Yat Siu - Inside Animoca Brands: The True Meaning of Tokens & The Metaverse Decoded!

Full transcript: Yat Siu on London Real

2:33 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Yatsu, the entrepreneur, investor, business leader and gaming pioneer. You are the co-founder of Animoca Brands, a world leader in entertainment, gamification and blockchain innovation. To date, you have invested in over 500 companies with the goal of building an open metaverse based on blockchain technology and deliver true digital property rights for all.

3:08 Your latest innovation is the Mochaverse ecosystem and the Mocha ID, a novel digital identity system which you believe will revolutionize the Web3 landscape. You have said that over the next 12 to 18 months, we will see Web3 gaming and entertainment onboard over 100 million new users to Web3 and that, ultimately, blockchain technology will help solve many of the biggest problems facing humanity today. Yat, welcome back to London Real. Thanks for having me again. It’s always a pleasure.

3:37 Us too. I just want to start by saying that Animoca Brands and Mochaverse are both now portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures. We’re excited about that. What we have is the world’s first media-powered investment firm, where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge Web3 and AI companies while giving our partners 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.

4:04 Yat, super excited to be a part of this journey with you in many different companies. So let’s jump in. And first of all, thank you so much for supporting us and being part of the journey. We really appreciate it. Good. We love it.

4:17 Our whole crew is so excited. And we’re involved in so many different companies with you guys. And so it’s been a crazy journey. Three years ago, you know, you were on remotely, and I didn’t know what the metaverse was. And you taught me what it was.

4:33 And it’s just been incredible to be part of this adventure. And it’s just starting. I remember that. It was like a bad video call. It was the quality. It was actually COVID.

4:43 We couldn’t actually be meeting in person, but here we are. It’s great. It’s crazy. And it’s common. We’ve had Robbie on the show as well.

4:50 And you guys just do so much hard work hitting the road and spreading the message. Honestly, I don’t know of two guys that travel more, speak more, work harder to spread the message of Web3. And it’s just you guys are a dynamic duo, constantly nonstop. And I know so many people now at Animoca, I must have met 10 or 15 of your members. Incredible what you’ve built.

5:12 Thank you so much. So congrats on that. So much to talk about today. Your Mocha token recently launched, representing the Mochaverse. Just went live.

5:22 I think it had a whopping billion dollar valuation. We’re going to get to that. There’s rumors of an Animoca IPO in 25 or 26. We’ll get to that. And it feels like we’re on the edge of a really strong bull run in crypto.

5:36 But I wanted to start with the fundamentals of why you think Web3 will change the world. You recently penned an article on Medium, and it was titled, The Meaning of Tokens and the Purpose of the Mochaverse. And I was curious, why did you write that article now? And what were you trying to explain to people, both in Web3 and maybe people outside of Web3? So no, thanks for asking.

5:59 So I think one of the reasons that, while we intrinsically also understood this, one of the challenges that we had when we are starting to launch, essentially, a token that we’re backing with Mochaverse and many of the projects that we actually launched a token with is for open campus EDU or a SAND token for basically a sandbox and the SAND ecosystem or Hipcoin, for instance, right? They’re all tokens. What do they really mean? And I was actually struck that even in Web3, sometimes people would go and really just look at it as maybe a fundraising mechanism or a non-dilutive way from an equity standpoint or from an equity perspective.

6:31 Some people might say, wait, are you actually extracting value from the shareholders by issuing a token? Wouldn’t it be something that is like an asset to us? You know, sometimes people would ask for maybe a dividend because their equity holders and so on, and we can get to sort of the mechanics around that. So people didn’t really understand it, I thought. And so I basically decided it was important for us, especially on the eve of the launch of the Mocha token, to explain what is the token, what does it mean for our own shareholders as well, and more importantly, what does the token mean broadly speaking?

6:58 The way that we explained it is, you know, if you read the article, is that tokens are best thought of as representations of network effects. And what was really, really powerful is that up until today or maybe recently with tokens, you never had a way of owning a network effect. When you think about sort of when you think about sort of an L1, L2 token, let’s say Ethereum or even Bitcoin, are you buying it because of the PE ratio? No. Are you buying it because it generates a certain amount of gas?

7:24 No. So how does that make it, you know, an investment proposition and yet people buy it? What is it that you’re actually buying, right? And so we used to explain it in the context of an economy, right? If you’re investing in the US or investing in China or investing in a country, you’re not measuring it against how much tax they generate.

7:41 You measure it against the GDP, the size of the economy. But what does the economy and the size and the growth of an economy really represent? And we came down to one thing, which is network effects. If you have strong network effects in a country, that to me can be measured in multiple ways that are not necessarily tangible in the sense of what profit does it generate. There’s an economic cycle around that, but there’s also a nationalistic payback.

8:03 There’s a nationalistic patriotic side to it as well. If a country has strong culture, if a country has strong national pride, you know it’s strong as a unit, then even if the country doesn’t have the same economic size, you can actually kind of predict where its trajectory is. If a country has a very low patriotic sense, if it has a very low sense of national identity, well then probably you can also tell how the strength of these network effects are. For instance, you know, most Americans are proud to be Americans, right?

8:31 And despite all the issues and trouble, they will still go, I’m proud to be American, I’m proud this is, you know, my country. And that in itself becomes a very strong defensible area in which you can grow things on. And we see this pattern with L1, L2 tokens. I mean, if you’re a Bitcoin maxi, or if you’re a new theorem, or if you’re in Solana, or if you’re in SAND, whatever it is, you’re proud of that identity. And so that’s a way in which we thought we would help explain the fact that when you own a token, you’re actually owning a piece of network effect.

8:59 And there’s something broader, like we talked about how admission is true due to property rights. But what is property rights? I mean, outside of the fact that when we think of property rights, we can think of, oh, I own your car, I own a house, and with that you have the foundation and the building box of, you know, capitalism and building things on top of it. But one of the struggles we have is how do you have a world in which billions of people have property ownership?

9:22 That’s actually hard. I mean, if every person in the UK could own their property, what would it mean for the state of the property world in, for instance, the UK? First of all, there would be more equity and there’d be more value. But how do they get access to that? That’s kind of the hard part.

9:37 You know, and same as with shareholding, you know, the biggest corporations in the world, I think Microsoft, has like 80,000-plus shareholders. That’s not a bad number. But actually, when you think about it, that’s actually a really small number in the context of the impact that Microsoft has, but there’s some practical reasons behind it. We’re also a public company. We have 2,800 shareholders.

9:55 I can’t imagine what it’s like managing tens of thousands of shareholders in terms of giving out notices and, you know, voting on stuff. Can you imagine what it’s like managing a million shareholders? In fact, I can’t think of any corporation in the world that actually has millions of shareholders because it’s not possible, yet alone printing the perspective would probably make you bankrupt before you send something out. But on tokens, you can have a million shareholders, token holders.

10:16 You can have a billion token holders, in fact. You can envision a future in which we could all essentially be property owners through tokenization. But it doesn’t mean it has to be a token that represents physical ownership. That’s one sort of variable. I think the more powerful element is that you own a piece of the network effect.

10:32 And that network effect isn’t purely financial or purely utility. It’s actually a connected element of all of these things put together, which means, yes, some people can fundraise on it, but that’s not the real meaning behind it. Fundraising is one way in which you can share participation. On the other hand, you could raise capital for it, of course. But then, when you raise capital from a network, who does the capital belong to?

10:54 And in our view, this capital belongs to the community, because the community are the owners of the network. And see, this is where sometimes things are blurred. For instance, some people think, oh, I can raise equity, I can raise capital with tokens, but then the ownership goes into the equity. No, no, no, no, not quite the same. Yeah, sure, you have influences, value.

11:13 But actually, the capital that you raise for the token really belongs to the token holders, doesn’t it? It should belong to the people who are part of the network, who help construct value in the network. And when you give out airdrops of tokens, what’s the purpose of that? When you think of it as a network effect, then the purpose of giving airdrops is to expand the network effect. It’s not just, you know, yes, you call it marketing and advertising and bringing in users, but the real value is around creating stronger, bigger network effects, which that makes you think about, well, maybe then I need to be more conscious about who I give the token to.

11:42 I need to be more aware, I need to be more specific, which is why with Mocha ID, it’s important, because I need to be able to give people with the right reputation. If I share my network effect, I want to make sure I share it with the right community members. I don’t want to share it to some bot or to some farmer who doesn’t care anything about your project, who’s just here to extract, you know, basically sell your token to make some quick profit and move on to the next thing.

12:03 You know, that’s not what we want, so therefore we need an identity solution. And every project in the world needs one, because most of us care not so much about creating huge financial utility, but we care about product network effects, where people create a lot of value. The financial part is important, but it can’t be the primary or only part of it, because otherwise I think it corrupts the network, unless you’re building a financial network for financial purposes.

12:26 That’s possible too, right? And I think people conflate these a lot, and so that’s why I penned this article to make it clear to people that when you own a token, you own network effects. And before tokenization, you could never own a network before, and that’s why it’s so powerful. And I think, again, when I talk about corporate structures, people forget that the idea of owning equity in a company, in the span of human history, is actually a very, very small part of our history.

12:50 It really was only a couple of hundred years ago, where we had a stock market, where you could actually have common stock shareholding. I think it started here. Yeah, this first idea. The British East India Company, for instance, was I think one of the pioneers in this area. But again, up until then, you couldn’t do that.

13:05 So that’s a new construct, right? And the limited liability corporation really only came into effect the last century, right? I think in the 50s and 60s, and really only became mainstream in the 80s. So this idea that you had limited liability corporations was, again, a fairly new thing. So these things are all evolutions, but yet somehow we seem to think that that’s the way it always was, which is not true at all.

13:25 You know, we evolve, we change, and tokenization is just at one level, which means that it’s possible to have an equity structure as a company, and then to share the network effect, you need to have a way in which you can do that through tokenization, meaning that, you know, if you think of, let’s say, Facebook as a company, or Meta as they’re called today, if you want to own a stake in the network effect of Instagram, you couldn’t actually do that. You could only buy shares in Facebook, which is really not having any value in terms of sort of your participation or your sort of network in Instagram. But if Instagram was a token, you could not actually participate in the network specifically of Instagram, which gives value to equity holders in Facebook because it empowers the network and expands it, but at the same time also creates the right incentives and motivations and the network effect ownership of the people who are, for instance, inside Instagram.

14:14 So we see this for everything we do. And for Mochaverse, actually owning Mocha tokens is a way to participate in the network effect that Adam Mocha’s building of 500 plus portfolio companies and, you know, the millions of users within the network are growing. And you made a very specific point about how, in previous technologies, the network effect was judged just by the number of members and the number of nodes, whereas in Web3, it’s the quality of those, which you kind of made reference to, and you made the comparison of, say, the Hong Kong economy to the North Korea economy.

14:43 I always love using North Korea as an example. Yeah, Westside, North Korea. Yeah, yeah. But you compared one with the other. One had a population, I think, 10 or 100 times, and yet the GDP…

14:52 Well, you could probably make that comparison. That talks about the quality of the members of your network. So, I mean, we’re both old enough to remember the days of the dot-com boom. Yes. And if you remember, you know, one of the mechanisms that people always used to use, and they still use it today, is Metcalf’s law, right?

15:07 And essentially, Metcalf’s law, I mean, without going into the specifics, was essentially a way to sort of measure the value, the power of the network, essentially, in terms of how many users there were in the network, how valuable the network would be. And so in the dot-com days, right, if you had a million users, then your network had a certain power, and they could value it, right? Oh, I remember back in the days when, sort of, you know, whether it’s investors or investment banks would say, okay, this user, this internet company had a million users, the average value of each user would be like $10 or $20 or $30, and therefore, this is a potential future of value, and all that kind of stuff, right?

15:41 The mechanism, the idea is correct, but what people have failed to do, and I think they failed to do that in Web3 as well, is that not every user is the same, right? And the value of these users aren’t all the same. And whether this is a country like North Korea versus Hong Kong, or whether this is a platform, for instance, you know, the value of Amazon users versus the value of, you know, an e-commerce portal in, you know, Algeria, for instance, right? I mean, again, they might have, maybe, per user, completely different R groups, right?

16:11 And therefore, they’re not nearly as valuable. And one of the things that I find interesting to sometimes use is, sort of, you know, actually, Reed’s example, right, where he talks about how there’s networks within these networks, an expansion of Metcalfe’s law, where he says that actually, you have actually subgroups inside these networks that can actually become much more powerful and bigger, and we see that today, for instance. I think when you look at Reddit subgroups, right, you mean Reddit is big as a network, but actually, Reddit is made not by Reddit as a network, but by the fact that actually, there’s a number of communities in there that actually might become bigger.

16:44 But the difference is, and this is why I think permissionless in Web3 is so important, is that when the network starts to become bigger, then the actual, sort of, let’s call it network that, maybe, sort of birthed it, as it were, there’s nobody that can stop it. So I would argue that Reed’s law, and actually, already existed way before, but it was always pushed back by the platforms because they controlled the network effect. In Web2, the network effects belong to a platform.

17:09 They don’t own a user, so they can sort of lock it. You need permission. You need to pay fees in order to access these network effects. That’s actually their power. That’s the property that they have.

17:18 And, you know, there’s a famous story, and there’s many of them, of course, but the most famous story, I would say, is probably when Facebook started to grow, there was a company within using the network as a Facebook that essentially started to become bigger than Facebook itself, and that company was called Zynga, right? You know, for those of you who don’t remember, that’s Farmville, right? And that company became so big that actually the network that Zynga became became a threat to Facebook, at least in their perception, because Facebook wasn’t a truly open network, right?

17:45 And many of the user growth actually came from Zynga, such that Zynga could argue and become more powerful than Facebook itself. Now, in a Web3 example, that’s fine. Both networks will grow. They will coalesce together, and there’s liquidity across, and actually, what really would happen is that they will both grow. The network effect in Web3 is shared.

18:01 But in this case, the network effect actually belonged to Facebook, and Facebook deemed them a threat, and guess what they did? They started to tune the network effects away from them, and suddenly, Zynga almost went out of business, right? And, you know, this is like one of those examples where what happens when you don’t have property rights of what you own. And, you know, again, if you don’t own or have a right in this sort of network effect, then someone can always take it away from you.

18:24 And here, again, the network effects do mushroom, except that if they don’t like it, they basically squash it. And we see the same also in society as well. If there’s someone who has a movement, or like for yourself, for instance, when you start, you know, coming out with your movie, you build a community around that, and then some people don’t like that community. If they are powerful, they can deplatform you and say, I don’t want this, and they essentially censor you.

18:48 Even though your community potentially might become even bigger than the community that actually sort of, you know, you started from because it’s a powerful idea, you know, the stuff that actually changed the world come from those ideas. And that’s actually, again, where the permissionless nature of Web2 is so powerful. And so we also said in the article about this, what we call the shared network effect, which is very different in Web2. Web2, every network effect is our islands.

19:11 They don’t share anything. But in Web3, it’s shared. Meaning, imagine if, you know, for instance, you know, Ethereum went to $10,000, or Bitcoin went to a million, or, you know, Sand went to $5, or Ton went to $20. I mean, we can just put all sorts of examples of anything. What actually happens is the entire ecosystem benefits, right?

19:33 That’s a powerful thing about Web3. And so I almost often get puzzled about this tribalism, but I get it because it’s human nature. But in reality, actually, if one ecosystem grows, the entire ecosystem benefits because it’s permissionless. Liquidity can flow from one place to another place. Value can go from one area to another area.

19:51 It’s the true open market. It’s capitalism, actually, as it should be. And it’s what free trade always wanted to be before people started creating restrictions and trade bans and all that kind of stuff in the name of protection, but protecting who is a question, right? And they always say, Ethereum was the greatest thing that ever happened to Bitcoin. And the maxis will get all ruffled when you say that.

20:12 But that’s kind of what you just described because this network got massive. It brought all these people in. And once they were brought in, they say, oh, what’s this Bitcoin thing? And then they go into this network. And in fact, these networks are important to bring people into Web3 because this is the other thing as well.

20:27 And it’s a topic that we delve into the mochaverse as well, which is that for the mochaverse, we don’t only just are looking at building network effects that are economic and value. That’s obviously one element of it. We’re really trying to build strong social and cultural capital. And one of the challenges that we’ve had in most network building, especially in Web3, is that there was too much emphasis on the economic side, which is valuable and important, but it’s not the only thing.

20:53 Because if you’re building something where the value is purely economic, you attract a certain kind of customer or certain kind of end user who’s really only there to extract. And that actually becomes negative for the network in the long run. And we’ve seen a lot of these problems. And again, you need them as well, and you need that mix, but you can’t have it be dominated essentially by people who are there purely for economic capital. And the same goes for when you think about new token launches.

21:17 I think of new token launches, whether it’s a meme coin, whether it’s mochaverse, whether it’s sand tokens or tongue token, really as a form of network inflation, right? So to me, when a Bitcoin maxi says there can only be Bitcoin and nothing else, I don’t see someone who actually is a defender of freedom, although he would heavily argue against that as well. He said, well, I’m, of course, it’s a freedom specialist, I get that. But actually what you’re saying is you’re saying I’m allowed to issue a token.

21:45 I’m allowed to own this token because I was there before you. But when you issue a token, then you are a scammer. Why? And so why am I not allowed to sort of create a new network? Because actually really what happens is he fears that you’re taking something away from him.

22:02 And it’s an age-old class warfare thing. And I sort of see this sort of thing when people in Silicon Valley, sort of the ones who disrupted the class three, four decades ago, are now looking at people in crypto in Miami saying that’s not real value. What are you doing here? But those same people who disrupted the world, with coming in in t-shirts, thinking differently about the world, being back then all the people who were wearing suits and ties in New York were like, what are you guys doing here?

22:36 You’re not part of our community and this is all nonsense and there we go. So this sort of moving from one class to another, you see this pattern where people are sort of looking to defend their cultural capital, their social capital, and not allowing other people in. But you need that inflation because that’s how innovation and growth happens. Because as humans we generally inflate the world because we have population birth. We have new people entering the world.

23:02 We have new ideas. Every new idea, every new innovation is a form of network inflation that actually adds value to the network in one form or the other because of diversity and growth and opportunity. If we all could only use Bitcoin, that’s great for all the people who had Bitcoin in day one, but everyone else essentially what do they become? They actually become serfs of the ones who have more Bitcoin. And that to me is essentially no different than essentially creating sort of again a class system and again I would argue that many Bitcoin maxis would definitely hate my description.

23:35 But to me going against the ability to sort of bring non-networks into effect, they don’t compete with Bitcoin. They actually help it grow as an ecosystem because it brings more people into the ecosystem. I personally believe that Bitcoin is going to be worth millions of dollars, not because it’s going to be sort of the main utility. It’s because it’s going to be a status symbol. 21 million Bitcoins, that’s all you can have.

23:58 How many people are in the world? If I own one Bitcoin, that’s actually one of the highest levels of cultural and social capital that you can have. It’s not the pure economic value that’s important. It’s the fact that I have a Bitcoin and therefore I am of a certain community and I think that’s a value. And I think the more they embrace more people in this space, the more it will grow.

24:17 This exclusionary attitude is elitist and classist and that to me I think is a problem. And Mochaverse, the whole point about Mochaverse is how do we make it more inclusive? How do we bring more people in? And so that’s what MochaID does. That’s what the token infrastructure does.

24:30 You know, how do we include more people into the network effect into Web3? And so what does Mochaverse look like in five years if you’re doing everything right and why is identification such a crucial part because a lot of people don’t know too much about Web3. Even people in Web3 might not understand why that’s so important. So I think it’s important to delve into the thinking of what is important for humans and how we build reputation. Mochaverse’s goal is to essentially make sort of, one, leverage our network effects.

25:02 That’s part of the incentive layer. So let me delve into that a little bit first. If you’re part of the Mochaverse community, we feel in the element of the shared network effect that the more people participate in networks, the bigger the network grows and the more decentralized. So taking another example, what would happen to the value of Bitcoin if there was one dominant miner? It would basically go to zero, right?

25:27 Because you know it’s centralized and someone controls it. What would happen to the value of Ethereum if there was really just a few people that controlled the supply and they basically had control over all the staking power? It would not be worth anything where it is today, right? So actually, the more community owned, the more decentralized these ecosystems are truly decentralized with the right community holders, the more valuable it becomes because there’s more participation and there’s trust in the participation of that network effect, right?

25:53 Which means that we actually need to be thoughtful in how what we invest in to give it more network power, the paradox is to actually share the network more, which is very anti-Web2, right? Web2 is more like, hey, wait, I’m not giving away my network, I want exclusivity. But actually in Web3, the more you share the network power, the more stronger the network comes. But how do we do this? Well, we want to make sure that the tokens, the network effect of these tokens go into the right users that actually deserve it because they add value to the network.

26:27 But how do we do this? So in the last few years, I think one of the biggest problems that Web3 had was that you had a lot of extractors that were only there for economic purposes. And what they do is they run bots, they sort of do fake accounts, they basically sell by KYC accounts from some people from around the world to basically just get air drops as a way to grow in the network. But then what they do is they just sell it, for instance, at some profits because they really don’t care about the product.

26:51 They only basically do it for money. And with AI and with bots and so on, you can do all sorts of things. So we need to build a reputation layer that can be trusted. And so Mochaverse is one way of doing this, which is you have an ID system that’s so bound. I don’t only just know, and again, I might not know that your name is Brian or your background, but I know that you’re verified and you’ve built a reputation.

27:12 Now, just think about how the real world works. We built everything on reputation. If you’ve gone to university, if you have a degree, if you’ve worked in a job for a certain amount of time, you have a reputation. The reason we don’t go around all constantly changing our name, which you could, by the way, right? I mean, I could go to a government office and I could just change my name if I wanted to, and I’d go through a swear and oath and do that and issue a new passport and begin a whole new life if I wanted to.

27:38 But why would I do that? I would throw away my entire history. I would throw away my job credentials. I would throw away my legacy, maybe even friends who might not find me. My entire network effect that I built over, I don’t know, decades would go away.

27:53 So most people don’t do that. Generally, people change their name because they have to hide or because they need to run away from something. But most people don’t want to throw away their legacy, their history. That’s what we need to achieve in Web3. Because if you have a reputation, whether you’re famous, whether you’re good at your work, whether you’re great at your craft, people come to you.

28:11 Oh, this restaurant has a great chef. Sales out. This guy makes great crepes. Sales out. This guy makes great shoes.

28:19 Sales out. What’s he doing? It’s his craft. It’s his network effect that’s percolating. The more people who own his shoes, the more people who eat their food, they grow the network effect, right?

28:28 And their reputation builds upon that. So a soulbound NFT, in which you can build these reputation layers in Web3 in a verified manner, is a ticket in which then, if I want to give you an air drop, if I give you value, I know that you are someone who doesn’t dump the tokens or I know someone who actually builds value, that you have network effects that are precious. That’s what we need to build. And in Mochaverse, we have the perfect flywheel because every one of our investments, many of them, most of them will issue a token to build a network.

28:57 Who gets access to those networks? Mocha ID holders and Mochaverse NFT holders and Mochaverse token holders. They have the first sort of stab at that, but they have to prove that they’re worth it. So they have to work it, they have to do stuff, and the more they work it, the more the reputation they build. Eventually, once they’ve shown how much value they’ve generated for five projects, ten projects, twenty projects, whatever project, well, just like in the real world, you get a promotion.

29:25 Whether you get more, whether you get more value, maybe you get a job in that place. To us, we see this as effectively a network of people who are the most valuable people in Web3 who help build your network. That’s what Mochaverse is about. For pixels, which is probably still the number one on-chain Web3 game outside of the tone ecosystem, we brought one-third of the traffic to pixels with Mochaverse. For a game like 9 Chronicles, also one of our portfolios, they were saying how 40% of all the Mochaverse users actually became paying customers in the 9 Chronicles ecosystem.

29:59 That’s value. That’s what you want. Of course, they get rewarded from the ecosystem, but it’s worth it because they built a network effect. Remember, we spend billions of dollars in gaming alone, $100 billion a year, but broadly speaking, just think about how much advertising money is spent. In the trillions of dollars, to do what?

30:16 To bring in people to join your network. Your network could be a restaurant. It could be a shopping mall. It could be car sales. Or it could be your game.

30:24 We spend so much money on that to a platform that only takes away. Apple, Facebook, Google, they basically just take away value from you and then they say for the benefit of what? To bring you a user. Great. But does a user get a benefit?

30:39 He just gets introduced. For an introduction fee to pay that kind of money, that seems pretty high. But instead now we can say I’m going to pay you directly. I’m going to pay you $10, $20, $50. I need $50 to try my product.

30:54 If you don’t like the product, you can sell and make some money. But if you love the product, then guess what? I’ll earn you for life. And what is the percentage chance of someone who gets money given that he’ll put back into your ecosystem? Infinitely higher than giving it to an Apple or Facebook, Google, who has no incentive to do so.

31:14 So what happens actually is that the flywheel of capital in Web3 is much healthier as a result. But it’s still about the best product. If you have a bad product, it doesn’t matter how many tokens you get. They’re not going to use it, right? Except instead of paying a platform that doesn’t put it back into the ecosystem, you’re now actually paying an end user.

31:31 But of course you need to know whether the end user is the right end user. So if you just give it to an anonymous person, you’re actually just shooting in the dark. But now with something like Mocha ID, I know who you are. I know what games you might have played. I know what reputation you have.

31:45 And the more loyal and the better you are in building your network reputation, the more value you will receive. And again, we have that flywheel to begin that process. But in the end, our big hope is that it’s not just going to be Animoco’s ecosystem. It’s going to be every ecosystem that wants it because I want the Mochaverse user because he has a good reputation, which is how the whole world works anyway, right? I mean, I remember as an immigrant kid growing up in Europe, we were looking for a certain type of, you know, like people, this was in the 80s, right?

32:15 So one of the most coveted type of customers were Japanese customers because, you know, Japan was top of the economy and they would spend very well. And then there was American customers, right? That to me is no different. It’s a reputation. Oh, Japanese customers pay well and are great customers.

32:27 How do I get them? Right? Or maybe like Chinese customers today, right? This cycle happens all the time. You build a reputation around it.

32:35 And this is what we want with Mochaverse. Is Mochaverse your kind of piece de resistance? When I saw you coming out with it, I was like, oh, this is what Animoco was all about. This is what you’ve been doing for five, seven years. Ultimately, you know, buying all these assets, investing all these Web3 games.

32:52 But the ultimate plan was to create this ID system, this community. It’s a network, right? This network. We’re always about building a network that’s shared in our values that can deliver digital property rights. That was always part of the vision.

33:05 But of course, how do you build that in an inclusive manner? And actually, in the Web2 way, it’d be like, oh, do we build a LinkedIn? Do we build a social network? But in Permission’s Web3, it doesn’t really make sense. Someone else can do that, right?

33:17 Since if we build the infrastructure around that, this sort of, you know, this omni-chain structure that can sit across all chains, which as an ID system, then actually that would be more powerful. So we are kind of basically building a network effect of Animoco through Mochaverse. So it’s very, very critical for us to obviously not just make it successful, but actually to sort of demonstrate what happens when you have ownership of a network. And we couldn’t do this before, because if we have like five investments or ten investments, okay, that’s nice.

33:49 But how do you build a network effect around that? Where you had to have a certain type of scale and a certain type of sort of oomph in size before you could actually do that. And so again, this is, we felt the timing was right to do so. And of course, the other thing is that ecosystems like TON are bringing a lot more users into Web3. That’s part of this as well.

34:07 You know, we didn’t yet see up until the TON ecosystem how we could bring hundreds of millions of users into the ecosystem. We all thought gaming would be that way and we can see this with TON and gaming right now. But you needed a way in which the distribution flywheel wasn’t restricted. And Apple and Facebook and Google are still restricting Web3 companies in terms of their distribution. I mean, Apple, for instance, is like, yeah, you can have NFTs, just can have utility.

34:31 And why would you actually launch it on the App Store, for instance? It doesn’t make any sense, right? But for TON and Telegram, you can just do this unrestricted. So again, this will grow the ecosystem. And again, because of the shared network effect, just because you’re growing on TON, yes, TON will benefit greatly.

34:47 But that means a user can also start moving into other parts of the ecosystem, which is what they’re doing today. Okay, well, let’s talk about TON now because it really is a parallel narrative to what’s going on in Vocalverse. And you were really early. You made a big investment in TON a year ago, I think, right? At the end of, you know, mid-to-23.

35:05 Why, how did you see that early? Because TON has become the talk of the town this last few months. Like they, you know, Tucker Carlson interviewed the founder of TON in April or May, you know, you got mainstream there. The founder was at the stage of token 2049. Before that, he had been fairly quiet.

35:23 Yes. And then, of course, Pantera announced it was like one of the biggest investments they ever made in the TON coin. And then they offered it to some of their people. I got an email to get some OTC deals to spread it around to their people. Yes.

35:38 Even more fascinating. But you saw this early. So what did you see? Because everyone, including you, has said Web3 Gaming is the way we’re going to onboard the next billion users. And everybody in Web3 wants that, but no one can see how that was actually going to happen.

35:53 We can’t spend all those advertising dollars with the Web3 companies. It doesn’t make sense. But when did you see TON and realize that this was something that would be the gateway? Well, so first, from a distribution standpoint, I think the biggest sort of hurdle that most companies would have had looking at TON and Telegram was how close was that relationship? Because TON, the open network, always made sense.

36:18 But of course, what wasn’t clear, remember, Telegram actually went through a lot of trouble earlier. Because they had an ICO back in 17th century. Back then, right? And then with Graham and so on, and essentially that sort of quasi-backfired because it was treated, essentially, as a sort of a security sale. They had to settle and so they had to withdraw.

36:34 Some investors lost money. So obviously, there was a little bit of hangover over that. But the thesis always stayed the same, which was like, if you could leverage the Telegram network to grow your business, where virality wasn’t basically restricted, it would be okay. The other thing, of course, was that for the longest of times, Telegram as an institution was very un-commercial, intentionally so. So in other words, you weren’t allowed to do advertising.

36:57 You couldn’t really make money that way. So it was sort of indirect manners. Otherwise, you could potentially run into trouble, all that kind of stuff. Part of it, I think, had a little bit to do with the relationships between the app source, for instance, right? In terms of, you know, Apple and Google might not have liked the idea when TON was still growing, that you had potentially a competitive business inside Telegram, for instance, around what they were doing.

37:18 So all these elements, essentially, were not playing sort of, you know, were maybe reasons why sort of the TON Telegram thing wasn’t sort of front and center. But the potential was always there. So we saw that. And when we decided to take a sort of deeper plunge, also becoming a larger validator, is when we saw proof with our own ecosystems, right? So one of our sort of Web3 games, Gamey, for instance, they actually launched sort of, you know, the applications on Telegram, and they saw that morality.

37:45 Today, Gamey has 3 million daily active users because of TON. That’s crazy. Now, just think about that. That’s a big number, even for Web2, right? And that would have been impossible to think about when you think about even just a year or a year and a half ago in terms of, you know, Web3 games, let alone, you know, Web2 games was a tough number, but Web3, I mean, where are you going to find a distribution point that’s going to let you access it?

38:09 Everyone’s focusing on, yeah, you know, the App Store will let me do it, or Google Play will let me do it, but there’s all these restrictions that made it hard and intentionally difficult and all that kind of stuff, right? And so Telegram essentially allowed that morality, those network effects that they had, to essentially be accessed fairly openly. That was the thing. And of course, the friendliness of, you know, the wallet integration zone was very helpful as well.

38:31 Again, making it more frictionless from an adoption standpoint, but the big, big thing was really around the fact that they were allowing essential viral frameworks to sort of help grow and accelerate the network effects that were already inherent inside Telegram through the Tom Blockchain. And when we saw that, we decided, this makes sense, and we basically sort of plunged into the ecosystem. Really, as we did early on with, you know, we supported OpenSea or Xinfinity or Sandbox back in the day, it wasn’t purely from a financial lens.

38:59 It was really about a utility lens in terms of, wait, this is an ecosystem that’s going to grow. They could be a ticket for mass adoption. We’re going to support that, and we’re going to bring our ecosystem into that as well so we can help grow the space. So absolutely, to us, it made a lot of sense. You know, we’ve taken multiple other type of sort of investments in other areas that we’re hoping for mass adoption as well.

39:20 Some happen faster than others, and sort of certainly when we decided to do that and then Telegram kept rising and TON started accelerating as well. And then, frankly, the macro of the market improved too. I mean, we made investments in TON back when the market was really considered a bear market, right? I mean, you know, this was before Bitcoin and TF, right? This was all the stuff.

39:39 Again, this comes down to, it wasn’t just a faith in TON. It was also a faith in Web3, right? It was, and again, this comes down to the conviction, right? A lot of people are like, oh, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But even if it made a lot of sense, I think a lot of people wouldn’t have invested back in 2023 because the Bitcoin narrative wasn’t there, the Web3 narrative wasn’t there.

39:58 The US political narrative wasn’t there either. I mean, the world has completely changed from a year ago where Web3 is, where it is, you know, back then for where it is now. Yeah, no, it’s always important to remind people that 2023 was a completely different time. Absolutely. And that you can’t look at it through the lens of what’s happening right now.

40:16 Yeah. So, look, let’s jump into that then because we’ve seen in the last few days what they’re calling the Trump pump. The market’s up massively. The president that has, what, a 70% chance of being the next president according to Polymarket, which is, of course, the on-chain betting system. Of course.

40:33 Which is apparently very popular right now. It is popular, yes. Is predicting that, and we’ve seen crypto at a massive jump on the back of it. President Trump. Well, there’s choice of vice president as well.

40:44 That’s interesting. Exactly. So, President Trump literally just dodged a bullet. Fascinating. He just picked JD Vance, which is a pro-crypto VP.

40:52 Video just surfaced of him kind of slating Gensler back in February as far as the way that he’s executing his job. And Trump figured out, I think, when some random dude with sunglasses raised his hand at Mar-a-Lago three months ago, that crypto could win him the election alone. Not to mention dodging bullets and winning debates. And so, look, I ran for office here in London, and I know what it’s like to be a politician, and politicians care about two things, money and votes.

41:20 And when you see an issue that is passionate in your fan base, you go all over it. And I don’t think, even though it was obvious to us that any politician saw that. Bobby Kennedy was touching around with Bitcoin, but when Trump saw that, he went all in on that. And so, now we have this kind of Trump pump. What do you make of this potential massive 180 in regulatory environment in the U.S.?

41:44 So, first of all, I don’t think there’s a 180 on the regulatory side yet. Well, not yet. And we don’t know. We don’t know, so it all depends. But I think it fundamentally, and I don’t know that we should call it specifically a Trump thing.

41:57 I mean, first of all, Trump is media savvy. I think he has an instinct. I don’t necessarily know how deep he’s into the topic, although he has sold NFTs quite well. So, you know, who knows, right? But I would say that fundamentally, Republicans have broadly been pro-crypto to the extent that Democrats have broadly been anti-crypto.

42:16 And I think it comes down to really, you know, at the deeper level, the ideological constructs between the two, right? You know, and both of them come from a lens of what they think is best for the nation and best for the relative security constructs, right? For instance, you know, the Republican perspective, you know, when you think about things like CBDCs, is like Trump and the Republicans generally are like, no CBDCs. Why? Because it really comes down to this idea of sovereign property rights, right?

42:45 If it’s your money, it’s your money. There is, you know, like, you know, you cannot have any way in which that can be taken away unless there’s certain things that happen. There’s some kind of due process that takes place that’s in their frame of mind, right? Controversial as that might be to some, right? Whereas I think definitely from the Democratic perspective, which comes with bigger government, bigger oversight, is actually coming from the perspective of, well, we need to have control over people who are doing bad things, and we need to be kind of sort of policing that more, right?

43:14 Those are two different perspectives. And again, I would argue even, again, depending on how philosophical we want to go, I would say that the Democrats are veering more into a Hobbesian view of the world, which basically talks about, you know, Hobbes is trying to defend, essentially, government perspective that the state of nature is actually anarchic and chaotic. And so freedom is great, except that then it’s just freedom of who is the most powerful, right?

43:39 If I’m the strongest person, then I basically am your tyrant. And you need government to essentially protect and defend and all that kind of stuff, because people are inherently prone to being, let’s say, bad or evil, right? And you can kind of see that lens, right, where Democrats take a lens towards people who have money a little bit more negatively, right? It’s like, oh, you have money? Maybe you are too powerful.

44:02 Maybe you are corrupted. Maybe whatever that is, and we need to protect people who don’t have that. And so we need strong government to do that, in contrast to the Republican perspective, which is, you know, I would argue, more Lockean, in the sense that, you know, we’re not bad people. People are inherently good. We do need to have rules that sort of defend against the minority that are bad, which is kind of the camp I think of as well.

44:25 I think most people aren’t bad. There’s a small number of people in the world that are, you know, spoiling it for people. But do we really have to restrict all of our freedoms in exchange for the single-digit percentage of people who are actually bad, right? I mean, that’s the difference between, you know, a police state type of thing where everything is controlled versus to something that’s a little bit more open but accepting of the fact that, you know, if you’re an anomaly, then we have to treat you in a certain way.

44:51 But generally speaking, you know, we walk on the streets and say hello to each other. We don’t have to worry about getting shot or that kind of stuff, right? So it takes a slightly different lens from that way. But they have different ways in which they sort of look at that perspective. And I think crypto falls into that category in terms of their policy.

45:05 So I think it’s not specifically a Trump thing. I think it’s a Republican thing. But I think Trump definitely latched onto it as a more significant campaign agenda, propelling it essentially up to a national level, which to me is a win for the industry. Regardless of who wins as president, I think we’ve now reached the point of no return where, you know, crypto, Web3, and blockchain is an important topic that I think politically can no longer go the way that I think some people thought it might have gone maybe even just a year ago because the narrative has just become so strong.

45:39 One thing that we’ve observed, and this is more anecdotal, so we don’t have a lot of evidence yet, is that a lot of people in America that are owners of this asset class, of this digital asset class, tend to actually be more of sort of the ethnic groups, right? So in other words, you see more in the Latino segment or in other ethnic groups like, for instance, Asian Americans, for instance. There’s a larger percentage owning it there. Again, of course, there’s a lot of, you know, mainstream Americans that have it as well, but it’s just the actual sort of percentage ratio isn’t as great, right?

46:10 So you see that. So it’s a little bit about if you’re pro-crypto, then you’re maybe winning that particular vote. But also, I think, you know, crypto is also the one mechanism in which a lot of young people are seeing opportunity, right? If you think about the state of equity in America, it’s actually pretty bad, right? The 1% all get richer, the poorer get poorer.

46:29 What way do you actually have a way in which you can bridge the gap? And actually, Web3 and crypto has proven to be that way for many, many people. And therefore, it’s a little bit like, wait, this is my ability to make money, this is my opportunity, and if there’s someone who’s taking that away from me, then why would I vote for that person? And I think, you know, this is controversial maybe to say, but in a world where the world has become more inequitable, where many families can’t even afford to sort of, you know, maybe even put food on the table in some cases, or have to certainly worry about their kid’s education because they can’t save enough money to send them to a good university or a good school, for instance, then why would it matter to have things like, you know, as important as it is, like pay a green premium, for instance, or worry about certain things about the environment when I can’t even worry about myself, right?

47:19 And I think this is controversial, but you see this, for instance, in Southeast Asia, where there’s a lot of pressure to sort of, you know, obviously it’s important to decarbonize and to think about the environment, but if a family is going to starve because of it, then really you’re asking to make an unconscionable choice, right? If I can’t put food on the table, then, you know, why do I need to worry about someone else in America or in Europe being concerned around the fact that he wants to have sort of, you know, green conscious food when they’re about to die, right? So that’s kind of the situation that I think the world is in as well.

47:50 There’s a lack of understanding around that. You need to solve both problems, but I don’t think you can solve it unless you solve the equity problem first, which I think Web3 is doing. And there’s about 100 million Americans that own crypto? I’ve heard that number kind of thrown around. Yeah, I mean, so I think, but that number is also a lot in centralized exchanges.

48:08 So that means that they do own it as an asset for investment purposes, and certainly if you’ve owned crypto in the last year and a half, you know, and it’s mostly going to be Bitcoin, I imagine, you should be doing okay, right? So from that perspective as well, you’re not looking at it as an asset class that is sort of hurting you. You’re looking at asset class that is actually giving you access and growth, right? If you just chart the price of Bitcoin over the last year and a half, then just exposure to that sort of, to that digital asset would actually mean that you should be pro, right, because it’s doing well for you.

48:41 And therefore any politician that would sort of go against that narrative means you’re going against that community. And also, frankly, if you own crypto, you probably are your voting age, right? Because you’re someone who can, has money that can invest and do something in that space. I was being told that a small percentage of those people, maybe it was 25%, could potentially be single-issue voters, like they’re so passionate about crypto that that actually might get the vote.

49:07 Now, maybe it’s even smaller, but I don’t know. I don’t know, except that when you look at the electoral system in America, actually when you look at the swing states, it doesn’t take many people to make that change. I mean, you know, in some cases it could be literally hundreds of voters. And so I would say the single-issue voters will swing the vote, I think so, but not necessarily because it’s 25% of 100 million, but because it’s going to be 500 people that are somewhere in, I don’t know, whether it’s, you know, Cincinnati, Vermont, or whatever.

49:38 It’s like Arizona, Pennsylvania. Exactly, Pennsylvania, like in those places where they’re literally voting that way because it means so much to them. And I think generally, I think the strategy has been for people to go after being pro-certain single-issues around that. And so, yes, but I would say it’s too early to tell because there’s many, many political issues that, of course, you know, I wish that the, I certainly wish that there was sort of a party that could blend both, right?

50:09 In some ways I feel like, you know, both parties had to sort of sometimes go a little bit extreme on both sides to try to sort of attract a particular basis, which I didn’t think is particularly healthy. Yeah, again, from my experience in politics, I mean, a good politician or a politician that lives and survives knows how to weaponize topics. Yes. So they find an issue. A lot of times they’ll stumble on an issue, I think Trump stumbled on crypto, quite frankly, and then they see it as something divisive, then they weaponize it.

50:36 And I even argued that Elizabeth Warren did the same thing with crypto. I don’t even think she really cares, she knows she can use it as a weapon to amplify her influence. And so now I’m going to demonize that thing and I can get some action there. So, yeah, I agree. It’d be nicer if they both came together.

50:53 But if Trump and Vance go in, it’s very possible they would post an SEC chairman in this pro-crypto and it can make a massive change. Irrespective of how, you know, irrespective of whether, you know, sort of they changed the chair or not. The point is, is that under, you know, I think most people will assume that under a republican sort of government that essentially it’s going to be pro-crypto and the rules will change around that, or at least a political stance will change.

51:18 So I think that’s definitely on the cards. You know, I think there’s something interesting around the perspectives here, right, because when you look at, for instance, someone like Elizabeth Warren going after anti-crypto, I think the undertone of her message, and I don’t know, and that’s why I think it’s people shooting up, sometimes sort of aside from, sort of away from each other, is that it comes down to her version or her lens of what she thinks is justice, right? And, you know, Elizabeth Warren has built a reputation, not specifically going after crypto, but specifically going after corporate wealth, right?

51:52 Like, it’s this narrative that I was saying earlier, right? You know, if you’re wealthy, if you’re powerful, you’re, you know, did you get there with ill-begotten means? Are you bad? You know, there’s this narrative in America that’s become anti-capitalist, actually, as I think I said earlier in the show, where people are looking negatively towards capitalism. I think that’s where she is at, right, in terms of, hey, you know, like, these people are making all this money.

52:16 They’re not good for America in a certain way. We need to, it’s not just about taxes. It’s around taking power away from them, and that’s a narrative. And for her, I guess, crypto was a narrative that sat on top of that. But I think it’s ironic, because actually, I think crypto is the opposite.

52:30 I think sort of crypto and Web3 and decentralization is actually about giving power to the people, by giving them equity and ownership in these network effects that they actually can be included. Like, how do we create a world where every person can be a property owner? It’s not going to be physical land, but it can be digital equity. Yeah, let’s talk about that. By the way, here in Europe, where you grew up in Austria, and also here, there is that lingering smell of socialism as well, and you see it in the newspapers.

52:57 It’s not lingering. It’s right here. I mean, Britain, what you think is a little bit more aligned with the free markets of the West, you know, I always pick up on it, because maybe I grew up in America, but whenever there’s someone wealthy that’s talked about in the papers here, there’s always this tone that they’re doing something wrong, or there’s something bad about them, if they’ve amassed wealth. Maybe that’s obvious to you. Well, I mean, so first of all, yeah, when I grew up, as I grew up in Austria, and I still see this sort of there, you don’t really talk about money, right?

53:26 Which I think has been a great disservice, because whether you like it or not, understanding money, economics, financial systems is critical, because most people don’t appreciate that money is probably the biggest social network in the world. Understanding money isn’t specifically around just about value and exchange of value and sort of, you know, sort of accumulating wealth and so on, right? Understanding money is understanding human nature, social behavior, and the networks around them.

53:59 Like, I call it a social network because money is a reason why you can transact with a complete stranger anywhere around the world and do business. I don’t need to know your name, I can just buy my meat, buy my shoes, you could be in China, you could be in the UK, I could be from anywhere around the world, and today it’s a dollar generally, through the dollar, we are connected. Yeah, maybe also through the dollar, we can become friends. Oh, we invest together.

54:29 Friendships are formed from investors and from investments together, from success together, from business partners. Also, money can split friendships as well. The point being that money is probably one of the most social, the most powerful social networks and social currencies of sorts, right? And because we have done, in Europe in particular, sort of moved away from that, we don’t want people to understand it. The conspiratorial theorists might say it’s intentional because that’s how you keep class hierarchy, right?

54:59 If I understand money, you don’t. Actually, that means I understand power and you don’t. And if I understand power, that means I control you, right? That could be the conspiratorial version. I don’t buy that quite, but that could be one version of it, managing your population.

55:12 But I think the other thing is just that people looked at money as something dangerous to sort of change the social order of things. Because the base of economic capital, when you accumulate economic capital, it actually paves away for what we want as humans more, which is social and cultural capital. And what is social-cultural capital? It’s respect, it’s reputation, it’s what we want actually. At the end of the day, you know, you see the story with billionaires who are suddenly giving donations and doing good in the world and doing stuff.

55:43 And whether they appreciate it or not, what are they doing? They actually want to elevate their social currency, they want to elevate their social capital, they want to elevate their cultural capital. That’s what they want, right? And in cultural capital, you have these things that are sort of objectified capital. This peer board here would frame it.

55:58 He has a very good way of thinking about this. Framing sort of objectified capital is the first step of moving away from the economic capital. So I may have amassed lots of money, but now I want to sort of have a better reputation. So one version is I buy an Lamborghini, right? But for the people who are at the higher end of the stratosphere, who are sort of at the top end of the social and cultural capital, they look at the person with a Lambo and say, nouveau riche, nice try, that’s okay, fine.

56:25 But within that particular circle, they’re like, oh, that’s nice. You know, Miami had that reputation for a while, where, you know, everyone suddenly had Lambos and fast cars and everything, or Hong Kong had that as well, right? And so there was a base of people around that building reputation within their circles, with their high fashion and whatever. And then they start to evolve into the next level of, okay, are you a good person, or what’s your reputation, you know, and so on and so forth.

56:46 And I think, you know, in places that you have incumbent structures for a long time, that sort of embodied an institutional cultural capital was so established that you almost had to create a framework so that economic capital could never enter properly in that sphere. And so if you’re young, like Hong Kong, like Dubai, for instance, or even like Miami, you don’t have the legacy of hundreds of years of the past that sort of create that institutionalized embodied cultural capital where value is sort of meant to sort of suppress the economic side of things because you wanted to defend your status, right? You know, for instance, like if you’re royalty, you could be poor.

57:24 You could be poorer than that merchant. But guess what? You’re a lord. You’re the Duke of something. And you might not have as much money as that merchant, right?

57:32 We’re here in London, right? I mean, you know, the royal class all had a higher status than the merchant class, and it was not about how much money you had, but it was a way to sort of organize that. But the world’s become much more blurred today, right? And so I think, again, and it goes back to the idea of the mochaverse. We want to build with the mochaverse much more cultural and social capital through the NFTs, through the token ownership, and essentially through the ID system because ultimately, as humans, that’s actually what we want, right?

58:00 And I think economic capital, though, is the base. If you can’t have access to that, you can have a way to develop, right? You needed property rights first for capitalism to develop, for economic capital to have a base, before you could actually create for the evolution to have this sort of social and cultural capital. Got it. It’s fascinating.

58:20 Let’s just linger on capitalism briefly, because in America, you know, my daughter is at university, and, you know, people literally have conversations about Marxism there. And I couldn’t believe it. I was like, they really are serious? She’s like, they’re really serious about this. And so, you know, the basic tenets of capitalism are being questioned in a country like America, which is surprising.

58:42 One of the things you always told me, and it’s the foundation of animoca, is this concept of property rights, specifically digital property rights. You’ve always been a proponent of capitalism. Yes. But that’s not necessarily popular these days. Well, so capitalism as a term has become quite politicized.

59:00 So I think that’s why sometimes that’s a challenge, and I’ll get into that. But most people won’t be challenged around ownership. And I think if people truly study Marx, they will understand that actually he advocated for the abolishment of ownership in the sense that he saw that as a foundation for something that actually was bad. But the reason why people are sort of fascinated about Marx is that Marx is very smart. In his time, you have to look at all the context of the time when he sort of came up with this capital and when he looked at the problem, because he came from a wealthy family.

59:35 He wasn’t sort of a working class. He actually had privilege, but he saw what happened in the Industrial Revolution and he saw how people were treated, and he almost felt, and it’s important to understand that there needed to be an evolution that in order for communism to happen, capitalism first had to reach its peak and essentially prove to people how that was essentially something that was sort of unfair and created essentially this new class hierarchy before class warfare would begin. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but that’s basically sort of his theory, and his diagnosis in terms of what happens when you have capitalism run rampant was true then, is true today.

1:00:15 So in other words, I think why people look at that is that it’s kind of like when you see the evidence, someone 100 plus years ago predicted essentially what sort of rampant capitalism would do in terms of the inequity, and he was right, you get attracted to that. That’s correct. But just because you were able to sort of diagnose the problem you have the solution. And so I think the dangerous thing is you shouldn’t look at Marx necessarily as saying that he wasn’t diagnosing the problem correctly.

1:00:40 He was correct in terms of what happens when capitalism is left unchecked or when there’s a way in which capitalism is probably distributed. But his solution, which is communism, actually caused one of the greatest sort of death and destruction in really the last century, if you think about it. And we don’t have to go into details, but just look at basically what happened to Russia and to the early stages of development in China, which really, if you think about China, a lot of people look at China and say, that’s communist.

1:01:05 It’s not communist at all. It completely rejected sort of the Marxist version of communism and essentially moved to a actually property rights sort of, it’s socialism, but with very strong capitalist and property rights sort of frameworks, right? So it’s not, I would argue that China is in many ways much more capitalist than Europe, for instance, right? But delving a little bit into sort of this foundation of property rights, what’s so important for property rights for us comes down to freedom.

1:01:35 And I think George Washington had this sort of favorite quote, right? Which is that, you know, basically, you can’t have freedom without property rights. That’s paraphrasing. I don’t even remember the exact quote. But essentially, if I don’t own my property, if I don’t own the things that I have sovereign rights over, then what freedom do I have?

1:01:51 And it doesn’t just start with property, it starts with your name. If I own my name, then I have freedom of thought and my own individual freedoms. People sometimes forget that most of us in our human history and our family history didn’t own our last name. You know, what is it like? I don’t know.

1:02:09 Half the population in Korea ending name came. Or in China, it’s Wang, right? Or why in, you know, your last name is named after your village you were born, or the fact that you were like a butcher, or the fact that, right, the professions that we took on as our last names, because we didn’t have last names. Last names were only given to the lords of their time, because you had a history. You were someone.

1:02:29 Everyone else was a serf. They didn’t deserve a last name because they were essentially disposable, right? The next people were born to some generation of something, but they would still be called John, or, you know, I don’t know, Alfred, or whatever the names they were, because they couldn’t keep their identity. So it starts with that. Once you actually own your identity, then from that you build the foundation of your freedom, right?

1:02:51 And the beginning of that then is, okay, I own my house, I own my property, I have the freedom to transact, I have the freedom to sell. But it begins with the freedom of thought, with knowing that I own myself. Right. That’s not being a slave. That’s not being a slave.

1:03:07 That’s one. And then having your identity. Exactly. And I think the ideological wars that sometimes happen between people who fight on socialism and capitalism, sometimes even just begins with a sense of, sort of, what do you actually own, right? Where is that security of, are you actually, do you actually own what you own?

1:03:26 Do you have rights over that? Or who gets to decide, for instance, that it shouldn’t be yours, for instance, right? So these are all these elements around sort of where a lot of conflict happens. But I think, again, going back to sort of people, sort of, let’s call it love of Marxism, I think, again, you know, because an intellectual predicted what could happen when capitalism goes rampant, doesn’t mean that the solution is the right one, right? And I think, again, back then, there wasn’t a way to sort of think about how to distribute equity more fairly.

1:03:57 So I actually am a much bigger proponent of sort of Rawls’ way of thinking around this, right? So Rawls was someone who, John Rawls was a sort of a philosopher who was most famous for theory of justice. And he actually sort of created a thinking thought framework around equity where he said, you know, it’s, again, it’s okay for people to make more money, provided that everyone else benefits from it. That’s still capitalism, right? That’s not saying we’re doing away with capitalism.

1:04:28 It just puts a framework around capitalism that it has to have some element of social good broadly. And I think this is something that if we tuned it this way, then actually I think capitalism becomes this net force of good. Because if you don’t have capitalism, you wouldn’t have innovation, you wouldn’t have disruption. There wouldn’t be the incentive for people to actually do what they’re doing, right? I mean, you can see these capitalist countries are more innovative, more creative.

1:04:53 You know, America’s power is the fact that it has creative destruction because of capitalism, right? If it didn’t have capitalism, you wouldn’t have the ability to sort of, you know, build that type of thing. China, embracing popularized capitalism, gave rise to Alibaba and Tencent and all these companies. It didn’t happen because of state-owned enterprises basically sort of guiding it this way in a socialist manner. That’s not how it works.

1:05:15 Human incentives and motivations need to be given those type of sort of incentives. And capitalism is a way to do that. But I think the other sort of drawback is that, you know, we used to have strong, you know, sort of antitrust rules. So that was a way in which you would keep markets open. Again, capitalism only works when the markets are truly free.

1:05:36 When you build a monopoly, actually what happens is the markets no longer become free. And again, this is a distinction that I think some people don’t fully recognize because maybe they don’t study it or they just look at capitalism, they look at Apple, and they say, or look at Google and Facebook and say, you make all this money, right? You’re a bad capitalist corporation. I would argue that these corporations are anti-capitalist. They’re not anti-capitalist because they’re not making money for themselves.

1:05:59 They’re anti-capitalist because they’re essentially infringing and impinging on the free market. When I’m buying advertising or a service, you know, on Apple or Facebook, am I dealing with a counterparty or am I dealing with an algorithm? I’m dealing with an algorithm. How’s the algorithm tuned? It’s not tuned to the benefit of the parties.

1:06:16 It’s tuned to the benefit of one company, which is Facebook. So again, they are monopolies. And monopolies become anti-capitalist because they actually want to restrict a trade. They want to restrict the freedom of things so they can benefit more. So in a truly capitalist market, it needs to be open.

1:06:36 And that’s why Web3 is so powerful because actually you can’t monopolize. You see this with the vampire attacks on OpenSea. You see this on the vampire attacks on Ethereum. When Solana opened up, they’re like, hey, you know, everyone who’s an Ethereum user, you can move over, for instance. Or you see this with not just L1, L2 chains with games and everything.

1:06:54 Hey, you have a board A. I give you all these benefits if you try my game. That’s actually a truly permissionless open capitalist framework. That’s what the open market and free market should be like. And you can have a monopoly.

1:07:06 And that’s why we’re such big believers in how we can have true digital property rights in Web3 because of the fact that it’s permissionless and decentralized. Yeah, I remember when you first said that, you know, for example, Google is a monopoly. It was last time you were here and it just really opened my eyes because you would never assume it is because you’re in this free market framework, but it’s no longer a free market there anymore. We’ve had our run-ins with something like YouTube and I know that’s not true.

1:07:32 And so that’s actually not acting in a capitalistic way. But most people miss that. And so they point at it and say, bad capitalist, you know, bad monopolist. And capitalism is information. So the market gives you information.

1:07:46 I mean, you just talked about sort of prediction markets. It’s just one example, right? But it’s through the markets that we have a language in which you can tell what works and what doesn’t work or what we mean to be mindful or not mindful of, right? I mean, if you didn’t have capitalism, you know, a lot of people don’t like capitalism because they say it’s volatile. But actually, capitalism, the volatility in capitalism, I think is a feature of capitalism.

1:08:11 You know, if you think about the world today, it’s not stable at all. And I don’t mean just recently, you know, with the markets and whatever. I just mean in general. Think about how many people lose their job every day and get a new job every day. So when you look at the index on an annualized basis, you might say 2% or 3% unemployment.

1:08:29 Sure, that’s great. Pretty stable year on year, right? But actually, to the people in there who lost their job and gained their job in that year, not stable at all, right? Think about how many companies are shut down every year. Like in Hong Kong, I think it’s something like 2,000 or 3,000 restaurants are shut down every year.

1:08:45 And of course, about 2,000 plus restaurants open up every year. That’s not stable, right? That’s totally like this. So if you were able to chart the changes that happen in these capitalistic frameworks on a daily basis or weekly basis, you’d probably see something really choppy. But because we don’t see that, we just make the assumption that it’s stable, but it’s not truly.

1:09:07 So I think the volatility in capitalism is an important feature because it informs the state of the market. If you’re doing badly as a business, your price goes down. If you’re doing well as a business, your quiet price goes up. If there’s demand, you can’t just look at the demand from the perspective of how well you do in sales. That’s one area.

1:09:23 But also popularity, right? So if I like you or if I think you’re attractive or if I think you are something that I desire, the market will tell you as well whether it’s priced appropriately, for instance, over time. So these are indicators of information that are really important. And again, because we’re not tuned to it, because we’re not trained, a lot of people don’t understand how to sort of do it. But the ones who do, they have power.

1:09:48 And that’s why we need more people to be financial literate because the more distribution you have of knowledge, actually the more equity you create. Speaking of volatility, let’s talk about meme coins. Yeah. Because maybe two interviews ago, you told me this, or maybe it was backstage at one of the conferences. You said, Brian, crypto is a store of value and NFT is a store of culture.

1:10:10 That’s what you told me. And you said that before. And when I saw the meme coin craze start happening at the early part of this year, I just thought back to that statement to me. And even though it’s not an NFT, it was a way for people to express themselves. It’s a form of culture.

1:10:25 It’s a form of culture. And you always said that culture is the biggest, you know, TVL in the world, which is total value lock, if you’re not a web three native, which meant that most of the GDP or value in the world is actually an expression of culture, which most people would be like, what are you talking about? It’s, you know, iron and steel and technology. But you would say, no, it’s culture. So maybe talk about that.

1:10:46 And then talk about what you see in meme coins, because they’re clearly here to stay. Yeah. I think large financial institutions like Franklin Templeton are now covering things like Dogecoin as an asset class. Obviously we’ve seen the rise of a lot of meme coins. But, you know, case in point, Doge and Shiba didn’t budge in coin market cap over the last two or three years.

1:11:03 They held their value and are right up there still with some of the biggest L1s in the world. So they’re clearly viable. And they’re not flashes in the pans. What’s your read on all this? Well, first, I mean, I would argue when you talk about culture that when you think of an asset class like gold, how much of it is utility versus how much of it is the culture of it being that store of value?

1:11:26 The utility of gold is perhaps not even a single digit percentage of the actual total market cap of gold. And therefore, when you think about money as a construct, a social construct, but a fictional one, it’s also an indication of culture. So, you know, I go back to this thing when I talk about tokens being all sort of, really sort of representations of network effects. Well, what is a network effect truly? It’s an expression of culture.

1:11:55 We’re friends, we’re part of the network, we’re related to each other. Every social network is a form of a culture. They could be very basic or they could be very deep. It depends, right? And so when I said NFTs are stores of culture, what I meant was that the NFTs, because they’re more complex, have the ability to create deeper types of cultural connections.

1:12:17 So in other words, if you have a certain trait, a certain look or a certain design, I can identify more strongly with it. So we all know it’s a board ape, or we all know it’s land ensemble, or we know it’s a mochaverse. But they look a little bit different. So notice how when someone has to sell their NFT, like a mochaverse or a board ape, they often apologize to the community. Oh, you know, I got to pay for my grandma, oh, my students’ kids, right?

1:12:39 They feel a need to somehow apologize, but why? Because they’re leaving a community. They’re essentially moving away from a certain cultural construct that they have, and that abandonment or departure is painful because it’s something deeply personal to you. That’s expressions of culture. It’s not purely utility.

1:12:58 If it’s utility, I don’t care. I just sell. I just do. I just move on, whatever, right? And for the longest of times, even though Bitcoin also represented culture, the actual sort of store of value was its biggest cultural aspect of it.

1:13:09 So Bitcoin as a store of value was its main narrative, but it’s still a form of culture. It’s just not maybe as deep a culture because a fungible token has different expressions of cultures because it’s the same. So in other words, if you have a million Dogecoin and I have a thousand-gold Dogecoin, it’s still Dogecoin, right? So the only measure I know between you and me is that you have more, right? And so I can look at trading patterns or how you sell as a way of expressing it, but the identity isn’t as personal versus think about things in your own culture.

1:13:39 For instance, if you won a running competition or you ran a marathon, that pair of shoes is priceless to you now, for instance, right? Or if you won a game in Wimbledon, for instance, or in a tennis match, we’re here in London, for instance, that racket, right? Or your name on the wall. Or the name on the wall. That’s priceless, right?

1:14:00 That is the kind of cultural social capital that is now sort of at a level that money can’t buy, right? And that’s kind of where sort of NFTs are. So to me, NFTs and things like ID, like Mocha ID, those are the expressions of culture that are at the pinnacle. They’re the ones that ultimately become what money can’t buy, right? So if I own a rare gold ape, maybe that’s what money can’t buy.

1:14:28 It doesn’t matter that the floor price goes up and down. That one is just simply not for sale. It’s special. Part of our legacy, part of whatever, that becomes that sort of embodied capital that is sort of supreme, shall we say, right? And so to me, meme coins are culture, but they are economic capital still, right?

1:14:48 Meaning that I enter Web3 and I might join because of money and I might join because it’s a community and I think it’s cool and it’s a little bit of fun and at the same time it could be sort of counterculture as well and a little bit sort of anti-establishment. That’s all culture, right? But then if I want to stand out inside that meme coin community to say, okay, I’m this now in the social sort of cultural perspective, the difference of having, you know, one million doge and you have 1.2 million doge and you have two million doge, no longer is that distinguished.

1:15:24 So you need that next level. And so by the way, this is why I think NFTs are currently in this market despite the fact that trading volumes are better than a year ago but still down from its peak, right, will recover is because this will be the next level of expression as we do in the real world. You know, the wealthiest person in the world, they all know family, right? What do they sell? Not utility goods, okay, right?

1:15:45 I mean, you know, if you think about, when you think about sort of the luxury industry, what is it when I’m buying luxury? I mean, you know, I give this example often about you don’t buy a Birkin bag to put stuff in it and you don’t buy a Rolex watch to tell the time. What you’re doing is you’re buying things to elevate your social status to demonstrate that you have things that money can’t buy. And we do this with experience as well. I mean, people post stuff on Instagram and say, oh, I’ve been in this incredible waterfall.

1:16:13 What are you doing? You’re actually trying to elevate your social cultural capital by saying, I got to a place that you didn’t go to and you don’t know where that is, but it’s really cool, isn’t it, right? Okay, these are all other ways in which we try to express ourselves. And again, money helps us get to that, but at the end, it becomes something that money can’t buy. All right, so I think this is where meme coins, to me, therefore, are that initial expression of culture, but then they have to evolve into that next level, but they have communities around them.

1:16:43 And again, I think meme coins are the cultural expression of our time in the world when the world is deeply inequitable. I think one way to think of Web3 and blockchain is if you believe that the world continues to be unfair and inequitable, then there’s a few ways in which you can sort of invest in that thesis. One investment thesis is luxury goods and real estate. That’s a safe one, right? 1% I’ll make more wealth, sell more stuff to them.

1:17:10 I mean, you know, like, I would go to somebody, and I’m in London, right, and I would go to these restaurants, and you know what, I do have some money, but I look at these prices and I was like, like, who can afford this, right? It’s super, super expensive to sort of pay for some of this type of food, right? And so, but if you’re an investor in those areas, you would do well because the one percentile that’s living in, you know, Knightsbridge and Chelsea, Mayfair, Belgravia, they don’t even blink an eye because to them it’s nothing.

1:17:42 It doesn’t matter that that restaurant might even charge you 50% more. They’re generally okay because they don’t even think about it because they’re accumulating so much capital. So that’s one way that a lot of people have invested in it and done well, like luxury goods, right? But I think the other way is crypto because crypto is, to me, is actually the equalizer in the space. If I’m invested in these network effects that I help build and grow and construct, I can build value on top of that.

1:18:06 That, to me, essentially, is the promise. That was the promise of Silicon Valley, by the way, 30, 40 years ago, right? If you invested in these tech companies, they would actually create more equitable frameworks of more information distribution and more value for everyone involved. And that was true for Web One, right? Because we all had access to the open internet and open source.

1:18:24 But in Web Two, that ended up becoming consolidated in the hands of a few and the access to opportunities in the hands of a few VCs, right? So it wasn’t just the fact that you had a few companies that started controlling it. You also had an investing network that essentially only allowed people to participate in these opportunities if you were of a certain class, if you were a certain community, if you knew the right people, right? If you had that particular cultural capital, right?

1:18:51 Silicon Valley basically became the establishment, you know, when it was, in fact, anti-establishment 30, 40 years ago, and crypto is the one that’s really against that. To me, you know, crypto is what Silicon Valley was 30, 40 years ago, and it is exactly that promise, and therefore I think that’s another way. If you want to make a fairer world, if you want to create more equity, and you believe that the world is unfair, then actually supporting the Web Three industry will actually help grow this.

1:19:21 To me, I think it is almost like, you know, I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a social enterprise, but it’s a capitalist purpose, and it will basically help build a fairer world as a result of that. Okay. And so a meme coin is kind of an entry-level way of me expressing some culture, being part of a culture, but this will morph into more bigger ways for me to do that, which means more of an NFT, more of an individualized way for me to show off. And so NFTs aren’t dead, NFTs are still around, and they’re going to be coming back because the meme investors are going to graduate to the next level, to discern themselves.

1:19:57 Well, how does a real world work? I mean, once you make a certain amount of money in the real world, will you do make more money? Sure. But you start moving into a bigger house, you start buying faster clothes. And, you know, at a certain level…

1:20:10 Donating to charity. Donating to charity. At a certain level, the niceness of the clothes being more comfortable or feeling better has nothing to do with the kind of material it’s made of, right? It’s got everything to do with, oh, that brand feels really good, but what is it that makes it feel good is actually what’s in your head. Not necessarily the fact that it has a sort of texture or whatever.

1:20:32 I mean, there’s an interesting sort of inverse reaction between a certain type of, let’s say, shoe wear that you wear, or the comfort degree, and the expense isn’t correlated to each other, right? And we see this… Louboutins. Right, exactly. So again, but it’s still important because it’s how it makes you feel, right?

1:20:51 And how it makes you feel is actually probably maybe the most important thing for humans. Yeah, so true. Fascinating how this stuff reflects right back to us and what we really are. Artificial intelligence, we need to talk about it. Sure.

1:21:08 Again, I think it was… I think we were at consensus last year when we were backstage, and, you know, this is when people were starting to talk about it. Chat GPT had already happened. You said the blockchain is going to be critical for these future AI agents to communicate with each other from a value exchange. Yes.

1:21:27 Fast forward to today. What do you think is most important? I mean, what I see is some very centralized companies dominating a lot of AI innovation and their access to compute, which is, right at this point, very expensive. And then I say a lot of really fascinating blockchain plays on AI, including deep end plays, which is a way of decentralizing some of the ownership there. Yeah, compute power, all that kind of stuff.

1:21:50 Yeah. What do you see? What do we need to kind of keep our eye on here? What’s important? So, in general, every time there is an abuse of something over time, there seems to be, historically, a counter reaction to that, right?

1:22:04 So, to me, Web 3 is a counter reaction to Web 2, in a sense, right? But it would only be possible if the Web 2 companies had abused the power, which they did. If Apple didn’t deplatform companies, for doing something that’s against their policies, if Google or Facebook wouldn’t deplatform companies, you know, or X or whatever, then maybe a lot of people would say, well, you know what? Why do we need Web 3? Why do we need decentralization?

1:22:29 You know, these sort of, you know, benevolent dictators are doing just fine. They wouldn’t have called them that anyway, right? But because of the abuse, because of the problems, and the same is for government, abuse of money, or, you know, people who reject the idea of that the government should be able to print money, you know, freely the way that they have, for instance. That actually was the prime reason why Bitcoin was birthed, right? These are the objections, right?

1:22:50 So when there is something that you think is an abuse, there’s a counter reaction to that. And when that abuse becomes unbearable, then essentially there is a revolution that takes place. The difference, though, is that the way we express a revolution today doesn’t necessarily have to be physically violent, but it’s still a form of violence, right? Which is to say, I’m rebelling against this. You know, you could argue that, you know, the creation of Bitcoin was a form of violence of a certain form.

1:23:14 It was violence against the existing financial ecosystem, for instance, right? It just didn’t express itself militarily, but it was still a revolution, maybe silent as it was in the beginning and now becoming much larger as a result, right? So the same, I think, is going to happen with AI, which is that, you know, open AI and all the sort of centralized AI plays are offering a lot of value to humanity and services, but there comes a point where, you know, the value concentrates in sort of capital power to someone else.

1:23:42 Also, the information that’s coming through, like there’s a lot of controversies right now in terms of, you know, why is this AI showing people of certain races like this versus not like that, right? And again, we don’t have to go into specifics around sort of those topics because they’re clearly sensitive, but the point is it becomes an expression of someone’s opinion, right, who’s basically guiding the AI in one direction or the other, right? Or, for instance, why can this AI not be available in China?

1:24:06 For instance, certain AI, actually most of the AI technology developed in the US is not available in China and in Hong Kong, even though Hong Kong is, you know, a free market and we have, you know, freedom of expression and you can get the BBC and all that kind of stuff over there, you know, for political reasons, it essentially was removed, right, because it was part of China, for instance, right? Is that, you know, again, it’s a form of censorship. So what it happens is that it forces places like China to create their own AI with their own narratives.

1:24:34 So again, the world will have many kinds of AI as a result of that that aren’t free of opinions, objective truth in the way that we think of it, because they have certain natures in them, because the centralized powers that be actually will sort of, you know, manage that. In their mind, they might say, this is the right answer. And again, it may be to their community it might, but what’s right for them might not be right for you, right? If you’re a platform from YouTube for content you create that you think is good content, that is not hurting anyone, but might be objectionable to someone else, someone decides that that content is okay, it’s still censorship, right?

1:25:08 So you can censor stuff regardless of whether it’s web 2 or web 3 or AI content or not AI content, right? So that abuse of power when it’s centralized will still happen. So I think decentralization of that will solve that regardless of whether you have an overlord with a lot of power. I mean, you could argue that Apple and Facebook or Google are, you know, are super powerful. They are.

1:25:27 They haven’t stopped blockchain, right? They can’t stop Bitcoin. They can’t stop the whole world crypto web 3 movement. And I think the same will happen with the AI. I think what’s really important for AI is that this powerful value source that will come needs to be owned by the community.

1:25:40 And again, the network effect ownership can only happen through tokenization. So we’ve backed a number of web 3 projects that basically do that. And so we think in the future, whether it’s deep in, for instance, with decentralized compute, so we know one of the big currencies of the world in the future is going to be compute, for instance, right? But if you can have ownership, this to me is a defense, if I am owning sort of a part of an AI network in which I deliver compute, that I have an incentive to keep that alive as opposed to just going for someone else’s sort of AI system in which I don’t have ownership in, right?

1:26:15 So that’s a powerful construct. Like, for instance, the defense of Bitcoin won’t only be because miners make profit. It’ll be because people want to defend their value, for instance, their ownership in these things, right? So there’s all these elements around that I think will create much more sort of open and fair frameworks. You know, if I’m a creator, I need to be able to sort of track, for instance, you know, who’s using my content for stuff and am I getting fair pay for it?

1:26:39 Like, I think in the future, where everything that AI generates can actually create fractional value to the creators, to the millions of users, only blockchain can really do that in an auditable fashion. So again, I think of that as a great way of solving essentially creative equity in the world. But again, we’re early in those developments. I think, you know, with AI in particular, we need to go through that stage where people look at AI and say, wait, that’s actually not doing me a student disservice.

1:27:07 You see this with creators already saying, hey, that ripped off my work. So all of these things, like with copyright and so on and trademark protection as well, will fall into sort of hodgepodge of issues that we have to solve with AI. But I think blockchain would be the solution for that. Yeah, when I look at it, based on our experiences with Web2, I just see the same beast with the new tech. I think, wow, this really needs to be open source and decentralized.

1:27:31 Yes. Otherwise, it’s going to get away from us very quickly. So I think, again, you know, whether it’s social technology, whether it’s AI technology, whatever it is, at the end, it all serves a human purpose. At the end, AI doesn’t exist for AI’s sake. AI exists for our sake.

1:27:52 And so if we as humans empower, we actually can take it away as well. And I think, you know, this is one of the things that I have faith in, right? For instance, I look at Web3. If you had said to most people 10 years ago that decentralized technology, built on the decentralized infrastructure that was as inefficient in terms of speed of transaction like blockchain, would disrupt the world, you know, in terms of capital ownership and property rights, the way that it is doing today, most people would have said it is impossible, impossible to conceive for all sorts of reasons.

1:28:26 And here we are. But again, who enabled the value and power of these networks? It’s not CPU. It’s not GPU power. I could use that GPU power and probably make more money, but give it to AI agents today.

1:28:37 It’s human ownership. So it comes back down to our incentives, our needs. The AI can create wonderful things, but if there’s not a human on the other end that appreciates it, it’s worthless. It’s important for us to remember that, right? Yes.

1:28:53 We glossed over, but I want to hit one more time education. When I ran to be mayor of London, I proposed the London coin that I was going to put into every wallet of every man, woman and child in this city. I was going to do a one-off tax on the banks, sorry, and take that liquidity and give it to everybody. And the idea was that they would finally get a financial education by learning how to use this coin and learning how to stake it and all these different things.

1:29:19 Didn’t go over that well, but at least I made my point. I also wanted all the voting on the blockchain and the budget on the blockchain, and of course the politicians really want that. But we talked earlier how most people never receive a financial education. I had Robert Kiyosaki in that chair two weeks ago, and he talks about that as well. And I know that when you’ve been here before, you talked about how it was scandalous that people didn’t receive that education.

1:29:45 Today, it was really fascinating how you say that really money is the original social network. And the fact that you don’t have an education about that is really interesting because then you don’t really understand. Your disadvantage right from the start. Yeah, right from the start. And you can get it as a network as really fascinating as opposed to just things to accumulate.

1:30:03 It really is a way, it’s a form of communication. It is. That’s what Web3 taught me, is that human transactions are a form of communication. We are all part of a node. We’re all nodes in a network.

1:30:14 When you think about what happened in Web2, in some ways, whether it’s intentional or unintentional, they understood our network power and they just took it away from us. And we just willingly gave it to them, right? But in Web3, we can take it back. And in some ways, money was that sort of network as well. And it was only the only difference was it was really governed by governments.

1:30:36 And so those governments had a slightly different agenda. It was still about managing their forms of power. And we can see today how money is being used in government for forms of power, right? How it influences power. But again, when you’re spending or using the money, you’re not spending it only because of its economic power.

1:30:55 It’s actually a network power that comes into effect. If you get closed off from the US dollar, if you get sanctioned, you don’t just lose money. You lose access to the world’s network. You’re closed off from the world. That’s actually, that’s as devastating as a country essentially losing access to the internet.

1:31:13 What’s the difference between the two actually? Yeah, it’s like being in prison, isn’t it? Yes, or isolated, yes. And so on the forms of education, you have created Open Campus and the EDU token. And this is a big part of what you’re talking about for the future.

1:31:30 It’s a big part of Animoca. And you’ve recently put out a whole variety of grants for people to build on this. Can you talk about this? Because I would assert that nobody in Web2 has really cracked education. I haven’t really seen anyone successfully crack it.

1:31:47 I mean, there’s attempts at it. You could argue that YouTube does a great job of Web2 education. But I don’t know if anyone has. It definitely hasn’t been cracked on Web3. What are your plans?

1:31:57 How will you look at it differently? What do people need to understand? So there’s so many topics in this one. But generally speaking, you know, education is a $5 trillion space. And so a lot of people don’t appreciate.

1:32:09 That’s actually so much bigger than gaming and entertainment and culture in the classic sense. But most of education is top-down from government as well. So funding comes from government, taxpayer money, all that kind of stuff. So it forms all part of that ecosystem. One of the biggest challenges is that the biggest creators in the space, which is teachers, there are more teachers making content in the world than there, for instance, movie actors or musicians.

1:32:32 I mean, if you think about it, it makes sense. But yet they’re permanently underpaid. Part of the reason they’re underpaid is they don’t understand that the intellectual property they create is actually valuable. You know, the value of those ecosystems, the networks that teachers create, they don’t have a stake in it. They don’t have ownership in it.

1:32:51 But in a way, you could argue that they’re doing a service to society. And if it’s a truly completely socialist state, it probably doesn’t matter because they’re all taken care of. So they offer value to the network. But because we live in a capitalist environment, we need to find a way in which more of the capital value goes to them as important contributors to the network. That’s one way to think of it.

1:33:13 And so that’s kind of the reason why Open Campus was originally birthed. Teachers making more value from the content they create as part of the Five Children ecosystem, you, for instance, can now contribute back to that teacher network by owning EDU tokens or by contributing to this. And we would help fund those ecosystems as a result of that. For instance, I think of Web3 and token networks as a way, through the membership alone, you create capital ownership in actionable, maybe even social enterprise activity.

1:33:46 Why do we tell people in the Bitcoin community to hodl? What’s actually the impact? Yes, there is an element of greed and self-service and saying, hey, you know what? Hold Bitcoin because I want to sell mine. I want to go up in value.

1:33:57 Sure. But actually what you’re doing is by making it go up in value, you’re giving it more power, which actually means that you’re enhancing the network effect. So that in itself has that effect as well. So meaning that if you believe that Bitcoin is a positive force, just simply by holding it, you can do good in the world. That constraint is pretty alien, think about it, but actually works.

1:34:18 Now imagine what that could do when you think about sort of this idea of charity completely flipped upside down now, or actually simply by holding something, I know that I can help the world in a way, for instance. That’s actually another way. Instead of essentially giving money away for charity donation, you can actually be a stakeholder, and by holding this, you can actually help add value to the network because it’s shared within the network. So open campus isn’t purely in that direction.

1:34:45 Open campus obviously was now actually announced recently. It’s sort of node operation sales. So in other words, we’re trying to create an educational blockchain where universities, colleges, high schools can actually start building on-chain on their ecosystems around that, creating essentially effectively an L3 for education. And why we chose to do that direction is because we recognized that actually universities and colleges and schools actually have very, very little knowledge of blockchain.

1:35:13 So we felt that we had to address it at the ground level. We would normally not suggest launching another L1, L2, L3, but in the case of education, it made sense because that’s ground level, right? And why do we do it this way? Well, just think about sort of why do so many people use Macs today? One of the most successful programs was Macs in Schools.

1:35:34 Actually, when you start getting sort of younger generations using a product or service at the early stage, they start using it going forward, right? And that’s something that Windows only realized much later. So Apple really solidified themselves in the education market and created this framework of people using Apple products just for the long term, right? So again, we think of the same thing for Web3 and blockchain. If you can start at the foundation level where people understand what is blockchain, what’s digital property rights, why is it important, through a token infrastructure like Open Campus and EDU, then that lays the foundation for essentially onboarding people into Web3.

1:36:08 And we can do this from day one at the ground level, whereas if we say, let’s use Bitcoin, sure, we can use Bitcoin, but it’s expensive, right? And it’s costly and it’s complicated for people, so we need to make it easier for them. And again, this is why an L3 for education makes sense for us. So that’s kind of part of the vision. And of course, once you, to your point, I love the idea of the London token, to the extent that people receive tokens, then they have to know what to do with it, right?

1:36:36 And then they have to understand, oh, what’s financial education? How do I use it? Why does it have value? What is a network effect? Oh, that’s interesting, right?

1:36:43 And then again, we sort of bring that around and create more value and education in the space. That’s definitely part of the goal. But unlike other projects, it will take more time to develop. This, to me, is a long tail. Education is always about the long tail.

1:36:57 And to me, once we hit that sort of escape velocity, it’s kind of like YouTube or TikTok, right? When people think about YouTube, they don’t necessarily think of it as the biggest education network in the world. But today everyone goes there for that. But it didn’t start off that way. I think people only realized much, much later that actually YouTube is probably the biggest learning platform in the world.

1:37:18 Yeah, it really is. It really is. Yeah, yeah, it really is. Maybe one day we can, you know, put it in the hands of people. That’s the whole point about tokenization and decentralization, right?

1:37:29 Yeah. It becomes something that’s owned and controlled by the people. It would be an incredible evolution in humanity. That’s Web 3. That’s where we’re going.

1:37:38 I mean, you know, DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations. Do they have about $30 billion of value locked? They’re 10 million governance holders. They mean one ecosystem environment place in the world where 10 million people can decide the fate of $30 billion of assets. I can’t think of any.

1:38:00 And this is so early in the stage, right? We will evolve. And this is why MOCA token and MOCA versus so important to us as well. I believe in the future where we will no longer have the dominant forms of organizations are no longer going to be corporations. In the classic sense.

1:38:20 They’re going to be community owned. More like as in the nation sense. And we see this today. Who runs Bitcoin? Who runs Ethereum?

1:38:30 Right? Who runs Solana even? It’s community owned. And what are the value of these community owned ecosystems? Larger than some of the biggest companies in the world.

1:38:43 So this to me, we’ve already seen what Web 3 can do. Decentral autonomous organizations are just the beginning of that. So to me, this is clearly the future. And so if we as an MOCA want to basically put ourselves as in the forefront of that, then we have to also think how do we become more decentralized and participate in that space. And that’s actually part of the reasons why the MOCA token is so important for us.

1:39:07 Okay. And so what does the future look like? I was talking about maybe an IPO. I can see what you want to do in education. I think I can get the idea with MOCAverse.

1:39:17 Obviously gaming is something that’s in your DNA. Sure. What do the next couple of years look like for you? And also, how is Yat feeling at this point in time? You know, you’re a very even keel kind of guy.

1:39:31 But internally, you must be going up and down and up and down and up and down. Are you the most optimistic you’ve ever felt about this space? Or have you always been looking forward to what’s going to happen? Generally, I always look forward. I would say that, you know, I’m not sure about the expression even keel.

1:39:49 I’m not quite sure. I think to me, the mission and the purpose was always there. So I always look towards that. So maybe if it looks like I’m steady, it’s because the goal and the mission and purpose is as steady as it was before. That has never changed.

1:40:04 I’m always excited. I don’t know that I would be, you know, again, not that I have a heart rate examination of when I’m in this show from here over six months ago. But I always find that when I’m talking about this and when I’m giving talks, I do give it my best. I always express myself as fully as I can and as passionately as I can. My ideas do evolve, right?

1:40:25 So meaning that while it’s broadly still digital property rights, you know, the distinctions around the forms of capital, the way we think about capitalism, the way we think about inclusivity in space, do evolve and change because certain things didn’t exist before. Like, Tom didn’t exist before. Moka Toko didn’t exist before. Mokaverse didn’t exist before. These are all things that evolve and happen over time.

1:40:42 But I am as optimistic today as I was before. So in that sense, I would say we’re still sort of heading in that direction. You know, an IPO, I think, is definitely in the cards. But I think of an IPO as more inclusion into the space, right? In other words, if you go public, we can bring more people into Web3.

1:40:58 Like, for instance, if you look at the great success of Coinbase, you know, they’re a wonderful company doing incredibly well. But they’re also a proxy for Web3 for people who are looking to get exposure in the space in a different way. And I think Anamoka can actually resent that You know, we just recently posted our financials, right? We’re sitting on something like $3 billion, close to $3 billion worth of assets, for instance. You know, we are probably the most exposed public Web3 entity in terms of broadly the Web3 token ecosystem out there.

1:41:29 You know, we think of wanting to have a play and say in all of these growing network effects in the world of Web3. So how do we do this? How do we bring more people in? I think going public is one of those ways. I have a dream in the future that I’d love for us to have tokenized security, as in our equity would be a token that’s separate from Mocha.

1:41:47 I mean, Mocha is a network effect. But again, as I said, there’s a distinction between equity and the network effect. And I see no reason why in the future we wouldn’t be able to give, for instance, tokenized rewards as a form of dividend distribution to our shareholders. But we can’t do that today because it’s kind of impossible to distinguish whether you own my shares in the moment in which I give you a token drop. I can’t know that, for instance.

1:42:13 You know, we tried to do this in the Mochaverse, right? Basically, we gave a free NFT to our shareholders. It was a nightmare to get their paperwork and materials and proof in. And then we don’t know whether they still own their shares, for instance, all that kind of stuff we went through. And a large number of shareholders never even participated because it was just like, how do I do this?

1:42:32 Or it was kind of complicated, right? But if it was on chain, we can prove it. There’s also all the elements with MochaID. I can know whether you’re a good holder, whether you’ve been sort of helping build the network, you deserve more or you deserve less, all these things we can do. So, again, I think the future is tokenization.

1:42:50 And I think for every public company in the world, being tokenized will be helpful. And by the way, I think this isn’t just for us. But I think we could be one of the first, if not the first, company to do that because I think it would be very on brand and very appropriate for us to tokenize our security so that we can essentially give value to our shareholders in the form of token dividends. What do you think when you hear Larry Fink say the same things you’re saying, or similar, talking about tokenization, tokenizing treasury bonds?

1:43:24 Michael Saylor jokes he’s the chief marketing officer for Bitcoin. But, you know, it’s fascinating to see this guy that two years ago wasn’t even for Bitcoin and now is talking about tokenizing everything and that’s the future. I mean, that’s a pretty incredible change. What do you think when you hear that? I think it’s amazing.

1:43:43 But I also think that at the end, when you understand what is Web3, what is sort of, you know, in this case, Bitcoin or what it represents, it’s the purest expression of property rights and freedom and capitalism, which is one of the reasons why I was also puzzled about why so many Americans were against it. And that’s when I started to realize that actually America wasn’t as pro-capitalist as I thought it was because the America I remember was decades ago. And the America of today actually has a lot of people who are anti-capitalist, but not truly, I believe.

1:44:17 It’s just because capitalism hasn’t worked for them. And so, therefore, it’s not a surprise to me that people who are capitalist in their thinking but also big believers in the constitution and in freedom and property rights would generally lean pro-crypto over time because they will understand that actually it’s part of their value system. But I think crypto is as American as it gets. This, by the way, isn’t necessarily true for Europe. I think this construct of property rights isn’t really something that, while it’s respected, the capitalist aspect of this isn’t necessarily popular across Europe the way that it actually is, for instance, in America.

1:44:56 And one of the reasons why Asia is so pro-web-3, comparatively speaking, even amongst, I guess, individual holders. I mean, the unofficial number, I think, for people in China owning Bitcoin is I think it’s like 25% or something. Really? There’s a large percentage of Chinese people around the world that own Bitcoin, for instance, or own crypto assets. I don’t mean that as a population.

1:45:19 I mean just the ratio of people who hold Bitcoin broadly speaking. Again, because they’re actually capitalists. They’re actually property rights loving people of sorts, right? And so they look at that as a form of security. And so in Asia, we have that because capitalism has worked, right?

1:45:32 People forget that South Korea, which by the way, I think it’s 60% or 70% of people under the age of 30 all have crypto in South Korea. But you know, South Korea’s GDP was lower than North Korea some 30, 40 years ago. And what changed in South Korea? Property rights, intellectual property rights protection, capitalism. And so in living memory, this is true for China.

1:45:57 This is true for Southeast Asia, right? It’s true for all the dragon countries. When they look at that, they go, oh, we remember a time. My parents had nothing. We had no property at all because anyone could just take it away.

1:46:10 So we treasure it more because we know what it looks like. I grew up in Europe, but I grew up at a time when it was still east and west. I used to visit my mother in East Germany. I saw what communism is like. Young people today don’t know what it’s like.

1:46:25 So it’s a textbook thing. And so they read it. And so they don’t understand actually what it really is to be in a communist country, what it really means to have central control because they take their current freedom and their current property rights as for granted because it’s always been like this. So they don’t understand what it’s like not to have it. So we must constantly remind ourselves, which is why I think it’s so important to actually study history, right?

1:46:49 Maybe, you know, you don’t necessarily need to study history to maybe predict the world, per se. But I actually think history gives you a lens of, you know, understanding human sort of thinking, understands our society, and frankly, the lessons of the past need to be heeded. And I think definitely being sort of overtly communist, I think, is definitely one of those things we most people would agree is not a good thing once you understand it from the lens of history.

1:47:16 10 years from now, what does this space look like? Moreover, what does the world look like? And not even a lens of web3, but how much adoption has happened? I always tell my students, I believe 10 years from now, every minute of your day will involve a blockchain transaction. Yeah, I think that’s a pretty fair statement.

1:47:34 I think 10 years from now, we’ll have, you know, billions of people on-chain. Total infrastructure will change the result. I actually think it will create a kind of rebirth of sort of, I guess, the way that we think of capitalism and free markets, because a lot of transactions can happen on-chain. I think we’re going to have an explosion of network communities around the world, because they’re all going to form these sub-communities that are tokenized in one form or the other, but they’re going to be open and decentralized.

1:48:04 So they’re not going to be part of a platform, right? They’re going to be sort of, you know, all over the place that can essentially sort of interoperate with each other, but will still be capital communities within themselves. So consequently, I think the whole world will essentially be moving broadly on-chain in one form or the other. I also think we won’t be talking about blockchain in the way that we talk about it today, in the way that we no longer talk about music in the sense of MP3 either, or that we think about TCPIP, right?

1:48:30 I mean, you know, to me, L1, L2s are like the ISP wars of the 90s. I don’t know if you remember, there was AOL, Prodigy, there was like, you know, like PSINet. I mean, AOL bought Time Warner, right? I mean, you just think how crazy that was, the biggest transaction in the time. It was a $30 billion sort of murder, whatever that was, right?

1:48:50 So those sort of, you know, like telecommunication infrastructure, essentially where we are today in the Internet age of, you know, L1, L2s, right? But at the end, it will evolve around that, right? And it will come into sort of, you know, culture and entertainment, or choose what we’re doing today in the Internet. And I think that will become much more front and center. I also think we’ll create much more equity as a result, meaning more people doing creative endeavors, you know, whether it’s creating educational content, learning content, whether it’s sort of art or like, you know, assets or whatever online, for instance, will be a major source of income for people, right?

1:49:30 It will sort of turn upside down how we think about the gig economy, right? Today the gig economy feels more like leftovers, right? But now I think these will become main things, and AI will feed off the content that’s created from these web through creators and essentially pay royalties and dividends back to the people of their creation because they can source it and analyze it. And people are willingly giving it to those AIs because they know that the AI is essentially creating derivative works of their material, which then can be fed into as a form of income value.

1:49:59 I think of that as sort of a broad framework of the future. And of course, that means that there’s more transparency and there’ll be more innovation that will be developing on top of things because now we can see everything on chain, right? So I think that will sort of be quite fundamental in my view. I actually think it’ll create a more open world. That’s certainly the optimist in me speaking.

1:50:20 Is there anything that can stop this? I don’t think so anymore. I think you’re right. I mean, you know, if anything, a lot of people were pessimistic last year around, you know, the U.S. regulatory framework because Asia is broadly speaking optimistic.

1:50:35 The Middle East, as we know, is also very positive. Europe is, you know, was more positive than the U.S., right? But with the current climate, you know, with the fact that, you know, if ETFs are potentially about to be approved in the U.S. even, right? I would suspect that, you know, it’s well on its way.

1:50:52 And whether it’s five years, 10 years, 15 years, I think it’s a foregone conclusion that Web 3 and blockchain is here to stay, you know, and will essentially replace the current frameworks of Web 2. And, you know, there’s a lot of critics out there who sometimes say, oh, but then there’s going to be new oligarchs. The people who own the Bitcoin and the crypto today are going to be the wealthy people and they’ll consolidate their power. And I disagree with that notion.

1:51:18 And the reason why is because you can create your own token. You can create your own networks on top of it, forming a kind of inflation, and those guys might call you scammers and whatever, all this history will repeat itself, but you can do that. You can’t do that really in Web 2. I can’t build a network and avail myself to the network of Apple or Facebook or Google because they shut me off. But in Web 3, you can’t shut them off.

1:51:47 If I have something better, something more valuable, or something disruptive to the community, remember, communities can form just out of spite. I mean, you know, things like GameStop. I mean, GameStop is still a $10 million market cap. I mean, you know, that to me doesn’t make sense at a, you know, purely economic perspective, at what, 330 to 350 times PE. It’s just people holding on for the culture.

1:52:16 And again, it’s a network, right? And that network can be created by anyone on the Web 3 in a permissionless manner, which means I think we’ll have a free flow of ideas and creation much more open than we have today because there’s nobody out there to essentially censor you from that, right? So I think it’s going to be a really interesting world that we’ll be seeing as a result of that. How do you think you’re going to feel, you know, 50 years from now when you’re looking back, knowing that, you know, you had a huge part in changing the world forever?

1:52:49 So I don’t think about that in that way. 50 years is a long way away. I worry about things that we need to do in the immediate future to make this reality happen. And to me, success would really look like is that the ideas that we talk about, you know, cultural capital in the space, digital property rights, if people don’t even necessarily remember who coined those terms, who talked about it that way, but it’s just there, and everyone appreciates it in the same way that people talk about democracy or freedom or property rights, right?

1:53:22 How many people actually go back and quote John Locke about sort of, you know, or even Adam Smith, right? You know, there’s you. Right? Or, you know, some people, like in colleges and whatever, right? But the ideas are enduring, and they kind of belong to everyone, right?

1:53:42 This idea of freedom and property rights and democracy doesn’t really belong to, you know, one person or a group of people. I mean, we give credence to the founding fathers of America. We give credence to Rousseau. We give credence to, you know, philosophers around those ideas, but, you know, it belongs to everyone. That, to me, would be the legacy that we want to sort of make sure people have, is that it belongs to everyone.

1:54:07 And so you no longer have to identify, oh, this is what Annemoko said, this is what Yad said. It’s just something that’s there, and that, to me, means it’s ubiquitous. And once it belongs to everyone, it can’t die. I know it’s almost like this concept that you don’t have to be a slave and your freedom is a right. It’s like you can’t walk that back ever.

1:54:28 That’s right. And it doesn’t matter who said it. Yeah. It’s something that’s there forever now. Yeah.

1:54:33 And because it’s your narrative, it’s your story, it belongs to you, it’s indestructible, powerful. Powerful. I cherish my Mocha ID. Thank you very much for that. How can people get theirs and become a part of this Mochaverse?

1:54:49 Well, I think the easiest thing for you to do is basically go to Mochaverse.xyz. You can sign up for Mocha ID. And if you want to start a participating network, start with one Mocha token, right, and begin your journey. If you want to level up faster, you can do a Mochaverse NFT if you want. That’s kind of priced around, I think, to ETH, give or take, right, so expensive.

1:55:13 That’ll give you sort of, let’s call it, I would call the Mochaverse NFT as that sort of cultural, social capital, right, that’s kind of sort of part of that sort of elevation. But you don’t have to. You can begin being part of the community just by having a Mocha ID and some Mocha tokens. That’s a very passionate community. I remember when I posted the picture on X with my Mocha ID.

1:55:34 I got a lot of love. Yes. I felt cool. I felt like I was really part of a community. Yes.

1:55:40 And they were like, yeah, you’re in. You’re in, Brian. Welcome, you know? I think someone said, you know, I didn’t like some of your videos, but now you’re part of the family. Indeed.

1:55:51 I mean, that’s what happens when you join a community. And by the way, this is how people used to feel about joining nations, right, when you became an American citizen. It was a party, right? You became, you know, if you were, you know, someone from elsewhere and you came to be part of that community, you were welcomed and you had that sense of belonging and passion and friendship. That’s really what’s, I think, so wonderful and powerful about the best web through communities out there and Mocha versus definitely one of them.

1:56:18 It’s fascinating how our own technology is a mirror on what we really are, what humans really are. And what we really desire. Yes. Yeah. And AI shows us that and blockchain shows us that, web free shows us that.

1:56:30 Things that we didn’t know about ourselves were learning because of these technologies we’re creating. Indeed. Fascinating. Another amazing conversation in the books. Thank you very much for.

1:56:41 Thank you for having me. This beautiful three-year relationship we’ve had through these amazing episodes. I think these will be watched 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years from now. And people will see maybe the sparks of something that changed humanity. That’s the way I think about these things.

1:56:57 So thank you again. Thank you for the tireless efforts of you and your team just constantly going out there, constantly spreading the message. And everything Anna Mocha does is super inspiring and we want to do more things with you and just keep these conversations going. So thank you. Appreciate it.

1:57:13 Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. My pleasure.