Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Talk Is Easy. Questions Aren’t. | Kill Switch Live EP.15
Recorded: Feb. 6, 2026 Duration: 1:57:30Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto founders shared insights on project launches, fundraising challenges, and innovative solutions in the blockchain space. Notable highlights included the introduction of new platforms like Credible and HIO.FUN, which aim to enhance investment security and leverage AI technology in music creation, respectively. Additionally, the importance of partnerships and the need for quantum-resistant infrastructure were emphasized as key trends shaping the future of Web3.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What's up? Welcome to Killswitch. We got another beautiful Friday here. The markets might be red.
beautiful Friday here. The markets might be red, might be a bloodbath out there. Not the first
time we've seen it. I'm sure it won't be the last, but we're here with a great panel full of
amazing guests. I'm very much looking forward to grilling in the hot seat today. And so first and
foremost, I want to thank everybody here for being here, our panel members for showing up,
having the courage to step into the hot seat.
And for all of you listeners right now who are here to join us for what should be a pretty entertaining conversation.
I'm Chapo. I'm the founder and CEO here at Assure DeFi.
We've been doing these Kill Switch episodes now for the last three or four months.
I feel like they get better and stronger
every single week. Our panel members maybe come in a little bit more prepared. I don't know whether
any of you have listened to past episodes before, but the quality of the guests that we have on,
the engaging conversation we have, the challenging questions that are asked and the education that we provide for everybody listening, I find to be invigorating.
And despite the fact that we are in the face of a downturn in the market yet again, we're builders, you know, and builders need to rally together. And I've always loved being a builder in a bear market because in my mind,
it's the right time to build and it's better and easier to build in a bear market than it is in a
bull. You build in the bear so you can capture value in the bull. That's the honest truth. I've
been here for 10 years and almost nobody builds in a bull. It's hard to build in a bull. There's
too much going on. There's too much noise. Everybody and all the support that you need are too busy to help you. And so you've got to get
it done now, guys. Now's the time. Now's the time to put your head down. Get to work. Don't worry
about the noise. Don't worry about the price action. Don't worry that you're a whole lot poorer
than you were six months ago. Think about how much richer you'll be in another couple years after what you're building right now is fully successful.
The market returns and you see people actually using what you're building.
That's the real key.
So first of all, I want to do a quick mic check for everybody here.
Robert, I see you're off mute.
Are you there, my friend?
Yes, I am.
Great intro, by the way.
And I can't agree more about the enthusiasm to build.
I would argue it's not that easy to build in the market
as it is in the bull market because you get more nervous.
But this is the time where you need to concentrate for sure.
Robert, building is never easy, brother. It is never easy. And I will expose everyone here today
just about the challenges of building. It is hard, whether it's a bull, bear, it really doesn't
matter. Building is hard. And in this space, it's particularly hard. I talked to some of my team members last week about how, you know, this whole space is hard mode.
And compared to the Web2 space and a lot of traditional industries, it's a brutal one.
It's not only fast paced, it not only changes quickly, seems weekly almost that it changes, but also you're forced to build in public. So you're exposed,
you know, and that's not the case for all builders, but it is here. And so as much as I would say,
it's easier to build in a bear. It's certainly anything but easy. And I would agree 100%. So
thank you for your mic check and the intro. Omnity, are you there?
Howdy, howdy. Can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear, brother. Thank you for being here.
Cellframe.
Thank you for having us join.
You bet.
Sorry, go ahead, Cellframe.
That's okay. Go ahead.
Yeah, what's up? This is Glenn from Cellframe.
Thanks for having me. It sounds like an exciting event.
Awesome. Welcome. Thanks for being here. How about my co-host, Mikey Roots? Are you in the building?
What's up, Chapo? I'm here and I'm ready, sir.
All right. What's up, brother? Thanks for being here again. Mikey's been co-hosting with me the
last couple of months. Always has some good insight. Always, you know, stays quiet in the
background a lot of times until he has a hard hitter always, you know, stays quiet in the background
a lot of times until he has a hard hitter and then he comes and pounces. He's like a leopard
waiting in the grass. So watch out for that lad. Credible, are you there, man? We're here. So yeah,
Blaze on handle today on Credible. Glad to be here. Thanks for the input. Blaze, what's up?
It sounds like maybe you smoked a morning joint and you are ready to go i don't
know it's maybe just from the name yeah no it's like blazing trails right blazing trails getting
down there deep and figuring out what's up okay okay i love it uh let's see we got one more guest
here tokenized hello hello good morning, good evening.
And are you speaking on behalf of stake.link
or are we gonna have the official account
come up here as well?
No, I will be sticking on behalf of the DAO at least.
Yeah, the official account is just lurking.
So thank you for hosting and inviting me.
Absolutely, I think we had one more panel guest that was scheduled to be here. So thank you for hosting and inviting me. Absolutely.
I think we had one more panel guest that was scheduled to be here.
Kurt, I see you on a call.
Is Heyo in the building?
Are they coming?
Yeah, they were talking to us earlier.
Haven't heard from them in about an hour or two.
So we'll see.
Well, we're going to rock and roll.
They're supposed to be here.
You know what?
They're lost. We got the right people here. If they show up, we'll stick them in the hot seat last. We'll make them hold off and we'll give them the hardest questions.
How about that? Guys, I always like to start out with a little icebreaker. We've never met in
person. Might've talked to a couple of you before but this is a collaborative discussion
it's going to be some back and forth it's just not me sitting up here preaching as much as i
know that you all love listening to my beautiful voice so i'd like to kick off and talk about
something that i posted a video about today you know most teams that i work with i've i've worked
with 2 000 plus teams over the last five, six years.
And there's a couple common threads between most of them.
You know, one of the most challenging things in this space is fundraising.
And the unfortunate reality that we see time and time again is it takes money to build.
I wish it wasn't the case, but it takes money. It takes money to operate. It takes money to grow. It takes money to execute the things you want. And we have these
fair launch solopreneur type of ventures that are out there. And sometimes they're self-funded.
Sometimes there is a very little amount of capital that's required to start an idea, but that's the exception of the rule.
Most things you really want to build take money to build.
You've got external service providers.
You have costs.
There's operational capital.
You need to fund a real team.
People need paid in order to work, at least the ones that are talented, because they can get paid elsewhere and there's a big opportunity cost.
They're talented because they can get paid elsewhere and there's a big opportunity cost.
So you need money.
So you need money.
And it seems like 99% of people and teams that I talk to, they need money and they're
not very good at figuring out how to go get it.
Fundraising is tough.
Real world, tough.
This world, actually tougher.
You'd think in this space, given that it's decentralized, you have access to this global market. It's somewhat crowdsourced. You can take small
investments. You can take big investments. It's like Kickstarter on steroids. You'd think it'd
be a great way to get funded and it should be relatively easy. It's not. Competition is
insanely high. VCs have gotten rinsed this last cycle. VCs used to throw money at the biggest
dog shit garbage projects you could possibly imagine back in, well, back in 2017, it was
real bad. I mean, they were throwing money at everything, trying to see what sticks. 2021,
their returns were a little bit poorer. They got a little bit more selective.
Now they're struggling. They haven't provided the same level of returns they have
cycle over cycle. And they got locked up. They got rinsed. Retail figured out that they were
getting absolutely taken and raked over the coals by VCs. And so retail got a little smarter this
last cycle. And so they weren't providing nearly the amount of exit liquidity that the VCs would
have liked to have seen. And so VCs have tightened up.
They've puckered up.
It's not as easy to go raise from VCs anymore.
And private investors like myself, I invested in 400.
I made 400.
I think I wrote 400 angel tickets over the course of three years.
And I'm not personally investing a whole lot either because there's a whole big market
out there for tokens that are already live.
Risk has already been taken off the table.
OTC deals are available if you want private type of investment.
You don't have to lock up your tokens in long vesting schedules with a huge unknown from the team.
So fundraising right now is important, always will be.
You need money to be successful.
money to be successful. And it's also as difficult as it ever has been. And so I wanted to open it up
And it's also as difficult as it ever has been.
to you guys on the panel to talk just a little bit about that dynamic right now. The video that I had
posted was focused around what's really required to be successful fundraising. And in my mind,
from what I've seen, it really comes down to one thing. Teams don't get funded because of ambiguity.
It's because investors don't say yes for fun.
They say yes when the risk has been taken off the table.
The risk that could be mitigated is gone.
And when risk stops being undefined for them, that's when they can step in because they can properly evaluate the upside against the risk.
They don't really ask themselves so much, how big can this get?
That's obviously one part of it.
They need to know that there's upside there.
But the bigger thing for them is protection of capital.
They need to be able to take another swing.
swing. So they're wondering, how can I lose? What can go wrong here? And that's actually much
So they're wondering, how can I lose?
What can go wrong here?
bigger. That's a much bigger piece of what investors and real capital thinks about is
the protection to the downside. And so what I've seen is that the real unlock to capital is simple,
really. You map the downside, you contain it as much as possible. You explain it, you get it out there. You don't hide
the downside and make them wonder. You explain the downside, you make it easy on them to evaluate
what that downside risk is. And when you do that, and you pair it with something that's a real idea
that has significant upside, now they can make an investment decision. I think teams typically do a
very poor job of that because they mask what the downside really is or they don't address it head on.
And it leaves a lot of question marks in investors head and they struggle to pull the trigger.
So my question out to you guys, I have a few questions, just leading questions.
And anybody can either raise their hand or just come off mute.
And I'd love to have a little discussion to kick things off here.
You know, what are the biggest ambiguities in Web3 that keep serious money on the sidelines? And, you know, what are the things that founders
are refusing to quantify for investors or typically don't hit head on that you think
limits their ability to fundraise? Open floor. Yeah, I'll go first. Yeah, with credible,
you know, we're actually tackling this very issue, right? So these down only economics of negative 85 to 95%. And the space has definitely gotten a little too used to it, right? And so we're putting basically back in the basic principles that this capital, you know, is not locked forever, where you've got billions of locked capital that just has been
wasted, is creating a mechanism to actually move that capital and keep it free flowing so that you
get actual capital execution. So I think what founders typically do is they've got a solid idea
that they really believe in and they think they've got a market, but what they really don't understand is how to actually take that idea and make it work, right?
How to actually make revenue.
So typically what you see is these revenue models that don't make any sense and don't
have real numbers that can get real traction.
So I think that creates a lot of the risk.
You know, the other thing is that teams, they go out to raise, they don't raise the amount
of funds that they need.
And so then they end up ghosting, right, because they can't actually get the product to market.
So fixing a lot of those kind of surrounding issues will help the market overall.
Great insight.
And couldn't agree more.
Yeah, the thing I want to add here yes it's basically that's what a
little bit of the journey as with credible it started actually as with me
and blaze actually brainstorming how we can how we can make the the fundraising
gears more retail oriented and at the same time protected.
Right?
You could observe the time when we were brainstorming,
it was about a year ago, yes,
when the pump.fun was going to the next level.
So it's like, come on,
like why people are spending so much money on pump.fun?
We need to do something with more in a sustainable way,
for projects, for something that is not only not only you know like about pumping and fun but more about
bringing money to the real case and making the people more likely to to get
a return and and another war another reason is that we were building
credible was even down the line later on with Native.
So Native is incubating Credible.
We've been going out to investors
and asking them about the round raising money
and then going to food exchanges,
looking at the IEO options, initial exchange options.
Yes, also fundraising through an exchange. We've seen how productive the market is.
You can't imagine, like you as a founder, you really need to, sometimes you need to
pay a million dollars.
Really, this is like the money they are looking.
Exchanges are looking for a million dollar, right?
To help you raising for them.
That's a lot of money.
That's a lot of money is that for what?
For just like a simple marketing
and the mechanism that is out there is this machine
is really around having a high valuation.
So you start a project, you want to sell the project with a high valuation. So you start a project, you want to sell the project
with a high valuation. So when you are giving these tokens to a market maker, to an exchange,
you are able to give that $1 million. Because if your project is valued at 10 million, then
how the hell are you going to give 10% 10% to an exchange just for you know opening
it doesn't make sense right so so the whole machinery here is that you know you need to go
and launch with 100 million valuation this is what this is the figure we are getting a minimum
ideally 200 million valuation yes to get into that machinery and this is either as well right
like you know they don't want to fund you unless they want to see a clear way how you go to IEO, right,
or TGE with 100, 200 million valuation, right?
Because, you know, it's a lot of-
Look, it's always been tough.
I mean, look, you have two competing sides, right?
One side wants a very clear it's not only
about being but that is just you know like this is this this is broken this model is broken
like because yeah well there's a lot of broken models you know there's a lot of broken models
for fundraising in this space period yeah but this is broken like like how the hell we have projects
you know going to the market to the retail market with 200 million valuation, right?
Often without even having an MVP, working MVP.
Right, with nothing but a pitch deck and a dream, right?
It's wild.
Yeah, hype, hype, purely hype.
Well, look, I want to give Omnity a chance to talk.
And I understand Omnity has a hard stop here in about 10 minutes. So I'm going to shift gears and actually move directly into our hot seat. But Omniti, did you have anything to comment on on the fundraising side before we stick you right in the hot seat?
difference. The entire stock market is bound by that standard, and that's how they manage
financialization. We don't necessarily have that here. There's so many little proprietary corners,
but I don't have to dig into that. We can get right into the hot seat.
All right, cool. Well, before we jump into what you're all really here for, I know you weren't
actually here to talk about fundraising and our icebreaker combo. Everybody's here to see the hot
seat. That's what everybody really wants to hear.
We want to see whether these guys are going to get the kill switch
or whether they're going to survive.
And so this is where the fun begins.
Now, before we start, I'm going to ask everybody to do me a favor.
Go down, hit that purple pill in the bottom right.
Go like, retweet.
Not my video, but the actual space here
because I want you guys all to have the audience that you
all deserve. And so go throw this link out to a couple of friends. Tell them to come join us.
Everybody who joins says this space is awesome. Why is it awesome? Because it's so different.
We have good quality guests, but we don't just sit here, blow hot air around and shoot the shit.
We actually dive into the real issues that projects
have succeeding. Why do we have such a low success rate in this space? It's because most founders have
blind spots and they don't realize why they're not going to be successful because they haven't
seen 2,000 projects and haven't worked with 2,000 projects themselves to learn from that.
Why are most investors not very successful in space? They don't know the
right questions to ask. They don't know how to do their own research. They don't know why businesses
fail. They don't know really how people are positioned for success. And so everybody can
learn something here. And before we kick in, while you guys are going to share the space around,
I want to remind everybody here that as a founder in the space, you are already a winner. And I say this every week.
So many people sit on the couch, eat their Cheetos, think of great ideas, never take the first step.
They never even go create a Twitter account.
You know, they don't go create a website.
They don't learn how to deploy a website.
They don't hire anybody.
They don't actually create a brand.
They don't try to manage a community.
You guys are
already so many steps ahead of most people who had an idea. And so the fact that you're even here,
I don't care whether you get the kill switch or not, you're already a winner in my mind.
And whether you get the kill switch or not today does not matter at all, whether it's the end of
your journey. You know, I'm one person. I'm over here. I'm just going
to decide whether I think you can be successful the way that you're positioned or whether you're
in trouble. That's it. And it takes a lot of courage to expose yourself here to an expert
in the space who gets to grill you publicly for 10 minutes. It's not easy, guys. So you all should
have some respect for each other. I hope at a a bare minimum what you get out of this is some knowledge about some things that you have to work on in order to be successful
And you also get connected with some other founders who i'm sure are dealing with a lot of the same struggles
Our goal as a business at assure defy here is to support credible builders
And to make life difficult for the scammers and the grifters of the world. It's a pretty noble mission. I wake up every day feeling really
good about the work we do. And we do that in a lot of different ways. We help people with growth.
We help people with trust. We help people with security. We make sure that the people that
we're helping are actually credible and accountable and responsible for the funds that people have
given them to build, which I think is incredibly
important. And additionally, when we give money to bad actors in this space and the scammers and
the grifters of the world, that money leaves our crypto ecosystem forever and it doesn't drive the
space forward. It's bad for business. It's bad for everybody. It's bad for the credible builders.
It makes it harder to raise funds. Those are funds that are no longer here to actually support the real growth of credible projects that are building. So that's what we do as a business.
And this is part of it, guys. Challenging people, we need to have more challenging conversations and
not just pat each other on the back and say, you're doing a great job. I hope you're successful.
That doesn't really help a founder. So I hope you all get
something out of this. With that said, Omniti, I know you got a hard stop. I'm going to try to
move through it quickly for you. You are first in the hot seat. And for anybody who hasn't been
here, the format's simple. You get one minute to give us your pitch. Give us one minute on what you
do, what you got cooking, and then you sit in the hot seat for 10 minutes. I'll deliberate,
and then I'll tell you whether you survived or whether you got killed.
Sound good, Omniti? You ready to rock?
Yes, sir.
All right, cool. Your one minute starts now. Go ahead.
So Omniti is a suite of products for developers and for users.
If you want to do something interesting with Bitcoin, we want you to take advantage of what we've got.
We're basically based on a SaaS type model, which means that we understand we need to exist and make money off of a fraction of the transaction fees
that are being handled on the network. We do not have subscription fees or anything else like that.
We just build cool stuff and ask that a very small portion of the fees be allowed to help us eat.
So that is represented in a few different products
on the more developer-oriented side,
but also still got a nice UI.
Anybody could use it.
The bridge for runes that we built two years ago
has seen over 500 million in volume.
That valuation changes because runes markets are crazy.
But we've also built the first on-chain runes indexer
and the first on-chain ordinals indexer
because we want developers to have better access
to runes and ordinals technologies.
That stuff needs to be on-chain for trust purposes.
On the developer side, or sorry, on the user side,
we launched RitSwap.
That's the first open source runes dex,
and that's integrated into our execution environment.
Yep.
Okay, so you're one minute.
You're one minute's up.
Bitcoin-focused type of platform. My first question to you is, isn't the runes and ordinals
and BRC 20 market dead? So the BRC 20 market is the smallest of the three you just cited.
I wouldn't say that it's dead, but it's struggling with standardization. Runes and ordinals as a
standard are pretty locked in.
They don't change a lot.
They're not really strong right now, but they are everlasting.
So we think that even if they're not strong right now, they'll come back.
Do you believe that that's temporary?
And why do you believe that's temporary?
Well, there's a couple of reasons.
But the simplest one I can say shortly is that when you decide you don't want your
ordinal, you decide you're done with runes, you get your sats back. That's a really different
thesis than what happens on Ethereum when you're tired of your NFTs.
Okay. Makes sense. What's the biggest part of the platform? Is it the bridge?
The bridge has the highest TVL and throughput numbers because we're a technical partner for Odin.fund.
That was the biggest launchpad for runes.
So we had a lot of technical business come through them.
What has the business looked like?
You guys have been in operation for, what, two or three years now?
We started with a research group six years ago we
we pivoted to bitcoin three years ago three okay that was the pivot to kind of what the current
platform does today correct okay and so walk me through a little bit of what that looks like over
the last three years as the market that you're serving has gotten pretty well crushed, you know, or the volume
is down substantially. What has that meant for you guys volume wise, revenue wise over the last
three years? So even up until the end of last year, we saw still pretty good volume. There was still
a large amount of Bitcoin products and services seeing the value and tooling of ordinals and runes we think that'll
come back um but yeah the the sort of downside coming away from the uh having is that everyone
was really excited about the having and they always are but nobody thinks about the the next
step which is okay the the bottom end of the bell curve you know the boring post.com boom period so
we're here for that we're not uh you, we're not uncomfortable lasting out the industry. Well, help me with some real numbers here. I don't know whether
that's transparent or fully private on your end. Maybe that's the first question. Is that,
is all public information? It's all on chain as far as the amount of revenue you guys are making
through all of the products, as well as, you know, volume, fee structure, TVL, that sort of thing?
It is completely on chain. I can describe that we also have the Rune that we issued and the token that we issued about five years ago. That's basically the scope of it is revenue coming in
from those dApps and the initial investment from a long time ago. So give me a couple numbers here,
and they don't have to be exact, but three years ago,
two years ago, one year ago, what does revenue, what does protocol revenue look like?
Protocol revenue is fractional from fees. So that means it's not super high, but hey,
at 500 million TVL and much more than 500 million throughput. If you calculated it based on that snapshot of time,
I think it would look somewhere around 3 million.
If I'm doing the math right, it is a fraction of fees.
So it's not supposed to be a super huge revenue.
It's a market play.
We're trying to be a significant portion.
Look, 3 million is a lot of revenue.
A lot of people are struggling to get their first $10,000 in revenue. So 3 million is a lot of revenue. A lot of people are struggling to get their first $10,000 in revenue.
So $3 million is a lot of revenue, and you have a lot to be proud of, first of all.
And also, given that I think the average crypto project lasts six days, and you guys have been at it for years, says a lot.
My question was more directly, what does the revenue look like?
Like three years ago, was the revenue $1.5 million, then it was a million. And then last year it was 400,000. What's the revenue trend look like
year over year as the market has waned? So year over year, we weren't collecting as much.
When we first got into the Bitcoin tooling game, when we just had the bridge open,
the fees were extremely, extremely small. So it's kind of bell curve
looking. You know, it was coming up after the halving. We had Odin Fund success for a good 18
months. And then starting probably, you know, Q4 last year, you saw it dip down more significantly.
What was revenue roughly in Q4?
What was revenue roughly in Q4?
I think it was like 350K.
It's not very much.
Well, that sounds relatively in line with your overall revenue historically then, though.
If it was still 350,000 in Q4, that's a 1.4 million a year run rate, which sounds like higher than what you have had over the last three years.
Yeah, there's a couple of bursty moments that come and go with Odin Fund.
A lot of it's not centric to Western markets, but we're not preferential.
If there's a hot moment for the US or hot moment for Europe because they decide that runes are good for Micah, that's fine, too.
How big is your team?
At our largest, I believe we are 50.
Today, we've scaled down to extend runway.
I think now we're about 12.
OK, so 12 people currently and you guys in a quarter had 350k in revenue protocol revenue what kind of costs do you guys
have not including the labor in order to run the business so there are significant on-chain costs
that's part of how the fee structure is built um i apologize i do got to jump in just a second
but um no problem we'll wrap it up thank you ultimately um the on-chain indexer for runes and for ordinals, those are
pretty expensive to operate because they require compute to be paid for constantly all the time.
So that's a big chunk of our costs to manage. Okay. Any idea what that costs monthly, roughly?
I think it's around 15k. I could be wrong ordinal's one we've uh redeployed once to slim
it down well look i'm gonna be i'm gonna be just direct blunt and honest here just like i always
am and i'm gonna cut your hot seat short because i know you have to run and i'm gonna make a quick
snap decision on you surviving or getting the kill switch. And you, my friend, have survived.
Congratulations.
You are the first one in the seat today.
You have survived.
I give you guys a shitload of credit
in order for continuing to build,
maintaining the protocol,
building something that is needed.
Bitcoin is probably the only safe cryptocurrency out there
that has a moat that is strong enough
that's never going away.
As much of an ETH bull as I am, and I think maybe ETH has been defined the king,
ETH has tons of competitors and tons of risks as well. Bitcoin really doesn't have any. There is
no second best, as Saylor says. And Bitcoin has historically just been Bitcoin, and we all know that it was never going to remain that way.
Ordinals, runes, the Bitcoin DeFi, things like that, it requires infrastructure that you guys are obviously providing.
I'm sure it will also be a competitive market over the next 10 years. I would say given that the general perception I have, at least from somebody who's not deeply involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem,
is that the runes and ordinals market has really suffered similar to almost like the NFT space.
And the fact that you guys are still producing enough revenue in fourth quarter in order to sustain a team of 12 tells me that you guys can survive bull or bear.
in order to sustain a team of 12 tells me that you guys can survive bull or bear. And it sounds
like you're making good business decisions also with respect to scaling down the team to extend
runway with the hope that the market does swing back. And so I would just say, it looks like he's
gone up. Oh no, he stayed on as a listener at least, but I know he had a hard stop, but
guys, this is what it takes. You have to pivot. You have to make changes. You can't keep a team
of 50 when the market turns and your revenue doesn't support it. The business has to change.
There's obvious product market fit here. Most people would kill to say that you had $3 million
in revenue as a protocol. And the fact that it was talked down like we only have 3 million
says a lot, right? They have big aspirations. They have big goals. They've been here for years.
Very solid guest.
Very solid panel member there.
I won't say he knew his numbers exactly, but if the numbers are real and it can be proven on chain, absolutely no reason why a protocol like that can't be successful.
I love picks and shovels plays.
That's one that's not only to market, but they've proven that there is product market fit and that the fee structure works to support their team. Absolutely easy
survive there. I wish Omniti the best of luck. I hope that the market does turn for all of our
sakes. It would be nice to have some tailwinds instead of headwinds. I could appreciate that
more than probably anybody knows. But phenomenal guests. So thank you, Omniti, for being here. And I know you're back on listener now, but thank you for being here. Congrats on
surviving and for being here in the first one in the hot seat and starting us out on a good note.
Any volunteers to go next?
I got a hand raised from Tokenize.
StakeLink or Stake.link, right?
That's who you're representing today?
Yeah, I prefer when we call it Stake.link.
Stake.link.
All right, Stake.link.
Your time in the hot seat starts now.
One minute.
Tell us what you got cooking.
Cool.
So we're a liquid staking protocol that is comprised of 15 top tier chain
link node operators such as link pool galaxy digital from adventures matrix link stakefish
and others uh we solve a fundamental problem with staking it's locked idle capital specifically
with channeling staking you lock your capital for 28 days. We, on the other hand, give you STLink,
which is a receipt liquid token that earns staking rewards
via something that is called rebasing.
And you stay fully liquid, tradable, and you can use it in DeFi.
We have around 56 million in TVL,
and we're the only link LST in the market
with over 10% staking dominance.
We distributed $5 million in rewards to LST in the market with over 10% stake in dominance. We distributed $5 million in rewards to LST holders and to SDR stackers.
And we are fully aligned with Chainlink and the Chainlink tech stack
from CCIP for interoperability, CRE, a bunch of other letters
that you probably guys don not necessarily know about.
Yeah.
That minute always goes by quickly,
but I got the rundown and you did a nice job explaining that.
And yes, we have way too many acronyms
in this whole system, don't we?
But I understood everything you said.
Maybe some people felt like you were speaking Greek,
but I at least got it.
So we're good. Your 10 minutes in the hot seat starts now, my friend.
My first question to you is, any additional rewards carry risk?
Very hard to get free rewards, no risk.
How do you quantify the risk?
Well, there's like the smart contracts risk that exists in every DeFi protocol that people should be aware about.
They can look at the audits or they can look at the TVL and maybe it can give them a bit more confidence.
But I think liquid staking just provides a utility and open up much more capital.
a utility and open up much more capital.
And this is something that I find very valuable
and I see that the market also sees it.
If you're looking at it.
What's the trade-off risk-wise
of native Chainlink staking versus what you offer?
So natively you're locked for 28 days.
When you're staked, you don't get RSC token.
And that's it.
You earn 4.3% APY a year.
It's not auto-compounding.
And in comparison with us, it's fully liquid.
And we provide a higher reward rate because of the exposure that we have to the
node operators pool that the native community doesn't have so um yeah i think like it's it's
just it's a superior form of staking um and uh and what's the trade-off right higher higher risk
higher reward so what's what's the trade-off? It sounds like you get higher APY and you also remain liquid.
What's the trade? What's the trade off? What's the downside?
I don't see any downside for it.
Is it? Well, there's at least some, right? You have additional
smart contract risk because native stake, you're using native
staking, but you also have the, you also have additional smart
contract risk on your side, right?
Correct. Correct.
Correct.
We rely on the native staking contracts.
Every ST link that is minted, it's always equal to one link in the native staking contracts.
You can always redeem it, usually instantly.
And if not, it could take a week.
And if that fails, then yeah yeah, it's like you have the natural, like, 28 days.
But it's just a better form of staking.
And, again, if you look at the ETH ecosystem and you look at Aave, for example,
and you see how much deposits in ETH, like vanilla ETH in comparison to LSTs,
in ETH, like vanilla ETH in comparison to LSTs, people with money clearly sees the
leverage that this technology of liquid staking provides.
So explain to me, you're leveraging the native staking on the backend, which requires a 28-day
lockup, but you're giving users the ability to be liquid on the token that they have. How does that work in practice?
If the yield is coming directly from the native staked link,
is there a risk of a bank run?
No, there isn't.
And there's a few, we can call it fallbacks.
So we have this thing called priority pool,
which is a buffer pool where people
stay deposit their link and when space opens up natively we use automation and we snipe the space and then we provide them the st link tokens um again we there's this unbonding period we also
automated that to make sure that if people want to exit, they
can exit faster. And we also have liquidity on secondary markets, right? For example,
on Curve, there is a stable pool for ST-Link that is traded against Link. There's around
$5 million there. So you can also always swap back on secondary markets but um yeah like natively i
guess in our protocols and you can always redeem it back um and i don't see how a bank can exist
when again one st link is always equal to one link and well probably more than one link with the yield reflected.
Okay, I think I fully understand that.
How does stake.link make money?
What's your revenue model?
Yeah, so this kinda goes back to the first question
that you had here that I didn't have a chance to respond.
I think that in like the web two world, I guess, like the traditional finance, usually a company that is like a startup, they are basically reinvesting the money that they have into the startup itself.
Right.
But in Web3, we are kind of used to distributing the rewards to the stakeholders.
So the SDL, which is the governance token that we have,
once you stake it, you get a portion of the protocol's fees.
So we are distributing a lot of money that if it was in the traditional world,
it would be capital that we could use to finance and expand
but we are in web 3 and sdl stakers are eating good and link stakers that use our protocol are
eating good as well so this is where we it's kind of the trade-off that you have to take into account
kind of the trade-off that you have to take into account.
I understand. Well, I understand that. That's all very clear. And I think in a decentralized
protocol, some decentralized protocols are designed to give 100% of it back. And it's almost
a charity platform. That's generally not the case, right? Teams allocate themselves potentially
tokens, even if 100% of the revenue goes out there, teams will allocate themselves tokens and then sell off into the liquidity pool in order to actually recognize value for themselves. But is that really the structure? Or does a portion of the revenue come to the team so that you guys have operational capital to continue to build and maintain the platform?
that you guys have operational capital to continue to build and maintain the platform?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So we have different fees, allocations.
We have this thing called core contributors fee.
There's a parent company called Linkpool,
that they are the ones who are the main core contributors right now.
contributors right now they are the ones who are pushing developments technically and they have a
They are the ones who are pushing developments technically.
three percent fee on the node operator pool in the community pool so yeah they earn their cut
of the protocol in stlink or in any other lst that we have and this is how they are getting
their cotton funded but we are at this phase kind of bootstrap by them.
They assist us in like,
mainly like capital and connections
to form new LSTs and new projects.
But it's a good question.
I think we're like fully sustainable
because we don't rely on our governance token
to fund our project
so what does that what does that look like i mean as far as how the it's super important that the
team gets paid and i don't mean just the individuals but you know the protocol itself
needs funded um as i started off by saying money's required to build it's required to maintain it's
required to operate it's required to have a team so explain to me what that actually looks like you know how on a month on a monthly basis what kind
of revenue does or fees are going to to the team or the protocol in order to you know provide you
the runway that you need in order to continue to operate where's that coming from um so i can say that um we've minted
sdl uh when you stake sdl you receive re-sdl which is an nft that gives you a portion of the
protocol fees so the dow minted a bunch of them and there we are earning like a thousand or something link a year that we can use as, I guess, like we use it for incentives or for anything that we'd like to advance.
Yeah, it's an indirect way to get a split of the protocol revenue.
Okay, got it.
But this is like a DAO initiative.
So it's, again, currently you have the core contributors that are from Linkpool.
Linkpool is a separate company and they have their own business as well, which is fully, I believe, sustainable.
So as for the protocol itself, the DAO itself, it's running, you know, like, of course that we would like to raise capital so we can expand faster and better stronger but
yeah we we don't have like vc backed uh like we're not backed by like big vcs we had a raise of
a quarter million two years ago and yeah that's well your 10 minutes in the hot your 10 minutes in the hot seat is up. Again, did it go by fast?
Definitely.
It always does.
You survived too.
Absolutely no reason to kill you guys.
You're up and running.
Congratulations.
Another great quality guest in the hot seat.
I love what you're doing.
I'm actually extremely
bullish on um on staking and restaking um i think that it makes a lot of sense i grew up in this
world where we just basically bought tokens and stuck them under our beds and hoped that they
were worth more when we pulled them out and when defi came i said this makes sense now we can earn
yield on these things. This
is great. And then there was all sorts of issues. It was complicated. It was expensive. Staking
contracts were getting locked up. It was brutal. Smart contract risk is real, guys. And if you
haven't been involved in any type of smart contract issues yourself, you might not recognize this, but you will always, always pay in risk for the reward that you get.
And I think it's always very important. If you guys are out there and you are saying,
oh, I can earn X, Y, Z. You have to ask yourself, where does the yield come from? Number one,
most important question, where is that yield coming from number two what risks am i taking on in order to
get paid this yield and it really is that simple if you can fully understand both of those then
you can make an educated decision here you can compound your staking you can get additional
rewards you can earn more money the risk that you take on is essentially the smart contract risk. And by the way, there's
also a potential risk of this platform no longer being supported because they don't have the
operational capital to continue. That is a risk. May sound far-fetched. Smart contracts can exist.
But if front ends disappear, things get complicated. If teams disappear, things get complicated.
It doesn't sound like that's the case here to me. The backing that you have from both the parent company and the direct ties with
the Chainlink team and what you guys have integrated, phenomenal. You guys have done a
great job in coming to market. You already have a good user base, it sounds like. You have TBL,
the system's working. You have some multiple sources of revenue to keep the team operating.
Although it sounds like you need more,
we always need more.
We need more capital.
Your capital raise will be difficult, I'm sure.
All capital raises are,
even the successful ones are hard.
But I would say, I love the concept.
I think it makes a lot of sense.
Almost every ecosystem that has native staking like this
could use restaking.
And one of the biggest issues with staking is the lockup periods and the fact that you aren't liquid.
And that's what prevents people from wanting to stake. And so creatively having liquid restaking sounds super complicated.
It's actually not as complicated as it sounds, guys. But it essentially allows you to earn those staking rewards while
staying liquid. And that's a huge benefit because one of the biggest risks you take on a lot of
times to stake is the fact that your tokens are locked up. So it's a great value proposition.
Most of the time you would think if you're more liquid, you're going to earn less. That's the
case with a lot of staking protocols. The fact that you can potentially earn more and be liquid is a huge benefit. And that's why you're finding
success. So good use case, plenty of chain link holders out there. This is maybe a side note,
but I think chain link is one of the best protocols that the crypto space has ever seen.
It's one of the most important ones. And I think it's not
going anywhere because of all of the integrations and the need for oracles in this space. However,
I'm kind of a link bear from a token perspective. It seems to me like Chainlink has really focused
more around becoming a company in this space that provides necessary infrastructure
and has really not made it a priority or focus to return value back to the Chainlink token.
But that doesn't mean that there's not a lot of linked token holders out there.
Doesn't mean that they don't want to earn yield. Doesn't mean that there's still not a lot of
people that believe in Chainlink and feel like if they own the link token, that they don't want to earn yield. It doesn't mean that there's still not a lot of people that believe in Chainlink and feel like if they own the link token,
that they will benefit from Chainlink's growth.
And so I think the platform can be incredibly successful.
That's my own personal take, not financial advice,
but thank you for being here.
I appreciate you representing the project and the platform.
I think it's very cool.
You guys have done a lot.
You have a lot to be proud of.
Bullish on the future. Incredible. What's up?
Thank you for the invite. All right. I'm ready to go. We're up on that one.
All right. Cool. Cool. You were raising your hand early to be next in the hot seat. I love it.
See, if I start dropping the kill switch on people early, then everybody gets real quiet.
It's like you move to the back of the room. I call on you. You're hiding under your desk. But no, when people are surviving,
there's lots of hands up to step next in the hot seat. So Credible, you are up.
Your one minute starts now. Go. All right. We're Credible. Protected crowdfunding on Sui. So we're
founders raised with confidence and investors protect with easy exits they're
protected this keeps capital moving so you know the problem in the market right now is overall
we've all been talking about it on here it's a player versus player casino you're down negative
85 to 95 percent and on the opposite end of the spectrum you've got liquidity locked in these
pre-seed rounds that is never going to come out because the team ghosted or just, you know, vaporware, whatever
the case may be. So we're working on this with Credible. How we're doing that is protected
capital. You make a vested interest in a team in this pod of capital, but it's reserved. So it
streams to the team over time. You've got an exit. You can exit at any time with reasonable fees.
Move that capital to execution to other teams that are performing and actually executing.
So that's what we're working on overall.
We're in our early pre-seed round, raising $400K, looking at a $5.5 million valuation.
And we're ready to work here and change up the industry.
I think you were actually at the end of your one minute.
Yeah.
Right when I blew the bell.
So you must have practiced this to be exactly on point, man.
I appreciate that.
Thank you for the prep.
So basically a launchpad, just a new take on a launchpad, right?
Yeah, we're not saying it's a launchpad.
We're saying that it's a new way to invest in Web3, right? Because we're targeting both crowdfunding platforms and this VC network of investments, right? So we're targeting pre-seed early rounds of investment.
Why SWE?
So SUE, you know, the interesting thing about SUE is they have some good growth.
So right now.
Hold on. Can we stop for one sec?
Yeah.
Is it SUE or SUE?
You know, I got to know.
I always say SUE.
So, yeah, it just depends on guess who you're talking to.
Robert can chime in if he's got a more direct opinion.
But right now on SUE, they've got about 2.5 billion TVL, and they're looking to ramp up to 5 billion and 26 is a forecast.
So there's automatic traction right there with what we're doing.
Now, we believe Credible actually is not just on SUI, right?
We believe that this product is something that actually will reach retail in the end.
That's our long-term vision, but you've got to start somewhere.
So we're definitely not looking at specific chains,
but creating a product you can invest in no matter where you are.
So that's a goal.
Okay.
Well, look, I've been involved, been partnered with them, worked with them,
seen an insane amount of platforms that have come through that are launch pads
or platforms that are
intended to connect capital. Going back to what we just talked about in the beginning,
raising capital is hard, right? And essentially, you're a capital raised platform. And so what
your mission is, is to connect people with capital to those who need it and to make it a win-win for
both. Great mission. I would say marketplaces in general that have two
sides where you need to have the demand and you need to have the supply in your case the supply
is quality projects to invest in the demand is on the investor side and who's willing to provide the
capital and both those have to scale at the same time if you have some great projects that are
launching and you have no investors then the the project starts saying, well, we can bring my great project here, but, you know,
Credible can't give us the capital. So they suck. And you have the exact same thing on the other
side where go find some great VCs and people who are ready to throw capital at it. It's like,
the quality of the project suck. I don't want to invest in any of these. It's very hard.
Either side of those is hard. Just finding good capital is
difficult. Just finding quality projects who are going to use your platform compared to the other
hundreds that are out there that they can potentially raise through is hard. What's the
plan in order to be able to scale both of those simultaneously at the same time? Why do you think
you can be successful doing that? Yeah, so what we're doing is we're being reasonable with the process, right? We know that in the first year, we're only going to launch
30 to 50 projects, right? And so we're actually curating those batches right now. So in the,
in the beginning, we're going to do a lot of whole handholding with the projects that are curated.
And we're also going to leverage, you know, our partnerships we've established throughout the years on the VC network side.
So just kind of open up the platform. Right. So and we think that once there's momentum and we can show there's momentum, it'll be a game changer.
And the difference what's different about Credible than anything else you've ever seen before is our atomic principle exit.
ever seen before is our atomic principle exit, right? You can exit the investment
during the vesting cycle. That's a key killer feature that no one has right now.
And we've heard a lot of people talk about the pain they're experiencing
with making that pre-seed entry and not being able to exit and then see the TGE happen and
their values locked while the value goes negative 85, 95%. So this is a market
differentiator here. Sounds a little bit like what we just talked about. You have the ability
to take the upside and also remain liquid. Correct. Yeah. That would be a big differentiator.
It's why most people, including myself, aren't investing in private sales right now. And pre-seed
is because of the lockup and it doesn't become liquid and
then you get to watch it evaporate and there's nothing you can do about it anymore, right?
Yeah. And we feel really good that this mechanism isn't just for that initial investment,
that we'll be able to attract that DGEN and that Web3 native crowd to create these momentum
shifting structures, right? Where they see teams gaining traction, their communities growing,
right? And that liquidity in the system may move to, will move to top performing teams over time,
showing that the system itself is designed not to pick winners, but let the investors pick them.
You know, to build what you're trying to build is is going to be hard and i guess what i want
to hear from you is how are you guys positioned with who's on the team and what relationships
you already have to find 30 to 50 quality projects on suey in your first year and also
be able to bring on investors that are ready to throw capital at that? I mean,
that's the big challenge here, right? So how are you already positioned to do that today?
So we're positioned in this way. So we're all veterans, a team's full of veterans in the Web3
space. We've built on multiple blockchains, Near Protocol, Cosmos, Polygon, right? So we have relationships across this network here.
We're presently being incubated by native on SUI, and we're leveraging that as our main point to
kind of our launch pad, if you will, no pun intended to jump off from, because they've got
a deep network. They're already integrated well with SUI. They've got lots of partnerships.
We've already got three LIs from three really killer projects. We've got lots of partnerships. We've already got three LIs from
three really killer projects. We've got the largest DEXs on board, right? So it's all about
that momentum. And so we've got the momentum. We're going to raise this pre-seed round.
You know, if the VCs are looking at what we're doing and they really like it, we raise this
pre-seed. Then we talk about next to network,
right? And see how they can help. Let's talk about the funding. We talked about this earlier.
It takes funding. You said you're going to raise 400 grand. Where's your 400 grand going to come
from? Yeah, that's VC raise. Are you guys already positioned to do that? Do you have any commits
yet? Where's the fundraising process on your side right now? So actually, we're just going to start fundraising next week.
So that's the position we're in. So we're very early. No checks written yet.
So that'll kick off next week.
What's the plan for timing as far as actual launch?
Launch is end of Q2.
OK, so about mid-year. And is that 30 to 50 projects in first year or by end of 2026?
That's first year, yeah, from launch.
Okay, so about one, roughly one project, maybe three a month, something like that is what you guys are planning.
Yeah, we've got a pipeline of 20 already that we're working to close LIs with, and most of them are very credible.
So, you know, that's the good news on that front.
So the projects, as you know,
isn't going to be the challenge and finding good projects because we've got a
good network, but we really do want to work hard.
And like I've even mentioned to you prior,
we got to work on that funding network, the whales, the DGENs, right?
And the Vs.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
Yep.
A hundred percent.
Where are you guys at on the development side with respect to actually having the platform
and the back-end, front-end, smart contracts
and full system in place to support this?
So the system's already developed.
It's online on SUI TestNet.
So we've shipped our third version of the contract there.
The UI is already up.
You can test it in the alpha today.
We'll be adding our atomic principle exit, the APE feature for the DGENs and those that are more focused on liquidity movement.
We'll be adding that next into the system.
I just realized the APE acronym.
Incredible.
Incredible marketing. I love realized the APE acronym, incredible, incredible marketing.
I love that APE, atomic principle. The atomic principle exit. I do love that.
Look, your time in the hot seat's almost done, but I've got one more question for you. And that
is 400,000 sounds like a lot of money to individuals.
But when you lead a business or you lead a project, 400K evaporates in a heartbeat between the initial liquidity, you know, whether it be marketing, the team expenses, development, audits, the list goes on and on and on.
So why 400,000?
$400,000? Why not more? If you have the VC connections and you have the ability to raise
Why not more?
on projects behalf, you have to believe in yourself enough that I would think that the
actual platform supporting this would need more money in order to be doing the effective marketing
and real operations to get this thing done. So why $400,000?
Yeah, this is just a first round, right? We do understand the market conditions and we don't want to come out and jump out of the gate with big numbers.
We feel like the valuation at 5.5 million pre-cash is good, right?
I mean, there are projects raising, going to be raising up more than that.
So we just want to get off the platform and execute and then look at future rounds as we gain traction.
We didn't talk about that, but the system has fees on capital execution.
So the way we really make money long term, year three, looking at that three million that Sheldon was putting up,
is that on every capital hop, we have a transaction fee.
We have exit fees and reasonable fees, but it takes time to get that momentum.
Love the answer. I really do. Some investors, some people seeking investment are very greedy
and they have their absolute head buried in the sand as far as what the actual market conditions
will bear. I always recommend when teams are raising, raise as little as you possibly can, not as much as you possibly can. When you're raising, raising money is hard. We've just been talking about it all show
here. Raising money is hard. So, you know, setting a reasonable target is a good baseline. But also
when you go to investors and you're raising something that is reasonable with a real plan
of how to use it and you can execute unlimited capital. It shows you can be efficient with money too. And investors are generally more keen towards that. Investing
at reasonable valuations instead of the $200 million valuations with a pitch deck.
You guys are obviously beyond pitch deck, but not that far. You're still in test net, yes,
but you haven't had clients. You don't have revenue. The platform isn't fully live.
You know, you haven't been able to have a proven model for investors yet. And a $5 million valuation
for a platform that could be as potentially lucrative as something like this could be
is reasonable. You're starting to take some of the risk off the table, going back to what we said at
the beginning. And so you are another survivor, my friend. Congratulations.
We have not killed anybody today. Everyone is surviving. I can tell you that's not necessarily
common. I'm pretty confident that I have dropped the kill switch every week for the last month or
two. And so far we are batting a hundred percent. What I would tell you, and I always like to give
just one or two minutes of
my thoughts after I get a chance to put some people in the hot seat, is the challenge of
scaling both is something that is so difficult, it's hard to comprehend. Because just the investor
network side is essentially a project in and of itself. And then you have just the project side, which is, again, a venture in and of itself.
And when you combine those two,
it becomes exponentially more difficult and risky.
And the issue with these systems, marketplaces are,
they can be some of the most valuable platforms in the world.
And we've seen it time and time again.
The issue is that it's not even just about being successful with both.
First of all, you have to be successful on both sides. But the real challenge is you have to be successful on both sides simultaneously and they have to grow together.
And so if projects scale and the investor side doesn't at the same rate, you have issues. If the investor side scales and the project side doesn't scale at the same rate, you have issues. And so there's massive executional risk here. From an idea standpoint and where you are today, I'd say there's no reason why you can't raise money. There's no reason why a platform like this can't be successful. And so there's no reason to drop the kill switch at this point. It's just too early. But there is an absurd amount of executional risk here about whether you
can actually scale both of those at the same time. And so from an investor standpoint, going back to
why investors say no, I would say the biggest thing is executional risk. And if I was to make
an investment here, I'd be really diving into what those relationships look like and what the experience of the team is because it's the people
that are ultimately going to execute. And I see most of the risk here, not in the idea,
not in the smart contracts. It's actually a relatively simple concept. It's mostly in all
of the executional risk, whether the team has the goods to go get it done. And so you guys survived.
I wish you guys the best of luck.
I think Assure DeFi could be a great partner for you guys on the security side, particularly,
and the trust in helping the platform maintain high credibility and make sure you don't have any fraud issues coming through.
So I'd love to talk to you about that.
I know you're in test net right now.
We'd love to throw our hat in the ring to be a security partner broadly for you all
as you move forward with the development, too. And we'd love to help with that in the ring to be a security partner broadly for you all as you move forward with the development too.
And we'd love to help with that growth path.
So congrats on surviving.
Thanks for being here.
Appreciate you.
Very nice to talk to you.
And just like everybody building cool stuff, I wish you the best of luck.
I, I am here to support you.
Our business is here to support you.
And we need credible platforms like you guys out there that give people a way to connect them with the capital and also stay liquid.
I'll be a user once you're up there.
Joel, what's happening?
Hey, good morning.
How are you?
Can you hear me?
It's not morning over here. Can you hear me? Yep.
It's not morning over here.
It's almost beer 30 where I'm at.
But if it's morning over where you're at, good morning.
I hope you have a coffee and you're ready to rock.
Thanks.
It's 4 a.m. for me.
I'm in Seoul, South Korea.
Yep, ready to go.
Okay, cool.
Well, I know you joined us a little bit late, but you've heard the format. You get one minute to tell us what you got cooking, and then I'll put you in the hot seat for 10 minutes.
Are you ready to go? Sure. Sounds good. All right. Your one minute starts now. Joel, go ahead.
Great. So I am Joel, CEO of HIO, HIO.FUN. We are a network of AI streaming agents.
We run an AI music streaming platform.
We have a music agent currently right now that's generating a thousand songs per day
and it's doing it autonomously by taking the data from other places in the platform,
what people are searching for, listening to, what they like, what they don't like, things
like that. It's then taking that information,
taking that data, and generating full-length tracks. Each of our agents work together. So
next to the music agent is the playlist agent, and that's the agent that people are going to
put in their prompts, their text prompts, any genre, any style, any feel of music,
and the agent spits out an hour-long playlist for you.
And similar to YouTube, if people like, comment, share, subscribe on the content that you're
creating, that counts as engagement, and then you get rewarded our token.
We also have a live agent that operates as sort of a live streaming agent based on, oh,
that was fast.
It does go quick. always does man you know and as a founder i could talk about what we do at assure d5 for hours so it would be tough to pack
it in one minute but your 10 minutes in the hot seat starts now sure so first question sounds
really cool the future is here brothers brothers and sisters the future is here agents are making
music agents are picking what we're listening to The agents are telling us what agentic music we should be listening to. The future is definitely here. So very cool. Very high tech. I love it.
Talk to me a little bit about the revenue model. I heard rewards. Rewards are great, but you got to have revenue to support it. How do you make money?
I heard rewards. Rewards are great, but you got to have revenue to support it. How do you make money?
Right. So we do have our token, but the token is not the business model itself.
What we have are creator tools, subscriptions, and then B2B integrations as well.
So on that top layer, that top B2C layer, users can then pay to upgrade their features. So they'll get more playlist creator
power as they use those sharing functions, things like that as well. And then at the base of what
we're doing, you know, we're creating the music. So we have the IP to date. We have over 300,000
songs that are live on the platform. So then now we are going to go and take those IP and then make some B2B deals. So whether it's a movie, drama, TV, commercials, gaming, metaverse, whatever it is, all these platforms need music.
of the music that's making that music,
you are co-creator with us.
And then you are also paying,
you're also getting a share in the revenue as well.
So the goal of the platform is to turn music into an actual asset and share
in the words with everyone.
That was the goal.
How long has this been live, Joel?
So we went live last year, April.
So we are coming up in a few months here on a one-year anniversary. So far, we have over...
Congrats on still being here and still building. Thank you very much.
As I say a lot, that's success in and of itself. And having some grit and determination as a
builder, regardless of the market and what's happening, is extremely important for success.
How many monthly users do you guys have right now?
Active listeners, users, that sort of thing.
So to date, we have over 500,000 connected users on the platform.
I mentioned over 300,000 tracks have been created.
Playlists, over 65,000 because they're also able to-
Hold on real quick.
So I understand.
I heard agents were making all the music.
You've got 500,000.
Are these agents 500,000 or are these 500,000 humans?
So 500,000 users, connected users in the platform itself.
The agent that's making the music is our music agent.
But that music agent is in the background making music as well autonomously.
How are most users using this platform?
They must not be actually making the music.
500,000 users, 300,000 songs.
So it's not like a Suno type of use case then.
It sounds more like people are using it
for something different.
Is it for the playlist generation
and they're listening to what the agents are creating?
Exactly, so the users are making the playlist themselves.
In our next sort of version two that's to be dropping in a couple of weeks now, we are allowing users to make songs individually.
And then they're also going to be able to take that music.
And it's tradable in that sense.
So we've created an INFT that we've embedded our music agent into the INFft that allows the user to download so now they're
able it's like having a music in a box you're able to download it's programmable it's tradable
and then you can as that music agent is making songs for you your ip your catalog grows and then
as those b2b deals are happening on the platform as well the value grows and you can choose to
keep the rewards every month or you can trade the entire catalog itself.
Are all of those users free users to the platform
or is this a freemium model and you have both free and paid?
Great question.
It's a freemium model,
so it's completely free to listen and stream on the platform itself.
But the platform, what it does,
it takes users from just casual listeners
to creators all in one go. So as soon as you create that playlist, you get automatically
created your own channel. And then the engagement on that channel goes towards your rewards
that you're making. Yeah. So are users paying to use the platform right now?
So we do.
We just developed that sort of that creator model.
We're going to go ahead and release the second version before we really start marketing that first version.
That paid feature that will give you more features.
Right now, if you want to get those extra features, users can use our token to go ahead and do those things. But we'll do the big push for the
upgradable features, you know, starting, you know, this month and next month.
There's, I mean, there's nothing wrong with this necessarily, this business model, but, you know,
acquiring free users is one thing. Acquiring paid users is a completely different animal.
And right now it sounds like your users are essentially free users.
You've been in user acquisition mode versus trying to monetize the users yet.
Is that accurate?
Absolutely.
The goal of 2025 was to sort of make sure, you know, this works.
make sure this works and this idea of taking users from creation to monetization and try to
create a whole loop of the system. That was the goal that we're trying to prove last year.
I think with our numbers and onboarding all of these users, I think we're able to prove that it
is something that's very useful and fun at the same time. And then, like you said, now the goal is monetization.
Okay.
And as far as that monetization,
like right now, the only thing that people have paid for,
it sounds like, is just with tokens for some of the features that were available in the V1 model
and they were able to pay with tokens.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
Yep.
So do you have any numbers on in 2025? and they were able to pay with tokens. Is that correct? That's correct. Yep.
So do you have any numbers on in 2025,
how many, like what the fees were in tokens or in like kind of a US dollar equivalent?
How many people were willing to spend tokens
to do things in the platform?
For that feature,
we launched that at the end of last year.
So to be honest, maybe only a couple thousand,
I want to say two to 3,000 came in for that feature.
What makes you bullish
that people are really going to pay for it?
You know, like, I guess this is where I'm always at.
First of all, congrats.
Again, I have a lot of respect for all founders
and most people struggle to get to their thousand users,
let alone 500,000.
And once you get to a user base,
it's a whole lot easier to monetize an existing user base than it is to build one. I'm going to
tell you. So I give you a lot of credit and it's a great model if you can afford to basically go in
cash burn mode while you grow a user base. But now is where the rubber meets the road.
And it's whether you're going to be able to monetize the user base you have. What gives you the confidence that people will be willing to pay for it rather than it just being cool, fun, free, great.
But the minute you want to charge them a buck, they say, I'm not paying shit for this.
Well, we did a very quiet release to sort of test out the feature at the end of last year.
the feature at the end of last year. I have strong belief that with the data that we get with the
people, the type of people that are using the platform, it's not just only for the casual
listeners as well. There's a big need case for creators who are not only trying to create and
become creators on our platform, but they're already creating on other platforms like YouTube, like Instagram, et cetera.
The problem for a lot of those creators is that they are demonetized because any content
they upload, all of that copyrighted music that they're using, any revenue goes to the
original copyright holder.
But now with the AI music, not only are they creators in our platform, they can also now
monetize the platforms that they're already on. So when I look at the data that we've collected
from the 500,000 users or so in six months is pretty big. When I look at platforms like Suno,
for example, and I just look at the traction and the numbers that similar platforms are getting
that are just simple AI tools, we're trying to offer a full suite to those,
those users and the numbers and the attractions there are still,
still very strong.
So I'm very confident that we can just monetize users that we have on our
platform.
The only goal is to do it the right way.
I've gotten bell.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Well,
you look,
your 10 minutes is up,
but I do have one more follow-up question for you.
I'm going to,
what's nice about being the host is that I get to extend a bell anytime I want.
And I have one important question that I want to understand just about your business model before I end.
Sure. Is the goal and the way you envision the business in order to monetize your existing user base and have subscription fees, you know, features that they will pay for?
subscription fees, features that they will pay for? Or do you think that the bigger play
is in that B2B, we're going to have a Gentic music creation and we're going to sell the hell
out of it because now we own the IP for millions and millions of tracks that we're producing every
day. And that's where the real money is for you. How do you see that split with the focus of your
time moving forward and the team's effort with where the real money is?
The real money is in the B2B.
The top layer sort of B2C model was very useful last year because it allowed us to onboard a lot of users.
I'm going to cut you off because I just wanted the simple answer.
Because if that was the answer, then my next follow-up question that I have for you is, why are you positioned as a team in order to sell music B2B?
Do you guys have the experience and the relationships and network to be in that game?
Yes.
Right now, currently, we have a team of 12.
Our CTO and a couple of our members worked together on the similar music platforms in the past.
And with a slightly different business model, the type of B2B deals and connections that
they are made in Asia and elsewhere, from streaming deals, large companies, TV licensings
as well.
A lot of different plays for the AI music.
Okay.
So we do have a lot of... Let me give you one more follow-up then,
and then I promise this is my last one for you.
My last question for you is,
it sounds like you have 300,000 songs already in the database.
Yes.
How much money have you made on b2b deals from
those 300 000 songs i haven't made any b2b deals yet um all i've been doing is i've been going
around doing a lot of networking and i've collected all of the people we're interested in
um as well as some new streaming platforms as well that need the music
um i think i'll start tackling that in a few months.
Within the next couple of months to make those deals happen.
Okay.
Well, your time in the hot seat's over.
Thank you for being here.
Even if you showed up late, minus 10 points.
I'm sorry.
My apologies.
But that's okay. Given that it's four in the morning, I'm going to give you 10 points back.
So it was a wash.
You've survived too, Joel.
Yeah, you've survived too.
We are batting 100% today.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, guys.
I don't like dropping the kill switch.
I love talking to people who I think can genuinely be successful and that have the goods.
And what I would say is I love AI music.
Some people hate it.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm not a real artist and I'm not turned off by it.
I just think it's incredible and I'm very AI forward myself.
So I'm sure some of you have seen it.
Some of the 50 Cent many men retakes that are like country versions and soul jazz versions and stuff like that.
I just think they're awesome.
And so I'm a listener of AI music myself.
I've used Suna.
I've created some of my own AI music.
I've created some stuff for my wife, my mother, just my friends that's funny.
I think it's awesome. And it makes all of us create. I think what AI has empowered for me is I'm typically not the most creative person in the world. I'm very left brained. And so music, art, a lot is very right brained. And my AI companion can be very right brained for me. And so I'm very bullish on the future of AI music. I think that AI art, AI music, that sort of thing is it's here to stay.
I think it's awesome.
And it makes all of us create.
It's not going anywhere.
And there's going to be a value placed on human created things.
But a lot of humans aren't capable of creating music.
And just like humans weren't capable of writing code, humans don't play instruments.
code. Humans don't play instruments. They don't have good voices, but they still want to create
They don't have good voices, but they still want to create music.
music. And I think it opens up the entire world to being music creators, which is really cool
and powerful. And when people realize the type of quality that they can create themselves,
that's in their own style and their own version, a whole new world is unlocked for them. And I
think there's a huge growth path ahead. I would say I've worked with actually, I think probably 10 or 20 projects
in the last four years that have been focused in the AI music space. So I know it pretty well
at this point. And I love what you're doing. I love the approach, Joel. I like the focus on
user growth. As I said, the user growth piece is the hardest. If you can't get
that, no matter whether you can cure cancer, if you can't get it in front of people, you're dead
in the water. You have 500,000 users, huge reason to celebrate, huge accomplishment, first of all.
Just like our last guest, I'd say you have a lot of executional risk. There are very successful
apps that have had tons of users
that end up being free and they struggle to monetize them. You may find that's the case.
There's a lot of people out there with great music who struggle to sell it. It's a weird industry.
It's a very relationship-based industry. You haven't told me anything here that says that you can't do it, but you also
haven't really proven to me that you can. And you haven't proven to yourself yet, even with a
repertoire of 300,000 songs that you can even sell one. So I would say there's a big executional
risk of whether that business to business model is ever going to come to fruition. And there's a massive risk for you all in
competition too. It's easier than it ever has been to create music, which means a lot of the people
that used to buy music are going to create it themselves or insource it. And I think that
business to business model, if that's really the play that you're going after, I would challenge
you. If I was your advisor, I would challenge you on that and really
think through, is that the model long-term that people are going to keep buying music? And is it
worth the amount that they're willing to pay for music is going to go down and down as the supply
of music and availability to insourcing becomes pretty readily available. I think the cost of
music is going to go down. And so selling a business to business is a tough
venture. I'm more bullish the fact that you have 500,000 users and you should be able to monetize
them. Not many people have that. That's your moat, in my opinion. The B2B side isn't a moat.
You having 300,000 songs is not a moat. I could spin up swarms of agents and probably develop
300,000 songs in the next month. And these studios and
the people who are buying it probably will too. And they'll have sophisticated experts to come
in and do it. If it's something, if they're the real buyers of music, that's a real cost for them
and it's going to become cheaper for them to do it themselves. So I would say there's some
challenge there for your business model. However, you already have a platform. It's cool as hell.
I love it. I think agentic music is awesome. You
have 500,000 users, tons to be proud of. Your head's screwed on straight. It sounds like you
have a capable team with some experience. No reason why you guys can't be successful. And
just like a lot of businesses in the early stage, you're not really sure what path is going to lead
to your success, but I feel confident that you guys will figure it out. You'll find it given
how far you've come and the user base you have.
So all I'd say is I wish you guys the best of luck, man.
Regardless of what path you choose, I hope you find success.
I think it's a very fun industry to be in.
I appreciate you being here.
And I'm sure DeFi and myself, I would love to support you in any way we can.
So we can connect offline and we can talk about what challenges you guys have that we may be able to help with if there are any.
But, man, great talking to you.
And thank you for showing up even if it was a little bit tardy.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for the opportunity.
And, yes, love to speak to you more offline and continue building the relationship.
Sounds good, Joel.
Cellframe, you have been insanely patient. Thank you. Last but certainly not least, thank you cell frame you have been insanely patient thank you last but certainly
not least thank you for waiting thank you it's always hard it's always hard to sit there for an
hour and wait through all these luckily you haven't had a whole bunch of people get you know
the kill switch so we've set you up for success and hopefully we can actually bat 100
but it's all up to you your one minute starts now are you ready to rock i'm ready to rock
let's do it your one minute starts immediately go cell frame is not a web3 business cell frame
is a web3 infrastructure why do we need a new Web3 infrastructure?
Ethereum is lacking.
Ethereum is complex.
It's quantum vulnerable.
It's not built with simplicity and a vision.
True Internet Web3 infrastructure should be built with simplicity and vision.
And we have a visionary founder, Dmitry Gurasimov, who looked around in 2017 and said, we need a quantum, infinitely scalable, quantum resistant network, layer zero with bespoke blockchains for anyone who wants to build a P2P business.
And Cellframe is the only infrastructure out there that is worthy of being called that, of being called infrastructure.
And people, when the quantum apocalypse hits people will come
flooding to us people are already coming to us because of a variety of interesting innovations
that we have we we have smart contractless dApps so you talked about smart contract risk we're
limiting that we've got we've perfected scaling and we are quantum ready, already mainnet since a year and a half ago.
Okay, well, heck of an introduction.
A lot of technical jargon probably for people who aren't deep in the weeds like I am.
But I know what CellFrame is all about.
It's a pleasure to have you guys here.
I've known about CellFrame for some time now, actually.
And I do think it's important infrastructure, personally.
So I'll start out by saying that.
But this whole quantum risk is interesting.
It's undefined, right?
We think it's a risk.
It's almost a theoretical risk.
In theory, if we are able to get to quantum computing, we've got a problem.
The question is, are we going to get to a point where there's actual scalable enough quantum computing that it's a real risk?
It's at least not here today. I think we can all. Would you agree with that?
You have to you have to realize that when we say quantum risk, it's not just about how soon can we scale quantum computers, which just as an aside, all the experts are basically saying within five years, it's pretty much going to happen.
However, it is here today in the fact that certain, for example, certain Bitcoin addresses have such vulnerabilities that they can be cracked with a long enough time effort with a large enough conventional computer. So conventional cryptography as it exists today is already
vulnerable today. If you're trying hard enough, I don't know if you guys remember, there was some
Bitcoin, old Bitcoin wallets that had money moving around a couple months ago, and many were
speculating that a large enough
motivated person with a supercomputer
could have cracked those walls
because of vulnerabilities
and in the way that they were constructed.
So the quantum is here.
We are already migrating,
and all blockchains that were built
on the old elliptical curve cryptography are fucked.
It's 100% true.
Does this have the ability to, like, okay, I'm a Bitcoin holder.
Can I move my Bitcoin to CellFrame and now it's quantum resistant?
Or is that not really the way it works?
Like, existing tokens can't move to quantum resistance.
And so, you know, there's no real porting something over to being quantum resistant.
It has to be you should build it on cell frame from day one.
You're exactly right. There is no porting. There's only migrating.
So if you have any, if you have Ethereum, if you have Bitcoin,
whenever those two protocols decide that they're going to do a quantum upgrade,
you're going to have to migrate those into a new quantum resistant wallet basically swap them one for one for a quantum resistant
version there's no other way around it because they're the the private keys which are which
hold everything together are not going to be private anymore so you have to swap that key
for a new key and that requires uh but yeah a migration and not a port. So from a security standpoint, talk to me a little
bit about, you know, cell frame as a whole. I guess, you know, look, I'm relatively technical,
maybe more so than a lot of listeners here, but I won't claim that I'm the most technical person
on earth. The way I see it is you have the key itself.
You know, if we would have made Bitcoin keys a whole hell of a lot longer, maybe they would
be closer to quantum resistant.
If you made them 14,000 digits long or something like that, they'd be more quantum resistant,
I assume.
So there's one piece there.
And then there's also the network itself.
You know, Bitcoin miners are essentially securing the network.
Is it the same structure for CellFrame?
What makes it quantum resistant?
It's a fairly useful shorthand to think about longer keys.
There's different types of cryptography that we're integrating.
That cryptography is being developed by cryptographers and tested and judged by international bodies such
as the nist so we integrate the industry-leading quantum resistant cryptographic types and you're
right that if bitcoin had started out with a much much longer uh private key it would have been more quantum resistant. But at this point, we're working
in a post-quantum slash quantum resistant world, whereas everyone else is still just thinking about
it. So there's the key side, right? So the key side can't be cracked or quantum resistance,
but then there's also the actual chain side. And that's why Bitcoin is so secure is because
you have to have 51% control of a network, which is now all but impossible to get 51 control of what's the network side on the cell frame am i not
thinking about that correctly is there also that piece of the security which cell frame needs to
build up to get to a point where it truly is as secure as something like bitcoin or ethereum that's correct yeah so
we on that side you know the classic attacks on that we know about on blockchain that we've been
talking about for years those attack you know 51 attacks stuff like that yes that requires network
stability and that's something that that will build as you know as cell frame grows and we
design our architecture to facilitate that as much as
possible. But on that side, that's just as big of a risk, though, right? I mean, when you look
at the risk profile, it's the network or network security risk. And then there's also the key risk.
And if you have one and not the other, it's just like leaving your front door open while the back door is totally locked.
Right. I mean, aren't you even if it's quantum resistant on the key side, if if the network itself is up to a 51 percent attack, aren't you more at risk potentially?
I mean, at this point, we have at this point, we haven't reached complete decentralization.
reached complete decentralization.
We still have mechanisms that are centralized
by the core team that are keeping those kinds of things
at bay.
So as the network grows, then we release those reins.
As decentralization starts to kick in
to prevent that kind of thing,
we release the kind of remaining aspects of centralized control that still exists in the network.
First of all, I love your answer.
Most people say, yes, we're decentralized and they tout this.
But the reality is nothing's decentralized in the beginning.
Decentralization is an ideal.
I say this a lot, at least maybe once every three shows I talk about this, but
decentralization, even Bitcoin isn't as decentralized as we want it. Ethereum isn't
either. And every single altcoin and L1 on planet earth is centralized to some degree. And that's
how all businesses start. It starts with one guy and an idea. It's the ultimate centralization.
And then he hires a couple of founders and and you grow a team and then you get some network
or node runners and you get some miners and it grows and it becomes more decentralized
over time.
The goal is as decentralized as possible.
It's not decentralization.
Decentralization is something that you chase forever.
It can never be as decentralized as you want it because you
want it to be as decentralized as humanly possible. You want every single person on planet
earth and in the universe in order to be running it. That way it's impossible to crack, right?
So I loved your answer there, by the way, and the admission that it is still centralized,
and that's totally okay. That's where I would expect you to be right now.
Maybe just some education preview, though though since i think people say is it centralized or decentralized as if it's something that's a binary type of evaluation and it never is
um what kind of usage do you have right now on the blockchain like you know do you have a lot of daps
tokens volume tvl like give me give me some high level on just how many people are using CellFrame right now.
We're getting there.
We have about five tokens going on.
We have teams that have come on to build KelVPN, decentralized VPN, NodeSys, decentralized factory.
We have a flat coin stable coin project.
And we have QEVM, which is porting,
trying to build work on building easy ways
to transfer Ethereum smart contracts to cell frame network.
And then we have one awesome kind of meme coin
slash utility coin, CPunk,
which are also building a messenger and a lot of cool stuff.
So we've got, you know, which are also building a messenger and a lot of cool stuff. So we've got,
you know,
and then we have a few hundred node operators across the world that are
active.
So I would say,
you know,
we have a,
we have a core community of some thousands and then we have users on
KLBPN who are just using it as a VPN service as well.
So let me ask you the critical question before we wrap, since your time in the
hot seat's almost up. The critical question is really this. You guys have been around for a
while. That's not many projects. There's not this mass momentum that has started that is network
effect of both users and projects who say, why am I building on Ethereum? That's all technology.
I'm going to build on something that's quantum resistant. And people creating new wallets are creating them on creating quantum resistant wallets.
The user side isn't there yet. Projects who are building want to go build where their users are.
So there's this kind of paradox of if I'm a builder, why am I going to build on a network that currently doesn't have substantial users?
How are you going to overcome that?
What's the go-to-market strategy to really get some accelerated adoption and get this true growth of the network happening?
I mean, you're right that we've been around for a while, but we haven't finished.
We've been building.
You know, you talked about fundraising in 2017.
Our founder was, you know you talked about fundraising in 2017 uh our founder was you know we were in russia we didn't have we had a very small raise and we've been building cranking out from scratch 100 unique self-frame code and we're getting this
year to the finish line in terms of building out the core platform you know know, I think Polkadot had 500 million in a war chest when they were launched, and
yet their thing is not worthy of being called infrastructure.
Infrastructure is built by lean teams with a vision and a clear idea of what technical
requirements are needed for that infrastructure to work for a long time.
That's what Cellframe has.
So we're attracting users based on our
technical merit that's going to accelerate right now the quantum narrative is extremely high you
know you see ethereum is scrambling to say oh we've been secretly building um quantum resistance
for years haha do you believe us no like everyone is now preparing for the quantum apocalypse.
So new builders are going to look around and say, do I want to enter this Ethereum shit show, which is has no lasting is like duct tape together, giant complex behemoth. Or do you want to go this clean code from cell frame?
You know, we've partnered with a company called Nonos, which is building an operating system based on Web3 principles that runs on RAM purely from scratch.
Their founder, Italian guy, take a look at our code.
And he's like, yes, this is good Web3 code for my new high tech operating system.
So that is what's bringing people in.
Interesting project.
Very interesting topic always like to take a couple seconds to deliberate and i've been pretty quick with
my decisions here and i'll be honest i'm a little torn blockchains are very difficult to build
similar to marketplaces it's really the user growth and the
network effect that's important. You have to have the builders come. You have to have the users come
at the same time. You have a two-sided equation. You have to have the builders,
have to have the users. Users don't come if nothing's there. Builders don't come if there's
not users to use it. I think your tech is great. I'm going to give you, it sounds like you guys have been
deeply focused on the tech and my gut says that you guys have the goods when it comes to the
actual tech and the tech will be important. I don't know whether that importance of the tech
is going to be today, whether it's two years from now or whether it's 20 years from now frankly and so there's there's
a risk there and how real the quantum computing risk actually is or whether it's kind of just
a media topic right now and the practicality of it won't really come to fruition for decades
you've survived though my friend i'm going to give it to you. We batted 100%, I think, for the first time in two months today. Look, here's the gig. You have a lot of risk, as I said. I think for you guys, I'm most on the fence for you because it is new tech. It's a very big venture. It's huge. It's incredibly difficult to build those two sides.
There's a reason why the actual successful blockchain is like, why did Solana become so successful?
Maybe we can talk about that for two minutes.
I would love to hear an answer from anybody on the panel.
One quick sentence. Why did Solana become successful?
Well, they had a huge hype.
They had a huge war chest and they built
a... They sacrificed decentralization
principles to build something
that was fast and worked now.
And so that's cool.
Great answer. Just stop there.
But you can just stop there.
That was a great answer. I think you
actually nailed most of the key points
of why Solana was successful.
And one of the big ones, I'm sure you heard it, War Chest.
Solana had a pile of cash.
It's insanely expensive.
They incentivized people to grow and build on there, and they incentivized users to come use it.
there and they incentivize users to come use it. And, you know, the sad part of this whole space
is that most people who are actual users, they don't give a shit about decentralization. They
don't even know what it means. What is decentralization? It's like a foreign word.
They don't care. They're like, is it easy to use? Is it fast? Cool. And they don't think about
security until it's really a problem. So I can tell you from somebody who's run a security business for five years,
people don't care about security until it's too late. It's a very difficult thing to sell
upfront. And I think you're going to have a very difficult growth journey here in getting people
to want to operate on a quantum resistant network today when quantum risk is very undefined.
And it's going to be tough.
It's also going to be tough to acquire users in a completely different chain that's not interoperable.
Also very difficult.
And with all of that said, I do see a real risk of quantum computing in the future.
I think you and the team have been at it long enough that you're not going to give up.
I think it is something that you guys can bootstrap for a long time.
And if the quantum resistant risk comes to fruition, you'll see people wanting to look towards a blockchain like that.
I think the biggest challenge that I see is that you don't have a war chest.
There isn't the hype and you can't generate hype without a war chest very easily.
There isn't the hype and you can't generate hype without a war chest very easily.
And so it's going to rely on potentially the timing of the quantum computing both sides like you really need to kick off that
network effect of builders and users both coming to the platform at the same time so i do think
it's possible for you to be successful i think you have a very difficult journey ahead it's going to
be an uphill climb and it's going to take a lot from a trust standpoint of new code for people to
use it and for builders to come. So trust is going to be
paramount for you all. And having an effective go-to-market strategy on the dual prong of both
the user side and also the builder side is really the secret sauce for success. And for your sake,
I hope the quantum computing risk becomes real sooner because you can't wait forever.
That's my two cents.
What you got is a follow-up.
Yeah, I just want to thank you for your insights.
I think they're great and challenging.
I just want to add one more detail.
There's a scenario where right now we're building, you know, with AI driving compute costs.
costs. We're going to be needing distributed computing,
You know, we're going to be needing distributed computing, right?
juggling across
a distributed network. CellFam is built in pure C code
in a way that is extremely efficient, lightweight, and
can recruit the hardware. At a certain point, the builders of these
distributed networks are going to be looking for the most efficient, they're going to be looking to cut
edges on these Web3 enabled distributed networks. And our thing is the lightest, most
efficient, highest performance blockchain, in addition to being quantum secure. I just wanted
to add that in. Well, look, the tech sounds great. I gave it to you on the tech already. So you don't
even have to convince me on the tech in the future use case of how important it's going to be. One more risk for you all is I'll say in
some ways, the same way I feel like how Assure DeFi, you know, look, I'm open about our failures.
And we brought a product to market five years ago for KYC for founders that was intended to,
and we still offer it today
and we still provide this service to many
and I still believe in it wholeheartedly.
It's that founders in this space should be verified.
They should be accountable for what they're building.
100%, full stop.
Why would you want to invest in somebody
that's not accountable and can run away with no recourse?
Makes no sense.
We don't do that in the real world.
We shouldn't do it here if we want to be taken seriously.
And on the same side, you all here today are very credible founders. Amazing panel, maybe one of our best. And the challenge is somebody who is a bad actor
could spin up a project tomorrow and say, we're a quantum resistant blockchain.
And how different do they really
look than you guys right now? It's so hard for the users and investors to figure out what's real and
what is total fugazi in this space. And so from a marketing perspective, it's very nice to have a
service from the founder point of view, which says, look, most trusted name in Web3 says we're fully
verified and responsible. And there's no way that that grifter over there who spun up a website and said, I have
a quantum resistant blockchains about to sign up for legal accountability.
You know, fraudsters won't do it.
So it's a great way to separate yourself from the noise in an extremely crowded, noisy space
filled with scammers and grifters.
And so I wholeheartedly believe in that service that we offer and what we developed with law
enforcement and attorneys. And I believe in that service that we offer and what we developed with law enforcement and attorneys.
And I believe that that is the future. But and there's a big but here.
We haven't seen it take off in five years. The concept, sure, Certix started offering it.
You know, some of our other competitors at one point we had 100 global competitors.
And so the concept obviously has legs, but I think we were
just too early. You know, I think that this is going to come a little bit later when regulation
and people wise up a little bit and the market gets a bit more educated and they realize that
this is insane giving money to a guy named Chapo with a monkey picture with no real name, no ID, no legal,
you know, no legal backing behind him when I could perfectly invest in somebody who used to be an
executive at Microsoft who's also building a blockchain or these people who have real things.
Why are we giving our money to cartoon dogs with no responsibility? It makes no sense.
However, I believe we were too early.
I think you guys also have a risk at CellFrame of just being too early. Right idea, right tech,
good product market fit, wrong time. And that's not something you really know right now. And
that's one of the challenges too, is that we don't really know when the real risk of quantum
computing is coming. We don't really know when the real risk of quantum computing is coming.
We don't really know how quick that decentralized compute is going to put the squeeze on that's going to force everybody into it.
And unfortunately, it's just the nature of the business.
There's a lot of outside external factors that are outside of our control.
what's inside your own circle of control and influence.
And it sounds like you guys are doing that.
And you can only deal with what's inside your own circle of control and influence. And it sounds like you guys are doing that.
So another super high quality guest building something very cool,
very much needed at some point,
at least.
And we are absolutely here to support you guys in any way possible.
I would love to see self frame be successful,
help you with that growth journey,
help you on the trust and security side,
whatever it is that you need.
You know, we help plug gaps with teams and we want to support you guys.
And I mean that wholeheartedly.
I really do want to see the good people who are passionate about what you're building.
Amazing to hear the tenure of some of the people here.
You know, I've been at it five years with a sure defy and been in the space almost a decade.
But it's rare when we have guests on
here that they've been building for multiple years and today i think almost everybody here
has been building what they're working on right now for years it takes an insane amount of grit
and determination to make it this far and so i give all of you a ton of credit, huge respect to all of you.
Let me just shout out the, here we go.
Let's all throw up the fist, come on.
Respect for the founders out here, building.
It's the only reason why we have a space like this,
because of people like you who are waking up in the morning,
going to get after it, trying to create something cool,
leave a lasting impact on the world.
And so I got a huge amount of respect for you.
Look, guys, we're out of time.
Loved the conversations today.
I want you all to think about one thing as a closer.
They're just numbers on screen.
Anybody out there, and I mean this really deeply we've lost people in markets like this people have killed
themselves over numbers on a screen I get it it's emotional watching your net
worth plummet putting you in a bad spot some people are getting liquidated, not sure how they're going to pay rent next month.
It can be bad. Be kind. We challenge founders all the time here and intentionally, and they know
what they're getting into. Being a founder in this space is brutal emotionally sometimes,
mentally tough. It's difficult to wake up every day in the face of adversity and just go after it and do that for years on end many times.
Sometimes without a paycheck, sometimes actually funding it yourself.
who's building something in this space
and you want to bring something negative to them,
have at least a common courtesy to do it with respect.
I may be asking founders tough questions here.
That's my job on this show.
It's what I want.
It's why people come.
But I'm going to do it with respect.
And they're fair questions to ask.
And you're allowed to ask hard questions. Just don't be demeaning. Have some respect for the people who are out there working hard to build the space that we love and that we participate in.
So depression, anxiety about what's going on with the current market conditions, go touch some grass.
Go spend some time with the people that you love.
Remind yourself of what's really important in life.
It's not numbers on a screen, I can tell you.
When you are laying on your deathbed, you are not going to look back and say, man, on February 6th of 2026, I really wish that number was higher. It won't matter.
Blip on the radar. That's it. And I think if we all had the ability to sort of zoom out and say,
when in doubt, zoom out. Zoom out in your own life. Think about what's important to you.
Think about what you spend your time doing every day. Are you doing the right things?
think about what you spend your time doing every day. Are you doing the right things?
Are you making yourself better? Are you putting yourself in a position to be successful in the
future? That's the real question. And that's what you should be spending your time on.
The things that make you happy, spending time with the people that you love,
spend time doing what you love, making yourself better every day and positioning yourself to be more successful for the future.
If you can answer that honestly, you're good.
You won't feel that sense of depression.
And that's why I said it's most fun to be a builder in the bear.
Because when you're a builder, you get to put your head down and go work on something that you're passionate about.
You're thinking about the future.
You're not looking at the chart and watching Bitcoin drop 12% and feeling sorry for yourself saying, oh, I should have taken more profits. You're thinking it's just a blip on
the radar. You have a long-term view and builders have a sense, a much greater sense of a long-term
view than traders or just general users in this space because it does take years to
build real things. And you have to have a long-term view and you have to have that patience.
And so I think builders are just inherently set up to deal with this type of emotional volatility
and have just an iron stomach for it, unlike most other people. So learn from that.
If you're not a builder, start working on something on the side.
It'll at least give you a passion project while the market bleeds.
We might be waiting a year.
Who knows?
Maybe it's a month.
Maybe it's a year.
Maybe it's three years.
The truth is, I don't care.
I don't care because I've got a longer-term vision.
I know what I'm doing.
When I wake up every day, I've got a passion that I'm going towards.
I get to come on here and talk to other people
Other people who are facing the same stuff
Other people who are building completely unique things totally separate from what i'm doing
And I love that
That's what makes me passionate getting to hear your voices getting to challenge you guys hearing how you think about things
And supporting people
Because that's what
I'm going to be thinking about on my deathbed. I'm going to be looking back and saying, did I do
everything I can to support the people that I wanted to support during my life and who was
there for me? That's the real important stuff, guys. It's not the price of Bitcoin today.
It's not the price of E. It's not how much money you got in your bank account.
None of that really matters. It all fades away. So keep your head up.
It's not easy out there. It's not easy as a builder. Tough conditions right now. But I can
tell you, life is good. We're all here. The fact that you're here listening to a space and you're
here to share this Friday with the beautiful people around here, you're already a winner.
So I appreciate all you joining. We'll be back on here next week.
I can't wait. I love this. It's something I look forward to every week. Phenomenal panel. Congrats
to our panel. All of you survived. I'm telling you, that's the first time we've had, I think,
in two months where everybody survived that I didn't have to drop the kill switch. So
amazing to have such good quality people here. I wish you all the best of luck. Totally hope you guys have massive success in the future.
And I personally and Assure DeFi are 100% on board to support you in any way that you want.
You know, we have an immense amount of experience to see what doesn't work, what does work.
When you work with 2000 Projects, we've seen it all at this point. The good, the bad, the ugly,
at all at this point the good the bad the ugly the real ugly the real real real ugly um and so
we just want to help in any way we can so with that said i'm gonna wrap guys we'll catch you
next week i hope you guys all have a phenomenal weekend keep your head up i'll catch you guys
thank you all. Bye-bye.
