Full transcript: João Simões on London Real
3:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Joao Simoas, the business leader, crypto pioneer and blockchain expert. You are the co-founder and CEO of Genesis LRT, an innovative liquid restaking protocol using the exciting new Eigenlayer technology. You have spent the last decade working in private equity, FinTech, and you founded BitMasters, Portugal’s first Bitcoin mining firm.
3:24 You are a professor on the global MBA program at Deakin University in Australia, teaching corporate finance while also advising on Web3 startups. Your aim is to lead a blockchain technology revolution, and you think that Genesis LRT will be at the forefront of this movement, changing the world of finance forever. You believe that Eigenlayer’s restaking solution offers a groundbreaking approach that will enhance security, yield and trust on the Ethereum network. Joao, welcome to London Real.
3:52 Brian Rose: Thank you so much for being here.
3:54 João Simões: Thank you so much. So I think that you did an amazing intro. I have nothing to add.
3:58 Brian Rose: Perfect, man. Well, look, I just want to start by saying that Genesis LRT is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, which is the world’s first media-powered investment firm.
4:08 Our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge Web3 and AI companies while giving our partners like you marketing exposure across the London Real Media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. Joao, we’re super excited to be part of this journey with you, man. So let’s jump in and maybe we start simple here. Right. What is restaking? And maybe to go on that journey, maybe we even have to back up and say, what is staking?
4:40 Brian Rose: Right. Maybe we start and maybe explain it to people who might be newish to this ecosystem. So how do you do that?
4:47 João Simões: Yes, yes. So that is actually that is a very simple way to explain this. So staking is actually so yeah, taking a little bit of backing up.
4:55 So first, in the traditional finance world, which is already a field that is being developed for hundreds, thousands of years, right versus crypto that exists for 10 plus years. There is so much things in DeFi and crypto that need to be built, to need to be made. Right. So we in DeFi, we are looking at traditional finance and other instruments and thinking like, what can we do to enhance and to make better products, financial products? Because DeFi is finance. So we are building financial products. So and if you see in DeFi, there was nothing that resembled, for example, a mortgage.
5:32 And that’s exactly what is staking in a very simplistic terms. So with a mortgage, you have your house, you stake your house, you put it there. Right. And in exchange, you receive liquidity. Right. That’s the same thing as liquid staking.
5:46 So you stake your ETH and in exchange, you receive liquidity, a liquid token. So that’s the same thing. And restaking is the concept of double mortgage, which exists in the US. In Europe, I believe it’s illegal, but in the US is a very common practice. So you are staking your house twice and getting double the liquidity.
6:04 And with restaking is the same thing. You are staking your ETH twice and getting double getting the liquidity on top of that. And how do you get the yields also on top of that? Very simple. So your house will act like a savings account.
6:19 So when you are putting your money in a savings account, you lock in your dollars or euros and you are receiving a yield by staking your euros or dollars. And as liquid restaking is exactly the same thing. When you stake, you are saving your ETH on a savings account. And because of that, you’re receiving yields on top of that. So in a nutshell, that’s it.
6:40 You are staking your house or staking your ETH, getting yields and getting a liquid token on top of that as liquidity. So in a very simplistic terms, in just like what, five minutes, this is restaking.
6:51 Brian Rose: OK, now let’s just talk quickly about Ethereum staking. So in, you know, blockchain and crypto assets, we have something we kind of call the blue chips of crypto. And that’s usually considered Bitcoin or ETH, which has a market cap of about 1.3 trillion and ETH, which is about just under half a trillion right now.
7:08 Those are by far the biggest assets, the ones with the greatest history, the biggest user base. Now, Bitcoin is really kind of digital gold. It has its own network. It’s really decentralized and it’s still on proof of work. But Ethereum recently moved to proof of stake about a year ago.
7:26 And by doing so, people that owned chunks of Ethereum, I think it was 32 Ethereum would actually get you a node where you could verify transactions. They started getting yields on Ethereum. And this was something that makes it very different than Bitcoin. And you could get, I think, about a 4 percent annual yield for just taking your Ethereum and saying, guess what? I’m going to put it aside for a period of time. Someone’s going to take that and approve transactions with it.
7:55 And this asset is now going to give me a 4 percent yield, which was really interesting. And again, it starts to look more kind of like a bond or a fixed income.
8:04 João Simões: Yes, yes, it’s very similar to a bond. So each validator right now, the yield is about 4 percent per validator. And going on jumping on Eigenlayer, I know that we will jump on Eigenlayer eventually, but already starting this topic.
8:17 So what Eigenlayer does, and that’s why everyone is so excited about it, is that when you restake the second layer, Eigenlayer is actually built that your second layer, you can have multiple validators inside. So when you stake on the second layer, it goes to a Eigenpod, which is the second validator, aggregator of validators. And inside, you can have multiple validators. So your second stake actually is divided in multiple stakes. And if each validator is the 4 percent, as we have now as a market standard, this means that you stake once, you get 4, you go to Eigenlayer, and inside the Eigenpod, let’s say that you stake on two or three validators.
8:57 This means that you can have 4 plus 4 plus 4. Then you are hitting that sweet, sweet spot that everyone is excited about, meaning that Lidle Staking or Rocket Pool Staking, which is the first layer, is no longer attractive. Why should I get 4 when I can get my ETH on a second layer that will divide on multiple validators, and that can get me 12, 18 percent yields? Amazing. I want that. Everyone wants that.
9:24 Brian Rose: And this is the headline that gets everyone sitting up in their seats because 4 percent annually is not a bad return. Although these days, compared with the Treasury curve, it’s not exciting. It used to be more exciting. If rates drop this year, which we think it will, it’ll look better, but it doesn’t resonate as much as 8 percent or 12 percent or 16 percent. Now, I just had Jordan Belfort on my show. He’s the wolf of Wall Street.
9:45 Yes. He just wrote a book about finance that’s actually really good. And I got to know Jordan pretty well. And his whole theory in this book is that the way to make money with Wall Street is to put your money in, say, an S&P fund and allow it to compound. This is one way. That only gets interesting if you’re making a 9 or a 10 percent return.
10:06 If you can’t get those kind of returns, that money won’t go to millions over your lifetime. But if you do, it’s one of the best strategies for the average person. Now, enter what you guys are doing. You guys can start getting people 10, 12, maybe 16 percent yields. All of a sudden, because of a compounding effect, this can really create wealth for people over time.
10:29 João Simões: 100 percent.
10:30 Brian Rose: And this gets people’s attention. And so it’s new technology. Again, I can layer really kick this off. It’s a much anticipated protocol. But right now, you guys are taking something that was 4 percent and potentially leveraging up.
10:44 Although, tell me if that’s the right word to use to where you can get 12 percent. Now, I went to the MIT Sloan School of Business. You know, you took courses in finance and they always have a risk-reward diagram. With more reward, typically comes more risk. So what’s the catch?
11:00 João Simões: Yeah. So the catch here, and this is something that I have been also discussing personally with the Eigenlayer team, is really the slashing risk. So slashing is when there is like a bad actor or a hacking in a validated transaction. And you get slashed and you lose like the 32 ETH that you have in the validator. In this case, you lose the staking portion that you have.
11:21 Brian Rose: Okay. And then that can happen?
11:23 João Simões: That can happen if you get hacked. Right. Or if there is some kind of error during the transaction or if that is a bad actor, they call it the bad actors.
11:31 Brian Rose: Right. So if you approve a bad transaction, then they take your ETH away. Yeah. And say, don’t do that. Right.
11:37 João Simões: The interesting part here is that because you have multiple validators and you can only get slashed per validator, meaning that even if during the imagine that you have you are staking five validators. Right. So the first one plus four from Eigen. If you get slashed in validator like Eigen one, you still have three transactions that go through. So you still instead of getting like the 16 percent, you’ll get 12, for example, and you get slashed in one.
12:03 And but what we are doing is we are working on what we think that is a groundbreaking solution is we are applying that insurance against slashing. So we are developing that and we are also developing something that called DVT technologies. We are applying that with Genesis. So DVT is called a distributed validator technology where in the first layer of stake, we are we have clusters of multiple validators that keep your keys private and that go around it and makes it to go secure, 100 percent secure.
12:37 So you are never validating in the same one like it is distributed the validation keys. So it makes it extra secure. Genesis is the only protocol with this at the moment. So we are working with all the top tier validators like either stake, you know, kill, you know, staking. We have, yeah, every stake, and like all the tier ones, we have them there.
13:02 Like I can give you the the full list and like it’s all about security. Right. And bringing back them, the question to two Eigen layer, I had a conversation myself, which I’m the creator of Eigen. And what he told me is that he believes that because Eigen is so leveraged up only the protocols that have insurance or some kind of prevention mechanism to avoid slashing will survive. Because he knows that the slashing can occur.
13:33 And now let’s take it to a more extreme case. So if you have you if you are slashed, for example, in a validator one and you get slashed in validator two or three at the same time, this means that your slashing compound effect can go up. And this is where the danger comes in. So at the early days of Eigen, and I talk about this during my talk at Istanbul, you theoretically, if you read the Eigen layer paper, theoretically, you can go up to two hundred percent slashing.
14:03 And then you open the question like where if your money is a hundred percent, how can you slash two hundred? Where’s the other hundred is avoid who pays that? You know, and I asked that direct to the Eigen team. And apparently what they are trying to do is inside the Eigen port, the risk is divided, meaning that if you have two validators is 50 50 slashing, not 100 100, you know, which makes way more sense. But if you apply on top of the insurance and if you get slashed in one, but you get insurance of 50 percent or if you get insured in 25 percent, then the customer is happy.
14:38 We are happy. Everyone is happy. You know, so I believe that’s really the future of Eigen is that, of course, you are leveraging up a lot, but at the same time, you are ensuring people that their capital is safe. And if there is a slashing event, you only get you only lose, so to speak, like five or 10 percent of your reward, which is if you are getting 16 or 18 percent, sometimes losing five percent. It’s nothing, right?
15:04 Brian Rose: OK, now, when I was in Dubai for January and February, that’s all people were talking about was Eigen layer, Eigen layer, Eigen layer. Some people had invested. They were up like 20 X. It was like the next big thing. When will it be up and running?
15:19 Brian Rose: I’m curious. Great, great. And is your technology fully dependent on them? Or will you be able to use your technology with other providers in the future?
15:27 João Simões: Yeah, great question. Two part question. Yeah, respond and respond to the first part.
15:32 So Eigen layer right now, they will divide their mainnet launch in three parts. So it will be mainnet V1, V2 and V3. Mainnet one will be actually in about 40 days. So it’s almost there. We already preparing our team to launch it with them.
15:47 So everything is aligned already. I was with Chiram also here in Denver and he confirmed me in person like 40 days. OK, 40 days is life. So V1, then the V2 will be end of Q2, then V3 end of Q3. So that’s that’s the goal. And the differences will be that the V1 will open Eigen layer to the protocols.
16:11 So you can already start getting yield, start getting some rewards. V2 enhances like the AVS is the validators, all that. And V3, I think it will apply like the slashing mechanisms and all that. Like it will be fully released by Q3.
16:27 Brian Rose: OK, so that’s when the rollout. The second question, I guess, was are there going to be competitors to Eigen layer coming up?
16:35 Brian Rose: Yes. So when you answer that, maybe tell me why is why is Eigen layer so special? But answer that.
16:42 João Simões: Yeah, so there is currently, to my knowledge, only one other competitor of Eigen layer. I don’t remember the name, I’m sorry, but I know that there is one team trying to build something similar, but it’s still very early on, you know.
16:59 I believe that that is a great question. And a lot of people are asking that question right now in the space is like, why Eigen is so special?
17:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, why so special? Because every other DeFi protocol can be copied really easy. And we saw that happen over the last three years.
17:13 João Simões: I think that, I don’t know, like I think they they are building something so clean. The team is so good that I guess everyone is going with it, I believe. But I do agree that eventually there will be competitors. Eventually, you will have probably in one or two or three years, probably a world where you will have Eigen layer and the Eigen layer 2, Eigen layer 3, Eigen layer 4. And we as Genesys, our second layer of staking can go to Eigen to the other, to the other, to the other. For example, we can integrate because we are doing it with Eigen because they are doing the technology, but we are not fully dependent on them.
17:50 If there is another company doing a similar strategy with more security or with better yields or whatever it is, with better infrastructure, we can switch the other one during our second staking. Why not? But they were the ones that came up with the restaking narrative. So I guess that’s why everyone is so excited about it.
18:13 Brian Rose: So in January, I attended the Satoshi Roundtable, which is this very hush-hush grouping of about 500 of super crypto OGs.
18:22 We took over the whole Waldorf Astoria Hotel on the Palm. We weren’t allowed to disclose where we were, no videos, no social media. And it was these, you know, discussions, these roundtables that these events would just come up. If you had an idea, you’d stick it on a card and then people would show up and speak really frankly, because it was all off the record. Now, one of the topics was, is Eigen layer the next 2008 financial crisis, right?
18:48 And so I went to that one just to check it out. We hadn’t invested in you guys yet, but I’m keeping my ear out. And people were saying, OK, what are we thinking? You know, we’ve already seen Terra Luna, which was paying 18 percent as a stablecoin, algorithmic stablecoin crash. We went through 08. A lot of people believe that, you know, well, we know that Satoshi kind of wrote the Bitcoin White Paper in response to the financial crisis.
19:13 And so the big question I’m sure you get is, are we setting ourselves for another overleveraged situation where it could end in tears for the crypto market with Eigen layer? What are your thoughts?
19:27 João Simões: Yeah. So the thing is, if there is like a catastrophic event where you get multiple slashing on across multiple validators at the same time and you get that black void of the 200 percent slashing or something crazy like that, it could crash. Like that’s the reality. You know, like it could crash. But what I see and I think that the Eigen layer team knows that very well.
19:52 And like the Shiram is a Berkeley guy, MIT guy like this, like the team is really good. And I think that’s why they are delaying the product so much because the product was supposed to be released like last year. Then they delayed to Q1. And now it’s like end of Q1, early Q2, because they know that they need to release something so bulletproof that needs to be the best of the best. And even myself, sometimes I get mad about that. I was like, why are they so slow? Why are they taking so much time?
20:24 And then when I talk with like investors and advisors, they say like, well, I actually prefer to be slower than to rush it. And we have a catastrophic event. And then I’m like, they are right. You know, so I guess that all the LRTs and all the projects are really respecting Eigen layers time because they know that they need to release something so bulletproof that nothing bad can happen. And if there is some slashing events, maybe it’s like five or 10 percent, but never above that, you know, because like the leverage here is so huge.
20:58 Like there is so much money put into Eigen like billions and billions of dollars already that if this goes bust, it’s bad.
21:07 Brian Rose: And it already has money locked into Eigen layer. How do you lock money in if it’s not live yet?
21:14 João Simões: You can, I think it’s all about investing, maybe majority is investment.
21:19 Brian Rose: Okay, or buying like nodes or something.
21:22 João Simões: Yeah, majority is investment.
21:24 Brian Rose: Now, big question is, is the founder of Ethereum or one of the main founders, Vitalik Buterin, what does he think about restaking? And I think he maybe changed his mind when it first came out. I think he was a bit suspicious about it. But recently, it seems like he’s changed his mind. Yes.
21:40 What’s he saying? And I think he might have either talked directly or indirectly.
21:45 João Simões: Yes, yes, yes. So Eigen in the big Eigen, sorry, Vitalik in the beginning, he was like very, very anti Eigen layer because he saw what could happen to Ethereum. And he foreseen that and he said, like, wait a minute. No, this is so much leverage that it’s something happens.
22:00 It goes bust his own creation is destroyed. So it was heavily against it. But after a while, he started seeing that. Wait a minute. If we have more Ethereum staked, this means that there is more security on ETH and there is actually more people involved in Ethereum.
22:19 So maybe we are bringing Ethereum to the top one. Maybe Bitcoin is not the top one anymore. Ethereum is slowly taking the first spot. And then I think when he understood that by not locking your assets once, but locking in twice and enhancing the security of Ethereum even more and making it more secure, more trustworthy and to have more people putting more money into ETH, I think it changed his mind at that moment. So I was with Vitalik during the Istanbul event at the staking summit and DevConnect and Binance blockchain week.
23:01 He was there during that week. And I had the pleasure to speak with him. And this was the thoughts. So what he said is he’s slowly shifting his mind because he understands that, well, if we are bringing more Ethereum to the ecosystem, if we are making it more secure, he’s OK with that. But he’s still worried about the leveraging part, of course.
23:27 Brian Rose: Which makes sense, but also the more decentralized it is, the more staking makes it a more robust network. And the Bitcoiners always criticize and say we have the most decentralized network and they point fingers at Ethereum and then they point more fingers at Solana and they say, look, most of these nodes are controlled by a small amount of people. And they always say you’re not decentralized. We are. So we know that’s a criticism. It’s part of the trilemma.
23:50 And so the fact that Vitalik wants to do this makes sense, which maybe brings me to my next point. And this is an interesting point. We’ve now seen the approval of the Bitcoin ETF. We’ve seen BlackRock dumping sometimes a billion dollars into the Bitcoin ETF when we’re only mining sometimes a 10th or a 14th of that amount. We’ve seen Bitcoin price go up in reference to that. The big question now is the Ethereum ETF.
24:18 Now, the date May 23rd is in everyone’s mind because I think it’s maybe the earliest they could approve it. But if this gets approved, you and I both used to work in finance. I spent 15 years in fixed income derivatives. I worked on Wall Street. I worked in Chicago.
24:32 I worked here in London. And I know institutions love a yield-bearing instrument. Now, Bitcoin is not that instrument. It’s digital gold. It’s a diversified asset, perfect for any portfolio. And they are aping into it like nobody’s business as they should. And they’re just getting started.
24:48 So sovereign wealth funds aren’t in there. As Kathy Wood from Mark Invest says, the wire houses aren’t in there. The Merrill Lynch Bank of America’s Morgan selling. They’re not even in yet. But when these institutions smell a yield-bearing instrument and a yield curve, let alone smell a high-interest-bearing instrument, I think they’re going to go absolutely bonkers for this asset.
25:09 What are your thoughts on that?
25:11 João Simões: So I had the pleasure to speak with the Franklin Templeton team that is one of the teams behind the Ethereum ETF. And they are actually building the Ethereum ETF. And I spoke and I asked this question directly to one of their team members like, is the Ethereum ETF happening? Yes or no? Answer is yes.
25:33 Answer is yes. It’s happening, it’s happening this year, and it’s confirmed. So when I saw that and when I got that information, I was literally immediately in my chats with my team saying like, guys, put all your money into ETH. It’s going to be crazy. Like, I believe this year is the year. Like, it’s going to be a massive year for crypto. Because again, all these things that we have been just talking in this couple of minutes is like, Ethereum could surpass Bitcoin.
26:02 With Eigenlayer, with now the ETF, and like, what’s next? Solen ETF? Maybe, you know, and I think that the fact that now corporate is looking at crypto, especially big banks and all these traditional finance guys that were always doubtful of crypto are now looking into crypto and say like, well, maybe this is better than my bonds that are not performing, than my portfolio that is not performing. My portfolio that is performing 1% a year or two. And we in crypto, we are like, in Dubai, living our best lives, right? Getting the sweet, sweet yields of 10, 15%, even in stables. Look at stables. They are giving yields of 10 plus. If you put your money on USDT, USDC, you are good.
26:54 If you put some good money on USDT or USDC, you pretty much you can retire. And that is crazy. And if you put that in the mix with a portfolio of restaking, with a mix of some Ethereum ETF, moon.
27:08 Brian Rose: It’s so you’re saying it’s happening. It’s happening. And again, I think I was listening to Anthony Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital, who’s actually here later this afternoon, who said once they approve an ETF with a proof of stake instrument, then the floodgates open. Because from there to get to a Solana or a Cardano or a polygon.
27:32 It’s so close. It’s hard to argue against it at that point. Now, the big question is, is Ethereum a security? And that’s the big question. Now, Gary Gensler, our good friend over at the SEC, he taught a class at the MIT Sloan School of Management. It was after I graduated. I was there in like the 90s. And I took that class because it was free on YouTube. It was 24 hours long.
27:53 I listened to it back in 21. And I learned, first of all, Gary is really smart. He understands crypto really well. And he said in that course that Ethereum was not a security. He said on that course, it’s on YouTube.
28:09 Now he gets in the SEC and he’s become a political figure. And now he seems to be echoing whatever the party tells him. And he says, now it’s not. And he’s digging his heels in him and his good buddy, Elizabeth Warren, and trying to stop it from happening. So the question is, is can he stop the Ethereum ETF? Now, he tried to stop the Bitcoin ETF and he couldn’t. Larry Fink said this is happening. And Scaramucci knew it was happening even a week or two before.
28:35 Because I believe there was so much money at stake that they railroaded.
28:40 João Simões: So much money. Like even yesterday, I was with one of our advisors that works for one of the major investment banks. And he just told me like we don’t invest anything below like a billion. So like if it’s not something to actually go all in, we don’t care. So I think that the ETF thing is one of the best, if not the best thing for crypto in the last few years.
29:07 And because the big banks love it, the retail loves it, you know, like the Black Rocks, the Goldmans, the JP Morgan’s, whatever. They are like, well, this is a safe way to put one or two bees to create a good diversified portfolio for our clients. And the thing is, the client is king. If the client asks your, if you ask your edge fund manager or your investment banking manager, whatever, like, oh, I want this percent of yield on my account and I can have this amount of money to put in.
29:36 They need to build your portfolio. So it’s the client that is already calling BlackRock and Goldman and saying like, guys, I want crypto in my portfolio, you know, that’s it.
29:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, I always explain to my students that, you know, what does a banker want most? First of all, he cares about one thing more than anything, more than his children, more than his life. And that’s his bonus.
30:03 So I worked at Wall Street every year. It’s about the bonus. And it’s like everybody prepares for the bonus, talks about the bonus. And the other thing he cares about is servicing his clients. And this is where people don’t understand. If your client wants to buy something and you won’t sell it to them, they will go to another bank. They will go to another manager.
30:21 They’ll go down the street until they find someone that does sell it to them. And so people think, no, bankers don’t want to sell them crypto because they can see crypto ending the banking system. Now, banks and bankers don’t think that far ahead. They literally think to the next bonus pool cycle. And if your client wants it, you better give it to them or they’re going to go find it down the street with someone else.
30:39 And so you’re right, there’s people expressing demand, not to mention, I mean, it’s an uncorrelated asset. There’s not a lot of those that pop around every now and then. Most of them are taken. And it’s new, it’s exotic, it’s hot. It gives a lot of yields. What do you want more?
30:58 Brian Rose: And so that’s come in now. And you’re telling me from your sources that the Ethereum ETF is happening. If that happens on May 23rd.
31:05 João Simões: I don’t know the date. I don’t know the date. It could be delayed.
31:09 Brian Rose: But if that happens this year, it’s going to take what already looks like a monster crypto rally and turn it into a tsunami rally to where we don’t even know what happens after that. It’s almost like a singularity point where you can’t determine the future because a lot of people look at this bull cycle and they look at the last three bull cycles and they say it’s going to end in April next year. But if you have not only a Bitcoin ETF but an Ethereum ETF on top of that, it’s really hard to predict that future, I would say.
31:39 So you’ve got a big smile on your face. You’re happy to be in the right place at the right time. You have said to me you are one of 10 companies that are building a liquid restaking protocol and building an Eigen layer. What does that feel like to be a tiny number of companies that’s servicing what could be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of money?
32:02 João Simões: So that is a great question and thank you for that. So when I was doing our fundraising for Genesis, one thing that I always used to say to our soon-to-be investors is look outside of your window.
32:14 How many coffee shops or how many hairdressers do you see in just your street? Five, ten? Okay, multiply that by the numbers of streets in your city, then in your country, then in the world. You are talking about maybe millions of coffee shops and hairdressers and whatever you want to put all these small mom and pop shops, right? Now, looking at restaking, there is only 10 companies in the world doing what we do. There is 8 billion people in the world. It’s not a no-brainer, you know?
32:49 Like you have sectors that have millions and millions and millions of companies and still are making money versus a sector that has 10 companies. And Eigen currently has already filled in maybe 20 billion, something like that. So all these Bs are going to be spread out throughout the 10 LRTs. So this means that Genesis specifically has the possibility of having between one to two BTVL in the near future very easily, which is insane.
33:22 Brian Rose: Wow. And what’s to stop more people from getting into this?
33:26 João Simões: I think it’s the complexity of the creation of all the logarithmic functions and all the programming part. Because luckily, our CTO is an ex-anchor guy and he’s the guy that actually was behind the liquid staking solution at anchor. So he already knew how to program liquid staking. So to do liquid restaking was just easy for my CTO. So I believe that the majority of people looking at restaking, they’re like, wait a minute, too complex.
33:57 They need to go back and learn staking and to learn staking will take like six months plus then you need to learn restaking plus six months. So I believe that right now there are probably developers watching this interview at this moment and thinking like, damn, I’m one year late. Right. Because if you start now learning staking and then you want to learn restaking will take you maybe a year. So when you start your project in a year or two, the market already is gone.
34:26 Right. Let alone have a bunch of developers in the field, have them understand it, to be able to build a project together. You can’t just whip that together. You can’t right click and copy that.
34:36 Brian Rose: No. Right. Reminds me of that movie. You know, Oppenheimer just came out and talked about the atomic bomb.
34:41 And it talks about, you know, the Americans and they’re trying to build it versus the Germans. And you got all that intelligence at almost labs that allowed them to produce that thing. You don’t have that. Yes. Or if you made one wrong assumption, like think the Germans had made one wrong assumption about it.
34:54 João Simões: Yeah. I remember the movie when they asked him, like, can we destroy the world? And he said, well, there is a near zero possibility, like near zero. Yes, it’s not zero is near zero in physics is always near. The zero is absolute. There is no zero in physics is always near. And they look at him like, so are you sure? Yeah.
35:15 Brian Rose: And then they do it and like, OK, is that when you guys talk about it? Genesis, you’re like, yeah, what’s the chance that Genesis blows up the world? You’re like, it’s near zero. It’s near zero. It’s near zero.
35:25 There’s also a point in the movie where they say, what are the Germans doing? They’re like, they’re using heavy water and they’re like, they’re not going to do it. They’re on the wrong. They’re on the wrong way. And so there’s a barrier to entry. And that’s understanding these complex, super complex financial instruments.
35:39 João Simões: Yes. Not to mention the technology. Yes. Correct.
35:41 Brian Rose: OK. So you feel like you’re way ahead of the curve.
35:44 Yes. You’re feeling good. You just overfunded this round. Correct. And for you right now, it’s just about execution.
35:51 João Simões: Yes. Currently right now, what we want is really to get the best partnerships and we are working very hard on it right now. Grow TVL and do the integration with Eigen in 40 days and move, you know.
36:05 Brian Rose: So I should in 40 some days be able to go on to Genesis and do some restaking and maybe earn some double digit yield. Yes.
36:13 Yes. Yes. OK. Yes, sir. That’s big news. Yes, sir. You know, I want to ask you about some of this financial technology because when I first got into DeFi back in 2021, I looked at the space and I was like, wow, there is some amazing innovations happening in DeFi that don’t have a traditional finance equivalent. Right.
36:35 And that’s what really got my eyes opened. And I remember I first saw the DeFi summer of 2020 where we saw companies like Aave and Compound just explode in TVL. I used to have Andreas Antonopoulos on my show back in 2015, 2017, 2019. He sat in that chair and he would tell me about the Internet of money and all these concepts. This is before stablecoins had even come out. Well, and he was he was predicting that all these things were going to happen.
37:02 And then in 2020, they happened and everyone was like, wow, this is happening. And not only could you get yield on your crypto, but you could get tokens in the protocol as well. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
37:12 And I remember looking at this because when I was on Wall Street, I would have brokers and I would do like interest rate swaps between my company Bankers Trust and say Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. And the brokers were these firms that would call me up and say, hey, I got a price here. Do you want to do a trade with Goldman? And they kept it anonymous until we did the trade. And if I did a lot of business with my broker, they would get me front row seats at the next game. Of course. And they would take me to Sparks Steakhouse. Of course, of course.
37:39 With the big wine glasses where the mob boss was shot out in front before. And that was the way they would reward me. But when I saw DeFi summer, I thought these guys, instead of rewarding you with the steak dinners, they actually give you kind of shares in the company and tokens of the company. Yes. And I thought, wow, DeFi is innovating where Wall Street can’t. Yeah.
37:59 And I can layer looks like a similar thing because Wall Street is great, but it really is stuck kind of in the 1930s. It doesn’t really have a lot of innovative solutions. OK. It created credit derivatives and it created credit default swaps and it did some interesting things. But because of the way it works and the institutions and the balance sheets, it can’t create something like a DeFi protocol.
38:23 João Simões: We can move so fast in DeFi. And I think like and even I was talking yesterday with one of my advisors that works in this big bank and we were saying like the amount of synthetics that we can build is infinite.
38:36 Like you need you just need to think about what you want, how you want to do it, how you want to wrap it up. DeFi, the next day, you just need the good programmers, the good blockchain engineers is done. Yeah. No need to wait for SEC’s approvals and whatever, you know, like, no, it’s next day is done. Yeah.
38:54 Brian Rose: And so people that don’t understand what Wall Street is really good at in the past is customizing risk. So say back in the day, I wanted to yield on my portfolio.
39:03 Well, back in the 40s and 50s, you didn’t have many options. You can buy some government bonds, maybe some corporate bonds. What if you wanted a 20 year maturity or a 30 year maturity or a certain rate? Yeah, couldn’t help you. Yeah. Later, we created these things called interest rate swaps. And I ran that book in the 90s for Bankers Trust and I could customize any rate you wanted any maturity that you wanted exactly what you want.
39:24 Yeah. Then later they said, okay, I want some exposure to mortgages so I can get some extra yield. Gotcha. We can cover you there. Yeah. I want some exposure to corporate credits. Got you. Yeah. But then they kind of topped out what’s beautiful about DeFi is people can come in and say, guess what?
39:37 I want this specific exposure. Yeah. I want staked ETH exposure leveraged up, but I want to get insurance from Genesis that gives me some slashing risk. I don’t want the whole thing covered, but I’m willing to pay 3% to get 25% of my slashing risk. That’s the risk I’m comfortable. Yeah.
39:53 And you’re like, we got it. I can create that instruments in a couple of hours and that’s what the market needs. Yes. Right. Customize risk and then customize reward. And that is a real use case scenario. That’s not just Cowboys over leveraging.
40:06 João Simões: No, it’s actually a real use case scenario. No, it’s real. And there are real people like getting a lot of money into this. And actually in crypto, we have a problem that like it’s a good problem that I just realized that we have like last year, which is so I’ve been in the crypto space for a long time. And now that I’m doing Genesis and like this was after beat masters after my exit and all that. And in Genesis, I was literally like calling all my former partners like, hey guys want to invest in guys? The answer is like, I’m retired. I’m retired. I’m retired. All the guys from like five, six years ago are all retired.
40:47 So you have to chase new people. You have to chase new VCs, new investors, because there is a cycle of like, let’s say for maybe five years where everyone gets so much money. Everyone retires. Then you have new companies. Then everyone retires. Then you have a new company. And this doesn’t happen in old school VC or banking. No, bankers just go and go and go and go. And you have bankers in that were working for like 30 years, 40 years, VCs that are working and working. Maybe they already have a billion dollar fortunes, but they can’t.
41:17 Right. But the crypto mentality is somewhat different. People get, I don’t know, 10 million plus or something. And they’re like, buying a house in Thailand, retire. They don’t care anymore. Then you’re calling. You want to do another project? No. Right. So that is so weird. Yeah. And that’s that’s a nuance of the crypto market. It’s a nuance. Yeah. Because everyone gets so much money so fast that the contacts that you are building now in five years are useless. Okay.
41:47 João Simões: The majority of everyone already retired. It makes it even harder to get new businesses.
41:52 Brian Rose: And even though we had a crash after the last bull run, people still locked away wealth. Yeah, a hundred percent. Talk to me about this bull run. Okay. This thing kind of came out of nowhere. We all were knowing or hoping that it was going to come at some point. But I mean, if you look at the prices in December or even in January, I mean, they were 50% less, 60% less. I pulled up a Solana graph last night for my students.
42:16 It’s up 800% in one year. You cannot have the traditional market. I was rubbing my eyes and it’s the fourth largest protocol. It’s not like some meme coin or some penny stock. You know, it’s worth, you know, 80 billion dollars. Right. And I was like, what the heck is going on here? Right. Talk to me about this bull run. You’ve been around.
42:37 What does this bull run feel like to you? We’ve obviously had the Bitcoin ETF approved, but then not much happened after that.
42:45 João Simões: I feel that this bull run could be like the biggest of all time, you know. And the thing is like, I tried to see this as a more conservative eyes, but even with the conservative eye, it’s impossible to ignore. BTC ETF, Ethereum ETF, Eigen later with billions and billions of dollars, the halving. Then you have something that I also know that you like to discuss a lot, which is politics. You have to look at politics, right? How is the politics in the US? How is the war in Europe, war in Israel? Like the world is crazy right now. And if you look at the world, if you look at the state of the economy, if you look at the investor sentiment, this is something very, very interesting.
43:27 So I did my master thesis in how comparing the investor sentiment versus the crypto markets. And what I discovered via doing several mathematical calculations is that the investor correlation versus the crypto markets is actually that the majority of the traditional investors, they don’t feel the market as it’s a traditional one. It’s a completely different. So the investors that invest in crypto are non-traditional investors. And because of that, it’s so much more volatile. That’s why you have the biggest yields. And of course, this is changing a bit now with the ETFs and the big banks coming in. But it’s interesting that the crypto market fits a different crowd.
44:09 The misfits, right? The people that don’t like the system. And the people that don’t like the system nowadays, it’s a lot of people. It’s not one or two. It’s in the millions, you know, in the billions, because everyone is tired of what we have, right? Everyone is tired.
44:28 And even like you see, like, I don’t know your opinion about like Trump, Trump is going to win. I believe so, you know. And the thing is, you can like Trump or dislike Trump. But look at the state of the American politics. You have no good candidates. The only person that I guess is doing something is Trump. So he needs to win, I guess. He’s the only good candidate. You don’t want to have Joe Biden falling in during a conference.
44:56 It’s embarrassing. The biggest power in the world is tripping and falling and sleeping during a conference.
45:04 Brian Rose: Come on. Is Trump good for crypto, you think?
45:08 João Simões: I think so, because at least it will slow down the rage from the markets, I would say. Yeah. So yeah, maybe, maybe yes. The worst, the worst, like if worst keep happening, people will continue to lose money on their feet and will continue to go into crypto.
45:27 So like the crypto function is actually an inverted function versus the real traditional markets. So the more you dislike the government or the system, the more you’re going to crypto. But nowadays, with the entrance of the traditional investors, it’s actually a mix, because the traditional investors already saw that it’s so good that even they want to be in. So it’s not only for the misfits, but right now it’s for everyone. And I think that’s the sweet spot. It’s because I’m no longer the crazy person that is investing in crypto. I’m a normal guy now.
46:01 And when you have the big banks that look at us and say like, oh, BTC is going to disappear or that is nothing, blah, blah. And now are the guys that are knocking in my door and saying like, Adrian, can you teach me about BTC? I’m like, well, that’s going to cost you.
46:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, the game has changed. And like Larry Fink was on Fox Business a week or two ago, and he was explaining that Bitcoin is the asset if you don’t trust your government.
46:29 And the guy said, he said, or you’re you’re worried about if they’re printing money. And he said, you mean like the US? And he said, no comment. I mean, this is the head of BlackRock who’s running 100 trillion dollars or something crazy. And he’s calling that out. And it’s it’s really a shift. You know, the fact that these people are talking it and marketing it.
46:46 And one of my guests came on recently and they said, Brian, nobody markets an asset like Wall Street. Wall Street is the best in the business about selling people assets. People forget the gold in your portfolio was really unheard of before the ETF. People wouldn’t even think of it. Now it’s considered a normal thing.
47:03 Wall Streeters can come up with an asset where the mortgage backed security, maybe a credit derivative link note, and then they’ll shove it down your portfolio is like no business. And you now got the greatest marketing machine in the world that’s just getting started. And they’re going to place Bitcoin everywhere.
47:19 João Simões: Yeah. And the thing is, just just to do a side note there, BPC exactly as gold. But gold, the interesting thing about gold is like they said that all gold is a finite thing.
47:27 Well, you have Virgin right now that is building satellites and you’re building machines to go into the space to mine gold in asteroids. So gold will continue to exist. You can find more gold in space in a lot of like planets and a lot of asteroids. They have a lot of gold. So you can continue to mine gold. BTC ends at 21 million. And there there is no more finding gold in asteroid.
47:54 There is no BTC in asteroid, you know, like it’s done. It’s done. So if you look at the basic economic rules of supply and demand, the supply continue to go up rampaging. Right. Up and up and up. And no, the demand. Sorry. And the supply going down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down.
48:12 It’s like the graph, you know, yeah, like supply. It’s ending. The demand goes skyrocketing. What is going to be for the price? Like I have VC friends of mine telling me that they believe that BTC will hit 500 K.
48:32 I don’t know. That sounds like way too much. But if the if the supply goes to like zero, if everything is mined and there is only that in the market, the price needs go up. Yeah. The question is, how up can it go?
48:47 Brian Rose: Well, Catherine Wood from Mark Invest, she said post ETF approval that she saw Bitcoin at one and a half million by 2030.
48:56 Two weeks ago, she revised that and said that’s happening earlier. I know she wouldn’t give a date, but like she’s like it’s happening earlier. What would that imply? Twenty eight or something. So even that aggressive price point, she’s saying it’s going to happen earlier because exactly what you said.
49:11 There was a great tweet the other day where someone said, look, as the price of gold goes up, you can actually find more gold because you can spend more money looking for it. Yes. Yes. The price of Bitcoin goes up. There’s no more. Yeah, there’s no more. So again, again, if the price of gold, say, went up a hundred or a thousand X. Yeah, you could probably send space probes out.
49:28 Yes. It would make sense to get it. So supply would continue. Yes. The supply is actually correlated to the price that that creates obviously a non you know, a non-scarce of commodity.
49:39 But Bitcoin does. So all roads point to this going up. And you know, Michael Saylor has been a guy that’s been buying and buying mine. I had him on the show back in twenty one and then again in twenty two. I remember I asked Michael in twenty one when Bitcoin was at forty thousand.
49:53 I said, up to what price are you going to buy Bitcoin? And without missing a beat, he said two hundred fifty thousand. And I remember I was like, what? That’s impossible, right? Because it was around around a high at that point. I think forty fifty was the high of all time.
50:07 And I said, what? He said, Brian, I’m going to hold this asset for a thousand years. He said, that’s that’s a bargain to me. That’s what he said three years ago. Wow. Now he has more conviction. He’s got fourteen billion dollars worth of it.
50:19 And he was in a conference in Madera in your home country a couple of weeks ago when he spoke on stage. And it was a really interesting talk. And it’s fascinating for me to watch sailor. He actually graduated from MIT about three years ahead of me. Super smart guy all in on this.
50:33 And he told the crowd, he said, look, in the past, it was maybe us against the banks. It was people like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett saying Bitcoin was rat poison squared. Yeah. He said, now that’s not the case. He said, now there are friends. Yeah. And he said, these guys just double the value of your portfolio by buying one percent of an asset.
50:54 These are our friends. They’re going to put Bitcoin in everybody’s portfolio and open up the network and open up people’s minds. And so then Michael said there are two types of people. There are people that understand Bitcoin and people that don’t yet understand Bitcoin. Yes. And his point was we are now all friends. Yeah. And I really thought that was an important olive branch that he was just passing out and saying, look, now Larry Fink is our friend.
51:18 Yeah. And I’m 100 percent with him. And so I just want to offer out, you know, our our our olive branch to those guys and say, you guys go put it behind it. Yeah. Because ultimately, anybody who gets it is on our team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, if you looked at BTC, of course, because of the supply and demand, like he’s going up infinity.
51:37 João Simões: Then you have his brother, Ethereum, that allows you to build on top of it, which is beautiful. Right. So it’s like these two siblings. Yes. One, which is the infinite gold that will eventually end. It will be there forever. And then if you can build and build and build and build, it’s crazy.
51:55 Brian Rose: It was Mike Novogratz of Galaxy Digital. He was at a conference, I think, token here in London. And he said he’s trying to explain it to some people. And he said, look, you know, Bitcoin is like digital gold. It’s an asset. You can hold it. It’s going to hold its value.
52:07 He said Ethereum is like is like digital technology. It’s like a Google or something where the future market cap of Google, it could be 3 trillion, 10 trillion, 20 trillion, because it’s programmable and you can do anything. Yes. And if you think about Ethereum that way, it’s this amazing compliment. It is. And it’s got so much more potential.
52:25 But now we’re seeing Solana at an all time high. We’re seeing meme coins going crazy. We’re seeing people talking about how gaming is onboard the next billion users. Like there’s a lot happening in the crypto marketplace.
52:37 João Simões: Because the thing is all the altcoins are correlated with BTC because they have parts of the code or some inspiration.
52:44 Right. So if BTC goes up, then ETH goes up, then all the alts go up that are built probably on top of the majority. Right. And that’s the question that I’ve been asking, like my peers in the crypto communities. If BTC goes up to 500K, what about altcoins?
53:03 It’s almost scary. Like if BTC like quadruples in price, altcoins will be like 4KX, 50KX. I don’t even know if that’s possible. Because altcoins are typically like much more correlated or much more multiples of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin goes up 10X, altcoins go up 100X or 1000X or 100,000X.
53:28 Brian Rose: Yes. So the total market cap could get really big. Bitcoin market cap might be 5 trillion, but the rest of it could be another 10 trillion. Yeah, 100%. It’s interesting. You know, meme coins we’ve seen kick off and a lot of Solana ecosystem meme coins are now worth billions and billions of dollars.
53:47 João Simões: But the thing is, some deal of these meme coins actually serve somewhat a purpose. And I do sometimes like take my hat off to some of these guys that are building them. Like, for example, Shiba. You actually can use Shiba in AMC theaters in the U.S. to buy tickets. Right.
54:04 You can use Shiba to like all this ecosystem of the Shibaverse and all that. Dodge, like Elon Musk just tweeted saying that you can now buy a Tesla with Dodge or you eventually will be able to buy a Tesla with Dodge. That is actually something interesting because you are actually creating some utility for this product that’s before it. No utility, you know. So it’s funny how a meme coin maybe is not so much as a meme, but actually holds value and you can now buy your Tesla with your meme coin, which is interesting.
54:35 Brian Rose: People need to stop hating on meme coins and start learning from them. So look at Doge and Shiba through the whole bear market. They held their places on CoinMarketCap, number 10 and number 13. They held billions and billions of value. And now people look at these Solana meme coins that are going crazy and the dog with the hat who’s now they spent 700 grand.
54:54 They’re going to stick it on the sphere in Vegas. And people want to hate on those things. And I told my students last night, I said Bitcoin was a meme coin for years and years and years. Kind of true. It was true. You were part of a club. They wanted to stick it to the banks. It really had no value for years.
55:11 And then it had this tiny value and it was a club. It was a cult. Max Keiser was on my wall here. He used to give people 10,000 Bitcoin when they won on his show. He gave Russell Brand 10,000 Bitcoin and Alex Jones 10,000 Bitcoin. They lost it. He didn’t give me 10,000 Bitcoin. Thanks Max.
55:27 And so it was a meme coin before. It was a symbol of community and culture. And so when people look at these meme coins lately, instead of hating on them, why don’t you learn from them? As humans, we love connection and we love culture. And all of these coins and protocols have a meme component to them. They have a community component. And the games do as well. People play games. You’re part of a community.
55:49 So we shouldn’t hate on them. We should learn from them. And they’re actually telling us more about this phenomenon of connection than I think we really admit. And all of these ecosystems are always community, community, community. You have a community on Discord. And these things are bringing it. They’re also bringing tons of eyeballs to the network.
56:07 So Chronos has a meme coin now. Guess what it means? More people are going to use that network. Solana right now. No surprises.
56:14 João Simões: The thing is, we are evolving. And this for me is the natural state of future economy, which is you are evolving to a token economy. Meaning that you have your wallet. Exactly as you have your wallet right now with some cards from different cards companies, different banks, you’ll have your wallet and it’s in your phone or in a chip on your hand if you want to put it there. If you want to be full time futuristic, right?
56:37 You have a chip in your hand, you just pass it and your wallet has different tokens and each token has a purpose. For example, one token is a Tesco token. You pay your groceries with Tesco token. Another token is a dodge to buy your Tesla. Another token is for fuel, for example, for a shell or BP or whatever gas company want. They build a token, you use it.
56:58 And if you use it, you can then stake it and get rewards on your gas. You get rewards on your Tesco coin. That’s the future. That is called the token economy. I’ve been talking about that since years and it’s slowly becoming that and the future is right.
57:13 And then you plug into your community, you have enough tokens, you can go to the events, you can go to the connections, you can go to the private chats. It’s a whole new digital world of connection. It is. And you can build yields on top of that. For example, nowadays, the supermarkets are still sleeping a little bit on token economics.
57:30 They, if you go on a supermarket, then they give you like these rewards or like if you pay, sometimes you buy a product on the discount, then you get like another product for free or you get the paperwork, a lot of paperwork, paperwork, right? Future is you buy a shampoo, you get another shampoo or whatever, and you can then stake your coin and get the yields on top of that purchase. That is possible nowadays. It’s just a matter of someone at the companies say, let’s do it. It’s already possible.
58:01 So why should you waste your time with fiat currencies and like all this paper economy when you have the digital, which is so much better and everyone will be so much happier and we’ll have so much more money.
58:11 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think people are opening their eyes to the limitations of their fiat currency and their banking system, which they don’t trust and their governments, but they don’t trust. Going back to Trump, I do think he’s going to win a few months ago. One of my guests called it even early, said Trump in a landslide. The good thing about that is we’ll have a new SEC chairman, which a new one can’t be any worse than this current one.
58:33 You’ll have a government that at least is saying they’re pro-crypto and they want to ban CBDCs. So at least that’s someone that’s actively talking about that. And this is an election year. There’s 80 elections in the world, the most ever. And that usually means rates drop in these countries. They say there’s not supposed to be correlated.
58:50 But what we find is that rates usually drop. So again, this year has a lot going for it.
58:55 João Simões: What about Argentina? Argentina just they want to supposedly substitute the currency for BTC. You have El Salvador that is buying one BTC a day, I believe.
59:04 Brian Rose: Yeah. So yeah. And then the head of Argentina is talking about banishing the central bank. And yeah, look, I think we’ll see more countries adopting Bitcoin. Bitcoin and Michael Saylor. He said, look, he said something interesting to me. Michael Saylor said or he said some interesting interview. He said, look, he said, would you go to a restaurant or a hotel that didn’t have a website?
59:23 He was asking this person and they’d be like, well, probably not. I want to check it out first. He said that’s what the ETF was for in Bitcoin, because before that, people on Wall Street, they couldn’t look it up. They couldn’t look at a chart. They couldn’t touch it. They couldn’t access it. So they wouldn’t go there or buy it. Right. He said, now they have that ETF. It’s like a ticker.
59:40 Yeah. And he said all of a sudden, now everyone can actually get access to this asset.
59:45 João Simões: Yes. And so this is going to just empower somebody 100% to get into the system.
59:49 Brian Rose: What should we worry about? All right. Now, look, you and I have both been in this space for a while. And we know that when you’re in the space, you start to do silly things.
59:59 And so even though we’ve seen the crashes, even though we got to get out of this before it comes down again, when you’re in it, sometimes you get this euphoria. Right. So what are we not seeing? What do we have to be careful of? Do we have to really know there’s going to be an end to this bull market? How do you try to ground yourself in this crazy market of trade?
1:00:18 João Simões: OK, that is a great broad question. So I remember that during the last bear market, I had to talk with a friend and he told me that I think this is it. I’m quitting crypto for life. I was like, damn, that’s tough. Like I was doing advisory at the time working in TradFi. I also had my like times where I was like mad with crypto, then I’m back, then I’m mad, you know, now I’m in a good spot with crypto.
1:00:48 But I also was mad before. And he told me like, yeah, maybe this is the end. Right. I was like, I don’t believe it. There are so many people building so many people that still believe it.
1:01:00 And the thing is, corporate and traditional finance banks, they were always looking, always crawling, you know, and you can feel it. You know, like, for example, JP Morgan, JP Morgan, one of the first, they even create their own coin. So they entered very early in the space and they start looking into it. So I never believed it was over. So, of course, it didn’t end. We are now in a very good position. What’s next?
1:01:27 So I think that’s what people need to think is they cannot be too greedy. Right. Like I see people that get extreme greed. Of course, that you have the indicators, you can read the stocks, you can read the charts. But what about if there is like a third world war that busts in, right?
1:01:48 If that shifts the market too much and you end up losing your house because you did a mortgage on top of that to buy crypto and now your crypto is worth zero in an extreme scenario. Then you lost your house. Then you are homeless. That’s a bit insane. So I would say that for people back home that are watching this video is like, bet what you can.
1:02:11 But I like don’t over bet. You know, come on. Yeah. Be reasonable. Be reasonable. Like I also believe that this market is the best market ever.
1:02:21 All the indicators are there. 100 percent. You can’t over bet a little bit, but don’t over bet your whole life. You know, like don’t put your house and your family into this and destroy your your household. You know, like, yeah, you can do a little bit more than your normal. But be reasonable. Be reasonable.
1:02:37 Brian Rose: Yeah. And this is the essence of portfolio management. You really don’t want more than 10 percent of your portfolio. I’m not a financial advisor, but you really want to be conservative. Yeah. Remember, I talked to Scaramucci a couple of years ago and he said, look, I am 100 percent bullish on this market, but I’ve been wrong before.
1:02:54 And I know that I can be wrong. And so that’s why I never bet the house on any one thing. That’s why you have to be careful in this market because it’s getting crazy. It’s feeling greedy. And the market seems to always do the opposite of what everyone expects. We all were expecting a hundred thousand dollar Bitcoin for Christmas 21.
1:03:14 Yeah. Everyone was going to get a Lambo for their girlfriend. And then everyone was positioned the same way, which meant when it corrected, it corrected hard. And we all saw that happen. So the truth is, we don’t know what’s coming up, but the future does look bright. We are seeing we have a 10 year horizon here.
1:03:31 And I always tell investors and my students, I’m like, look, 10 years from now, will every minute of your day somehow involve a blockchain transaction? Probably. Probably. And so this is going to be bigger than the Internet. So if you base that on that alone, that’s how we’re investing, knowing that this is going to be a huge part.
1:03:47 I remember the Internet back in 1999. I worked for a dotcom startup. It wasn’t about the price of Amazon stock. It was about the fact that the Internet was going to be integral to every part of our lives. Yes. And that’s the way you need to look at this. Right. Agreed. Agreed. The token economics thing, you know, like having the wallet with all the tokens, everything, you know, like it’s tell me about Dubai.
1:04:06 I know you spend time there. I just spent two months there. And I asked a bunch of my guests when we had our studio there. I said he’s Dubai, the center of crypto, the most important city in the world when it comes to crypto. What do you say to that? What does Dubai bring to the ecosystem? Why are so many people developing there and setting up shop there?
1:04:24 João Simões: Like I believe that one thing that really shifted Dubai was the war between Russia and Ukraine. So a lot of our Russian friends are now there. A lot of people building there. A lot of people are there because of taxes, because of freedom, you know, because Dubai is welcoming everyone that wants to make money. And we want to make money. We are happy making business. So I believe that it’s like 90 percent of Dubai’s expats. So it’s the perfect environment, right?
1:04:52 So you just go there and make business. And if you want to stay, you stay. If you don’t, you get out. It’s as simple as that. And Dubai is in the center of the world.
1:05:02 So you have Asia on your side. You have Europe. You can fly to the US. You have amazing infrastructure. You can do, well, pretty much whatever you want, you know, if you have the money. So I believe that’s all about freedom, I guess.
1:05:18 Brian Rose: I think it now is the center of crypto. I think the only criticism that Dubai has is that it doesn’t have a retail base in that city, per se. And maybe it doesn’t have a retail base like some cities like Hong Kong or New York. But it is probably the most important city when it comes to crypto. It’s got people coming from everywhere, including, like you said, all the Russians and Ukraine. We’re trying to get out of that conflict zone.
1:05:40 Every time there’s a conflict in the world, people move to Dubai. From COVID to Israel to Russia. And it’s a place that’s business friendly. What a concept you can do business.
1:05:51 João Simões: The thing about Dubai that is very interesting is that because there’s a king, there is no political instability. So it’s always stable. There is no elections. There is no shift.
1:06:03 So, for example, in Portugal, where is my country of birth, every time there is a shift in politics, everything changes. Like all the other policies got the trash, new policies. Four years got the trash, new policies. And then the country never advances, right? I’m not saying that I’m saying that we should not have elections, not at all. I’m just saying that to have polarizing elections all the time.
1:06:30 No, I think that the candidates need to be a little bit more aware of what the previous guys did and continue the work. Don’t destroy every time there is new politicians, right? So I believe that that’s the difference. Now that Dubai is stable and that’s why business is flourishing. Because in finance, there is already so much uncertainty that you don’t want to put more political uncertainty on top.
1:06:56 So you search a place that there’s no political uncertainty that you know exactly how it is and you build there. That’s it.
1:07:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, you’ve got a leader with a vision who’s got a family with a vision. It’s super long term. And again, look at their track record. It’s really strong for them to just say they’re going to do.
1:07:14 I mean, dubbing into the bit of world policies and politics here, look at China.
1:07:19 João Simões: Like it’s a dormant giant that is just there building, building, building, building. And we at the West, sometimes we’re like, we are so caught up in our politics like the US elections, European wars, blah, blah, blah. You never hear anything about China or Asia. No, they are building in silence. And every time I visit Asia, there is always something new, always something that is moving.
1:07:45 And I’m like, I never heard about it. And they laugh at me like, we’re not supposed to know. Only if you are here, you see it. If you are outside, like we don’t care. But they have that vision of conquering the world slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. Which I respect. It’s just crazy how fast they are moving.
1:08:06 For example, one of my Chinese friends actually studied here with me in London School of Economics. He said the other day that he left his hometown in China to study here in London. And when he left was like all like houses with like one to two floors, like very not high houses at all. When he returned after like four or five years, all the houses were now skyscrapers. His city, which is like a small interior city of China, is now full of skyscrapers in the time span of five years.
1:08:40 You see the development. This doesn’t happen in London or Portugal. No, if you if you visit Portugal today and if you visit in 20 years, it’s exactly the same houses. There is everything the same. The street is the same. Probably even the holes in the street are the same. Nothing changes in 20 years.
1:08:56 In China, five years, 10 skyscrapers in a village that is now not a village anymore. It’s considered a city.
1:09:02 Brian Rose: That’s crazy. I think our Western democracies are going to get a wake up call soon. And, you know, when you’re in Dubai, you see everything through that lens.
1:09:11 You start to look at our systems. And the problem is, is we pride ourselves in these democracies that promise quote unquote freedom. If you actually go there, it’s a mess. The politicians don’t get anything done. Your freedoms actually aren’t even there.
1:09:26 Sometimes you’re being censored and quieted more than anyone else. Again, politics are now a form of entertainment. And so everybody’s caught up. And who said this and who said that? That’s true. It’s this mindless noise and chatter that when you go to Dubai, everything just quiets down.
1:09:40 The taxes go down to zero. And we’re like, here, you want to do business? What a concept. You can come here and do it here. And we’re going to leave you alone. That’s it. And all we do is say respect our rules. The rules here are don’t mess around. Yeah.
1:09:52 It’s that simple. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a jerk. And don’t mess around. Otherwise, you can leave our little utopia party and go somewhere else.
1:10:00 It’s pretty simple. Yeah. And if you do that, you can do anything you want and keep your profits. And guess what? We’re not going to we’re going to give you all the infrastructure.
1:10:08 Yeah. And we’ve got a hundred year mission. And look at the last 20 years we deliver. I mean, what more could you want? I’m telling you.
1:10:14 It’s Western democracies. We’re getting a wake up call in Europe and in the U.S. And pretty soon, I believe people are going to be looking towards this model. Yeah. Yeah.
1:10:25 João Simões: And the thing is, we see a lot of this in politics in Portugal, probably in the UK, too, is like the brains that are leaving the country. Right.
1:10:35 All the best university grads are leaving. Why? Because you cannot sustain good people here. Why? Because there is no conditions.
1:10:45 Like if I’m getting 100K a year to 100K a year, I have to pay 50 plus percent tax. Come on. I’m not going to stay here. I have the full world to choose. Why should I stay here to give you my hard earned profits?
1:10:59 That is insane. That’s obviously not going to happen. And especially if you have smart people that know that they will all leave. And then you have the politicians at TV rambling like, oh, we don’t know why the best brains are fleeing our country. Well, look at your tax policy. Look at your incentives. For example, in Portugal, just as a fiscal policy in light for you to open a company or do anything is like so much paperwork.
1:11:24 It can take months to do something, whether in Dubai you click done. Like and then you have like all the leftish politics saying like, oh, what about the offshores? All these people are in offshores. Hell yeah, I’m on an offshore. Like in offshore, I have my manager there. I call. Everything is set. Yes, everything is done. Cool. One minute takes one minute to do business versus one year. What do you want to choose? One minute you keep your profits, the other one year and you still get taxed 50 percent. Come on.
1:11:58 And then what do you get for those taxes? The health care system here is broken. All of the infrastructure is broken and it’s not going to change anytime soon. Like what do we get, you know?
1:12:08 Brian Rose: And so and I’m seeing this a lot. I’m running for mayor of London. Congratulations. I look at this infrastructure and it just pains me.
1:12:15 And honestly, I tell people here like London used to be the greatest capital city in the world. Yes. And now we’re actually a laughingstock. And if you go to certain places, they’re like, oh, is that the place where you get stabbed and people steal your watch and the health care system. You have to wait four months to get an operation and you can’t get a house and there’s homeless everywhere. That’s your country. I’m like, yeah, but we’re a democracy and we have freedom. Oh, really.
1:12:39 And so it’s like it doesn’t add up anymore. That’s the problem.
1:12:43 João Simões: Like I lived in SF for a long time and San Francisco, even when I was there, like was already they already had an homelessness problem. But right now it’s called zombie city, you know, like if you cannot even walk like it just bodies on top of what is scary. It’s like he’s the walking dead but on real life, which is something that I never thought that even could be possible.
1:13:07 Brian Rose: Right. And they have the fentanyl crisis and now they have the trunk crisis, which is a mix of opioids and tranquilizers. It’s insane. And now they say, yeah, but we have the biggest capitalist society in the world and all that. Yeah, but like still the policies are maybe not there yet.
1:13:27 João Simões: But at the same time, if you want to work, there is a job for you. So I think that, yeah, I don’t know, the Western society needs to learn a lot and needs to do a lot of stuff. But at least like you, I guess that if you want to work and if you have the skills, there is a lot of work there, a lot of work there, like a lot, a lot. And it’s weird sometimes when people say like, oh, there is no jobs. I don’t find that to be true. If you are good at what you do, if you have a skill, there is a million jobs out there.
1:14:00 But I don’t find it people that want to work, you know.
1:14:03 Brian Rose: So what’s next for you? I know you got a trip to Asia coming. What does the rest of the year look like for you and for Genesis?
1:14:11 João Simões: So for Genesis, the goal is very simple to hit one billion TVL. That’s very simple. That’s what I’m working on, like a hundred percent right now and to moving forward as fast as possible.
1:14:22 So that’s the goal. Next is, well, I want to keep building it and maybe, I don’t know, the future is still incognito, you know, like I still don’t know. But I think that is going to be something great, like if he’s building Genesis for a couple more years, it will be doing that. If doing a new protocol, maybe on a new technology and continue to revolutionize DeFi, maybe, I don’t know, you know, like, but I think it will be bright.
1:14:53 Brian Rose: And you guys are generating a token soon as well?
1:14:56 João Simões: Correct. Coming up later this year as well. No, no, no, actually Q2.
1:14:59 Brian Rose: Q2, okay. And that’s going to be all part of your launch and all wrapped up in that piece.
1:15:03 Now, people have been kind of intrigued by this talk. What’s the best way for them to learn about, engage with, you know, Genesis?
1:15:11 João Simões: Yeah, so we have our website and inside our website, we actually have a blog post and we have a very, very good marketing team and PR team working weekly, daily to build blog posts on the technology. So every day we are releasing blog posts on how to interact with the technology, explaining, like, for example, what is the DVT, what is the clusters, all the validators, like one to one, we are releasing literally articles per validator explaining one by one every day.
1:15:38 So we are trying to do like a very deep down on every piece of technology that we do, not only to give a wider broad explanation of what you do, but also about the details. Because that’s what helps people to really understand the technology and really understand that, okay, these guys are doing this, but what does that mean? I got you. This is explained. This is explained. This is explained. And that’s why we are so proud about our our team and our work, because we have amazing, amazing technology, but it’s also crystal clear, explained online, fully open.
1:16:13 And also for everyone to see everyone that wants to see our details out there. Nothing is hiding. We have our documentation fully open, something that our investors love. It’s like our documentations are there. Everything is fully open. Everything is fully explained.
1:16:25 So open source, everything is there, you know, like we are not hiding anything for anyone. We are just showing you.
1:16:31 Brian Rose: I love it, man. That’s it. You guys are positioned to be part of this massive revolution. Yes. Again, we got a lot of events happening this year.
1:16:39 We get Ethereum ETF on top of that, Eigen going live, you guys going live. Yes. I couldn’t be more excited about, you know, investing with you guys and being partners with you guys. So just thanks for doing what you’re doing. I can’t wait to get in there. I’m going to be on your protocol, playing with my youth and making sure we really get it out because I really want to see what this feels like.
1:16:58 You don’t know until you actually get in there, get the tires and put some on and really get a feel for what’s going on. But this this sounds like the future. Yes, I love financial engineering coming into this space because it adds value that traditional finance can’t do. Absolutely. So it’s super exciting, man. Thanks to you and the team for doing what you do and wishing you all the best. Come back and give us an update maybe next year.
1:17:18 João Simões: 100 percent. 100 percent. Let’s do it.
1:17:28 Brian Rose: All right. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
