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Where Does DeFi Meet CeFi? 🤔 The Aggregated Ep. 128
Recorded: Sept. 5, 2025 Duration: 1:10:58Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Where's the music, Darren?
I can sing.
I mean, I'm not amazing at singing,
but I could maybe, I could spit a rap from the 90s or something like that. But I can't say it's going to be amazing, but it would be something.
I mean, I could hear the music, so maybe it was just private music from me. And that's fine.
Yeah, I didn't hear anything.
It wasn't just me. That's fine. It wasn't just me.
Great. Okay.
It was awkwardly quiet.
I was expecting something to get good jobs.
It was literally just me instead.
Am I going to spit a rap
or what?
Do it.
I'm not actually going to, but thank or what? What's the saying? Do it. Do it.
I'm not actually going to, but thank you so much for believing in me.
Everyone give him a word and he has to rap them.
It was all a dream.
I used to read Word Up magazine.
That's not a new rap.
I thought we were talking about a freestyle.
I didn't say new rap.
You're right.
All right.
He very clearly said from the 90s.
Oh, I missed that part. All right.
Salt-N-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine.
And pictures on my wall.
Every Saturday, Rob Attack, Mr. Magic Molly Mall.
Man, you guys are being lame.
What's going on, Rob?
I know, dude.
I'm with you in spirit 100 i don't want
to interrupt the magic that's happening to our ears right now totally yes i'm as white as they
come but i was actually just contacting record labels oh my god no way okay there's actually
some pretty cool crypto rappers out there maybe we can give them a platform to start spitting shit um but i'm definitely uh it's definitely not my forte i might try but
keep baking absolutely i i like it actually uh good morning everyone this is chairman bodray
of the miami county cryptocurrency task force at your service truly is an honor and a pleasure
i was going to add a little something
in there uh that i wrote a couple days ago from a small seed grows a very tall tree intrinsically
free program with innate fees and even when it seems from the scene that the flower doesn't grow
in between every seams to the roots will still show cryptographic system clicking so the info
don't show blockchain enable network so the data flows. We press the line every time like a free throw.
We push a button for the fees.
We call it a free throw.
Because I really got money always running on my mind.
We really run the county, but we run out of time.
That's all I got.
My boy.
Yay.
Yay.
Yay.
Give this man a deal.
Do it.
You're almost good as Vitalik on the big stages,
doing his poems and his little songs and stuff.
Man, it was like a token last year.
Oh, my God. It was like the most cringe thing but it's
just like it was so beautiful at the same time to see him just like probably so awkwardly and
so uncomfortably singing these songs on the stages with his crew and it was really really interesting
to see him speak and then also to see how he was like just acting in general when he wasn't speaking
um I think the guy is
definitely going to be like high functioning autistic he's he's quite something for sure
but yeah those songs are are that's like that's triple a that's triple a art in the industry in
the crypto industry who is this vitalik you ever seen his uh his songs that he sings on stages he sang a song after his uh his
he had a main stage uh speaker spot uh at token singapore i think it was uh on the tuesday or
something last year and after he did his talk he sang a song and it was so bad and so awkward but hilarious at the same time i think
it's like he's like notorious for doing those weird raps and like ethereum conventions always
have those like crazy raps and people you know either love it or hate it are they usually
associated with like a top signal or yeah maybe maybe that's it i don't know well we'll see what happens
with token in a couple weeks i'm sure he's speaking i'm sure there's gonna be something weird
well well he is feeling the spirit of the age um it's actually something that we talk about quite
quite often here is that uh once you get uh it's kind of phases once you get past the money which
is everyone's kind of initial phase and main phase then you kind of get into the power part of of the technology and the policy
and kind of how you integrate it the next phase of it which is i would say as important or or
will become even more important is the culture is the artistic expression and what he's the splint
is the feeling of his spirit exactly exactly it
goes you know being in crypto being in the blockchain um um it goes deeper than just um
the technology uh uh and the the financial parts of it right um i have a um a crypto evocation that
i say prior to all of our crypto task force meetings and a lot of the other meetings that I chair here within Miami-Dade County.
And one of the parts is that, hey, listen, this is about people.
You know, this is about people. And these tools, these mechanisms are only extensions and expressions of how we communicate and how we interact with each other. And so what I tell after my invocation, which I could share with you later if you'd like,
but I say that as Miami County Chairman, I always espouse to emulate the benevolent idioms
of this beautiful, immutable, forever ledger, to be distributed, to be consensus,
to rule by consensus, and to be immutable with my word.
So help me God. I do that to try to graphically and literally illustratively illustrate that
these concepts, mechanisms, coins, tokens, exchanges, wallets, will have a deeper significance to all of us.
And yeah, so I feel like he's feeling it.
He's like the music, like a baby.
He's letting his body dance.
And so it is beautiful.
Although cringey, that cringe is beautiful to see it coming out.
That's what I'm saying.
Definitely authentic as it comes.
That's for sure. I read an article recently that said autistic CEOs
and CTOs basically perform better since they don't
and also those who are away from the public, basically.
Because if you're, I mean, Vitalik is both,
he's public and he's autistic. But he did a great project we are all rely on
so i mean if he wants to go naked around the streets of my city near my house i mean welcome
whatever bro do your thing yeah that's is that a request or people i mean that's a wish
it's a request yeah that's a wish. It's a request.
Yeah, that's certainly a wish.
Did you guys ever see that picture?
The guy is well hung.
You guys have must have saw that picture.
He's well endowed.
Or he stuffs with a sock.
But yes, yes.
We've seen the picture.
I mean, that's the only way that you could have that much confidence
to do those dances on stage.
Right, exactly.
He just made revolutionary technology and made the base foundational level for this industry to flourish.
And then also has a massive schlong.
Have you seen the chart of a person's IQ to their testosterone level?
And there's that extreme outlier.
I was just about to say that.
That's the talk.
There you go.
Yeah.
You know what, big brain?
What is this testosterone correlation?
I'll see if I can find it and I'll post it in the chat.
While you're finding it, I'll explain it.
So basically, there's a chart that's saying,
basically, the more less testosterone you have,
the higher IQ you get.
And it's basically super I
don't know normal in terms of like 99.9 are in this on this line and there is just one guy with
maximum testosterone and maximum IQ that's Vitalik probably let's say Vitalik 10 more
times maybe he'll appear in this space like an incarnation of like the perfect man right like
high testosterone incredibly incredibly intelligent,
but then also can get away basically with the most awkward, crazy shit.
I heard about like some of his stories,
like some rumors of some people that are closer to like the youth foundation
about him, you know, having like a girlfriend in Pattaya in Thailand.
And I think he's like in uh an open open relationship he's like
polyamorous or something and anyways but uh I don't know too too much about it but he comes
around Thailand quite often and I just think it's funny it's hilarious but yeah I spoke to him in
Ukraine like he goes almost every year he wasn't there this year and the way like he he listens to you when you're talking like he understands you
on a deep level it's almost uh scary you know interesting very interesting guy i love him
dude i i there's something deeper here bro you love him yeah bro i might i might
I found the chart.
i found the chart i just put i just posted to you guys
I just posted it to you guys.
It's okay to have those type of man crushes.
It's okay.
Rock, who's your man crush in the crypto industry?
Is it Michael Turpin?
I know you're really close with him.
Who's your favorite?
I like Michael Saylor.
I'm a Bitcoiner.
Sandeep is awesome.
I was hoping you said me.
Definitely two centibes.
Okay, good.
I thought we had a bromanceance i was about to be very sad
you guys ready to get this party started or what i'm excited man this is a cool topic
i think it's time don't you know bump it up you got to bump it up rock are you ready
i'm still waking up but i'm as ready as I'm going to be, so let's go.
All right, cool.
So should we start with introductions?
Rock, are you going to do yours?
Sure.
I'm Rock Zacharias.
I'm the CEO of Lunar Digital Assets, Venture Studio, the Incubated, Polygon, QuickSwap,
venture studio that incubated polygon quick swap litvm and others um i serve on the polygon
LitVM, and others.
grants board and uh i'm a mentor bitcoin by accelerator co-founder of quick swap
um and uh head of global leadership council for michael turpin's bid angels and then
Global Leadership Council for Michael Turpin's BitAngels.
And then for the first time in, I think, like six years,
I'm putting my co-founder hat back on.
I'm a co-founder on LitVM, the Litecoin layer 2 that uses ZK roll-ups
and also Polygon technology to both roll up to LoCoin
and also plug into Ethereum and all Ethereum L2s through Pornadobs Agra.
It's endorsed by Charlie Lee and Light Quinn Foundation, etc. Cheers, guys.
Awesome. Awesome. I'm Nicole at Girl 007. I work for LDA and several other companies in crypto, mostly doing PR and booking and writing strategy a little bit.
Let's do Two Cent Timmy.
GM everyone
I am Two Cent Timmy
I am on the Polygon marketing team
and that's
do a whole bunch of other stuff
but that's mostly why I'm here
and I will say I am
in a very
interesting way I would say like I'm a
Bitcoin preferentialist who loves
DeFi and Yield
so it's an interesting mix for sure.
All right.
Thanks for being here, Timmy.
Yeah, you are the same.
All right.
How about Matthew?
You got to use the phrase I made up.
Bitcoin maximal-ish.
Yep, exactly.
One of my favorite accounts on crypto Twitter is Gwart.
And his, I think either his bio or his pinned tweet
is something like,
the real tragedy is Satoshi didn't think about yield.
And I just find that so funny and like
just so I don't know
it's like such a shitpost tongue in
cheek awesome comment on the
entire industry
who is this what's his handle
uh guardy
or something like that
if it's a tweet I'll find it and I'll pin it up
because it's just it's a tweet, I'll find it and I'll pin it up because it's just so funny.
Sounds good.
I mean, Satoshi did think about a lot of things.
I wouldn't be surprised if he did at some point
talk about DeFi.
I'm trying to think.
I mean mean he definitely
i'm still waking up but he talked about tokens
i mean he had opcodes in bitcoin for some programmability that were removed later
didn't he have a full full section meme coins, how much he loved meme coins?
Did he talk about meme?
It's like coded in there somewhere. You have to
look a little bit deeper. It's like QAnon
or something like that, but I think he had a whole
place about meme coins.
Yeah, it was right there in the white paper.
Should we keep going with introductions real quick
dog fart yes we should we should all right matthew you're up
what's up guys uh yeah thanks for having me again this is a great way to start off as i always love
about these spaces is they're so casual and chill but also a great place to network and
spread amazing knowledge and vision.
My name is Matthew Papineau. I run a venture studio called Papineau Strategies. I've been working freelance, helping build crypto projects for about three years, focused a lot in fundraising
and large scale marketing acquisition. So helping like layer ones and top 100s with their marketing plans, mostly connecting them to really strong marketeers in the space that help with virility. I've found a lot of success in that. I've worked with some pretty cool people in the industry at this point, done a little bit close to and almost over about $3 million worth of business development in the past couple of years for clients. And that's my major focus is really, yeah, being a connector and doing the business development stuff. I will
be at Token Singapore in a couple of weeks. So if you're around, that'd be awesome. I think that
the crew here today, Timmy, I would love to connect with you. That'd be great. And also,
Lingo, you're super hilarious as well, too. So we should connect. And of course, I would love to connect with you. That would be great. And also, Lingo, you're super hilarious as well, too.
So we should connect.
And of course, I'm sure Rock and the crew are going to be in Singapore.
But I always love coming here and chatting, guys.
Always good conversations.
Always real and authentic, which is nice for the space because a lot of time it's garbage.
So thanks for having me back again.
Thanks for being here, Matt.
All right.
Rune Bond. Thanks for coming, back again. Thanks for being here, Matt. All right. Rune Bond.
Thanks for coming, by the way.
I just invited Rune Bond yesterday in CryptoQuorum and he showed up.
So thanks for being here.
Oh, my pleasure.
I think it was a great conversation we had yesterday.
Hey, guys.
Yep.
Rune Bond here.
My real name is Denny.
I run the account here.
Basically an interface for ThorChain that allows people to bond their Rune
because Rune is the native asset on ThorChain
that allows real cross layer one swaps.
It also collateralizes the assets within the pools.
It's an excellent interface, you guys.
The first ever ThorChain bringing layer one swaps.
It is not a bridge in the conventional sense
where you have like an intermediary application layer that tries to seek consensus on different, you know,
smart contracts, layer ones. It is the real deal. We run daemons of each layer one. So all the
activity that happens, happens on the perspective layer one. So it's a real Bitcoin for a real
Ethereum and XRP and BNB and all kinds of different state coins and various assets. It's the real
deal. You guys very exciting. We're also building something called an app layer, which is Rujira. XRP and BNB and all kinds of different state coins and various assets. It's the real deal,
you guys. Very exciting. We're also building something called an app layer, which is Rujira.
And it's basically going to have a lot of the same primitives that have only been exclusively
available on centralized exchanges. So leverage, trading, perps, money markets, all the things.
So to keep it short, it's like decentralized Binance we're making. It's been a very, very hard journey.
A lot of issues we've run into.
So hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Very complex to get to run smoothly, but proud to say after five years of just bleeding out our eyeballs, it's running smoothly.
Very excited to talk about today.
I will yield to the next person.
Thank you so much again for having me.
All right. All right. Thank you for being here. Aida. Aida. I never remember.
Yeah. Aida. Aida. Aida. Yeah. Sup. Sup. Thank you for inviting me me guys. I'm Vlad. We will build an AI Power trading
terminal that allows to trade you over the 20 different chains at the same time. And
yeah, we're trying to just simplify trading experience for all the traders over the crypto
space, crypto world. And pleased to be here today uh i hope we'll have some cool conversation uh so my
intro will be short but just cannot mention about our new features that are coming next week we are
launching a really awesome mind sharing thing that's that probably will rock a bit more the
market so yeah that's probably it for right now and I hope we'll have
a good night, a good time
this evening, a good night will be
good or not depends
on your decision
on your holdings
yeah
that's right
yeah so thank you for
a word giving
and passing the microphone for the next person yeah thank you thank you for a word giving and passing the microphone for the next person.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for being here.
All right, we got two more introductions.
Kenton, Kenton was also, I invited him yesterday in CryptoQuorum.
Thanks for making it, Kenton.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Thanks for the invite.
I'm a colleague of Denny.
I started the Yusha Rune Fund. I manage it as well. It's a fund dedicated to investing in Rune and Denny the ThorChain weekly podcast, weekly space.
And as a node operator in ThorChain, I've been recently just pushed through a marketing fund.
So I'm going to be putting together a marketing team for ThorChain to try and spread the word, spread the gospel of DeFi and self-custody, no KYC, trying to make crypto cypherpunk again. And yeah, that's me.
Yeah, I knew you would have a lot to say on this topic. Thanks for being here and making it kind
of last minute. All right. On my end, I can only see that we have one more introduction to do.
So it's Lingo Rewards platform. Yeah, please introduce yourself.
And then if I've missed anybody, you know, let me know.
How much time have I had? I have here. Well, if I want to show good swap for everyone.
Anyway, yeah, my name is Alex. I try to join the spaces every week, literally my favorite
thing of the week. Thank you, Darren,
thank you, Rok, and Marshall, even if you're making it possible. For Lingo, we have a very
simple business model. You stake our token, and you can win rewards. We have a Rolex reward,
just finishing in 20-something hours. So if anyone's interested, link in the bio.
20 something hours.
So if anyone interested, link in the bio.
Defy and Cify is a really interesting topic.
And I want to talk about Mindshare as well,
if we have time, about what happened with Keitel.
But yeah, thanks for having me again.
Yeah, thanks for being here too.
All right, is there anybody else who's a speaker
yeah i think we've got crypto cock okay great hey what's up cockers um thank you for having me
that's too strong too strong is this actually vitalik's spirit animal i was gonna say how did you manage to not pitch in
during that whole conversation i was about to but then you wanted to start the real deal talk so
uh yeah i'm chris uh co-founder of crypto cock coin uh we are meme coin over on base um i'll do
i'll start by talking a bit about me um i've been in
the space since 2020 built myself up on a number of different projects helping them over on polygon
and actually migrated over to base a little over a year ago and um you know had an idea pitched it
to my dev we launched this amazing project. So, yeah.
I don't know.
Will I get a chance to shill about it later?
Yes, you will.
You will.
There you go.
So, yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Thank you for the invite, Darren.
Shout out to you.
Thumbs down.
All right, Darren, is there anybody else? I'll let him tell you all what he has me saved under in his phone.
Go on, Darren.
I'm pretty sure his Telegram name is just fuckwit.
And it has been for like four years.
And for some reason, I had notifications on.
So one day I just looked at Telegram and I had a notification from it.
It's just like fuckwit. And I was like, I had notifications on. So one day, I just looked at Telegram, and I had a notification from it. It just, like, fuck with it.
And I was like, who's that?
All right.
Is there anybody else on the stage as a speaker who hasn't introduced themselves, Darren?
No, I think we're good.
Cool.
I got to say, for anyone who hasn't been on our spaces before, we probably, from this first 27 minutes, seem like a very sophisticated bunch.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I think you might not be in your normal time zone, and that is why you're very tired this morning.
Is that true, Rock?
Sounds like you're in the behavior, Rock.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it gets better. It. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're, but it gets better.
It gets better.
What, what, what, what, wait, like a, what's morning?
Like a, what's, what's going on?
Like a, what's morning?
It's like a 6 PM.
Are you in Asia rock or?
Not exactly, but not so far.
No, I'm close... I'm in Europe.
I'm visiting California.
It's not that early.
Oh, okay. It's around 10, 11 o'clock, right?
Something around the morning.
It's 8.30 a.m., but I was up till 2.30 working.
He actually moved to Puerto Rico so he could start.
He's a little bit later.
That's the main reason I moved to Puerto Rico, is so that I didn't have to get up at eight in the morning.
I spent a year in Asia so that I'm actually just in the future while you guys are all just like, you know, in the past.
That's the biggest reason.
It's nothing to do with the fact that, um, I, I love,
I love Thailand a lot, but, uh, it's more to do with you being in the future.
All right. Thailand is awesome, man. All of Southeast Asia are amazing.
It's like, I honestly, just to be really clear with everybody here,
like business development wise, and this is,
this is not like any joke or anything. If you want to blast and blow up your career, if you're a person like me
that doesn't have hard skills, like you're not a developer, you're not like, you know, you don't
have a major finance or corporate or tech background or whatever. If you're like a soft
skill guy like me that, you know, is, is working on building the network, working on closing deals,
opening deals,
all that stuff. If you go and you want to be in the most impactful place in the world right now,
go to Southeast Asia, base yourself in Bangkok, and you are literally within a five-hour flight
of Tokyo, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong. You're close to Bali. You're in the center of Bangkok,
which is massive right now for business and is very easy
to do business in. It's a $50 flight, American $35 flight to Hong Kong from Bangkok. And it takes
an hour and a half. The amount of business that I do just in that period of time, I usually spend
the winter in Asia is ridiculous. The amount of connections you can make, and there's so much,
so much going on and it's very fluid there. So definitely, connections you can make and there's so much, so much going on and
it's very fluid there. So definitely, yeah, love the culture there, but also love the opportunity
there. Cause it's, like I said, the farthest place I need to go is, is Tokyo or Dubai and it's about
a five and a half hour flight. So anyways, agree with you, Rob, but also a great place to do
business and spark opportunity and build as well too.
All right.
All right.
Should we get into the questions? Let's get into the topic.
Yeah, there you go.
But all good points, Matthew.
You going to ask it or you want me to?
Oh, I thought you were.
I got it. I got it.
I got it.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's see.
Is Coinbase bringing Dex swaps into CeFi the start of real convergence between CeFi and DeFi?
Of course.
That's a good one.
Anybody? It's an open forum. Yeah, I think it's the
beginning of a transition, right? I mean, I don't begrudge CeFi at all because the technology was
not there, right? If someone wants to go from asset A to asset B, that's what we just did. I
mean, you have to surrender custody of your assets. You have to then have an IOU representation and
then you have to swap assets. It just, the technology wasn't there, but now that we have all these
various DeFi platforms, and there's more than ThorChain now, for instance, we use Cosmos SDK,
right? The technology is there. And now I just think it's better, right? It's better.
You don't have to have KYC. For me, for those who don't know, I think KYC stands for kill your
customer. It's absolutely terrible thing. We should fight against everything we have. You should be have a right to privacy.
And that's just the way it is. Also, it's permissionless, right? Open source code.
It is we make it as good as we possibly can. There's always the risk of bugs. There's no
different door chain. But when it comes to price execution, when it comes not surrendering your
custody, you guys can see what happens there.
This is where it's going to go.
And I think, you know, Seafi is just identifying the trend and they're doing their best to mold to it.
Right. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I'll stop there. Someone else wants to pipe in.
Well, I know that Lingo wants to pipe in because his hand is up.
So I got to say that I like the kill your customer.
I love that.
Yeah, that was a great point that you made yesterday.
And yeah, thanks.
All right, Lingo, you're up.
We need more context about kill your customer right after this.
Danny, when you asked the question question i was just like about to shout
the scs but i was finding the book market they couldn't uh i think definitely i mean uh for us
we launched on a base app on the base beta app and without doing like investing zero dollars we just
literally like chilled a bit in our community dm some people that might be interested. And we are number one on a base app right now.
And I mean, this is just like a super fresh start and fresh breath,
I would say, for the industry right now.
And definitely it's a great bridge between Defy and CIFI.
Awesome.
All right.
Anybody else?
Anybody else have further points or want to jump in you don't have
to raise your hand by the way if there's an opportunity i think coinbase is doing i mean
they are one of the people doing it but i would hardly say they're the only uh player in the
industry that's kind of onboarding uh defi i mean, we see a lot, especially working for Polygon.
I know like one of our biggest things, our focus is payments and RWAs.
So like we're partnering with Stripe and we,
but a lot of other companies still are working with Stripe on the payment
platforms or like major Revute is another big one,
like working with these companies to make it easily accessible for payment.
But also on the RWA side,
you have like secure,
secure ties and a cred who are doing like putting bonds and stocks on chain.
I think Kraken is another exchange that's doing a lot to rival Coinbase.
And I think we're just kind of seeing this.
We are seeing a convergence.
But I do want to call out that it's not only Coinbase.
Coinbase is certainly doing a lot.
I would say that especially in the U.S.
The highest budget to pay lobbyists in Washington to get laws changed for it is probably coming from Coinbase.
But I would say there's a lot of other stuff that's happening just to have people meet in the middle.
I mean, you could even look at what Michael Saylor is doing with strategy.
Taylor is doing with strategy.
And like that is a blending of DeFi and CeFi,
especially when he's beyond just the regular strategy stock.
It's a whole bunch of dividends that he's paying out with all of the other
tickers underneath the strategy portfolio.
strategy portfolio.
Timmy, yeah, it's really interesting because it's good to hear about Polygon's movement
as well, too.
I had mentioned Aztec the other day.
I sent him a message because I was on a call with some of my partners in Dubai, and they're
some of the top companies in the world for tokenized regulations for securities and tokenization, like helped write the bar regulations there and, you know, are very deeply entrenched in tokenization internationally right now.
as well to Polygon, which was so surprising to me to hear because I hadn't, until that point,
hadn't heard too much about Polygon and their push in regards to tokenization. And a lot of
people are understandably, not that it's right, talking about tokenization in RWA because it's a
big hot thing right now, but most people are just kind of retards and they don't like are actually
not really doing very much. But then there's, you know, then when I heard about that, it was like,
oh shit. Okay. Polygon's talking to, you know, some of my closely trusted, you know, one of my
closest entrusted partners in the space in regards to that. And you can't forget about, you know,
you're talking about like the mix of like, of like the obviously looking from central to DeFi.
Hedera is another example of being incredibly institutional that are making a massive.
Obviously, they're a staple.
I say obviously, but I know a little bit more than others, but they're they're very active in RWA and have been pushing very hard in that direction with tokenization.
And I've had some conversations with them in regards to that.
And, but they're right now clearly pushing deeply and hard towards DeFi and
really trying to build out that and really sink in that way.
Cause all of these big names that have massive brands, I mean,
some of them in the United States aren't very big in Asia.
But, but the point is,
is they all understand that they need a connection to DeFi as well too. And they need a connection to
retail and they need a connection to the grassroots. And that's where a lot of the grassroots is,
is because they need that virility. They need that, they need that degen as well. Right. So
it's kind of like this, you know, kind of to go back, sorry to bring this up again,
but Vitalik and Token last year talked about not picking Central or DeFi,
but finding a mixture of both, finding a happy medium.
That's how the industry is going to move forward.
And that was really, really telling.
So awesome to see what Polygon was doing.
I didn't hear that.
Vitalik said something like that? He said it on stage last year at the end before he sang his really weird song. He was like, instead of us fighting about DeFi and fighting about whether things should be decentralized or centralized, it's probably very important for this industry that we talk about a common ground and how we can find a mixture of both instead of being
so adversarial right yeah yeah i also want to like talking to the defy guys on our team and then um
like polygon incubated katana which is a defy focused chain and they talk to a lot of institutions
and like one of the interesting points and i would say it's kind of a myth in our, like the hardcore crypto crowd, like the tribalism where they're like, oh, these boomers and TradFi don't get it.
And then talking to our DeFi team when they talk about, like, you can take these on-chain stocks and like all of the cool looping mechanisms, like they get it right away.
And maybe it took them time because they are concerned with regulation and not breaking any rules that they're not supposed to break, essentially. sacred is a very big one where you can literally have your stocks and bonds on chain put them in
defi protocols collateral use them as collateral bar against them and loop over and over and like
that is it's basically showing leverage and to trad fi that they had never experienced before
and they're like oh this is this is brilliant they're open and i think that's a really cool like huge positive for the industry where like to vitality went like there's no reason why we
have to be against each other if we're um like i got into crypto not because like i want everyone
to be rich and i think that was the problem not like oh no there are these rich people and they
shouldn't be rich it's like, I want everyone on the planet
to have access to these financial tools
that before was guarded by a permissioned wall.
Basically, it was a walled garden.
Like that's the beauty of DeFi,
but there's no reason why we can't say like,
oh yeah, you're good with money.
Why don't you use our tools that we made too?
Like that's just, it's shifting the problem and creating another walled garden, which I think is just a terrible
idea. So us talking like positively about centralized stuff and the comment about Vitalik
makes my instinct to go the other way. But I do have to actually agree with you and go the same sort of here, Timmy, in that I think, you know, we we talk about, you know, a lot of people complain about, you know, the sailors.
The world and ETFs and the treasury companies, you know, being more centralized.
I do defend them.
And there's nuance here. And I'm not I actually am,
you know, sort of a decentralization maxi. But I will say that one of the whole points of this
industry was, we were making a system that anyone could use, and that couldn't censor people,
couldn't censor people and that it wasn't biased against whatever races,
countries, gay, straight, all of this. It doesn't care.
It doesn't care if you're rich, doesn't care if you're poor.
So for us to try to say, you know,
that black rock shouldn't be in our industry or something to me is,
is kind of silly because the whole point of our industry is like to include everyone
and to censor no one.
And so if we allow centralized kind of entities and companies, it's not even allowed.
It's just this is their, they just do it.
And it's not for us to say.
But I think giving the optionality of if you want to hold your own you know keys if you want to have
self-custody great and we should highly encourage that if you want more privacy do the extra you
know legwork to protect your privacy but if people want to hold their bitcoin you know in an ETF or
in their Bank of America account,
because they don't feel comfortable with all this stuff.
I mean, this industry is fucking ridiculous still.
Like Darren was helping me out just with a pretty simple task,
just moving some liquidity to base and, you know, trying to, it gets more, it just got more complicated because
of me trying to figure out taxable events and, uh, you know, a slew of things that go with this.
Uh, you know, I bridged using super bridge and I got layer zero, uh, CBBTC, which is not the CBBTC I want to have on. It's just a very complicated industry. And
at least until we fix all these things, I could totally understand a grandma would want to hold
Bitcoin on Bank of America. And there's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.
We should encourage otherwise, but let's give people the optionality.
These massive companies, like you think of massive institutional blockchains that are, you know, now starting to work with the government and are, you know, involved in a lot of these like aspects.
And I'm not like super hot and horny on centralization either.
not like super hot and horny on centralization either, but you just think about it from the
side of like them trying to protect their customers.
And they're trying to protect people that we're trying to get people involved in this
space and trying to have onboarding at a mass scale and trying to, you know, get people,
you know, help them have access to wealth, whether it's you're in Africa or you're the
whether it's you're in Africa or you're the granny in mid-Missouri or whatever, right?
granny in, you know, mid Missouri or whatever.
Right.
It's like these larger institutions, they have to have protections for their customers
or they get sued or they get blasted or they get destroyed politically or their brand or
whatever, right?
So I see it in that way where it's like maybe until, yeah, things are safe enough and fluid
enough, but maybe that is the safe enough and fluid enough for a larger portion of the population that honestly doesn't give a shit about security.
They don't care about their privacy.
They don't care.
Most people don't.
We all do, but most people don't.
But at the same time, because we're early and we're getting involved in this and we're helping build this industry, we're going to benefit from all those other people coming on and getting to use the technology that we struggled to prop up
and get to this point. So it's an interesting transition. But yeah, sorry, Tom or someone else,
if you guys want to go ahead and talk, I just wanted to make that point.
Kenton has his hand up.
Oh, yeah, sure. Thanks. I got a few comments. Yeah, I think CeFi is just a necessary evil, right? We need a bridge to go from, you know, fiat to crypto, right? And so I think CeFi is serving its purpose. And, you know, I think, I believe one day we'll just stop beating that bridge, you know, we won't have to like, burn it down or tear it down or anything like that. People will just stop using it, you know, and we'll just be using DeFi.
So for a while, like today, you know, for the foreseeable future, we're going to see the two coexist, right?
And I posted in the comments a video of CZ saying he thinks within the next several years, the DEXs will become bigger than the SEXs.
And it's just, this is the whole point of crypto, right?
It's decentralization.
And CZ has billions of reasons for that not to happen, right?
But he's being pragmatic and recognizing that
this is the future of crypto is DeFi.
And so rather than fight it, he's embracing it.
And that's why he invests in TrustWallet.
That's why he's integrating DEXs into TrustWallet.
So I think it's going to happen.
We're going to go there.
It's just going to take time.
And somebody mentioned about their grandma buying Bitcoin.
Like, I think that is kind of one of our hurdles.
DeFi has to become more user-friendly.
Like the, I think a lot of the tech is there and we've learned a lot of the other problems,
but I think our main problem is, is the user interface. But it's coming, right? It's just,
it just takes time, right? But there's a lot of smart people working on it. And it's not just,
working on it. And it's not just, I think we can all get wrapped up in our ideals, like
it's freedom and self-custody and privacy and all this good stuff. And the average person just
wants it to be easy. They just want to make money. They don't really care. Same with the
average business. That's a dangerous, but i want to push back on you and myself
of what i said earlier but it is a very dangerous kind of way for us to think that you know people
don't care about this they just want it to be easy um i think i'll just jump in real quick and then
you can continue on but i think there are always kind of parallel paths that humanity can take.
And I think with the internet, we kind of went down,
we were going down a good path of decentralization and then it like tended towards centralization and government takeover.
And I think if enough of us,
like it only takes even maybe one charismatic like person to shift the way we
think about things. I mean,
like look at where free speech has started to go in the world.
And then, you know, you had, you know,
just a few people fight back on it and it's like starting to move the other
direction all of a sudden. So my point is just that we the people should really push for privacy and decentralization and all
these values and we should really encourage uh self-custody this is why i i know bitcoin maxis
uh can be toxic but i think they're a valuable part of the industry. They are like the industry's
immune response. They are the ones that are kind of our North Star, and it is as annoying as they
can be at times and as toxic as they can be at times. We do need people, while I'm sitting here
saying, I'm okay with BlackRock having an ETF, I'm also going to say we, the people who constantly fight
and try to push people towards self-custody. I don't think we should alienate the people who
don't want to use it, but we should be saying, hey, please try to do self-custody. Be careful
of these centralized entities because the route hit all of humanity and especially in our space,
entities because throughout all of humanity, and especially in our space, they rug you or the
government rugs you through them and they'll confiscate your stuff or they'll go insolvent
and you'll be the last creditor and you won't get your money. This has happened for all of history.
But anyway, sorry, Kenton. Yeah, I agree with you. But yeah, it comes down to sales, to selling, right? And I think convenience is the Trojan horse for privacy and self-custody.
And so, like, you know, we can, the only way morality wins is if it actually does improve
people's lives.
And the reason tyranny has been winning and fiat has been winning is because people's
lives have improved, you know, relative to the freedom people.
That's why people, that's why it's just sticking around.
But, you know, we're getting to the point where, you know,
the freedom people, the privacy,
the self-custody people's lives are improving better than those stuck in the
old system. And that's how ultimately it's going to push people over.
And where I was going with the, you you know it's making things easier for people
to do that is profound kenton well let me finish and so um what's going to happen i think what's
going to happen here with with cefi is they're going to find it's easier to integrate defi so
like for example you know if you're an, you have to ask for an MSB.
It's all kinds of regulation and red tape and compliance.
Like, I wouldn't be surprised if half of Coinbase's staff is compliance.
If they start integrating DEXs in the backend
and making it easy for people to have self-c self custody, they can eliminate all of that compliance.
They don't have to do with any of it because they're not having custody of anyone's crypto.
So it actually, DeFi makes it easier for CeFi to adopt it because you start cutting out all the red tape.
because you start cutting out all the red tape.
And so this has been like the kind of like one of the big,
big picture views of ThorChain is that it will be kind of integrated into the
back end of all these sexes because it's, you know,
you can eliminate a lot of like, like regulatory red tape.
And so the front end, the user,
they're not going to have any idea really that they're,
they're using self custody or whatever.
That's just by default. And so I think,
yeah, so I think, I think that's the way I think eventually it's going to go there because it works this right. This, you know, that's the way it should be. Um,
I just want one more quick thing. Somebody mentioned they bought CBB, CB,
BTC. You can swap that for Bitcoin on ThorChain.
You can unwrap that very quickly, very cheaply.
So you don't have to hold a wrapped token.
It's not just about the red tape, right?
Have you been trying to trade on GATIO recently?
Honestly, I have around 2000, sorry,
yeah, around 2000K on there.
And I honestly cannot just stand it.
You need to enter your password,
enter your email verification,
enter your Google notification,
and then there is another password that they give to you.
So right now, Seafy is so far behind i think the only
reason why the two main reasons why c5 still exists in today's world first as you said yeah it's um
actually i'm not sure if you said it at least for me first is p2p i mean like i have my salary in
use the t it's the easiest way so if someone knows a way how to make a P2P transaction
decentralized I'll be happy to listen and I mean yeah there are many reasons but right now
ah yes sorry the second reason is budgets right now it's very simple I used to work for a DEX I
used to be one of the spaces actually on thisx. And they actually transformed to being Seafy
because it's really easy to have a real person
that's KYC to have the marketing budgets calculated
to onboarding this person, right?
So you know this person who this person is,
his passport you understand to acquire this user,
you spend 20, 30, 20 30 40 50 50 dollars
and then in a lifetime value you get 200 or more and then this model is productive so i think
that's the only two reason that's uh to fight index it exists at the moment
by the way i would love to know also if people know a decentralized peer-to-peer platform,
because they all pretty much got either banned or attacked over pretty much the last administration
and maybe even before that.
What about, I mean, this isn't exactly decentralized peer-to-peer, but it's kind of similar because you don't need to KYC, I don't think.
What about like Trezor swap?
I'm talking about getting like cash, real money.
Oh, on and off ramp?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's tricky.
That's the sticky part.
Yeah, that's the hard part.
Exactly.
I mean, can't you just like walk walk into a shop in Hong Kong somewhere,
give them $2,000 and we'll give you dollars?
Well, unless you live there, though, it's not sustainable, is it?
You can't just fly to Hong Kong every time you want to run.
I mean, it sounds like you can if you're Matthew.
Yeah, if you live in Bangkok, then you just got to step up, spend that 50 bucks
and fly over to Hong Kong and you're good to go. Yeah. And I mean, like there are some, you know,
there's lots of crypto debit card options as well, which are not, you know, there's some KYC
required for those, but often it's minimal. So there's that option, especially some of them
integrate well with some exchange you might already be using.
But to get into an earlier point that was made about CeFi and DeFi, I think one thing that's interesting to note this cycle is the fact that a lot of the exchanges, whilst they're on ramping customers to their CeFi exchange business, they're also dabbling in defy like a lot of you know
binance announcing is going to do something involving on chain liquidity on b&b and coinbase
has base and so it's like it's looking like at least to me that those two sides are getting
closer and closer together which is interesting i'd encourage that effort to be honest like one thing that's interesting is like um
having elements of an application a defi application that is permissioned
for kyc users and other elements that are not so you in that way you can be you can allow users
anonymity perhaps if they're doing lower volumes or uh if they live in jurisdictions that don't require
kyc and then you can still be regulatory compliant on the other side because for
certain jurisdictions that have more stringent regulations you follow in their legislation
it's interesting and like you know one thing that i'm working on at the moment which is Stratex this merger of CeFi and DeFi is quite interesting
to us so much so that to give you some brief
context, Stratex is a DeFi yield marketplace
on the bottom and then the best strategies get aggregated
into vaults and then the vaults themselves get tokenized
and can trade on the
secondary market which means that you take something like a DeFi strategy which is purely
positions within DeFi and that gets translated into a vault token which can be traded on a
centralized exchange so suddenly you have a user that's on Binance or, you know, any other exchange that's buying a token that's powering the DeFi ecosystem underneath, which is quite an interesting idea.
Because it means that the fee capture from the primary layer of access of crypto, which is CeFi, the fee capture from there can still flow into DeFi rather than being captured and siloed off at the CeFi level, which is quite interesting.
Something that we're looking at really closely.
I think it was Kenton that mentioned that I think everything will eventually
move into DeFi.
But, I mean, some of it might actually stay or be pushed towards DeFi,
like Coinbase as the example.
Well, DeFi is kind of a virus, isn't it, really?
Because as soon as you have an outlet that prevents...
So in a closed banking system, in an ideal world, you have perfect KYC and you have no cash,
which means that the value capture is 100% in a KYC AML environment, right?
So totally sorted. But the minute you allow those
banks to custody crypto assets
that have had a decentralized origin
on behalf of
clients or just for their own
business, then that
kind of watertight system starts
to leak. And when you have
CeFi or blended
CeFi, DeFi platforms that
have elements or can interact DeFi platforms that have elements
or can interact with other platforms that are non-KYC,
then it starts to leap really fast.
And so you go from something that was like a bit of a juggernaut,
which is like the old order, you know, banking system
where they'll block you if they don't like your political views.
And you go into this, which is like, you know,
quite interesting and easy to navigate from
all different jurisdictions all over the world people through business regardless of what
the politics of the day are which i think is quite interesting sorry darren well the way that coin
base has done this is like on the centralized exchange site and unchanged the way the sort of
deck swaps work
is that they just set you up a self-custody wallet,
you get like your ETH or whatever, your trade tokens.
And that like for this cycle,
or maybe even last cycle would have had everyone.
The way I'm looking at it is like, again, boarding my grand.
Say example, because it's easy and it's here.
She wants a little cock cock she wants some cock and
but what i would previously what interesting choice for your grandma darren but
you've never met my grandma the worst part is that i can hear children in the background on people's
yeah no that's fine but yeah say she wanted to buy some of that what i had to do previously was
like set up coinbase i can't have her kyc then try to set it up with custody wallet and then
get an off run from the coinbase to the self-custody wallet connect swap and then all of the stuff in between that which is usually a nightmare
but in the future if she literally needs the coinbase app and then she can go get as much
cock as she wants um so having to self-custody without a seed phrase all that fun stuff and then actually be trusted to seed phrase um
i hope she's not listening um
she's listening she's sitting right next to me yeah she told me um no it's much easier to onboard anyone in that and i think most people will just at that level just stay on coinbase
and like in the near future because there's no need
to then offer up onto the self-custody wallet if you if you don't trust yourself it's kind of like
the etf thing but when those people pass away though i don't think there'll be anyone to replace
them right so i actually yeah i agree with you i think i think people on the coinbase now they'll
stay there right but you know as new you know new babies are born, new people are born.
And like, look at a one-year-old today. Like, they're not going to be able to fathom a world without Bitcoin, right?
Like, they're just going to accept crypto. It's obvious. And they're going to be crypto native, you know, by the time they're 15.
And so, you know, maybe they'll have a Coinbase account, but they'll know the difference between a SEX and a DEX, right?
I find it so funny that we say that.
No, I think that's totally accurate.
Like, when I think about it, thinking, I don't know, 20 years, 30 years in the future, what we're going to have.
So it's going to be, again, a convergence of certain things.
One, companies aren't going to hold cash like they used to.
What's going to happen is we have all of these yield-bearing stablecoins that are coming out that are using treasury yield that companies are going to say,
why are we just sitting with dollars in our bank, especially these big companies that have millions, if not hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars just sitting there doing nothing.
companies that have millions, if not hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars just
sitting there doing nothing. So they're going to want to put it into yield bearing stable coins,
earn interest and use those stable coins to pay employee salary at some point in the distant
future. What's also going to happen is like when I was, I don't know, eight, nine, 10 years old,
sometime around there, my parents took me to a bank for
the first time and opened up a bank account and showed me how to use it and taught me. And I know
like when I have kids, like you were saying that are 15 years old, I am going to show them how to
use a crypto wallet. I'll say like, here's how you transfer funds. And parents are actually going
to teach their kids how to do these things on chain, not because I want to necessarily push
crypto for the sake of pushing crypto, but because I want to give my children the best advantage that
they can possibly have. And I see crypto as the way to do that. So you're going to get people like
people will know how to use crypto wallets, and they're just going to use wallets like we
treat bank accounts today. Like, yes, there are some people in the world that still don't have bank accounts that are unsure and it's super unfortunate and i'm not saying that but
like they will eventually have bank accounts you're going to have schooling systems and
education start reflecting like hey here's here's what crypto is and here's what a wallet is and
how you use it because that education is becoming so important. And then you're just going to have company like,
I think it's going to happen not with this big declaration of like,
okay, now we're going from banks to on-chain currency.
And I do think there's this middle ground.
We talk about like there, when we think about C5 and D5,
but there's like this weird,
there's traditional finance that is off chain.
And then there's on-chain centralized off chain and then there's on-chain
centralized finance and then there's defy and i think we're moving to a world where a lot of
finance is going to be on chain and that gap between uh like traditional finance and defy
is actually going to close because traditional finance is going to be on-chain finance and
they're not going to be much of a difference.
I agree with you.
I want to,
and I even want to one up you a little bit.
Your kids will be teaching you about crypto,
right?
Like look at kids today,
teaching their parents and grandparents about,
you know,
the internet and how to use Instagram and stuff like that.
Right.
Like me and Brock yesterday.
Right.
Like,
you know,
our kids are going to be teaching us about crypto one day
so that's how fast things move i want to push back and you guys are probably going to uh
want to murder me for this and i don't necessarily want this to happen or agree
uh that this is the best thing but i disagree with some of that stuff not because I don't want it to happen because I do
think it's the right thing and it would be amazing. And I'm certainly going to do the same thing with
my children and all the people around me that are open and willing. But when it comes down to it,
I think people in general, I have a lot of hope for humanity, but people in general, I think are
very lazy and also very ignorant and they would rather just take the easy route that's the most affordable
they would rather give away their power they would rather give away their self-sovereignty
and all those things that they've done for a long time and Kenton you made an example earlier about
you know I forget exactly what the example is but it made me think of like okay you know the people
that are in charge the people that are in, whether it's corporations or government or central bankers or whatever, they do as much as they do as little,
but as best as they can for the population to keep them calm so that they can control things
and gather as much wealth as possible until it gets to a breaking point and civilization flips
and blah, blah, blah. I don't think that it's going to be this thing where a bunch of people are
using hard technology or learning incredibly difficult things. I think that most people
are going to take the easiest route. The majority of people are going to take the easiest route,
and there's going to still be a small pocket of people, communities, children, their families,
and their parents, and their brothers and sisters that are
going to help them understand as well too, that are going to use these forms of technology to
build with and create with. And then most people are going to be consumers, right? And they're
going to take the easy route. So I don't know how much people are actually going to be operating
with decentralized finance on the front end, like, you know, software wallets and
other stuff, they're probably going to continue using banks. They're probably going to continue
using whatever the government or media feeds to them to move with things. I don't think this is
right. I think that that sucks, but it's kind of like meritocracy where the people that are
digging the most and want to get in there and make the most moves and succeed the most will try the hardest and try to, you know, take things in control into
their own lives, right? That is what this technology offers in many ways, but it doesn't
mean that people are going to do that. I want it to be different, but you see with like, say,
the internet, yes, okay. Initially, there was a small amount of people that use the internet.
And now everybody uses the internet.
But not everybody is creating with the internet.
Not everybody is actually benefiting greatly from the internet.
The majority of people are actually, you know, dampening their lives and making their lives
worse by being on phones all the time or being so plugged in and just deafening their experience,
right?
So I want to be optimistic and I am eternally optimistic,
but I feel like it's the majority of people aren't actually going to be,
you know, pushing this forward.
They're just going to be using it.
And then there's going to be a smaller portion of people
that are going to be the pioneers and running it
and running industries and building industries around it and whatnot.
That's my personal opinion.
But I hope that, you know, all of a sudden governments
and corporations and schools and everybody starts to adopt technology and be more friendly towards
decentralization, be more friendly towards these type of applications. But, you know, it just so
happens that centralized power is an easier way to control people and to, you know, suck wealth
from people and suck energy from people. And they've been doing that for a long time.
And power doesn't like to just let go of control very easily.
It has to be toppled, right?
Of course.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Yeah, I mean, and the whole thing, everything that comes around,
the first principle is complexity abstraction, complexity abstraction.
If you can abstract away the complexity, then that helps out tremendously.
And then additionally, if it's safer, it runs better, everything, right? And that's what's happening with DeFi. Right now,
it's hard. You have to remember, like, we have to try to reset your brain, everyone. I challenge
you to, like, pretend you know nothing about blockchain you're hearing about the first time.
You're starting to understand, you know, Bitcoin, block time, consensus, you know, proof of stake,
proof of work. You don't know anything's mean. You don't know anything about a transaction hash. This is a hurdle, right? And if we can extract away that
complexity as possible, then we're going to win. And I think actually it's quite easy to do that.
If you think of like any app that you use, I'm going to use Zelle as a native, but any money
transferring app, very simple interface, right? When it comes to fiat on-ramp, on-ramp, off-ramp, on-ramp,
excuse me, you know, just having regular fiat dollars be transitioned into stable coin dollars
and then going from there is a huge step. If you want to buy something in a store,
you can imagine where this is going to go. Think of what we use right now. You have a debit card
or a credit card in fiat land. You have an EMV card. You just tap the card on the thing and
your payment's there. That's what we're going to get get to you guys. We're going to get to the point where you will have a wallet and whatever interface
that is, whatever technology there's going to be many available, but it's going to be a seamless
process between having assets and then buying assets. And then we have the advantage in DeFi,
right? Because you don't need any of these regulatory, you know, burdens like KYC, you know, it's permissionless, right? Everyone's seen the recent censorship
with the founder of Tron, right? What's going on, like all that drama, all of that's going to be
abstracted away if we win, if we win, if we can make infrastructure like a highway, DeFi being
like a highway where people just drive on, doesn't matter if you're altruistic or the most nefarious person alive, that's what we need to get to. And everything is being built in real time. Everyone listening to this, the speakers, all the different protocols, Thor chain, Polygon, everybody, we're all active participants in this. And everyone here can do their own part to help push this technology and i encourage anyone
listening to this if you will are on a centralized exchange remove your assets from a centralized
exchange try to use interfaces that use thor chain or any other d5 i don't really care get your foot
in the game because the process starts with us because we are literally forming history in real
time sounds surreal to say almost sounds a little overly romanticized, but I promise you it
is the truth.
Great, Denny.
And guys, I need to bounce.
I want to thank you for having me.
Thank you for letting me hear my thoughts.
I just want to leave something with you guys.
Maybe, Denny, you can talk about it.
I thought blockchain was going to integrate Polygon.
There was talk about it, I don't know, a year or so ago.
We have Ethereum and base. I'm not sure what happened with Polygon, but maybe you it, I don't know, a year or so ago. We have Ethereum in base.
I'm not sure what happened with Polygon, but maybe you know, I don't know. But maybe we need
to pick up that conversation again and get that going. But thanks, everybody.
