in the crypto space, you have to have every moving piece
be working function on so um i love the team i love the product i've been talking with them four
to five months before i even ended up joining with the team and i'm happy to be here so i can
help explain and answer any questions about uh parasite perfect appreciate that thank you so
much for being up here as well and i do see that we got the main account up here, too. So that's great. We can launch into things. So first off, I'll just flip it back over to Brandon, just to kick into it here. Can you just explain a little bit about how this insurance system works? And, you know, at what point in time people are purchasing insurance? And then, you know, if something was to happen, how they would claim just kind of the process.
And then, you know, if something was to happen, how they would claim just kind of the process.
Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, you can come directly to the depth.
You know, we're direct to consumer.
We do have some other avenues in which you can sign up for coverage.
Like one is directly through revoke.cash.
If you are a revoke user or even if you're not, you can still go to revoke.
Great security tool.
And you can sign up directly through Revoke under the coverage tab. So that's one way in which you get covered. But ultimately, it's very easy. So we offer blanket coverage. So we're not looking at
specific assets that you have, we're covering a total amount of your assets. And so if you have NFTs or RWAs or coins or tokens that you hold in
and out of positions, that amount that you chose initially is still covered regardless of the asset
as long as it has a tradable value. So we've established that you can get coverage for a
certain amount. You just take the coverage amount. And then if you're phished or if you have like a
social engineering event or malware, you go through a claims process, which is an investigation.
So this is one of those products that does take a little bit more, I would say, hands on type of adjustment.
Because if you're covering something like a smart contract failure, smart contract failure is relatively easy to determine that there's no fraud in the system.
And that's because in the smart contract failure that happens to a particular protocol,
a large number of unrelated people are affected by the same event.
But phishing could just be you, right?
And so if it's just you, at that point, you have to make a claim in the system.
So you come into the claims portal, you make a claim, you go through an investigation process.
But the first point, we're permissionless all the way to the point you make a claim. And so when it comes time
to make a claim, you do have to KYC so that we can determine that this person is a known entity
to us so that we can reduce the amount of fraud. Then we go through the investigation, determine
what happened, and at that point, determine that your type of loss fits the type of losses that we intended to cover.
And then there's a payout that occurs.
So very, very quick actual process just mostly determines the speed in which we can pay claims is determined by how quickly the individual who suffered a loss goes through that process, gathers any information we're requesting, goes to the KYC.
But then at that point, it's very quick and easy. We can settle a claim in days where this
traditionally would take a month or longer just to get to the investigation side, settle out the
claim, but understand what happened. We're very efficient at doing this. And we've done some
claims, retroactive claim campaigns, where we pay individuals for losses that they've had prior to Fairside's coverage being live so that we can look back kind of like a pre-soft launch
where we just like we wanted to pay out claims and determine that that process was worked
trustworthy and then we could also glean information from claimants in the past and in order for
us to smooth out that process and make it cleaner, faster. And we've successfully done that.
So it's been a couple of great campaigns that we've had and some users have
gotten some, some money back for claims that, that they experienced,
or, you know,
loss events that they experienced prior to us actually going live,
which was really great learning for us too,
just to really streamline that process.
Beautiful. I appreciate you outlining that. I think it'd be helpful to talk to the numbers right now. Like how many people
are actually getting scammed? How many people actually would need insurance? Just some of
these different pieces and statistics. Well, you know, Scam Sniffer has like that data available
and we actually represent some of it on our on our site just initially.
Like we update it every once in a while. But, you know, just if you go back into like August and June of 24, which is what we're representing right now,
there was 47,000 victims of crime and $128 million in losses.
So it is not a small problem. This problem actually affects more people than any other type of loss in crypto, which is why we felt it to be the most valuable place to start. We look at this line of coverage as sort of like an essential line of coverage. We think of Web3 wallets as essential. You should have a Web3 wallet. You should have good security hygiene on that wallet. And security hygiene is amazing. And there's great tools like
CareBuris and Revoke.cash and WalletGuard and others. But the reality is those are preventative,
but they're not preemptive. You have to take a preemptive approach to the fact that this could
happen to you because those tools, as good as they are, they're still not a zero chance of a loss.
And so there's ways in which you can protect yourself,
but this is sort of that safety net that users can rely on,
that in the event of a phishing attack,
you think you're going to some free mint
and you get phished and your wallet's drained.
Think of it as wallet drainers, right?
Anything that's a wallet drainer for the most part
is one of the things that we're covering.
And so this type of coverage has not been offered in the space before and is vitally
important to move the space forward and to honestly onboard a bunch of users from Web
2 into Web 3.
And these users are very risk adverse if you're not here already.
And they need to have some sort of safety net to feel comfortable.
And insurance products are kind of that financial
primer of all industry. Without them, there's not been a single industry that has stood the
test of time. So I think this is something that has not been offered. So it's not something that
people are used to yet, but having it available. But we expect that this to be integrated like we
did with Revoke. We expect this to be integrated like we did with Revoke.
We expect this to be integrated into your favorite wallets. Think of it more like a travel insurance
experience. You know, you sign up for a flight. Do you want insurance? Yes. It costs you, you know,
40 bucks or whatever it is, and you buy it. That's kind of the thing that we want to replicate
because our whole process is to make this thing as simple and as easy as possible for anyone to get this kind of coverage without any excuses.
And so if the process is cumbersome and clunky, you know, that can prohibit people from doing that.
We've taken a different approach and said, well, Web2 does a great job with onboarding users and Web3 does a great job with transparency and efficiencies and things like that.
Let's marry these two concepts together.
And so we've made it so that the signup process
can happen to get coverage for your wallets
in under 30 seconds.
That's a huge improvement on many things
that we've seen in Web3.
But if we can emulate that process directly
into wallets as well,
to where you see all of your assets,
you see swap and all these, you know, send,
and you see all these buttons,
and then you see a coverage tab where you just click on that.
And it's like, do you want to cover this wallet?
You're like, yes.
Then you have the option to add nine more wallets to it.
So I think that that kind of integration,
that kind of streamlined process inside the wallets
and inside of other favorite projects that you,
that you, you know, tend to use
or that a lot of people are using
really goes a long way to introducing this type of coverage to the masses.
Just to quickly add, going back to the stats here,
building on what Brandon said, there was about 500 million in losses in 2024
across 332,000 unique walled addresses. So, you know, it's funny because
in this space and just like in life, people don't really care about things until they directly
affect themselves. But 322,000 people were drained last year for a total of half a billion dollars.
So I think this is one of those things that,
you know, people need a safety net in this space
for even if they're using preventative tools.
And although you wouldn't think that many people
are getting drained because they're using things
like ledgers or, you know, they're trying to pay attention
to what transactions they're signing,
there's a lot of people that are.
So if you guys wanna go check out more stats on this,
go check out Scams and they do a really good job of aggregating all this data.
And it's really interesting to read these reports because I don't think people realize just how much money is being stolen in this space as of now.
Yeah, and a lot of those people, Drew, thanks for bringing that up.
A lot of those people that are getting scanned believe themselves to be security-minded.
And you see high-profile names on X talking about the events that happened to them.
This is just what the first step that we can take in, obviously, protecting the community, is to get the word out and let people know that this kind of coverage exists.
people know that this kind of coverage exists because people there is always a threat that
exists even to the best of us that are as security minded as possible so yeah for sure like i've it's
it's very naive the stance that even people who've been in trends this industry for a long time take
like remember listening to the fomo hour of when um uh basement ron got his uh his um um
basement Ron got his unicorn fart dust drained from.
And the only advice they had for him was to use a ledger.
When I know specific guys within that crew have been drained themselves.
And not only did they not mention, you know, transaction simulation software,
like you already touched on, like CareBris or what MetaMask, you know,
acquired and is integrated into their own wallet right now,
which is WalletGuard or, you know, Blowfish.
But they also didn't mention anything like, you know, the coverage that we provide.
So it's just funny to me, like the lack of like, I don't even know, it's not awareness
because people know, like they know about our service and they know about these forms
of software that are so, you know, like valuable to prevent these losses but they're still not necessarily willing to talk about it because
i just think they think that they're not going to get trained themselves but you know they have and
they will again if unless you're like you know really using all these different things you're
not going to have a backstop so yeah well drew tbh i felt like i was i still am kind of that person when i first heard about you
guys i was like this is a fantastic product and i was like this is great but everyone needs it
but me like you know in your head you're like well i haven't gotten drained it's been a few
years in this product i don't really need to but um i'll let others you know take it but then i
realized like that's kind of stupid. It's a little arrogant.
I don't do the same thing with health insurance.
I don't do the same thing with car insurance.
I have insurance for everything else.
Why would I not do it for something that's directly tied into my network?
Right.
I think just because it's not commonly used yet.
We're the first of its kind.
But imagine not having health insurance and having a catastrophic injury and going to the hospital and realizing that there's a bill that you're not going to be able to pay or you can't even get, you know, the service that you need.
So I think over time this will be more adopted.
But for now, you know, our biggest problem is really just like spreading the word of adoption, which, like you said, Asgard, is hard to do.
Yeah, this is more like financial health insurance.
Yeah, literally.
Yeah, Zet.
Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me. What's up, everybody? My name is Zet, aka MetaZet,
because if you met me, you met Zet. It's always a pleasure to be here. Anytime Wolf invites me,
I never turn down the opportunity because this is the alpha. They always have the alpha
here. And really like, that's what we're getting today with this. Cause it's such a great product,
such a great idea, and it makes all the sense. And what I wanted to say is just take it from me.
I'm not, I'm definitely not the smartest person in the room, but I definitely thought I was too
smart for my own good. You know, I was a couple of years into this space and I was like, oh, not me.
That can't happen to me.
I'm too slick for that.
And I had caught several scams or would-be scams.
And I was a master mod for different Discord servers.
So just never thought I could get caught slipping.
But one day I did, I mint that I was supposed to be getting for an NFT.
I saw like on one of those scanning pages that it was minting out. So I quickly clicked on the website from that page and I didn't even like sign any transactions or anything. It was a gasless
transaction, but it took, interestingly enough,
or ironically enough, it took around $10,000 worth of my assets at the time from that gasless
transaction. So I definitely learned a hard lesson that day. Some lessons cost more than others,
but it's definitely a good lesson to learn.
And so, like I said, it can happen to anyone.
Just even going to a website and not even signing anything.
So, I guess my first question is, like, would something like that be covered?
What would not be covered?
Like social engineering, does that fall under that and everything?
Yeah, I can take these guys if you want.
That's a really good question.
And that's really important for us to highlight, right?
At the end of the day, we do cover retail wallet drains, but we don't cover every scenario.
So I think a good way to go about it is to put two types of delivery methods for the ways that drains happen.
The first umbrella is fishing. And The first umbrella is phishing. And the
second umbrella is social engineering. However, under those umbrellas, there are different ways
of getting drained. We call them loss events that we do cover. And not every loss event under those
umbrellas are covered, right? So the first one is malicious transaction signature. So if you signed
a malicious transaction set, then yeah, you are covered. The second is malware. If there was malware injected into your wallet or any of your hardware,
your phone and your laptop, and you send that hardware to us and we can verify that through a
third party, then great, you're also covered. And the third is address poisoning. Those are the three
main loss events in which if they're delivered in different methods, whether it's through phishing or whether it's through social engineering, you're going to be covered.
However, there are scenarios where you can get phished, you can get socially engineered where you're not covered.
I think the first example is revealing your seed phrase.
So if you did think you were speaking to a Coinbase employee and you revealed your seed
phrase for your Coinbase wallet, that is social engineering, but you're not going to be covered.
But if that malicious actor tried to make you sign a transaction as a Coinbase employee,
and then you signed it, you're going to be covered. A second type of event that you're
not covered is rug pulls. Third event is smart contract hacks. There are other platforms that do smart contract insurance
and kind of custodial account will drain.
So if your Coinbase account gets drained,
but that's not actually your own wallet,
we don't cover those.
So yeah, we definitely try to make sure
we make the lines clear on what we do cover
and what we don't cover.
And most of it comes to user mistakes
where they're not kind of bullying mistakes, such revealing your c phrase but signing malicious transactions address poisoning
and malware yeah thank you so much for that um yeah that's really great and i appreciate that
you know when rug pull coverage no i'm just kidding can you can you imagine that'd be nuts um
can you imagine that'd be nuts um but yeah right that's just impossible um but uh my real quick
and again i think that this just makes all the sense um i like i said i learned a hard lesson
and i don't go anywhere without a a pocket universe or a wallet guard type thing on me
but even that like i hear all the time in the, people who somehow get wiped and they don't even know what happened or how it happened.
You know, they they and I don't know if they ever get to the bottom of it, but I've heard several instances where they're just like, I don't know what happened.
I didn't click on anything. I haven't used my wallet in months or weeks or whatever.
And everything is gone. So I'm sure you could definitely help them get to the bottom with that,
with the investigation and all that sort of thing. But again, I think it just makes all the sense,
but my last question real quick before I throw it over to Tropic, what does this cost? You cover
about $10,000 across the board. What would this cost me? So is for ten thousand dollars is roughly 50 cents a
day so it's 1.95 so 10 000 costs roughly 200 bucks for the year okay great right so it's just it's
it's cost effective to cover it i think if you like in your scenario right where you lost
specifically ten thousand dollars had you spent 200 bucks to save $10,000 in the event?
I mean, it would take a lot of years of having that coverage before you were at a loss of paying on your coverage before you had a loss, right?
I think that makes a lot of sense financially for you to cover that kind of event or that much value.
Yeah, and that's $0.50.
Yeah, thank you.
$0.50 a day.
Yeah, thank you 54 cents yeah thank you ask yourself would you cover
for 54 cents a day and you still say no then maybe it is too pricey well that is amazing thank you
guys and that definitely doesn't make me feel better uh doesn't make me feel better but i think
that's amazing so um awesome i appreciate it very much i I will go ahead. And real quick, do you pay that up front, that whole $200? Do you pay that in fiat or crypto? Can you pay it monthly? And that's my last question. even USDC as well. But we're getting other forms of payment added as well,
more like Stripe integrations and Apple Pay and things like that to come.
So, yeah, I mean, 200 bucks covers you for 50 years, right,
on the 10,000 bucks before you're at a loss of having coverage.
So the financial side of it makes total sense at the current rates.
Yeah, 100%.
Awesome.
Well, totally.
Well, I'll throw it over to Tropic now.
Thanks so much
hey guys uh really cool stuff and uh good questions there's that um as far as uh you
know we touched in a few things earlier that you know various spaces and in groups that people are
in obviously like everyone thinks they're above it and so forth but uh do you partner with any
communities like directly because
i know there's a lot of dows or nft projects or even some of the the tokens right like they have
some pretty thriving communities that if you possibly reach out to their leadership to kind
of connect with them and what have you i think that'd be a great way of uh getting the word out
to the community itself and using them as sort of like an ambassador and a bridge to what you guys are offering because so many times uh especially with the nft community you'll hear like
the they go crying back to the founders that they were drained and their best nft was taken so do
you have any kind of partnerships in line like that yeah it's a it's a good question um so first
we do have a ton of ambassadors that you guys that have been kind of vocalizing their support for us.
You know, NFT Drew, Bo, we need a ton of people.
But your strategy is like exactly on par with what we're trying to do right now.
So we've been live around like three to four weeks now.
And we have been reaching out to a ton of communities.
Like one of the individuals that was a part of our retroactive
drain campaign was telling our story and how about after he got drained he went to the founders of
that um altcoin community that he's a part of a kind of like a small meme coin community and he
was a big holder at the time because he was in early and it obviously devastates the meme coin
community when a big holder sells all their assets but in this case
he got drained and then obviously the military actors sold all his assets and that founder was
like very warm and welcoming and they all sent him some money back too they were really nice so we
look for communities like that because we've heard of founders on the opposite side of communities
where they would antagonize some of their members that got drained i had had a similar story, except when he went back to the founder,
he basically said he was lying, he was gaslighting him,
and all these other things.
And then we try to parse for the communities that actually do care about the founders.
So, Chauvin, if you have any other communities that you're directly involved with
that you want us to talk to, that you want us to kind of, you know,
vouch for and then we'll connect with, we'll definitely do so as well.
I'm sorry, you can go on. you know, vouch for and then it will connect with, we definitely do so as well. Yeah.
I'm sorry, you can go on.
I was just going to, I was going to piggyback on some of the Asgard's comments there.
But yeah, there's NFT communities. There's entire like chain ecosystems, which we're talking to in order to provide coverage
directly and natively to their users.
But yeah, so there's definitely,
that is on the roadmap currently.
So yeah, we welcome any introductions there
because obviously the product can be used by anyone.
So regardless of the community,
you probably hold self-custody assets.
So, but that's definitely our approach.
Really cool. Yeah, I think that'd be good. I'll definitely reach out to you guys,
make some suggestions, but I know that was one of the things that was really effective with like
when WalletGuard was going around those workshops with Michael K. I've probably been through like
six of them. Literally. It's like one of the most, it's like, you know, like each time I
know like each time I just learn something new so just partnering with communities I think is a
just learned something new. So just partnering with communities, I think is a really cool thing.
really cool thing but I would say overall though um how has the reception been because anytime you
introduce a fairly new product especially into an area that is kind of you know stubborn in many
ways like you think that we're the most cutting edge and and uh leading the way as far as innovation
but in many ways we find that we're very stubborn. So how has
adoption been so far and just the reception when you're speaking to various communities?
Well, I think you kind of nailed it. Yeah. Yeah. I think you kind of nailed it.
You know, there's, there's hesitance in anything when there's a new product, which is, you know,
why, why we choose to partner with various specific types of projects that either bring security or bring a high trust within their networks,
because this is something of a product that does rely on trust, right?
And so I think that this is one of those things that needs to be, it's not a quick hit where all of a sudden, you know, you have, you know, a million users covered.
users covered. But it's more of a grind where you have to continue to be in the front of people and
see that this thing does work, which is one of the main reasons for the Retroactive Drain campaign,
so we can show and create a historical record of what we do cover. And so, yeah, I mean, I think
that this kind of community is sort of risk on, right? But as we move further and further into
maturity of this ecosystem, I think you start to value the assets more and more.
And so I think this is a long-term play for sure.
But, of course, we want people to sign up as early and as often as possible.
Go ahead, Askar.
But you're also supposed to be hesitant, right? Like when I first learned about Fairside, you can ask Drew and Brandon,
and even one of our other team members, TJ, I asked many questions before I even considered joining. And I think if you don't have questions to begin with, I also think that's actually a
little irresponsible. You should be kind of hounding on us on how it works, why it works,
you know, who you cover, what you cover, understand the fine details and nitty gritties
before you even buy coverage. So, I mean, I encourage every single person here to buy coverage, but
don't do so until you have confidence in us. So that's why we're here and we want you to just ask
all the hard questions. And that's why I'm also waiting for any hard questions I ever know has.
We would love to answer those because you should be a little hesitant when you're first learning about insurance and crypto.
Pretty cool. Thank you pretty much answered the main questions I would have.
I would just say just again, I think it's a really cool thing that you guys have going here.
And I just like how it's broken down so easily on the site.
So if anyone hasn't actually tried that little slider and see how things are and just click around on the site, it's pretty self-explanatory.
I think you guys did a pretty good job of just putting together a plain English website.
So I appreciate that.
You can always give props to anyone who makes it understandable to, you know, even the newbie.
So I appreciate that.
Great thoughts there.
All right.
Coming over to a couple others. Maya, you requested up on stage.
You want to share some thoughts or questions here?
Hey, thanks for having me.
Yes. I do come from a very heavy tech background.
My dad was an InfoSec engineer in robotics dev.
Security is a huge thing for me.
I have come across something that has been on my mind that's bothering me.
And I sent it to Michael.
So, I do work with Michael and Oum.
And I know them since 2020, 2021.
So, there is this thing on Telegram that people are wrapping the phishing link in Twitter links.
So the link actually shows Twitter, but it's a phishing link.
I'm a developer, but I don't wear any hats.
So I sent it for bounty, but who knows if they get it.
Is there anything that you guys can do to prevent something like that? Because if that goes,
it's going to be a wildfire if that starts happening because people see it and a lot of
servers already have x.com whitelisted. So that's a big problem that's bothering me.
that's bothering me. Is there anything that you guys can do about that?
Is there anything that you guys can do about that?
Well, we're not preventative. You know, we encourage people to use
security software along with buying wallet coverage, but we're preemptive. So you buy
this coverage in the event something like this happens to you. that's obviously more of a security-related, and we're
technically on the coverage side of things. And so in the event that something like that happens,
that's where we step up to cover the event. Of course, we don't want it to go widespread either,
but that is something that we would cover under our current membership.
Yeah, that makes sense sense thank you so much
and also my i guess the the one synergy we do have with platforms that do help you not get
during like wall guard revoke and other is that if there is what we're trying to do is that in
the future we want to maybe reduce premiums if we can prove that you're using tools that help prevent
you from getting
drained. So in the future, if you do find, you know, you put it out for a bounty, if you do find
that there's a tool that people can use on Telegram that helps prevent and spot phishing
links on Telegram, please send it our way so we can get aware of it. We're trying to keep up to
date with all the security tools out there so that we can assess our models in the future as well.
Oh, my God. That is such a good idea.
So I am a developer. I can maybe build a bot for it.
So to spot that, yeah, thank you so much.
I would definitely work on that.
Yeah, Ani?
Yeah. Oh, my God. This is amazing because I think everyone who works in Web3 or is involved in Web3 can relate to just being drained.
You know, like I've personally been drained a bunch of times and seen countless friends getting drained.
Obviously, Alex, Auntie Paca really recently got drained.
It's absolutely insane.
And thank you so much for building something that
actually helps people like that, right? Like everyone gets these phishing links and it's so
like, they make it so believable that you're just susceptible to it. My question would be around,
like, how long does the process take? What kind of verifications do you do if somebody comes to
you and says, hey, I got drained, I do have coverage?
Because anybody can come and say that, right? What kind of verification processes do you have for something, a claim like that? And how long does it take for people to get their
insured amount back? Yeah, that's a good question. So to sign up for coverage, it probably takes less than five minutes.
So when you go to file a claim, there's a few elements to it.
So the first thing you do is that once you need to file a claim and you have coverage, you go to our website, you click file claim, and then immediately you're able to fill in all the details.
The more details, the better.
So that can range if you're being, you know, if you're just being a little lackluster, it can take a minute. But if you're doing your DD and you're giving us as much info as possible, it can take around like five to 10 minutes. Especially if you lost NFTs, you just kind of detail every NFT you lost, you put in your approximate value as well. So the more detail you give us, the better. And even at the most detail you give, it would probably take only 10 minutes to file the claim.
So that can range if you're being, you know, if you're just being a little lackluster, it can take a minute.
to file the claim. The next step is then our primary investigator and then our other investigators
take a look at it and then first evaluate like, okay, is this even a valid claim, right? Like,
did you reveal your seed phrase? Did you get rug pulled or something else that wasn't under our
coverage? If it is under our coverage, then we'll approve it and then we have to start doing more
investigations. So our investigator will take a look at it and then they'll determine whether or not
they need more input from you.
So it can be as quick as a few days.
If let's say everything you've provided was fair game, our investigator has no questions,
it'll just take a few days and then you get updates in the emails on each step of the
way.
And if they do need more information, sometimes they can reach out to you directly through email
or they will also schedule an interview. Throughout that process, after you fill in all the information
that you have, you have to do KYC. That KYC only, again, takes around five to ten minutes. It can
take you a day or two to pull up some documents like proof of address, but the process itself,
the KYC, only takes around 10 to 15 minutes. And then after
the investigator is done investigating and let's say everything looks good, they pass it on to the
governance board. So in order to have kind of checks and balances, the investigator doesn't
determine holistically if you should get paid out because you can have some bias and conflict
of interest there. They will send that full report to a governance board.
And then they'll vote based on that information, whether or not you should be paid out.
And then, yeah, once they approve it, then you get paid out directly.
And process should take less than a week.
With our retroactive drain campaigns, sometimes it takes about a week right now.
But that's because we're usually waiting on the individuals to respond to us.
But the actual time of communication and processing, honestly, probably just takes a few days.
I love that. Another question would be, like, is there anything that you guys are building in terms of recovering an asset?
Like, let's say, are you guys trying to partner up with something like Openc where let's say like an nft gets flagged right and it gets drained out is there a way that you guys can somehow
ensure that yeah this asset does not belong to the the drainer right um and just be able to like
recover something like that is that something that you do or in the future planning on doing
that is that something that you do or in the future planning on doing well we have are you
talking about go ahead good i was gonna say um kind of seem like there's two questions there
one just in terms of verifying whether or not um someone's asset has been actually drained by
somebody else or are we able to recover those assets if they have been drained was it just
the latter or was it both uh it was the latter I kind of just want to know if there is anything that you guys
are planning on doing in terms of recovering assets, or is there something that can be done
in the future? So in the future, there are certain companies that we have relationships with that
focus on doing that directly. But like Brandon said, we're really more of just the preventative. We're not the recovery side of things. So, you know, like if someone is able to, if someone
gets drained and they're not able to recover that asset, they're still able to file a claim
with us, get money back. And let's say it's an NFT that allows them to have access to
a community they really value being a part of. They'll be able to go and replace that
NFT and rejoin that community. So as of now, no, but there are companies that we do work that specialize in that.
Yeah.
For example, we have a relationship with Chainalysis that can track assets and blacklist wallets
from preventing them from liquidating on exchanges, for example.
But it's limited because you have to imagine if somebody loses a $2,000
NFT, chain analysis is not going to get all hyped up about that and want to track those assets for
a long period of time. So it's really going to depend probably on the amount and type of asset
that's lost, whether recovery is something that is a fruitful event for anyone to track down.
Just depends mostly on the size of the claim.
I really like that.
I think you guys are building something super important.
Yeah, that was my question.
I'll hand it over to Tropic.
Yeah, just a quick follow-up question.
I noticed you said retroactive drain campaigns
with an S like plural.
I know one just recently ended.
Does that mean you have another one upcoming? Any information about the dates as to when that would be by any chance? retroactive drain campaigns with an S like plural. I know one just recently ended. Does
that mean you have another one upcoming? Any information about the dates as to when that
would be by any chance? There's actually a, I've asked if I'm wrong, but both have concluded in
terms of submissions that we've taken. And we're now going through the investigation of the claims in the second campaign, correct?
Yeah, yeah.
So the second claim submissions are over.
Right now we're in the process of evaluating all the claims that people have submitted that we have chosen to be selected to be illegible.
And we're going through that process right now.
And then after that, we do testimonials as well.
So it probably will take less than a few more weeks to conclude that. Whether or not we do more,
we're pretty keen on them. We do enjoy doing them and we think it's a good way to
help out to the community. I think one difference is that our second campaign didn't get as much
coverage as we wanted. We're literally giving away free money, especially to people who got
drained. So perhaps if we do another third campaign
we're going to think a little bit more about
how to get this more widespread
because we definitely want as many people to get involved
and have a chance to win up to
not win up to
but get reimbursed up to $2,000 that we've been doing
so Chopper, if you have any ideas
please hit me up in the DMs
we probably will organize a third campaign it's more about the way we want to do it next time doing. So Chopper, if you have any ideas, yeah, please hit me up in the DMs. We'll probably
organize a third campaign. It's more about the way we want to do it next time.
Awesome. The reason why I asked that is because the last time I was on a space with you guys,
it was like right in the middle of the campaign. And I mean, I timestamped it,
asked the question, sent it to my friend and everything. And she was at work. She's like,
yeah, I'll listen to it after. And sure enough, I think it ended on a Friday.
And then she hits me up on a Saturday.
I'm like, you got to be kidding me right now.
So, yeah, so that would be really cool.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm like, are you kidding me?
But anyways, yeah, I think it's just really cool that that retroactive campaign.
And definitely I'll do some brainstorming and i will 100 i hit you out
great back and forth good thoughts there as always from tropic we do have some time left
here to walk through um maybe just a couple other pieces as we're talking about this i wanted to just
get thoughts from the team and maybe drew or Brandon, if you want to kick in here.
How has the entire landscape shifted
in the last two to three years
in regards to protecting your crypto,
crypto scams, things like that?
Like what was prevalent
that has maybe changed a little bit?
What's new that people have to look out for?
Just curious how things have been adjusting.
Yeah, you know, it's funny
because when we first
started this, this journey back in, you know, 2021, 2022, you know, we were, we were doing
market research and trying to understand the space and where like the most amount of people
wanted coverage and what was most talked about. And at the time you heard a lot about smart
contract failure and exchange hacks and third-party custodian type
coverage and stablecoin de-pegging. But we were pretty fortunate during the FTX collapse that we
were in the middle of market research. We had a campaign out and we were serving, you know,
I think it was over a thousand people. And we really saw a shift in what seemed to be the most important.
There was like a migration and discussion. Everyone should be on, you know,
you know, having self custody and not keeping your assets on exchanges and all their stuff.
And people still have money, you know, assets on exchanges. We all know that we,
ideally you go in, you go out, you know, you don't hold your assets there for a long period of time
You go in, you go out, you don't hold your assets there for a long period of time, and you move back to self-custody.
But that market research really showed a huge demand for that.
And the demand stayed after the fact.
Even after FTX settled, there was still demand on this type of coverage.
And it was kind of outweighed and it was far greater than the thoughts and risks of smart contract failure.
Because when you buy smart contract failure, you buy it for the way it's done right now.
You buy it for a specific project.
But this is the assets that you're holding and that you really intend to protect.
Could be Bitcoin that you've been holding for a long time or a big bag of ETH and you're hoping eventually it pops.
Or whatever, or your soul, whatever it is.
You're holding these assets
in this position and intending to keep them very safe. And there was just no coverage for that.
And so there was this product market fit and demand that really kind of showed itself.
And so that's one of the big shifts I saw happen over the last few years. Everyone says self-custody,
self-custody, and then people don't do it until there's some big life-changing event or some big black salon that affects the widespread marketplace, and then people tend to drive toward that.
We're hoping now that we don't need a big black salon for everyone to see that coverage is available and that self-custody is essential for this industry, and wallets are important and protecting those assets in the wallet.
That's the big shift that I've seen personally
like when it comes to coverage side,
people may have different take on the market
and how it's shifting, but from a coverage perspective,
that's where I see the big shift
is like this essential part of,
because it speaks to everyone who's in crypto,
who's in crypto, who has any sort of self-custody wallet.
who has any sort of self custody wallet.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Definitely things have been shifting there.
I can appreciate those commentary and some of the different pieces.
I'm also just curious, when we talk about wallets and just general other pieces,
how else do you recommend?
Obviously, you talked about insurance, and that's being more of how else do you recommend? You know, obviously you talked about insurance
and that's being more of the backend, right?
If you do get hacked.
On the preventative side,
I did notice someone came up from WalletGuard
before I think that they dropped back down.
But just curious, you know, since we're on the topic,
just general pieces that you guys would advise people
with there to have upfront protection as well.
I know I just did a whole whole deep dive with uh drew into a bunch of these different pieces on how to protect yourself on the upside but yeah maybe oscar
or the fair side account if you guys want to speak to that yeah so just understand correctly
you're talking about some other ways to protect yourself before getting covered. Yeah, yeah. I think the conversations go hand in hand, right?
We're kind of talking about the post, but what about in advance?
Yeah, for sure.
I think the first thing that anyone needs to do is go straight to revoke.
I think the sad thing is when we are going to these retroactive drain campaigns
and talking to people who've gotten drained,
there's actually a pretty fair talking to people who've gotten drained. There's actually a pretty fair amount of people
who've gotten drained months later
because they did not revoke an approval
on a platform that eventually got hacked.
Or they just kind of completely forgot about it
and then they send money to a wallet.
So I think the first thing you do
in just any line of defense is use Revoke.cash.
Check all your approvals,
make sure you don't have anything lingering.
I mean, that's kind of the sad thing about this space
that you can do so many actions
and then each one's kind of scattered,
which is exactly why tools were built for this
in the first place where Voke is kind of open source and free.
I think there's a lot of other installs you can add onto
your browser that are really good. I think Carrierverse is a pretty good one. WalletGuard
was a good one. Anything that helps you initiate and understand what is happening when you're making
a transaction. Revoke also has an extension for those who don't know. Anytime you're about to give
an approval, it'll pop up and tell you what you're approving and when you're approving it.
Those three are pretty good extensions in general.
I like RabiWallet.
I know they have a pretty good UX UI
for understanding what you're trying to sign
before you sign it.
There's a ton of extension things
that try to prevent you from signing something
before you do,
and then make it as kind of,
you know,
Eli 5 as much as possible for users
because I definitely need that as well
when I am trying to kind of secure and protect my wallet.
While you were talking, I did see Om jump up on stage.
Would you like to jump into the conversation here?
Yeah, absolutely.
Sorry, I've been working and I've been going back and forth.
But yeah, I think there's a couple of things, right? So Maya brought up something earlier regarding like links being sent in like telegrams and stuff like that and kind of appearing like X links and then actually being like a scam.
common attack type or at least used to be common it's called an unfurling attack um so basically
like twitter has this thing where you can kind of make embeddable cards and then it redirects and
it's it's a it's a thing it's a problem um and you can kind of actually check that one by just
following through on the link and then getting the actual resolution and then uh but there's a
you can definitely build a bot is uh my i guess what I was trying to say on that point.
But as far as being proactive and preventative, revoking your approvals is 100% a great thing to do.
That will definitely account for things like if you have an open approval.
Let's say you have a Pudgy Penguin, you had an open approval, and then you go to a scam site.
The first thing they're doing, you have to think from the drainer's perspective.
What can I do? What can I steal? And they're going to leverage things that you already have open approvals on.
So like, let's say you have a pudgy, um, you have an open approval to open C because you've listed it once and then decided you're not going to sell it. You have an open approval. So now I can
basically create a, uh, zero asset sale back to myself. Um, and that's how effectively people are
getting drained on things like NFTs. And then
outside of that, when it comes to preventative things like phishing detection is extremely
important. So there's two, it's a twofold problem, right? So if you're a brand and you want to
protect yourself or protect your users and, you know, in an agnostic way, you can work with brand
protection companies like, you know, there's people that exist out there like Doppel, there's people that exist out there like Chain Patrol, and many more.
So engaging a brand protection service will help you kind of take down domains that are
illicitly created around your brand's IP. And now from a user perspective, using things like
MetaMask, I personally can say MetaMask just because obviously with the WalletGuard
acquisition, our security engine's been integrated and we also work with Security Alliance and
contribute data to them. So there's a lot of aggregated security intel that's updated on a
daily basis, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of URLs. And I'm talking thousands,
tens of thousands of URLs on a daily basis are being added to active block list by the minute.
So by leveraging things like MetaMask, you will actually be able to proactively block a lot of these things with phishing detection.
I have seen the numbers, and I can tell you it's insane how many scams we actually block on the MetaMask client.
And a lot of that has kind of changed since the acquisition and all that stuff.
So I can pretty confidently say that MetaMask has one of the best securities when it comes
to the wallets as far as infrastructure as well.
Now, without being a MetaMask show, like there are definitely other extensions that still
exist.
Obviously, WalletGuard is sunsetting, but there are people that exist like Pocket Universe
and others that do still do similar things out there.
However, a lot of wallets are starting to natively integrate
simulations a lot better. So you do just need to pay attention and take a breather. I think
the most common sense advice I can give someone is you don't want to be the first person to do
anything in crypto. That's like a dead giveaway that you're not in the right spot. Two is like,
take a breath before you make a transaction. Like if you see a counter or something's just ticking up and like, you're like, I'm
going to miss it.
I'm going to miss it.
It's generally a bad idea.
So taking a breather is like one of the first things you need to do in this space.
Uh, moving at a high velocity is, uh, not exactly the greatest thing.
A lot of people that I hear who actually end up getting scammed, it's because they're on
mobile and, uh, they're trying to make a quick transaction or a quick swap so i would just say like take a breather um try to be at your machine like your
computer in a good comfortable like environment when you're actually doing stuff rather than in
a rush sentiment oh my god those are such good um sorry those are such good points and yes i am
we are uh oma and i are actually building the security bot so we we had a
talk so that's going to be massive and it's going to help a lot of people and uh on top of that um
another thing that i always do whenever you want to do a transaction or buy something that you're
not sure of i recommend not doing it but if you really really want to get into a project, just do it with a burner wallet.
Use a wallet that has no fund in it other than whatever you need for the gas fee and for the transaction.
And I think that would help a lot to just always use burners.
Yeah, I think I like that.
You said a ton of great points, Maya, you as well.
I do want to emphasize that i like to have separation of
powers i think on mobile it's very easy to get drained so in general what i like to do is like
really separate the really important wallets on my desktop i'm on there less often i'm sent more
links less often on there and i would i'm not to say that you shouldn't be using mobile as well
but definitely have a separation of powers there the A few of the people that I've spoken to
as well during the retroactive drain campaigns are people who are really
security kind of not prone to drains and they had high security knowledge and they lost it all
because they're waking up in the morning, click something quickly on their mobile, right? And now
they have a separation of powers there.
Also, one thing I kind of wanted to highlight
as well is address poisoning.
This doesn't happen often,
but when it happens to you,
you're going to be completely dumbfounded
and you have no idea what happened
because you didn't really click on any link
or anything like that.
This is when most of these actors
will purposely flood your blocks scan histories
on Etherscan, for example example with wallets and transactions very
small dust transactions that look very similar to the walls that you communicate or send transactions
too often and they will send it with wall send transactions with wallets that have the same kind
of beginning four to five characters and similar four to five last characters as well because on
those block scanners the middle aspect of a wallet address is usually truncated so you don't really
see that so some people will go to either scan copy an address real quickly
and send it because they know that's their other wallet that they usually
transact with so whenever you're doing that please please please and when you
copy and paste that wallet I just check the letters and numbers in the middle of
the wallet string.
It's not really a common attack vector,
but there are a lot of people that lose a ton because it seems like you're doing something simple
and all of a sudden you don't see your wallet
receiving the funds that they're supposed to be receiving.
And then after an hour,
you just realize you said it's the wrong address
that looks very similar.
A general tip that I want to give people here
is like MetaMask actually has like an address book feature where you can actually label like your addresses.
Like if you send a transaction to something that you know is yours, you can be like, hey, this is my cold wallet.
So you can actually label it. So like there's a whole address book built into MetaMask as well.
And like a lot of stuff is changing, like where we're going to have like contracts like being named on transactions and stuff like that.
lot of stuff is changing, like where we're going to have like contracts, like being named on
transactions and stuff like that. But then on top of it, one of the other really cool tidbits that
we're doing is that, um, when you're sending money essentially to an address for the first time,
we'll essentially notify you. So like, if you're, you know, you shouldn't see that warning if you've
sent assets to your cold wallet before, you know, so, um, that, that, that warning should help a
lot of people from like really trivial attacks like address poisoning.
I mean, to be honest, it's not an extremely common attack method like you said, but it does happen on occasion.
And unfortunately when it does, it's typically whales, which is kind of ironic.
Now, the other thing to kind of mention there as well is like Maya brought up a great point about like asset segregation.
And it's like you should 100% have like โ there's like three wallet types that I like to tell people, right?
So it's like you have a hot wallet.
This is like your day-to-day use one.
Maybe you fund like a couple thousand dollars in there to quickly buy a meme coin and then maybe you get out of the meme coin.
That's your hot wallet, right?
Then you have a burner wallet, which is like, hey, I'm about to go do a new mint or a contract interaction or something that I'm unfamiliar with. That's where a burner
wallet is extremely useful. You can just keep generating these every single time. So it's just
as simple as going to like your MetaMask or your wallet and clicking add new account, and it'll
just generate a new account off of it. And then three is like your cold wallet, right? So like a
ledger, a multi-sig, or,ig, or different types of kind of variations like that
are like a great way to have like long-term storage.
And on these wallets, you should, on your cold wallets,
you should never have any open approvals, like zero.
Like there's almost no reason for you to have an open approval
other than if it's like a high net worth asset
that's maybe in a staking program
that you're calling acceptable risk.
That's the only thing that you should maybe have an approval on.
So if you follow these basics, like generally speaking,
like you'll be a lot safer than most people.
And then, you know, commonly like when people refer to things like,
hey, I haven't interacted with this wallet in a really long time
and then I just got my assets stolen.
99% of the time it's malware.
Like you got malware on your computer
and you did not store your seed phrase correctly. That's like 99% of the time it's malware um like you got malware on your computer and you did not store
your seed phrase correctly that's like 99 of the time what happened um the other one percent is
some like crazy attack vector but like very rarely will happen to anyone that's not high profile um
so those are my general tips um but i'm happy to expand on any of those if you have any questions. Um, it sounds like there's a lot of risk to people regardless of whether they're holding
it on MetaMask, even though MetaMask is one of the better ones from a security perspective.
Sounds like we might need to get insurance integrated for those people on MetaMask. What
do you think? Who knows, man? Who knows? It's definitely a distribution thing right like with any product
and um anything anyone builds right it's always distribution right so um securing distribution
for insurance or things like that along those lines like uh it's definitely the route to go
agreed hey guys i'm going to take one last hand here from tropic and then we do have a hard stop
here in two minutes uh so Tropic, go for it.
which one it is to add to his wallet. And I ended up sending the, the, the token that I meant to
send to my friends to the contract of the token, because that was the last thing I copied. And I
forgot that I sent him the token. Is that kind of negligence covered or not?
Um, I mean, Brandon, Drew, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I will say no. I think that
is kind of the negligence that we don't cover.
But I think as almost saying that hopefully in the future,
when you're using Updates and MetaMask where you can see the name
of the smart contract being sent, that way you're like, wait a minute,
I'm not trying to send this smart contract trying to send to my friend.
And hopefully that will resolve.
I do agree that a lot of times you're just kind of, even when you're not moving that
quickly, you just kind of make simple mistakes like that.
And hopefully in the future, most wallets have ENSs or some sort of reversible domain
connected to their wallets.
And then, you know, smart contracts are labeled the way they are.
But sadly, we don't cover that situation, to be honest.
Yeah, it would be hard to peg that as a fest.
Got you.
And yes, I was moving quickly.
I was going to catch a train.
So yeah, there's the common thread.
Oh, and I have one final tip and then I'll shut up.
You should use things like delegate.cash or other delegation tools just because if you have a cold have a cold wallet like if you just set a
delegation authority to like a hot wallet you'll never ever have to interact with your cold wallet
on like a minting site or anything along those lines but that's about it beautiful hey guys cut
in here because we are at the top of the hour huge thank you to fair side for coasting this
conversation it's a very important conversation obviously i think we went over both sides of
things as well right how you can both protect your crypto, but then really be sure that, hey,
if something does happen, I am protected on the back end. Make sure that you're going to their
page and deep diving into really just how cheap and affordable it is to insure your assets.
And there's a reason there's such insurance has become such a big thing. It's because when you
need it, it pays. Thank you again to brandon and oscar for
being on here as well the whole rest of the panel my tropics that om for jumping up ani for being
on here and of course ryan behind the wolf account going to turn it back over to you ryan to close
this one out and then i know we got to jump over to neos but big thank you as always to fair side
and excited to see everything else that they're going to continue to build and do. Thanks for hosting us. Really appreciate you having us up there.
Ditto.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah, loved it.
Enjoyed that conversation.
So, so important in today's world, for sure.
Thank you so much to the Fairside team.
Thanks, guys, for running that conversation.
All the great panel that came up here, Tropic, Ani, Zet, Oum, Brandon, Asker was here, Maya,
and the Fairside team. Appreciate all of
you guys. I am jumping over to Ace the Kid right now. We're going to talk the T word, tariffs,
but even more importantly, investing in a down market. What should you do? What are you doing
right now? We'll see you over there in just a moment. I'm closing this out. If you missed any
of the conversation, you can listen back to this recording
and we'll catch you guys all in the next space.
Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Thank you.
