Yat Siu - The Real Promise of Web3: Why Tokenisation and Decentralisation Matter More Than You Think

Full transcript: Yat Siu on London Real

3:40 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, My guest today is Yat Siu, the entrepreneur, investor, business leader and gaming pioneer. You are the Co founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, the global leader in entertainment, gamification and Web 3 innovation. To date, you’ve invested in over 500 blockchain companies, all part of your grand vision to build an open metaverse and a decentralized digital future where value flows to users, not just platforms.

4:07 You said the blockchain isn’t just a financial technology, it’s a cultural 1 enabling new forms of digital ownership, identity, and expression. You believe that true digital property rights are the foundation for freedom, creativity, and economic opportunity in the 21st century, and that the open metaverse will be the infrastructure that powers the next billion creators. Just recently, you said that after years of regulatory hostility, the US now represents the biggest and fastest growing opportunity in crypto as builders, investors and innovators finally return. Ultimately, you believe that tokens aren’t just tech, they’re a better way to build communities, fund ideas, and scale culture.

4:48 Yeah, welcome back to London Real for the 7th time. Thank you so much for having me again for the 7th time. It’s always wonderful to be here. You know, we were just talking about it four years ago was our first interview. We did it remote because of the time. I think everyone was.

5:03 Locked down. This is COVID so we had to do it over video. We had to, and I literally didn’t know what the metaverse was, and you actually explained it to me on that call and started this crazy adventure that we’ve been on and the world’s been on. So it’s always a pleasure to have you back here. So many things to talk about today because the world is changing, you know, exponentially, it seems.

5:23 Maybe we first talk about the USA, the Trump administration, and what I hear this upcoming Animoca IPO in the States. It was recently posted in the news. Talk to me about all those things. Well, I mean, OK, so maybe let’s quickly on the Animoca IPO and this is what we want to do in the US. So as I had said earlier, I mean, the US represents probably the biggest, most important opportunity in the crypto web free space. And that has a lot to do with the regulatory shift. It has also lots to do with the sort of pent up demand that the US actually and, and used people want to have around crypto and blockchain.

6:00 And I think The thing is also for us as a business, it’s an unusual time when you think about it, because normally speaking, when you think about the US, it usually tends to be leading in the technology sector. This. I can’t think of any sector in technology or really in any industry, you know, safe manufacturing, that kind of stuff, which is sort of more sort of industrial age type of stuff where America isn’t leading. But in crypto it is not. There is no real peer to Animoca for the time being, even when you look at exchanges, right? Sure.

6:29 I mean, you know, Coinbase is a wonderfully large exchange, but in comparison to the trading volumes of a Binance, for instance, or you know, OK X or Buybit, they actually much, much smaller. Or if you look at Update in Korea, they’re much smaller in comparison. So again, because the US has such a heavy-handed regulatory environment, they’ve kind of stopped the development of crypto phone in such a long time, despite its market size and its sort of pent up demand. And so for this scenario, we and other companies actually happen to have a leadership position without a real sort of American peer for the time being, which represents an opportunity for companies like us to actually look at the American opportunity to invest in America.

7:07 We already have quite a few portfolio companies, but we stayed away from the US for all the for all those reasons. And now it makes sense for us to come back then. So does it mean that we’re going to go popping in the US? It’s certainly one very serious contender, you know, given the liquidity in markets. And of course, when you look at all of the sort of of recent IP OS that took place, especially Circle, for instance, they’ve done phenomenally well.

7:27 So as a result, of course, we need to look at that market seriously as well. Had you asked me this question 6 to 9 months earlier, I was like US, no way, right? And now, of course, we have to take that seriously, right? And having just completed our sort of 21 audit, actually, that opens up the pathway to the closing of the remaining audits, basically helping us essentially get into sort of a final track to sort of an IPO. But quickly to the question on the US, so when Trump obviously became president, you know, all the markets rallied in crypto. But then of course, there are also these funny things that happened, such as the Trump coin, the Melania coin as well, and then all the tariffs.

8:05 And of course, most recently, you know, what’s happening in Iran and with Israel and so on. One thing that he has definitely introduced is a whole lot of volatility in the market and things that you can’t really predict. And while crypto has been moving up and down, of course, as the rest of the global markets have, Bitcoin has still broadly stayed at about 100,000 plus, give or take, right? So it’s actually been fairly resilient. And if there’s one thing that I think the audiences in crypto and in blockchain are accustomed to, it’s that kind of volatility. And I’ll also say that, you know, I think we, I mentioned this early in the show with you, sort of we live in very volatile times all the time anyway, you know, and what capitalism does, it just shows you where the attention is at that moment in time.

8:49 So where the price action is, where the price is up or down is actually a form of information tells you something about what’s going on in the world. And the fact that, for instance, Bitcoin has stayed fairly stable tells you a little bit about sort of what is that asset class. It’s not as volatile. Maybe that becomes a sort of quasi safe haven, even though it’s considered a risk on asset, actually of the risk on assets, maybe it’s considered a good hedge. And you’re kind of seeing that because in these markets, why is Bitcoin not at like 70 or 80 as some people have predicted is actually still floating at about 100, for instance. So you can kind of see, well, that’s developing as well. So that to me says more about that state of where people are in terms of blockchain and crypto than necessarily sort of what happened to all the other tokens in the market right now. You know, the entire space is still in excess of about $3 trillion despite all of that, which when you compare again to three or four years ago is in some cases, you know, anywhere from two to three times up, right. So again, you know, very positive signals, but what does it mean?

9:45 I think really the US policies with the passing of the genius Act as well with things like the circle IPOI think the market Act is being considered at its moment in time as well, right? the US is going to really sort of push forward the crypto agenda worldwide. Imagine if you’re AUS trading partner, you’re somewhere around the world, you know, call it, I don’t know, Malaysia or, you know, someplace in the Middle East or whatever that doesn’t yet have sort of, you know, crypto regulation or say even India, major major partner of the US as well, right. And sort of you now have a stable coin issued by a bank because of the, you know, stable coin act. So that means, you know, we should expecting JP Morgan coins or Citibank coins and they’re going to send that over across essentially to you as a client or as a customer. And the receiving bank is like what I do with this, I can’t receive it.

10:34 I don’t have regulation, I don’t have a structure for it. It forces every government to quickly accelerate just so they can do business with the US, right. And when you think about the sort of the way that technology was adopted worldwide, the Internet really started global adoption because the world wanted to get the information and trade and interact with America. If you might remember back in the early days, every major, major country was trying to build their own intranet, as in an intranet of internets, right? Like China had this version, for instance, and other places tried to build sort of a local Internet. It didn’t work out because at the end of the day, sort of, you know, global free trade information, sort of free information ended up succeeding, right? Even the fact that there’s a firewall in China. At the end of the day, if you’re Chinese and you want to have to have access to American news or content, you know how to get that right?

11:19 So the, the, the, the faxes at the Internet spread because of people wanting to do business or trade with America, whether it’s for money, for value, or for information. And that happened earlier, by the way, with things like telex and the fax machine. Again, worldwide companies were adopting that technology so they could do business with the US and the same will happen with crypto and stable coin. The rest of the world will have to move very, very quickly.

11:43 Places like Hong Kong and of course Dubai, you know, are already somewhat ahead, but the rest of the world is far behind. And now they have to play catch up because of the fact that the US has leapfrogged everyone pretty much with the exception of Hong Kong, by having passed essentially a stable coin act ahead of most other countries. OK, lots on back there, but let’s first talk about stable coins Circle IPO. First of all, before the IPO, there were rumors it was going to be acquired, you know, by Coinbase or maybe someone else.

12:10 Tether, Yeah, Tether was maybe going to acquire. Yeah, that was part of the rumors. And it was, you know, I think it was priced IPO 31 bucks at around I think it was $7 billion and then it’s just gone up and up and up and up. I think currently as we’re speaking, it’s at the $55 billion market cap, which is like 8X and it’s even up in pre market trading this morning on a company that didn’t have anywhere near the EBITDA that Tether had. I think Tether was like 11 or $2 billion, thinks Circle was under a billion because they spent so much money on BT And look, you see them at the conferences.

12:44 They got the big booths, you know that that’s not well. They’re building market share exactly. And so, but this thing just kept going and going and going. Why is that been up so much? And then you talked about the IPO successes. I mean our good friend and Tapiero runs incredible. Funds.

12:58 He’s also our investor. Exactly. He’s invested in you. And you know, he keeps texting me. It’s like every other day there’s a new IPO. So Darabit was the derivatives exchange that he sold to Coinbase.

13:09 He’s got crack in IPO coming up soon. Obviously, the Circle IPO is happening. And you know, he’s got a whole portfolio of companies that might also IPO. So I guess there’s a tremendous hunger for for exposure to these companies. But maybe let’s talk Circle. Did that surprise you?

13:26 Obviously the Genius Act passed around then, but we all thought it was going to pass and so is Wall Street now seeing this? Is this going to be the gateway drug for for crypto around the world? Well, first of all, stable coins are probably the one digital asset has probably found the sort of the, the sort of best sort of I guess product market fit in terms of its activity. And also when you consider the importance for stable coins in the US, it’s the way it’s certainly under this administration that they believe how the dollar heck of money can continue to not just sort of maintain, but actually spread and become more dominant, right?

13:58 So, so really putting out an act like this means that every other place and bank and so on is going to start looking at a stable coin. I mean, I think, you know, Amazon and Walmart and other companies like. That scares the banks. You know, they’re like, oh. What about maybe taking out? Yeah, potentially, potentially, potentially, right. But there is also this sort of ability to really spread the use of the US dollar in a much more larger, a larger way. When you consider that Tether and Circle, I think combined were probably the 6th largest buyers of T bill last year. That’s bigger than Japan and Germany combined. Let’s think about that, right?

14:33 So you essentially have private enterprises buying more treasury bills than essentially this sort of two US sovereign allies. I mean, that says something. And you can imagine how that’s going to extend even further. So you can see the importance of stable coins and why, why the US really needs to push that, which also means, by the way, that other countries in the world, they’re just going to sit back and say, OK, let’s see that happen. They’re going to have to respond themselves as well. So actually just ahead of the Genius Act, Hong Kong and Ledge Co just passed their stable coin Act probably 3 to 4 weeks slightly ahead of the US, right.

15:09 And, and we’re one of the sort of sandbox participants together with Standard Chartered. And we would, I would say to this point, that makes us still the only JV partner of an actual sort of note issuing back or just any, any, any back in the world, which is actually quite exciting. The very first stable coin overseas is going to be a Hong Kong dollar stable coin. And let’s see where it goes. But of course, you know, what’s interesting isn’t just what’s happening in Hong Kong, right? The things would happen in Hong Kong, happen to an extent with the best thing of China.

15:36 And when you look at, for instance, most recently there’s been some statements around saying from from the government around how actually Hong Kong is an ideal place to experiment around what it would mean essentially to have a stable coin. So I think those are the things that happened. Hong Kong has always been that financial gateway for experimentation for China. And even today, you can’t trade stocks freely in China. You can’t have sort of, you know, move capital around as you can in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has been essentially all this gateway all the time, which is also the reason why the US has been targeting Hong Kong. When you think about, for instance, you know, up until sort of recently, Hong Kong was a free trade part where it had different rules to China and the US basically shut that down. Most of the countries didn’t follow. It was basically just US.

16:23 Why did they do that? They didn’t do that because it was just about sort of, you know, oh, you know, basically because of because of the protests or because of so-called sort of civil liberties. That wasn’t that wasn’t really the reason. The reason why is because they were basically trying to sort of create the policy to see that they can basically create more of sort of controls over, you know, basically China because they knew that Hong Kong was the financial gateway for that, right.

16:47 So this is all part of sort of a larger political play. And I think because of the Internet, because of information, you can see all that becomes sort of more more broader and more wider. It draws just so much more attention. So stable coins isn’t just simply a tool. There is a lot of sort of geopolitics I think ultimately involved with that as well because of the role and influence of, you know, their respective currencies. Now what what does it mean for Circle? Well, I think Circle has a benefit of being first mover advantage, right?

17:14 So there’s one, there’s that one aspect. It’s also very dedicated towards it. Tether is unlikely to become an IPO. They don’t want to. I don’t think they need to anyway, right? And I think Tether has established itself very much as the crypto native stable coin.

17:27 And I think it will probably forever hold that place. But when you think about adoption of people who are not in crypto, which is still the vast majority of the world, we shouldn’t forget that over 90% of the world actually don’t engage with crypto. And for the vast majority of the people who engage in crypto, they only trade them in exchanges. There’s about four to 500 million people who own crypto. That’s a big number, global population being 8 billion, of course, but only about 10% of those are actually doing it on chain and doing D5 type of stuff. So for those guys, stablecoins are going to be very important as a medium of exchange.

18:04 For the vast majority of the world, though, how are they going to move into crypto? They’re going to move into crypto through stablecoin first. They’re not going to so sort of go there because they just want to buy crypto first because how do they do that? They first have to convert it into essentially a native digital currency in the asset that they understand, which is stablecoin. And that’s the reason, you know, we want to do the stablecoin with someone like Standard Chartered, because what Standard Chartered does also is gives the trust to the end user.

18:27 Again, in our world, we take it for granted that Oh yeah, Circle and Tether, we should trust them because it’s dollar backed. But for a normal person who’s never engaged with that, they’re like, wait, am I comfortable in treating and dealing with a currency issued by what appears to be a private organization? You know, that promises that I have put essentially A1 to 1 backing even if we know that’s the case versus a bank issue, right? So that element of trust is still the most valuable currency that’s out there.

18:56 And so I actually think Circle is going to have quite a bit of competition because all of the other sort of banks in the US are going to say, wait, hold a second, that’s a great business. Why should they hold the fund? We’re going to go out issuing our own stable points. So I think as from a macro standpoint, I think it’s really good for the industry that so many more stable coins are being issued. They’re going to be pushing them towards the clients only stable coins. And then what are they going to do? They’re going to be spending them somehow in the digital space, whether it’s to buy a token, to buy an NFT, to buy some assets and also to use them in digital commerce, which is also why Amazon and those companies are saying, wait, we’re commerce companies, Wouldn’t it be great if they were dealing with our own currency of sorts that was essentially dollar back?

19:37 So again, it makes makes a lot of sense for those guys. So outside of first move of advantage. So I do think that sort of mid to long term circle will have more challengers. And once the 2nd and 3rd and 4th stable coin is out and you see some numbers and you can compare against them, I think that excitement will probably start to teeter a bit. However, you know, if I will circle, I would use their market advantage than ever now and start doing Emily like crazy, right?

20:06 This is the time when you grow, you know, there’s competition, use that market power, and I’m sure they’re thinking about that, right? Now they have a massive treasury so they can start scooping things up left and right. That’s correct.

21:14 But the Bank of America CEO was said, he said even four or five months ago, as soon as that thing is passed, we’re going to have our own stable coin. And that was still early on. Now we’re seeing, like you said, Walmart, Amazon, JP Morgan is doing a test, some kind of a test deposit thing with Coinbase. A deposit token. Yeah, which is wild because you know Diamond, Yeah, exactly.

21:34 It’s just been the most anti crypto person ever, but also shows this kind of duality of organizations like Goldman. Goldman always said we don’t believe in crypto, but of course. Well, Goldman’s. But to be fair, Goldman has been quite early within the teams in crypto, at least in Hong Kong where a lot of the digital asset activity was based. And of course also in London.

21:54 They they, you know, some of the some of the people I know there in the team are some of the earliest buyers of like basically NFTS. But the. Official CEO version was they were not interested even even just recently thought it was 6-9 months ago. But remember, whatever that means. Yeah, But remember also it has a lot to do with the politics of the dealers, of course, right. I mean, you have to also look at where was the political wins literally roughly a year ago, OK? Trump winning was not a certainty whatsoever, right? And, and a lot of people basically just thought, OK, well, you know, the fact that if you were going to have essentially at that point Kamala become become president, then the likelihood of cancer being out is also not a far conclusion whatsoever.

22:34 And so everyone had to pay their cards very carefully. Right. Yeah. Can you imagine? Yeah.

22:40 And that that would be a crazy issue. And so just to clarify what you said, potentially the Chinese stable coin for the yuan might come out of Hong Kong and maybe out of the joint venture between Standard Chartered and Animoca. Yeah. So obviously we we this, you said that not I but, but to be clear, I think that’s the opportunity for what, why China would be interested in this Just in terms of actual facts. I mean, dim sum bonds today are essentially all traded mostly in Hong Kong, which is essentially, you know, basically Chinese bonds, OK.

23:12 And Hong Kong does something like 2 trillion renminbi a day, I think basically for foreign trade. So it’s, it’s vitally important for them. So Hong Kong is really that gateway. And if they’re going to do a stable coin, whether this is with us or someone else, right? Just to be clear, when I think makes a lot of sense. However, they’re going to be cautious. They’re going to be careful about this. They’re going to analyze this.

23:35 This is why they use Hong Kong as a test bed, you know, which is why there’s sandboxes and so on. So, so China is going to be doing this and Hong Kong’s going to do this in a very sort of deliberate, regulated and careful manner. But when they do come out with something, I think it’s going to be massive. OK. And Animocha in the future possibly could entertain AUSIPO. You obviously just got the audit done and but who knows that’s that’s in the future sometimes.

24:00 Yeah, I mean you got Justin’s son who said he’s going to IPO Tron in the US, which of course we love Justin, he’s been on the show before. He really he’s he is one of the greatest marketers ever in marketing himself and his company. I think he would later said that was just a vehicle like a treasury vehicle for Tron. Yeah, but I think, but maybe not I. Think treasury vehicles. So are are probably the most common thing right now, yes. So you know, for instance.

24:22 It’s a new hot thing. It’s a new hot thing. And you think about it, actually treasury vehicles are a great way for any token issuer to essentially bring attention to your product and a way to buy them without calling it an ETF, which has its own complications, correct? By essentially bringing on a kind of investor who knows about you. And also essentially it becomes an accumulation play. It’s also a fantastic way to ensure that the business in question, provided that is a decent play, is going to continue buying the asset and holding it on its treasury as a kind of, I guess, kind of what Grayscale used to do with Bitcoin right before it became an ETF, That was actually what GPTC was, right?

25:03 It was essentially a kind of basically Bitcoin index that the public markets could basically participate in. So I expect that to happen in minimum token. So I think that makes much more sense. OK. I don’t know that sort of Justin necessarily enjoys the rigors of a public company per SE.

25:20 That’s not to say that he wouldn’t consider that. It’s just to say that why would he have to deal with that? Let’s say there’s pros and cons. I think for us, being a public company makes a lot of sense because we think of ourselves as a potential consolidator, right? We also think of ourselves as one that’s already a public company.

25:34 We have 3000 shareholders. We have to have audit financials with the public accounts. Our numbers are public, so we have one. Public. Before, yeah, because we were public in the student strategy.

25:44 Exactly. So we have all the disadvantages of being company, but we’re not getting under the benefits of the market. So of course, us going public makes a lot of sense, but I think a lot of people just quickly on the audit, a lot of people were skeptical that we could even get a full audit done. And more importantly, this audit is essentially an unqualified opinion. Now that’s really important, right? Because a lot of people sort of said, oh, audits for crypto, it’s difficult, it’s murky, we don’t understand it. And this laser foundation essentially for all the audits to come out not just fairly quickly, but also with all the necessary frameworks that that took a while to establish. And why this is important is that I don’t think it’s just us, because the way we do accounting and deferred revenue bookings and so on is actually a blueprint for how other companies can now look at it and say, oh, you know what, when we have a company that’s generating revenue through crypto, how do I account for that?

26:37 Because remember, if you are a stable coin, very easy. I buy treasuries, I put them on chain and I, you know, the business model is quite simple. If you’re in exchange, like a coin base, also fairly easy. You know, you make it, you clip a fee, right? But a business like ours, which is not just investing, but it’s building, launching tokens, much, much harder. How do you deal with the inventory of tokens? How do you account for them?

26:59 What’s revenue reposition, what’s deferred, what’s not? I don’t think any company in the world has done this. So I think we’re the very first company to have essentially created a blueprint for how to audit a crypto company. So that’s why it took so long because this is the first time it’s ever been done Exactly. And the fact that maybe the industry was shunning audits before or also just not knowledgeable at all with what you were.

27:19 Doing well, that’s the other thing. So when we were a public company in Australia, this is 2018-2019, right before we got delisted in 2020, how many companies, how many audit firms out there had people who understood anything about crypto? So we were dealing with audit partners who never even owned any crypto, right, who didn’t know anything about this. So this current auditor, whole Chadwick, actually, they have a crypto practice and they dealt with crypto firms, so they had familiarity with it.

27:45 Today you’re going to find a lot more firms around who basically know and to deal with that, whether it’s an existing partner, whether it’s some new people that came into the firm because they own some Bitcoin, they own some crypto, they get it. It’s not some weird funky stuff. You know, they’re, they’re, they’re not necessarily even positively client to it. It’s more like they understand what it is and they can deal with that, right? Not that different from, you know, when, when new technologies emerged, whether it was Internet companies back in the day as well, Like how do I deal with, you know, remember back then in, in the 90s, people used to value Internet companies based on eyeballs, eyeballs, right?

28:19 They said eyeballs. That was evaluation metric. Of course, that’s changed as well. But the point is that people are still trying to figure out how to do this. Basically, blockchain and crypto is the same. So we’re getting to this point and it’s going to get easier and easier not only because of the work that we’ve done, but also because other firms out there now have within their core of people that they’ve hired, people who have crypto. So it’s much easier to deal with. Whereas five years ago, I mean, you barely have people who even heard of it within your degrees of network, never mind working with an audit partner, audit firm that actually sort of actually owns any of this or has any interaction with it to be confident that they can deal with it. Like we had to deal with questions with some former auditors who are like, oh, we don’t even know whether this token is real, right?

29:04 Well, look at the trading volume. That could be fake. OK, So what do you want us to do? Well, if you sell all your tokens and then buy it back, then we know there’s liquidity. Like, is that what you do in the stock market?

29:16 Do you like, do you want to prove the value of your shares just by selling one of those shares and then buying it? Like, it doesn’t make any sense, right? But it’s just that they just didn’t, they didn’t trust it. And there’s also a lot of, I mean, you’ve probably heard this before in the early days, it’s like, oh, trading volumes are fake. It’s all, it’s all not real, right? And you still get some of that, right? But look, I mean, on all these exchanges today, it’s something the order of 100 to $200 billion of daily volume trades, right? I mean, you can no longer say that that is basically just all, it’s all rubbish.

29:48 But you will still get people who are skeptical because it’s just so far their imagination that that’s possible, even though that’s exactly what’s happening. OK. You spoke earlier about Bitcoin and Bitcoin’s been this incredible story that quite frankly has been decoupled from the rest of the market the past past year or so. And so like you said, you know, right now we had a pretty massive action from the United States on Iran over the weekend and Bitcoin is still above 100 thousands. You know, it’s a one O 1 and change down from an all time high of 12 and maybe down from one O 4, one O 5 before that action.

30:23 And it’s become kind of the, I guess could be called the the risk on asset over the weekend because not much else trades. But we’ve also seen Bitcoin dominance going even higher and higher and higher. I think it hit 66% over the weekend. And Benjamin Cowan, who runs into the crypto versus a former guest, he’s cheerleading it the whole way, much to the chagrin of all coin holders. You know, maybe like us, is this ever going to stop because Bitcoin seems to be taking all the air out of the room.

30:53 We have seen the Ethereum ETF pick up recently. I think it had 15 days straight. Some people say that that stable coins are the the Ethereum Trojan horse into Wall Street. But altcoins have been struggling in a significant way that includes gaming tokens. That includes lots of things.

31:11 Is this going to continue? Is there any respite in, in in insight or is Bitcoin going to continue to suck all the air out of the room, especially with all these treasury companies. There’s 113 public companies that are now buying treasuries. At the last glance, that probably means, and I’m not joking, it’s probably up to 140, a 150 by now of people that are thinking about it. So what?

31:31 What is your call on that? I’m sure people ask you about this all the time, including your investors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so first of all, the whole sort of buying Bitcoin as a treasury asset, there are those who really believe in it, right? And we’re actually, we just backed one ourselves called DDCDDC Enterprises.

31:48 Which country? It’s US listed yes, OK, but Norma the founder, she’s Chinese and she basically got a lot of support from Chinese Bitcoin holders basically to display and it’s done very, very well as well. So and again, long term prospect for Bitcoin, we’re totally positive of this one. But I think the one thing, and I said this before on your show to understand is that when Bitcoin does well, ultimately it’s great for the entire their ecosystem because of the permissionless nature of crypto and of tokenization. You actually don’t have a monopoly effect. So as much as people say, look at Bitcoin sucking out all the air, at the end of the day, when you make money on Bitcoin, because it goes up, you end up putting it somewhere else. And when you put it in there, whether it’s through leverage, right?

32:32 Which is the other point here, right? Like part of the reason why when the markets deleverage so quickly is that because they’ve leveraged their Bitcoin to do something else in the crypto space, whether it’s Defy or the tokens and that kind of stuff, then actually it just shows that the more money you make in Bitcoin, the more capital flows into the rest of the ecosystem. Well, Michael Saylor’s not putting capital in the ecosystem. Yeah, but the treasury companies aren’t putting Apple lease system, the Maxis aren’t doing it, and the hodlers aren’t doing it. They’re just going to hold.

32:58 Oh. But that’s not true. The Hodlers actually are looking at ways in which they can generate yield from this. Some are, yes, exactly So they can find a way. Well.

33:06 And so, so, so the yield place of Bitcoin are starting to be that next wave, right, in terms of basically doing stuff there? But they’re so far disappointed. Yeah. So, well that’s because the yield is conservative yield. So we’re talking about single digit percentage, right.

33:18 So if you want to compare it to all coin gains, you can’t basically look at it the same. Questions about custody and and and and things as well. Exactly. But but very, very quickly, just just on this point is that when Bitcoin increases is in value at the end of the day, we might say, oh, look at how it’s taking up the sort of, you know, all the air out. But actually really what’s happened is that the sort of altcoin space has been more diluted with many, many more tokens.

33:43 When you look at the total market value of altcoins, actually they’ve done, they’ve done fairly well as well. So at the three-point, three $3.4 trillion of market cap size, I think Bitcoin’s about 1.6 trillion, right, Give or take, maybe something like that or two. It depends on which day you’re looking at, right? Yeah. OK.

34:01 Once you take out stable coins, it was about like 3-3 hundred or 400 billion. The rest is all coins, right? So that market has grown, but it’s just been distributed over many, many more tokens. The second thing is when you take a look at, for instance, and we can get into things like Ethereum and Solana and some of the big ones, because certainly I would say a lot of people look at Ethereum specifically. They’re not looking at the new tokens.

34:24 They look at Ethereum specifically and say, oh, look how that’s disappointed. And then in their mind frame, they’re like, OK, well, if the theorem is done badly, then what about all the other ones? Discounting the fact that over the last year, essentially, you know, millions of new tokens have launched, of which at least hundreds of them have done phenomenally well, right? Including our own Mocha token, for instance, which was, if you think about it, didn’t have any had, you know, didn’t exist before and has a six $700 million value even in this kind of market, for instance, right?

34:53 Or if you look at fence, the launch of something like, you know, basically the Pangu token with punchy Penguins, right? Sure. I mean, you know, we do, we believe that both of these token should be worth more, Yes. But again, we’re talking about a token that essentially did not exist up until December of last year and now has a value of somewhere between 6:00 to $800 million as well and trading very, very actively. So we shouldn’t forget that that’s what’s happening. And so this to me is the reason you look at altcoins versus Bitcoin.

35:21 Bitcoin is basically your gold. So it’s your reserve asset, right? But if you want to take sort of opportunities of fast growth, it’s always going to be in altcoins. You’re not going to have Bitcoin go, you know, 100X or even 10XI mean it will go there, but it will go there over time. Do I believe that bitcoins were worth $1,000,000? Absolutely.

35:41 I’ve been saying this all the time. It’s going to be one of the biggest status symbols in the, in the crypto world to have one full Bitcoin. So I absolutely believe that. However, is it going to happen this year? Nobody’s going to say that, right? But do you believe that, you know, a token that you basically want to support or that you think you believe in like like a like a start up, for instance, that it could rise, you know, 1020 X or even just three or four or 5X within you? Yes.

36:06 So the index to think about is will this project outperform Bitcoin? And if it doesn’t, sure, then maybe buy Bitcoin. And there’s this interesting sort of theory that in behavioral economics that think Daniel Kahneman put out under, I think it’s called prospect theory, but there’s multiple theories of me to talk about this, which is that most humans appear to be more sensitive towards an aversion of loss rather than gain, right? So, so when, when, when things are dicey and you want to play it safe, it’s more painful for you to have lost than to sort of to, to, to the, the, the experience of losing was more painful than the experience of winning, right?

36:46 So you forget, for instance, that, hey, you know, what if you invested in Axe Infinity or in SAN tokens in 21 and you would have basically made a ton of money you and but then the fact that you maybe invested in some meme coins in, I don’t know, or like Trump token or whatever it is that you invested in earlier in the year and you lost a lot. That whole category gets bunched together into altcoins and they say, Oh my goodness, that was very painful. Then we’ll do this or for instance, terrible disasters like like Luna Terra, right.

37:13 So you want to go into something that feels sort of more safe and and less risky. Then that’s why where people put money into things like like Bitcoin. But I think what will also happen is that there’s going to be a bifurcation ultimately between what’s in the category of altcoins, right? So in other words, because altcoins today is everything but Bitcoin, Yeah. What does that mean? Exactly what is a terrible?

37:32 Word yeah, it’s a terrible world, right. So so you have in there, you’ve got Solana, you’ve got Ethereum, but then you also have Bonk and you have Mocha in there and Sandbox and then you have every millions of other tokens. I mean you that’s not actually a fair definition either, right? So ultimately you’re going to have these these areas where you’ve got your Bitcoin, then you’ve got your institutional token place, which includes the Ethereum solanas, we think also Mocha and sort of and then even the ones that are sort of in the mean category like a Pengu, for instance, or even an 8 coin.

38:00 Sure, right. They’ve been struggling in this market environment in macro, but you’ve got people building behind it, you’ve got real ecosystems, you’ve got real support behind them, right? And we see that as a market opportunity. So most recently, for instance, one of the gaming projects we supported was called Cross the Ages and I think we’re both investors in Cross The. Ages. Yeah.

38:19 We’ve had Sammy Chiagu, their CEO, on the show twice. We invested 4 years ago back in 21. Huge fans of Sammy Vision the project. The project works really well. The game, the the you know, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve. He’s had a great tracker who is a game game developer that’s made profitable games games.

38:35 Lots of users, right? Yeah, great. Community, but the token’s absolutely been crushed right and so you have a few opportunities you go well do you look at a new gaming project or do you look at a gaming project that’s undervalued, which is by the way, what people do in the stock market all the time yeah, they look at what are the opportunities out there and there were a portfolio you know we spoke to them they spoke to us we were like, you know what I think there’s there’s something there right.

38:58 They were at AI think a less under $10 million market cap. I mean, you know, for a, for a company like that, which is a bargain even in Web 2 sort of classical terms. So I said, you know what, that’s totally sort of oversold. So we decided basically to support the project. We, we sort of, you know, obviously didn’t just back them, but we also bought tokens in the market.

39:22 Most recently we announced it as of the start of the year, the token is up 400%, right? So across the ages of the token has outperformed Bitcoin. Now of course, you can’t make the same parallel example. They’re not the same assets whatsoever, right? That’s kind of saying I outperformed gold. That’s not the point here.

39:40 But the point is that as a portfolio, I think it makes sense for you to look at different hedges, right? So you look at things that you have conviction on, right? I mean people who invested in AI companies before.

40:48 Right? Or companies who professed in biotech companies before. These are all companies, regardless of where they’re a token or not, that can outperform the market if you have conviction and belief in them when you see that, right? And so I think a lot more of that will happen. And so I think as a result, altcoins are going to be distinguished between those that have institutional backing, like from the likes of us or other ones. Because the one thing that we haven’t fully accounted for yet is that right now the black rocks of the world, they are buying Bitcoin.

41:19 What are they buying next? They’re going to start buying things next, right? You already see all of the ETFs coming out for different tokens, right? You know, Van EC is pushing all sorts of interesting ETF’s. Eventually you get more and more of them.

41:30 So you’ve got the next tier, which are the ones that the institutions can back, right? The ones that we come back, for instance, right? And then you have everything else, right? And to me, that’s no different than, you know, you’ve got your S&P 500, right? And then you’ve got essentially sort of, you know, basically sort of a sort of a lower tier and then you’ve got everything else, right? I think, I think we’re going to see the same thing with token as well.

41:49 But right now they’re all in one bucket, partially because it’s not sophisticated, which to me represents an opportunity. One thing that I think frustrates the altcoin market, and again, we’ll have to redefine that for sure, is that we see when Bitcoin rallies, yes, it pulls up. And then when Bitcoin sells off, it continues to sell off more. And if you get enough of those cycles, you know, somebody on crypto Twitter just recently recognized that the all coins are as low as they were when Bitcoin was at 75 K, even though Bitcoin’s at 100K now, because through those cycles they had sold off even more. And so I think most people agree in crypto that actually new highs in Bitcoin is always good for. Everybody but I disagree with that. Is that we’re looking at the wrong coins. I think so.

42:28 First of all, I if you look at the coins from before, then yes. But what you’ve discounted is that the altcoin market cap has actually increased because there’s more tokens in the market. So, so and does. That matter when some random, you know, meme coin is out there, I don’t care. It’s still the coins that I think matter are still lower. All right, so, so to, to, to sort of put into account a little bit the sort of what tokens do. Tokens are essentially a form of pricing information just like commodities, Just they do this from a network effect, network attention, community attention perspective as well, right. So if a token doesn’t do as well as it should when your mindset it actually should also be indicative of maybe there’s something wrong with it.

43:13 So I think Ethereum’s a good example. OK, Ethereum is a token that has a little bit of a conflict. It wants to be a sort of store value, but it also wants to have mass utility. Bitcoin doesn’t have that problem. As much as Bitcoiners would love you to spend your Bitcoin, it’s simply a store value.

43:33 It’s total all the way. And things like, you know, you know, Bitcoin pizza day is probably the perfect reason why people never want to sell their Bitcoin, right? And and so so the whole thing about Bitcoin is store value. And so it’s not confusing at all. But for Etherium that kind of sort of, if I want to have more utility, then actually fees have to go lower, right?

43:52 As in, for instance, right. So that that that is in direct conflict with necessarily being that incredible store value. So why and when did did Ethereum really rise in value? It’s kind of similar to how Solana is able to maintain its value, which is opportunity. What opportunity was in Ethereum? It was NFTS, right?

44:12 When I want to buy an NFT and have the opportunity to quickly react to it, I needed to have enough Ethereum on standby so I can make so I can make the trade, right. I didn’t do it because I gained like 2 or 3% staking rewards. Nobody gave a gave a crap around that. It was much more important that and that that I had an opportunity to buy something that essentially gave an opportunity in there. And so culture as an asset was really the key selling point. And when all these L twos came about really building utility on the theorem as a foundation because of its huge security layer and all the TBL that they had, the problem was that the tax became sort of extracted on the L2 side. What the L twos haven’t done is essentially keep their theorem. So it’s not helpful if you know, base or optimism or arbitrary make a lot of money and then they all start selling their theorem, right?

45:00 So what Ethereum is missing is a combination of bringing NF TS back. Like, you know, Vitalik should start buying some NF TS and saying this is great because actually more power to Ethereum means more interesting things that can build, right? And I think he’s acknowledged that, although I don’t think he’s a fan of it, which is part of the issue. But the second thing is also a little bit of essentially crypto diplomacy here, because what Ethereum is different from Bitcoin is it’s basically the federal, basically it’s a federal government, right?

45:29 So Ethereum is the federal government and it has essentially all these states or these, let’s call it satellite states, if you will, right? They’re optimism arbitrum, you know, basically base all those guys here, right? So what they need to do is all come together and say, OK, if you make Ethereum great, you’ll all be even greater how to coordinate. But right now you have a little bit of this sort of game theory situation where everyone else is essentially getting fees on Ethereum.

45:54 And then essentially, if you’re the one holding on to it, are you the one holding on with the theorem bag? Or is it better for you to basically start selling it before someone else does? And then you have to sort of cascading effect. So this requires some coordination, which means that Ethereum also has to evolve itself into a market oriented, much more capitalist organization, which in a way the Ethereum Foundation has never been. Yeah, right now that’s changing.

46:17 And we’ve seen, yeah, we’ve seen, you know, we’ve spoken to a few people there and and that’s changing and that’s good. And of course, Joe Lubin with, you know, what he’s doing with, with sort of essentially a strategy version of of Ethereum Treasury. Exactly. Treasury company. All these things are evolving and happening, but but again, more and more signalling has to come from Ethereum. That’s essentially capitalist oriented around that and trying to create value for Ethereum.

46:42 And it’s important to note that the superpower of tokenization is expansion of network effects. So when I basically tokenize something, I expand the network, which is the reason why something that appears to have no value suddenly has a lot of value like a meme quant, whether it’s worth 50 dollars, $500 or $5,000,000, that’s kind of beside the point. It’s just indicative of the strength of that network. Now, what I mean by that, What I mean is that the the tokenization effort spreads and combines networks such that you can enumerate the value of the network effect in question.

47:16 Even with a stable coin. You might say, well, the value of the stable coin doesn’t go up, but the fact that a stable coin is tokenized and spread to the world means that the dollar has more power. So there’s an interesting irony that despite the fact that the Fed essentially has printed trillions of a, trillions and trillions of dollars into the market, right, devaluate as a store of value, why is it that the dollar is more powerful than ever before, right?

47:46 And it has to do with the fact that more people are using it, right? And so you have this sort of interesting thing around, OK, you want more influence and more impact, that means you need to have more distribution. But when you have more distribution, you kind of have more inflation, right? So when do you reach that equilibrium is a, you know, market’s evolution phase and we’re currently so early still. Again, when you talk about sort of 500 million people on crypto, less than 10% are basically doing an AD 5. There’s 8 billion people in the world. We’re going to see very, very volatile times still, right? But again, if you’re looking for the assets that can outperform Bitcoin, you’re going to find it in alts, you’re not going to find it in Bitcoin per SE, which means that if you want to be have a strategy.

48:31 What I found also is that reason why Bitcoin is holding itself is that if I’ve made one in alts, I store it in Bitcoin, right? That wasn’t the case before. So to me, that’s actually positive because it means that I can now very easily move it from Bitcoin into other areas. So if risk on is back on, then alts are in my opinion are going to really, really sort of accelerate because all that risk capital is not willing to put it. If I’m risk off, which you know, things like an Iran war sort of is going to happen, then of course I go off risk, which is not just in the stock market, it’s also in tokens. And that’s what we see basically in in with odds. OK.

49:06 You know, I’m Anthony Pompliano. You know him. He’s been on the show a couple times. He calls Bitcoin your savings account. I always think that’s interesting.

49:13 You know, that’s the money you put away that you’re going to keep the rest of your life. And then, you know, you invest your other things in other pieces. I always think that’s a good analogy. Let’s talk about when this season might come, where risk goes on in these all coins. So we’re also hearing rumours of other ETFs happening, Solana, XRP, Doge, and some of these actually seem like they could be happening in the next weeks and months. Obviously genius looks like it’s going to pass, you know, and then there’s other bills after that. There’s that market, which is kind of making Defy OK in America.

49:48 And so I guess I’m going to ask you the question that people will ask you, when do we you think this is going to happen? Some people say you need a Fed dropping rates before there will be an altcoin season. That looks like it will definitely happen in May when we get a new Fed share, which again, isn’t that far off, especially if you know it’s going to happen. Do you think we need a Fed move for them to be an altcoin season? And when do you see this happening?

50:13 So I guess a couple things that will move crypto up. It’s either going to be Fed dropping rates or it’s going to be printing money. OK, Right. Yes, right. Right.

50:27 And, and outside of of course, you know, policy aspects and more stability in the market, which I think is the one thing we can’t necessarily sort of assume. One thing that we should assume with Trump is that there’s going to be a lot more volatility and a lot more things that we cannot expect, right? I think everyone in our industry certainly was not expecting this activity to take place over the last six months, right? I mean, it’s pretty wild if you look at the swings. Yeah.

50:51 So now what’s important for Trump, if you look at if you had to take a bet at things, you would want to make sure that the sort of U.S. government and that the markets are in reasonable shape to make sure that midterms are at least looking good, right? And also you want to make sure that Trump has, you know, I think he wants to make sure that he has a positive legacy ahead of him, which is also why I think, you know, when you look at what’s happening with the tariffs, the way that it acted wasn’t really that long.

51:21 And I mean, when you usually have a tariff war historically, it doesn’t end in a week or in a couple of phone calls or some great sort of, you know, posts and tweets. We had a great meeting. It’s all done. Like, you know, these are usually long negotiated processes. Is it over?

51:35 You know, well, I’m not saying it’s over, but but I think I think the attention on tariffs is no longer the same. Yeah, right. And it and so. So is that because the news cycle has gotten so short that you can’t shock anybody? Anymore, yes, so the shock therapy isn’t quite going to work the same way, but also the the fact that you’re trying to create an impact, you’re trying to create a reaction that will hopefully have a positive outcome and when that no longer works you go on to the next thing. But at the end of the day, what I think we they all want regardless of the way they’re getting there and regardless of all the criticism is they obviously want for America to be better and by the way, I don’t think that’s what everyone agrees with right.

52:12 There’s a whole bunch of people who say everything they’re trying to do is not for the benefit of America, but just for the benefit of a select few. I generally disagree with that statement because I think they do care about their legacy, right? And the legacy will be tarnished if it turns out that only the billionaire club made money and the rest of them basically didn’t. Because that’s essentially how you get voted out, right? And then, you know, at the end of the day, as we all know, history is written by the victors.

52:35 And so if the next candidate is completely going against everything that they’ve done before, they’re going to rewrite history. It’s not going to look very good. So I actually think they’re going to try to do whatever they can to make the markets look more positive, which basically means if the Fed isn’t isn’t going to cut rates, they’re going to do some other stuff. We’re playing around with these banking reserves and how much the bank has to hold in capital for owning treasuries.

52:58 And that’s since thinking about relaxing that, which is a way of printing money. I don’t know if it’s a way of printing a lot of money, but. Well, I mean, I think they’re very aware of the fact that they need to essentially get the economy back on track and to get essentially more flows into economies, not just overseas investments, but just drop productivities. So I think, you know, if I had to sort of sort of put a crystal ball onto it, you know, we generally believe that by Q4 and early Q1 actually markets are going to be up for recovery. And, and again, it’s for the lead up, for it’s going to be a very, very important, very important election in, in, in in the next year.

53:36 For the midterms, yeah. Well, I mean, look, we know that there will be a new Med Fed chair in May and we know whoever’s appointed is going to be going to be cutting rates, maybe 200 bips, maybe not. But so knowing that, would you expect the market to even react to that in early Q1, knowing that that is coming? Now there’s I think one or two rate cuts potentially this year according to Polymarket. Maybe that’s true or not, but we know we’re going to get something significant in May. I think that’s hard to dispute.

54:05 So does that already help markets? Or do we have to wait? I mean, people are. So I think what’s really interesting is that people have been very optimistic about things. So at the end of the day, given everything that’s happening historically, and I think this is fascinating to see, historically, people would have been a lot more bearish.

54:22 But right now, because we’ve become so desensitivized to sort of the sensationalism of it. All right, the fact that the stock market’s still doing OK, the fact that Bitcoin’s over 100,000, the fact that crypto is over 3 trillion as an overall market asset is actually pretty insane, right? And it does say something about human resilience, but it also says something about our hope that things are going to get better, right? And so I think there’s going to be more disappointment if, maybe, and I don’t know what that number is, if, if, when the, when the Fed does cut their rates in the future, then it’s not hitting the number they expected, right? They go, Oh my goodness, this wasn’t as good as I hoped. Boom, boom, boom, boom, right.

55:00 As opposed to do people expect the the Fed to cut rates? I think a lot of people are already baking that in, in one form or the other, whether it’s, you know, short to midterm or long term, they’re already sort of baking that into perspective. Many of them are making assumptions like US can’t support this kind of debt. They have to find figure out ways to do this. It’s just that essentially, I think, you know, the sensitivity to that is different.

55:19 So the markets are actually much more resilient, I would say, than one would expect given everything, you know, between the tariffs and the activities that’s been taking place, maybe to the detriment or the chagrin of the people who’ve been trying to sort of shake up the markets despite their best efforts. Tell that to the all coin holders that the markets have been resilient because they’re crying well. You know, I think the reason they’re crying is because they look at Bitcoin. OK.

55:45 OK. I think it’s a relative gain. I mean, let’s not forget where we were in 23 and in late 22. Yeah, OK. I mean, yeah, we could sit here.

55:53 And this is a man who owns a lot of altcoins. Yes, exactly. I mean so so. Listen when you talk. Yeah, I mean, you know, Ethereum was like I think 1000 or maybe briefly hit below broke below broke below 1000 instances, right?

56:06 And sure, you know, we’ve had, you know, go with 2800 now it’s like a 21 or 2200 or something, something like that, right? So when you compare it to Bitcoin, you go, Oh my goodness, right. And and that’s kind of where you compare it. But when you compare it to any other type of asset over the last, you know, of a of a very popular asset class, it’s up, you know, 2 1/2 three times. That’s not crazy. It’s certainly beat inflation and it’s certainly not bad, right?

56:32 And if you were playing in the market and you were active in in different activities, then you would have done OK too. But what you can’t do is I think just keep one or two assets and say that’s it. If you want to just really sit back and just sort of hold one asset, then I think Bitcoin’s the one to do where you basically want to sit there rather passively because it was the one that had the first major institutional adoption. But if it’s if you’re playing the altcoin market, I think you have to play it differently.

56:59 I don’t think you can say I’m just going to buy Solana and hear him and just sit on that. Right. So for instance, you know, when we got into TON, it was below a dollar, right? And yeah, you know, at it’s peak, you know, 7 dollars now it’s like 3 1/2 to 4 or wherever that sits. Like we’re not crying care about this, right? Like, you know, but one would cry if you were making comparisons.

57:21 And as humans, we have very comparative creatures, right? We don’t just compare against sort of, you know, prices and we compared others people’s success. Oh, he moves into this apartment in Mayfair. Oh, look, this guy bought this new car. We just it’s just a very normal thing for us to do.

57:38 And of course, in crypto, if you’re not in Bitcoin or if you’re more in altcoins, you look at Bitcoin and go, Oh my goodness, it’s not done so well, right? But you know, I would say you’re a much happier man if you basically count your blessings where you are fact that you’ve had winnings compared to most people in the world in this kind of volatile environment, because in the macro space you’ve done well. Could you do it better? Yes, I do think for instance, things like AI agents are going to be better at the stuff, for instance, like for instance, if you want to play, you know, in in the altcoin space, you know, you’re not going to just buy one token.

58:07 You probably have to have manage an index of 50 or 100 tokens. How do you do that yourself? This is where an AI agent comes comes into play. Or this is maybe where you start diversifying into things like, you know, funds or people that you trust that can do this, for instance, or you invest in projects you have long term conviction. I like to personally look at projects where have long term convictions, like the quasi ages example, for instance, or Mochaverse, right? These are things where you have a vision around that you think it’s going to do well, you might be wrong, but at least you’ve backed something positive as well. And if you, if you’re correct about this, then you will do far, far better than if you than if you, you know, than if you basically are just trying to sort of day trade, right? And we shouldn’t forget that the vast majority of people in altcoins versus Bitcoin are day traders, right? Because they’re there to trade in activity. And while they are important in the market, right, they are not the ones that you, they’re not the only part of that market, right?

59:08 So as you bring more people into the space, you want people to have long term conviction to hold, right? And so my challenge to the altcoin guys out there is that if you want to build a product that has staying power, then you need to build an audience that has staying power. In other words, don’t just attract the web 3D Jens, don’t just go for the people who want to trade your token. They’re important. Go for the people who hold your tokens, bringing new people into the audiences, which is why gaming is still important because that’s where you bring new people into the space, for instance, right.

59:38 And the fact that I can, you know, the, the, the fact that you own tokens in an exchange is great, but there’s only one thing you can do in exchange. It’s to trade. That user is going to basically speculate on your item

1:00:47 And then you’re complaining that they’re speculating like it’s like, you know, so you have to basically make sure that you have both sides of these audiences. And if you look at the bright projects for instance, where there’s ton of feminine mochaverse, right? You know, when we did our public sale, it was like a 250 or 350 million valuation, right? At it’s peak it was 2 billion, right? Now it’s sitting on 700 million.

1:01:06 Not bad, right? Telegram as well, right? You know, you were able to get it on market at below a dollar sitting at 3:00 to 4:00, right? If you got it across the ages, basically in the last six months, you would have done fine, right? There’s countless other examples of of successful altcoins. I think you just need to look at the project, study them, do your research.

1:01:24 That’s the other thing. So many people are just listening to what some person says and making the investment. No, do the work, Look at the background, see who’s backing it, see who’s talking about it. Don’t just, you know, don’t just sort of go into something you don’t fully understand. And I think that’s the other big message, right?

1:01:40 If you’re going to invest in the token, meme coins aren’t dead, but the narrative around a meme coin is no longer going to be the thing you should be investing in in the same way. Because remember, meme coins were an answer to a regulatory sort of sort of scenario the US had. If I’m launching A token and I’m telling you no utility, it’s a waste of time. Don’t take it serious, it’s a joke. Then it’s legal.

1:02:02 Then it’s legal, right? So you’re, by definition, creating a framework where you’ve created a bit of a joke, right? When many of them were secretly trying to build utility. This is different. Now you go out and you see the project.

1:02:14 Who’s going to just talk about the utility? What are they building? How are they communicating? Is it a real team? Who’s behind it?

1:02:20 No different than when you’re going to invest in a company anywhere in the world. And this is now able to be the case because with this regulatory sort of new regime, you now have the ability to essentially advertise a utility that you couldn’t do before. OK, so if I’m reading all those tea leaves, alt season starts in Q4 according to Yat Siu. Yep. Let’s go for it.

1:02:41 Q4. Yes, exactly. All right. You mentioned artificial intelligence in there, and I think you and I were backstage at the Consensus Conference three years ago, I think it was, when we both met William Shatner for the first time. That was awesome. Both pretty excited about that.

1:02:57 Fan moment for sure. Yeah, you have to. If you don’t know, you don’t know. But that was amazing. And you said, Brian, the tokens, the blockchain is, is what AI needs for it to function in the future. And you were the very first guy that ever said that to me. And I didn’t really understand it at 1st. And I had to think about it.

1:03:15 And then all of a sudden, we’ve seen so many people not talking about that. Where are we with AI and blockchain? Where are we with AI in general? Again, talk about sucking the oxygen out of the room. It seems to be dominating venture capital right now.

1:03:30 Silicon Valley, I would say, is all about AI. You know, you’d made a comment to me a few months ago that very few people in Silicon Valley actually care about blockchain. It’s actually other places that do. And I think you make an interesting point. So maybe you can speak on all of those things.

1:03:45 So first of all, I actually think that tokens broadly are the best bet for a regular person to hedge themselves against the future of AI. Why do I say that? Because what is the asset class that AI is going to interact with? It’s going to be crypto, but not just as a means of exchange, but as a means of creating value. So the powerful and really fascinating thing about a sort of a Genting AI with a token is that for the first time, an AI has true agency because it has true power, because it can mint a token, meaning that we can now work for an AI because the AI is making money of some form or something of value.

1:04:23 Now how does he make that money? Either he makes a smart contract, generates his own token, launches Solana, some versions of that exist, right? Small as it may be. Or maybe it’s just a really, really smart trading bot on AI that trades really, really well and essentially starts to make profits and use some of the profits to essentially pay users to do stuff that they needed to do. In the last four years, something like $48 billion worth of air drops were given to users.

1:04:51 Those are mostly protocols, Web 3 gaming projects, some AI stuff. What’s the difference between paid by protocol and being paid by an A agent? Effectively nothing from the end user standpoint. Right now. You say that’s a lot of money, but when you consider that essentially that’s just a proxy for the attention economy because it’s a form of advertising. Last year, the advertising industry globally was 1.1 to $1.2 trillion, right?

1:05:18 In a highly inefficient advertising market, like anyone out there who’s like spending money on Google ads or Facebook ads is going to tell you it’s not working out for me. And yet they’re still spending money on that, right? Yep, Yep. So that’s 1.2 trillion. So that’s the gap, right? In terms of the value that can be shared across the entire ecosystem, that’s going to be fully tokenized. The entire advertising space, the entire attention economy is going to be tokenized.

1:05:43 Who are going to be the agents that are trading that? It’s going to be AI agents. How are you as a user going to be sort of owning assets in the space where there’s probably going to be more trading activity between agents to agents than between humans to humans? I mean, in the market already today, it’s essentially bots that are trading against bots programmed by users. It’s not one human trader trading against another human trader. You might have that experience of Robin Hood and or etoro. You’re like, hey, I’m trading.

1:06:09 But in reality, at the back, the market makers and the bots are basically doing 99%. Of all that, is that what’s? Happening with the market makers, I mean, they provide liquidity, yes, but they’re also trading, right? And in crypto, most of the activity now is basically traded in terms of volume. You guys are market makers too, so you would know that you use AI.

1:06:25 Using AI, so they’re using AI bots and so on. They’re all trading, right? And that’s that’s typical. That’s what Twitter is, they say as well. Just bots and bots. Of some form, right?

1:06:34 So, so that means that means that the liquidity will come from those areas as well. And so if you think that’s going to accelerate and there’s going to be more intelligence and there’s going to be no trading, then as an end user, I think you’re not just going to be maybe delegating your trades to an AI. You’re going to be essentially looking at tokens that AI themselves might want to utilize, which means again, that the way you’re not going to compete with an AI in terms of performance.

1:07:00 So what is the asset class? Is it buying shares and open AI? You can’t do that. Good luck for most of the guys out there or it’s a crazy valuation, for instance. So what even are these AI agents going to be using?

1:07:11 They’re going to be using tokens. So that means by owning tokens, you essentially are somewhat already indexed against essentially a digital future, which essentially is what AI is developing even more, more dependencies and more growth in that AI future. So the specific tokens though, well. I would say specific, but also index tokens, right? I think there’s going to be a rise of index tokens.

1:07:34 They’re not just indexed in terms of maybe gaming or AI, but they’re also going to be tokens representative of ecosystems. For instance, if you thought that AI is gonna be building a lot of stuff on Solana, then you would just buy Solana. Solana won’t go up as high as a meme coin might, for instance, right? But it’s an index for that market, right? So you don’t have to bother or deal with essentially buying sort of 10 or 20 or 30 different tokens. You basically just hold a couple of those major ones, those major alts because you think the AI agents could be using them. And so you have to see where they are, of course, right. And of course there are certain AI tokens that you can maybe specifically pinpoint on, again, similar type of direction, but it’s easier for you to invest in them to to try to compete with them.

1:08:13 That’s just going to be that’s going to be difficult to do so, right. But the volume of sort of trading and I think it’s also going to really explode defy as well, because AI agents are going to be trading with themselves and trading with each other. And that’s basically going to be all happening on D5 rails and and that to me is going to be really accelerating that as well, which means again, there’s opportunities when you have more liquidity, more TBL, more activity that’s happening on chain and therefore essentially more growth opportunities.

1:08:39 Again, I think indicating much more direction in terms of all. Now, This is why I think Bitcoin won’t be sharing, although the horizon value won’t share the same in terms of that value construct, because Bitcoin is not an asset that’s used, right? It’s an, you know, everyone wants to hold on to their Bitcoin and I imagine an AI would do the same thing. There’s more value in holding your Bitcoin than to trade it. So Bitcoin isn’t going to be the tradable asset the same way it’s not going to be the one that’s going to be used.

1:09:08 I think people are obviously experimenting with things like BRC 20’s, you know, ordinals and so on, and that’s rising. But in comparison to what’s happening in terms of volume in the altcoin space, it’s still a very distant, it’s still very distant comparative. When will we see these coin indexes do you think? When will they become liquid or how will they be offered? Will there be AI agents holding that? Will they I?

1:09:31 Think we’re? Happy to trust them and. Well, I mean, so this is what’s interesting, right? Because when you have on chain records, when you essentially can audit the smart contracts, then you have third parties that can verify that type of stuff. You know, what we’re building with Mocha ID is a reputation system.

1:09:45 But at the end of the day, nobody said the reputation had to be human. You could build a reputation network under an AI agent who’s overtime built a reputation that you can trust, right? And I would argue that mentally we’re already trusting algorithms anyway, right? I mean, you know, I mean, even historically as something as simple as streetlights, there’s some algorithm that says green and red, and that’s very simple. It’s very binary.

1:10:10 You can cross the road and you can cross the road, but it’s not a human agent that’s sitting there saying time for red and time for green. It’s basically something that does it automatically and you just follow. So are we not already following the rules of some kind of machine that’s programmed in our life? In very basic terms, How is it different from extending it into even more complex facets of our life? I don’t think it’s that it’s that distant.

1:10:32 And when you think, for instance, the fact that when I go to an Uber rating and I have a, you know, like, I don’t know, 4.9 rating, for instance, right that of course users are generating it’s a reputation score, but I don’t know who gave me that reputation. If someone else just fudges the numbers, for instance, right? Of course, with blockchain you can verify it. You know, I would just trust it at face value, right? If you’re going to sort of buy something from from an Amazon seller or ratings, then he has a high rating, you just kind of trust that, which is why people bought it because there’s currency.

1:10:59 The same like how most people might trust an influencer who has a million followers on Instagram as opposed to 1000, because he makes an assumption that that is a valid sort of measurement scale because of the fact that it’s socially accepted, right. So again, blockchain solves that. And I think actually with with things like Mocha IDE, you get essentially enhanced forms of reputation and you can verify them. And and I think we’re going to start trusting AI agents in much the same way that we trust an Amazon seller rating again.

1:11:26 I don’t think we’re that far apart from that mentally anyway. Can you speak on what AI is going to do to us in general over the next 5 and 10 years? I mean, obviously Silicon Valley is scrambling. Zuckerberg’s paying apparently $100 million signing bonuses. When I worked on Wall Street, I thought we had a good because we were the most, you know, highly paid individuals in the world and you’d see the signing bonuses and the three-year deals.

1:11:51 I never ever thought that tech would take those numbers and multiply them times 100. So, so first of all, I would say that in general, when you’re building a company, when the only thing that attracts is money, you’re building the wrong culture, right? Basically, you’re building a mercenary culture, and I think we’ve seen what happens to societies and companies and cultures that are built upon on top of mercenaries. They just move to the next one that pays you more right? In some form of.

1:12:17 Fashion, yeah, but yes, right. Also a dearth of talent and every second counts. Yes, it, it, it does. But The thing is, is that when you pay that kind of money, does it really matter? So there’s a so, so there’s this whole point around how much money is enough.

1:12:32 And yes, there are some people were there’s never enough money, right? That’s a small percentage of the world. They just happen to focus around Wall Street, right? Just because it’s about money. So you’re naturally attracting more people in this area.

1:12:44 But 99% of the world isn’t focused around money as an end in itself. 99% of the world uses money as a means to a particular end, a family, the good relationships, a happy life, the good life, right? Depending on sort of, you know, which philosophy do you ascribe to? Like these are things you look for, right? And, and so when you go to most people and you tell them, hey, here’s, you know, $1,000,000, is that enough for you?

1:13:12 You know, they’ll probably say, oh, wow, that’s enough for me and they can do stuff with it. It’s not enough for people in crypto, probably, and certainly enough for people in Wall Street. But why? Because they’ve been pairing themselves against someone else who said, my benchmark has to be $100 million. And then when they hit $100 million, they go, actually a benchmark has to be a billion dollars.

1:13:28 Says who and why, right? It doesn’t really give you more happiness, right? And so This is why AI is interesting, because AI is not driven by people who are looking at money first. The researchers, the people who are excited about the space are building things that they think will change the world. The money is a byproduct of that. That’s very Silicon Valley ethos, by the way, right? It’s just I’m building stuff because I think it’s going to change the world and the money is a byproduct of what I’m building.

1:13:55 It’s not for the money, you know, so so the. Money also equals power, and I’m sure Altman thinks about that and Satya Nadella thinks about that. So I so while I understand what you mean by that, because money is power, I think the perspective of power as an altruistic form of power is slightly different. We can say. So, you know, when I had my interaction with Sam, you know, who is, I guess, you know, sort of you could say an effective altruistic, I would say in his perspective and his views on sort of universal basic income, which I don’t agree with, but I understand as a construct, I think comes from a good place, right?

1:14:37 It doesn’t come from a pace of I want to consolidate power, I want to control everything and I’m going to rule the world. It doesn’t have that type of that impact. It’s also not, I don’t think it comes from a sense of fear of losing power. I think it’s more of I need this power to generate that, which by the way, right, can also sort of lead to disaster as well, to be clear, right? You know, very few people build things with the intention of doing harm, right? They all have good intentions.

1:15:05 And then somewhere in between, they start coming to this moral dilemma of, OK, this looks slightly bad, but at the greater scale of things, I think it’s a better outcome, right? But I would say again, I would say that their perspectives I think have a much more the same. I think they care about the legacy, they care about how they’re remembered. I think they care about humanity and I think that’s or about the communities, whatever that is. So I do think that matters.

1:15:31 There are a smaller portion of people who are truly just about power, right? And of course, there’s this sort of famous old saying that I said on your show as well, the famous of Dodge absolute power curbs absolutely as well, right. So once you’re drunk on that power, right, then you, you might do things that that you wouldn’t normally do because suddenly you can act with impunity. And some people might criticize certain sort of, you know, business leaders around the world to be acting this particular way. But even people who sort of critique Musk, at the end of the day, I don’t think his intentions are around wanting to do bad things, right?

1:16:09 Like when, when, when, when the US government basically sort of was spending and not giving sort of the things that he thought Doge was going to do. You know, he, it didn’t seem to be about power at that point. It was like, that’s rubbish, right? So so they they will speak out when what they think is right. OK, but now is super intelligence going to kill us all?

1:16:29 That’s kind of what I’m more asking. Or a few people at the very top going to use super intelligence to dominate us all. 510 years from now, will there be 40% unemployment in the world? I think these are all very possible scenarios. So I’m a techno optimist, as you know, so I’m going to paint the positive scenario on all this.

1:16:45 I think you’ve probably heard enough doomsday scenarios for both to fill, to fill, to fill, to fill, you know, basically sort of reels of movies and and everything else around that. So first of all, and by the way, I do want to call out this interesting study. I think it was an MIT that basically said that people who use ChatGPT to write essays were sort of becoming less intelligent because their. Brains were not developed. Exactly developed the same way they were getting. Stupider.

1:17:09 Stupider. Effectively. Yeah. What’s? The lesson there I. Don’t know?

1:17:12 Well, Well, the lesson is essentially the lesson now, which isn’t that the similar from things that we’ve gotten used to? For instance, I don’t remember any phone numbers anymore, right? Because I don’t need to, right. Yeah. And so you probably. Wouldn’t even know your closest friend or your wife’s or your girlfriend’s phone number at this point. Whereas back in the day you’d have to have it memorized exactly.

1:17:29 Back in our day where you’d dial. It and, but the question to ask is, was it even a necessary thing to remember that number? No, right. And and so I think to me, AI is an extension of that. The the mental model I like to think of AI is it’s what the calculator did to us back when it was finally introduced to the masses. It made everyone a mathematician, right? Meaning that you no longer have to be a mental calculator to be able to really excel in the knowledge and the participation of maybe dreaming to become an architect or imagining you’re living room a certain way or designing certain things. Because the calculator and then by extension the computer was able to do that.

1:18:07 I think there’s a direct correlation all. We have more entrepreneurs and more creativity and more disruption because we have tools that enable human ingenuity and creativity to be realized through that ability. So if you accept that view, you can completely imagine what AI can do, which is that the ability that humans can conceptualize and create today is at an unprecedented level. I don’t mean just art and so on. I mean imagination, creativity.

1:18:34 You know, vibe coding, for instance, right? We’ve got portfolios doing, you know, vibe coding where you’re basically building games literally by just imagining it. And to me, I think that’s the much more natural skill we as humans have, which is that we’re not actually born to be computers. We never were. Or coders. Yeah, right, right.

1:18:50 We’re actually born to be divergent and creative in our thinking, in our capacity. So it’s a tool that allows you to essentially expand the potential of human potential mindset and expand our horizons to do more and get to a level of deepness in to in what you’re building that you couldn’t imagine before. Like if you even take a look at the last 10 years and you go to someone like my parents generation, it would be completely unimaginable how you can recreate something today. And yes, does it disrupt industries? Yes, the movie industry, creative industries, coding industry, everything is going to be disrupted. So for sure there is there is that risk, but it is a form of, I guess a new kind of industrial age, which is sort of an AI age and where essentially AI is doing a lot of tasks where you as a human need to upgrade and up level yourself to do the things that really only humans can do, right. And I think this is where consciousness, emotional intelligence, empathy, feeling.

1:19:54 Love Geoffrey Hinton says the AI’s have all that. In their silicone brains, not their organic brains. Yes, so, so, so, I mean, so I’m not there in the code fiddling around this type of stuff. But at the end of the day, I subscribe more to the view that the AI is still simulating a human experience, right? What I’m, what I, what I mean by that is that the AI doesn’t delight when it creates something. The AI isn’t the one celebrating a victory, right, in the way that a human celebrates a victory. And I sort of subscribe to also this idea that as humans, the fact that we are irrational and have this irrationality, this sort of chaotic being of doing things that aren’t logical. It’s a.

1:21:25 Feature not about. It’s a feature, right? And it’s a reason why we’re capable of incredibly creative things and also incredibly creative destruction, right? Right. So, so the, the the pendulum shift of human creativity is both wonderful and amazing and terrifying at the same time. And I think we project that same threat onto AI. We look at an AI and say you have this incredible potential to create.

1:21:49 Do you have this incredible attention to destroy? And that assumes that an AI was do will do something that is irrational as a human. And even if you code it in this manner, I don’t know that that’s the case, right? I think it’s. Assume you do something irrational. Could be very rational to get rid of all these carbon producing organisms on the earth that are ruining things. Can be a very rational decision by an AI. Well, I mean that would that would be the same equivalent to say that well, you know, genocide was rational, right as an example.

1:22:21 AI could come up with that. Yes. So my, my, my view on this one is that in the same way that you have arms races, AI arms races are also going to happen that counterbalance each other. So I don’t subscribe to the view that there’s going to be a master AI that rules over all AIS. There’s going to be a race sure to get there. But at the end of the day, I think the fact that we have multiple sort of, you know, groups and agencies and countries all basically developing their AIS somewhat in their natural in sort of national interest in their biases are going to be the elements that keep stuff broadly in a checks and balances.

1:22:53 I mean, whether you do call this, you know, weapons, whether you do call it whatever, there is a balancing act that stays there. I don’t believe that humans aren’t going to be the main center of attention because I think we have something ultimately that and and and we have something ultimately that a machine won’t ever really have, you know now, so I understand the point that sort of Hinton might be saying, but I think that comes from an intuition and it also comes from the thinking that a lot of people have is that we’re just computers. So if you subscribe to the view.

1:23:24 Organic computers. Right. That that as humans, that you are essentially just an organic computer. And you know, we have certainly. And by the way, some people also believe that feelings and emotions are irrational and our algorithms are defective, right?

1:23:39 I would argue the opposite. I would say that this irrationality, this ability for us to sort of do things that don’t seem to make sense, the fact that we take risks on things that actually don’t make sense and then create certain incredible outcomes, good or bad, right, is something that is a feature that gives us the ability to basically project ourselves sort of evolutionary. And there’s also, and again, this is beyond my broad knowledge, but an area of interest of the fact that, you know, we have, we don’t understand, for instance, quantum theory and quantum mechanics. The fact that there are indications that as humans, we have essentially forms of quantum entanglement or sort of quantum presences in us with, you know, the whole sort of, you know, the sort of Penrose sort of discovery around sort of the microtubules that essentially we’re giving off essentially quantum vibrations is indicative of the fact that we’re probably connected to a wider universe in bigger ways. Now, again, this is far beyond my sort of knowledge, but you know, it’s this whole, it’s also a question of ultimately from a physics standpoint, you know, when we die, we don’t really die.

1:24:46 Our energy re and dematerializes and essentially turns into something else, right, Right. So depending how spiritual you want to go, you can take extensions from that. So either way, call me an optimist, but that’s not something that an AI can do. That’s not something an AI. An AI is not built in that form of fashion.

1:25:04 I think as we explore more deeper and understand more about sort of quantum physics, quantum mechanics, whatever theory you subscribe to, you know, whether it’s the Copenhagen interpretation or whether it’s the many worlds theory or whatever it might be, as we get to deeper understandings, I think AI will help us get there because they can do the kind of computations and thinking that we as humans couldn’t, therefore, elevating our consciousness and elevating our ability to do things. And to the question of unemployment, I think it elevates us to become more creative overall. So there was a study, I may have shared this on the show as well by George Land and Bethany Jarvis. They basically did a study in the 60s, which they basically did for NASA scientists to see how divergent they were. Because, you know, when you shoot people to the moon or into space, you want to make sure that you know, they’re, they’re, if there’s a problem, there’s a mechanical failure or something, you know, it’s not a rule book that says, well, when this happens, do this.

1:26:00 Someone has to be very creative to deal with this. So they created this sort of set of tests to see whether NASA scientists and engineers could solve these problems divergently. So they took the same test and they followed children from the age of 5 to 15 to track how they were. And they gave the same test to adults as well, who are over the age of 21 or 21 or so. And what they found was that the five year olds were able to solve the problem divergently. I think it was 91% of the time.

1:26:26 And what that means is that we’re born creative, we’re born divergent. And then as they got older, I think 8:00 or 10:00 and then 15, that number went down. By the time they were adults, the 21 year olds scored 2%. So we went from 91% creative to 2%. And the conclusion of this was, and this was used in various bodies of research and science as well, is that we as humans are actually creative. These we had to do more autonomous tasks and schoolings in the Victorian system trained us to be human robots to basically help construct society as it were. But when you have something that takes it away from you and actually does that better, actually we can really do what we as humans were distant to do.

1:27:10 So if you take that lens, which is what I take, then I would say that we’re going to become more creative, more inventive, more intuitive, more in touch, because essentially AIS free ourselves up. Now, does that mean we’re going to live in the future as some output would think we would be, or universal basic income is going to be the way that we make money, like a Star Trek like future, because essentially the AI will make all the money and we’re just going to sit back and do our stuff? I don’t think so.

1:27:39 And the reason I don’t think so is because as humans, we are designed to strive for better. This desire to improve is what puts us forward as a species all the time. It’s why we went from Cavemen to being where we are today, right? Some people call it greed, ambition, you know, maybe it’s a vice to some. But the fact that we have that is why we push humanity forward. Whether it’s for personal glory, for the glory of others, for altruism, whatever it is always pushing something forward. There’s an intrinsic desire that we have as a species. And I think that’s a real part of, of, of what makes us human. So that means that that’s why capitalism works, because capitalism is a measure of that.

1:28:24 If I have a capitalist outcome, if I can make money from that, which is a form of power and influence, then I have a reason to take that risk. And, and the difference is that we’re going from, you know, and I said this at your show as well, we’re going from where essentially the labor of the hands into the labor of the mind. But what is the mind in this case? With AI, the mind can elevate our consciousness. And so we’re talking about something that is really in the mind as opposed to just imagining or creating.

1:28:53 And when you also think about where have the most creativity and growth come from, it’s all intellectual property, right? The biggest companies in the world today are all products of the mind. They’re not products of anything physical, right? And imagine what the world would look like when suddenly everyone that had untapped potential could open that potential with the AI that they were restricted to before because they couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that long ago where people used to look at people that had essentially were on the spectrum, like with Aspergers, for instance, right, which is sort of on the on sort of autism spectrum or ADHD. And they would say, oh, these people were basically defects of society.

1:29:33 And now it turns out that they have super powers of different parts. Right now, we call them learning differences. But the reality is that for some of those people on the spectrum, they can do things that we as humans cannot imagine for, let’s say, regular people, because we’re not tuned that way, right? And again, you know, with an AI, they might be able to tune themselves in different ways, but they can sort of grow and accelerate in ways. I actually think it’s the beginning of more diversity and more growth than not. And it comes down to 1 ultimate form of, I guess contention, which is whoever is building the AIS, what are they intending to build for?

1:30:11 I don’t think anyone is really intending to build for something disastrous. Humankind had all sorts of reasons to exterminate ourselves in the ARC history. And at the end of the day, we always rallied around what we thought was the right ’cause at the end of the day, and, and, and that’s what I choose to believe in. I think that’s what we’re going to end up being. I’m sorry. And the AIS that we’re building are going to follow those same footsteps because at the end of the day, I think they’re still products of us.

1:30:42 They are children’s of humans at the end of the day. Wow, very optimistic. And with all the quantum entanglement theory, I could have swore Doctor Joe Dispenza just came in here and sat down. So I never thought I’d hear you say these things, but they’re very interesting ideas actually, and you might have something there yet. So I guess to be continued. Went off on a tangent.

1:31:02 Yeah, no, but I never thought I’d come from you. I think it’s really interesting. Let me talk to you about gaming because you talked about this. What’s this vibe Coding, which is interesting. Obviously, you guys are known as the biggest, you know, blockchain gaming conglomerate in the world, probably a factor of 10.

1:31:21 And so, you know gaming really well. What is the state of the union of gaming when you and I bumped into each other six months ago? No, it was Satoshi Roundtable in January. You said, Brian, this is the year where GTA and the Nintendo Switch are going to put gaming back on the map for mainstream and that’s going to trickle potentially into blockchain gaming. I thought that was interesting. Also now we see the AI powered maybe where anybody can now code a game or before they couldn’t.

1:31:51 That’s why. And but we’re also still waiting for the blockchain gaming industry to kind of come into its own. And maybe that also has to do with the all coin season. So where are we? So where are we? So we’re kind of where we were six months ago in terms of the macro of the market, but I think that’s the actual buying opportunity.

1:32:09 So from an investor’s perspective, things like cross the ages is a great example. We like their product fundamentals make sense, we’ll support it. And by the way, you don’t just look at it from the perspective of is a game good, is product good? You also look at the founders and who’s behind them and say, is there an Ave. that you’ll get backing?

1:32:26 Because it’s, you know, for instance, as much as we talk about how Bitcoin’s great, Bitcoin is great because it became institutional, because BlackRock, Fidelity, all those guys started buying it as well. So is it an asset class that can appeal to that? OK, so so that’s important. Interesting. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game or whether it’s an L2 or an AI infrastructure.

1:32:45 If it can’t appeal to the institution, it’s locked out of a new asset category. Interesting you’ve always felt that way. So we started talking about this a year and a half ago actually. Sorry, in so earlier in 24 when the whole when pumped up fund really started to accelerate because up on that point, pump dot fund sort of, you know, before pump dot fund really became a thing, token launches were generally following a certain blueprint. And when it suddenly accelerated and essentially becoming sort of mass commoditized, how do you distinguish between a quality token and essentially, you know, just something that’s just sort of, you know, flat by 9, right? Yeah.

1:33:21 And by the way, that’s not that different from any product category, right? I mean, you could be a really great influencer on Instagram or could you be someone who’s just, you know, trying and you could be a one headed wonder like which which category are you and how you distinguish that, right? Who’s behind you, who’s your background? What have you done? All that kind of stuff.

1:33:36 And this necessitates you to do a little bit more research, again, as you do with everything, whether it’s for companies, individuals. So that doesn’t mean it’s just for gaming. It just means gaming has a lot more in that category, because we shouldn’t forget that within crypto itself, many people don’t understand gaming still, right? The they, they look at gaming as a trend and they say that’s fascinating, makes sense. But how many of the people who actually invest in crypto are actually people who are gamers understand gaming or have been in the gaming industry?

1:34:03 And it’s a very, very small number, right? That’s why it’s not very well understood. So you’ve got to look for those same factors. Now, talking a little bit about what gaming is as a macro. So as I had shared with you earlier, we generally look at tokens as market indicators, meaning that when a token does well, it’s not only the utility, it’s also macro.

1:34:25 Gaming actually has the highest on chain activity. It’s higher than than AI, for instance. And then why have AI tokens done better than gaming tokens? Because a sentiment on AI is better. So why is gaming sentiment bad? And this gaming sentiment isn’t bad because of crypto investors. It’s bad because broadly all investors have looked at gaming negatively because one gaming post COVID has not grown. So a lot of people didn’t realize that, but frankly, makes makes sense, right?

1:34:52 You know, metaverse in gaming was accelerating like crazy because everyone thought we’d just been living in our living room, in our bedroom and never leave home. And lo and behold, post COVID, we started travelling crazy and gaming didn’t radically drop, kind of like what happened with Zoom or Peloton, but it basically stayed fairly flat with a slight decline. But the slight decline is what’s fascinating. 2 two factors. One, declining child sort of birth rates in developing countries such as means less customers. So there’s a slow, slow decline, right? Of course, as you get older, you play games still, but the uptick isn’t the same, right?

1:35:27 The second factor is pricing for gaming up until the Nintendo Switch launch has stayed the same. And the Nintendo Switch only launched in June. So we’re talking really recent. So the effects haven’t been felt yet, right? So you’re paying the same for a game basically as you pay 10 years ago.

1:35:46 Whereas how many trillions of dollars have we basically printed into the market, right? The cost of milk is higher, cost of Labor is higher, cost of grocery is higher, but cost of games are the same. So in real money terms, game studios have been making less money. So what’s the news in the game studios? Lower profits, laying off people, cost optimization.

1:36:07 So it’s been a slow, slow, slower type of decline over the last really four or five years. And that’s been impacting tokens as a whole. And which comes my to, to my final point, the, the, the people who buy tokens are part of your game, but they don’t play your game. And the people who play your game aren’t necessarily the ones who buy your token. So the Venn diagram or the people who do both is actually very small, probably less than 10%. So that means you have to appeal to the token holders. That means you have to tell them the investor story as well. And then for the gamers, you have to tell them the gaming story.

1:36:42 Now this is something that most web precon game companies do not do, right? They either focus on one or the other and don’t understand the nuance between them because they haven’t run public companies. They don’t understand their dynamic. So that’s all part of that, right? So when when Sammy came to us with Cross the Ages and we had a chat, he realized very quickly he was great at making games, but he didn’t understand the investor relations nuance. But he recognized that the people who bought the token are not the people who play the game. And that was an assumption many of us included ourselves incorrectly made.

1:37:15 When the whole sort of, you know, as sort of Web 3 gaming and blockchain gaming thing really accelerated because we made an assumption that people who buy the tokens are also going to play the game, turns out to be not not the case. There was a much smaller ratio. But the ones who came from Web 2 into Web three, they rejected the token holders and it was even worse. They were like, we don’t care about you guys. We’re important about gamers because they came from the mindset of the people who play the game are going to be all the fun.

1:37:41 And actually that we’ve seen also backfire as well, right? So you got to merge both. It’s a new paradigm. And so and so I think this is just the evolution. So we’re getting better at this, recognizing that a token holder is a part of your meta game. It’s part of your holdings.

1:37:57 He’s part of your community, he promotes you, he talks about you. You need to, you need to incentivize him, but the game you play with him is different than the game you play with the gamer, right? They’re still part of the ecosystem. So I, I think of that as an evolution. So all these factors together are essentially going to create this perfect storm, we think, where gaming is basically going to sort of, sort of have its big moment again, because it is still the cheapest, fastest and most broadest form of, of entertainment. And also we still believe very much it is, you know, from a classic, let’s call it Apple design principle. It’s the most skeuomorphic form of crypto adoption there is from a design standpoint, skeuomorphic, yeah. So skeuomorphism is AI guess is what you call it when you try to create something that from a design standpoint is very similar to your real life experience. And Apple was a master of this.

1:38:51 So if you remember the very first interfaces at Apple, when you flip the page, yeah, it was a flip. It looked like you were flipping a book. Momentum. That was old, that was the old difference. They removed all that because basically new generations don’t don’t read books anymore.

1:39:03 So it doesn’t matter, right? But and, and also things like for instance, when you make a phone call, it has a handle like, you know, my kids have no idea what that handle is. They just, but why did they have that sort of, you know, phone handle? Because it was to tell us to say that design tells you it’s meant to be for phone call. So I recognize that. So that’s skiomorphism, OK.

1:39:24 And and when we say sort of skeuomorphic design for tokens, gaming tokens as in virtual currencies are closest examples of SNG crypto tokens and skins can be forms of NFTS or ownership in games can be essentially forms of digital assets you own. So the gaming audiences and we see this in Asia are most natural forms of users that can really understand on chain activity. And right now, that hasn’t really come to pass because right now we’re still talking about 7 million daily active players for blockchain gaming. Good number, but in comparison to the hundreds of millions of people who trade crypto, very small number.

1:40:59 And so how do we get to that point? We need to get essentially web free gaming to get to 100 million gamers that are essentially, essentially doing on chain activity and then seeing all the benefits from that. And why are we optimistic is because once you have a game that’s on chain or game activity that’s truly on chain, it becomes highly composable. And composability means UGC and gaming is all driven by UGC. So the two biggest games in the world, Roblox and Minecraft are all UGC user generated, user generated contract. And and what’s interesting about Minecraft as well is that all these people running their own Minecraft servers and creating their own micro communities, to us, it’s no different than running a note effectively, right? So the mental fame is kind of there. It’s just that it hasn’t been translated into a blockchain economic structure that is cohesively tying it together as a common community.

1:41:53 But that’s just a matter of time. And that’s where things like Sandbox can come into play as well, right? So we’re long term bullish, but we think the macro is going to improve radically when Nintendo Switch launches, which was a blown success and was pushing the price of essentially their sort of a Mario card up to essentially $90.00, which is, you know, $30 more than most of the games were sold for giving permissions, we think for other games to increase their price, hasn’t happened yet, but will happen soon, I think. And of course, Grand Theft Auto now GTA, however, was delayed yet again.

1:42:29 So when we spoke about this, GTA was meant to come out this September, maybe October. So now it’s coming out in, in I think May next year, right? So which means that sort of gaming, the big gaming explosion, will probably have to wait until Q1Q2 next year. OK, so that will wait, but then everybody will be talking about games and it also looks so good that you think there’ll be massive new adopters. Of gaming, I think also so with all the UTC gaming that’s happening out there, so for instance, GTA has the ability to run a role play servers as a role play server game.

1:43:04 So basically RP servers, which means you can run your own server. And we don’t expect Take Two to launch your own token. But under this new regulatory regime, we also don’t think that they’re going to take a very hostile stance towards it. And that’s important. And whether it’s them or someone else, if someone wants to run crypto rails on their branch of the game, then why stop it, right? You have the freedom to do so.

1:43:28 Under the past regime, it would have been dangerous to that happened because the SEC is going to come, come after you. But under this new regime, you probably have permission to do so and it’s fine. And particularly when there’s clarity as to what is usually token and what is not. I think it’s going to open the floodgates for essentially every gaming company, especially the big ones in the US to say, you know what, we’re going to launch a token or we’re going to do something or we’re going to tokenize something in that area as they’ve really been wanting to do, but they’re essentially weren’t, weren’t able to. And remember also that for us in the crypt industry, we’re used to living on the edge because we’ve been living on the edge all the time.

1:44:05 So this regime, the way they’re talking about it is enough license for us to say, let’s go full steep. But if you’re, you know, a major company like an EA, right, or even a Microsoft, you’re not going to launch a token based on, you know, positive sentiment. You want to see the law say that this is a utility token and that’s OK. And when that happens, it opens it up for for them as well. All right, So that could be coming where these games either issue their own tokens or other people issue them alongside in parallel which maybe gets to.

1:44:34 The game we should also remember, you know the whole sort of epic ruling that happened against Apple, right? This is. To allow in the American App Store? I’ve been told yes. It doesn’t apply yet to European App Store but now they can’t tax the out of game purchases. Correct?

1:44:49 There’s 3035 which will be rail against. For a long time exactly and and but it required essentially an enforcement to take place, right? Yes, it was epic ruling Exactly and and and So what we did then was an experiment with one of our blockchain games is we essentially added a crypto rail payment on it for tower for crazy defense hero and it had immediate adoption as well and people could start using the crypto to essentially pay for and receive value inside inside a game on the App Store.

1:45:17 So that was already an opening up of that and it was the beginning of that. So you can see how that kind of adoption is also going to open up because one of the biggest problems was the distribution vectors for gaming was restricted for use of crypto. Because even if I sort of have a game on the App Store, I can’t use crypto that that I could be sort of spending on it. And now I could if I wanted to, at least in the US. So I think that’s going to open up as well. So it’s it’s a confluence of all these things happening at the same time that is going to sort of accelerate the growth of this area.

1:45:47 Is that really going to pass to the European App Store? I think it’s going to pass globally. Apple’s going to be fighting that, of course. But if there’s one place that is even more sort of trying to sort of break up Apple’s monopoly, it’s Europe. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, give me the five year out perspective of what Animoca might look like.

1:46:04 Will you have offices in the US? Could there be an IPO either in the US or other markets? Could you buy one of these huge gaming companies or merge with them? What could it be? Yeah.

1:46:18 So first of all, to clarify, Animoca is much more than a gaming company. I mean 573 portfolio companies, billions of dollars of assets under management. Some people have actually described this as a are we the micro strategy of alts. I don’t I don’t quite like that term. You guys have a lot of investments in non gaming companies, correct?

1:46:36 We bump into you all the time in our own investing and I’m like Animoca’s in that, Animoca’s in that, yes. And it’s interesting, yeah, that you are. So I agree, there’s a lot going on. Plus you go to your own market, making you guys do a lot of things. And, and the way that I think of I’m an Animoca is that we started in gaming and we’re still very big in this. However, we’ve evolved because of the way that markets evolve when you want to push things of a new area. And that means that, you know, when we’re pushing digital property rights, we realize that digital property rights is much more than gaming.

1:47:07 Gaming is maybe a big way to push into it, but actually we can be so much more than that. This is why we have the stable coin. That’s why we’re doing sort of, you know, defy and deepen and AI and all these areas and expanding in this area. And we actually think what we’re building an Animoca is a company that is a Web three native business that essentially is a model to emulate for other companies who want to do business in Web 3. And what I mean by that is that the big thing that’s changing in Web 3 is that in my mind, we will no longer have fintech companies in the future, meaning that every business is a fintech company in the way that every business has to be an AI company and in a way how every business has to be an Internet company.

1:47:48 There’s no such thing. What’s the last one? Internet and Internet. Company Internet, I mean, of course you remember back it’s. True.

1:47:53 Now, yes, back in the day it was. Dot com.com You’re an Internet company. You’re not right. You’re on the Internet. You’re not right. Although it’s Walmart on the Internet, that’s a question. Well, but Walmart does does sales on the Internet, they have to have, it’s no longer a division. It’s very much encapsulated between it, whether it’s social media marketing or that kind of stuff, right. So, so that means as and they have to leverage it, right? It has to be a part of what they do. And so today we have these categories called fintech. And what Web three does is it essentially embeds Fintech into everything that you do, meaning that the small business owner, the restaurant, the small gaming company, they all have to essentially use fintech within their business to create revenue streams out of what they’re doing and beyond. And that’s what we’re doing in Animoca and we think we’re pioneering that model.

1:48:41 So give you an example. Why is market making so relevant for us? Because it’s a revenue generation model for gaming tokens as start, but also other tokens. The traditional model for the Web 3 gaming companies before was really a web two business model. Sell skins like NFTS, sell virtual currency like tokens. Yes, you have a market that trades them, and yes, you have basically people who can own them. But beyond that, it’s essentially a web two business model.

1:49:09 And it’s not that different from an exchange where an exchange essentially is really a web two business model as in the centralized exchange dealing in Web 3 assets. That’s what most of the early forms of web three games were. But you can evolve them because of default. And So what we realized is that, oh, hold on, we with market making, we can now make fees as a spread. Sure, there’s capital risk because we ought to put USTC or USTD at risk together with the other token.

1:49:37 But as a market maker, we can make a spread, which is much better than us selling tokens into the market, essentially into, into the, into the user. And So what it means that the game has to focus on creating volume and attention, which is much more aligned with the token holder, which is a different game to play than the one who’s only focused on is the game fun and, and, and exciting? You need both because the excitement of the fun of the game also drives volume, which in turn basically creates activity or the ones who own your tokens as investors. It opens up a whole new business model. And if you have a gaming company of size, you’ll want to have that as a business model.

1:50:15 And we’re experimenting with this. This is a business model we didn’t have two years ago, right? And we’re evolving. It’s, it’s a little bit like, you know, when Amazon first came out selling books. I mean, they still sell books, but that’s not why Amazon is Amazon, right?

1:50:28 And I think for Amazon and finance Mocha is exactly the same. You know, we came out in the market with, you know, blockchain games, NFTS, and that’s still what we do. But it’s a roughly a third of our business to a third of our business basically is, is our is our publishing business, is our sort of trading market making and of course our investment portfolio management side of the business. And so that’s why I understand why people look at us and say, well, if I invest in Animoca, am I essentially indexing myself against most of the big web three activities that are out there without having to invest in sort of 100 different projects.

1:51:02 And I think from a public markets play that makes sense. So while we haven’t fully baked that, I think I understand the reasoning behind it because we have an increasing asset portfolio position that comes from the way we manage assets in that particular space beyond Bitcoin. Of course, we have Bitcoin in a balance sheet too. But if you’re a Bitcoin holding play, then micro strategy or an ETF. But if you’re thinking about sort of what are the five to 10 stocks I need to buy to be indexed in sort of this next growth wave, the way that we’re setting it up is that we think Animoca has to be one of them, right? You need to have, of course, stablecoin, you need to have your, your exchange, you probably want to have your Bitcoin, maybe a couple of ETFs.

1:51:46 And then how do you play the rest of the market? Because this is not going to be a case where it’s going to be winner takes all, where there’s only going to be one or two big companies. There’s going to be a whole range of that. And and we think Animoca could be that company. So that’s how we’re setting ourselves up for that. So we’ve seen, like you said, Lubin’s doing the Ethereum treasury play.

1:52:04 We’ve seen a few. You know, obviously Justin Sun was talking about the Tron. Exactly. We’re going to see more and more ETFs coming out on L ones. How many more L1 ETF do you think we’ll see this year?

1:52:15 I think you can see a lot, a lot. I think everyone’s going to look at that. And I think, I think while the Bitcoin narrative itself will tire a little bit, even though it’s a good asset, it’s more like unless you’re buying a billion and nobody’s going to pay attention, right? And then you see this with altcoins coming as well. So I think we’re going to see sort of altcoin season. Some might be also stimulated, but again, not all of them, right.

1:52:38 I just wanted to just make this distinction. Yeah, that there is institutional altcoin, right? And then there’s everything else. Altcoin. Right.

1:52:43 And you are almost by definition institutional altcoin. We will cover it as institutional exactly, and also the total the. Ultimate index. Correct, right. But also the way that we look at the rest of the ecosystem as well is say you know, Solana and Ethereum and Tong, these will be considered institutional altcoins. Everything else that’s below, who knows, right? And doesn’t mean you can’t graduate to it, but you want to graduate into that.

1:53:07 And eventually, and this is about market sophistication and financial literacy, which again is, is a part of the whole of Web 3 thesis. As you become more financially literate, you will no longer classify them simply as Bitcoin and altcoins, right? And eventually we’ll be able to tier them as we should in in these type of categories, right? And also the use cases are also getting better because before, you know, we talked about the killer use cases being stable coins and of course, you know, holding Bitcoin and you know, maybe gaming. But you know what we do with open campus, for instance, with student loans on chain, that to me is an incredible killer use case for crypto.

1:53:43 So many students in the world need good student loans. Interest rates are crazy. D5 basically can sort of reduce your interest cost, actually make it better, faster, cheaper, which is what crypto typically does it on boards. Students essentially into the world of crypto because they’re going to start paying off their loan. Maybe in crypto, they have a wallet they need to have a digital identity with something like Mochaverse.

1:54:05 That means also they can start to sort of receive air drops for campaigns, maybe pay off their loans, do activity, add value into the ecosystem, Right. And most people ignore the fact that student loans is a $3.3 trillion global market. OK. If you take 10% of that and put that on chain, which is currently not super efficient, you’re essentially tripling defy globally. So you can see there’s so many other opportunities.

1:54:32 And again, at Animoca, that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for, you know, the moon shots and the big ideas that can really alter the space amongst all the other things that we do. And, and so far we had a pretty good track record of doing it as a, as a, as a, as a category, you know, in everything that we’ve been investing in. And, and for the last since 2021, we’ve been posting 9 digit revenues, you know, from some of the biggest most difficult crisis periods and continue to do so.

1:55:01 And I think therefore, it does make sense for us to ultimately be a public company that I think the stock market can appreciate better in large part also because we’re much more institutional. And does that come in the States? Stay tuned for that. Stay tuned. OK.

1:55:17 So like you said, I mean, you said in so many words, you have all the downsides of the public company now without the upside. That’s right. You were once a public company. So it’s very very different than really any entity in in Web 3. And also, if you’re an L1L2, it doesn’t make sense for you to be a public company. Maybe a treasury plate makes sense, but really you’re, you’re running as a foundation or you’re running as a, as an L1L2 run, run as a token ecosystem.

1:55:41 So I think, I think it’s very different from from what we do. We generate yield from the assets, right? A foundation doesn’t do that, right. That’s more essentially asset appreciation to the potential of the growth of the network. Yeah, this is fascinating.

1:55:54 Yeah, because you really set yourself up for and in some ways almost a must own asset in the space in the future for any investment vehicle that wants exposure in the space. And we see all these investment vehicles now adding Bitcoin to the portfolio via the ETF Ethereum to their portfolio soon, the other L once their portfolio. But at some point, there’s this whole other asset class that is the future that they’re going to want to have, and they can do that with you. That’s right.

1:56:20 And, and tokenization isn’t just about these digital assets, it’s RWS as well and not just stablecoins like sort of, you know, what I did with the Stradivarius. The interesting thing about the Stradivarius was that, you know, it’s a rare instrument that we know appreciates every year roughly 12 to 15% and most of the people, this comes down to the point. Tokenize your Stradivarius by the way, right? That’s right, Just for the record. Exactly.

1:56:44 Tokenize the Stradivarius Multi $1,000,000 asset. But what it allows people to do is to now partake in the growth of this asset. It democratizes access to an asset class that is understood by a previously excluded group of people in the financial world, which is mostly musicians, right? So you’re a classical musician, you’re not really interested in buying Bitcoin. And this is a this is a struggle about adoption.

1:57:11 You want to tell people, hey, buy Bitcoin, it’s great for you. Yeah. OK. But you have to 1st understand digital assets and you have to care about that. Those same people also don’t buy gold. They also don’t buy Tesla stock, right? Because they’re not attuned to this type of financial instrument.

1:57:26 They don’t understand it. It’s not their world, right? And yet the world without musicians will be pretty dire, right? We’d have a lot less pleasure, a lot less entertainment, a lot less fun, and frankly, a lot less love, right? Like, I think, I think we need that, right? And music musician is just one example. You could say the same for the culinary industry. You could say the same for actors. You could say the same thing for anything in the creative industry, anything we do, anything that delights us. Basically, most of them are not investors in the craft that they love because they’re investing in their labor. They’re still in the labor world, but they don’t, they’re not actually capital investors in that asset. So now when you present them with a way to have something like a Strad, in this case, what you’re really doing is you’re teaching them about money, right? And then they suddenly go, oh, wait, this asset appreciates the value.

1:58:13 I know it’s valuable. The person who buys Bitcoin might not care about a Strad, but the person who’s a classical musician, he will care about the Strad. And in that process, he now gets to learn about money and about value and about an asset class. And suddenly he learns why it’s important. And then he cares about inflation and he understands that money is not a store of value. And he graduates from that.

1:58:35 That’s what we saw in the Philippines with things like Axe Infinity on gaming. And what tokenization does is it opens up every category, turns it into a capital asset and introduces financial opportunity, therefore, therefore bringing financial sort of literacy and education in that process. And the future will be that most of us will be as we are digitally literate today. I mean, digital literacy was a thing in the 90s. Are you digital literate or not? Like I had to print my emails from a boss at AT&T where it was for a year because he, he just treated it like a fax machine, right?

1:59:10 So now we’re all digital literate, right? Even in places that are far and remote, however, or most of us. But what we’re not is financially literate. And what Web 3 will do is that we will all become more financially literate because everything we own will have the ability to be a capital asset tokenization, which means we learn about money, We learn about sort of what it means to have financial inclusion and investing and the relationship with risk. And I think that world will really radically shift and change when there’s billions of people who understand money. They don’t understand it today.

2:00:45 And you do that by going to their world with the Stradivarius with the you. Tokenize their world. Right, with the Super chef, with the whatever, you tokenize that world and they’re like, Oh yeah, I get that. Of course I’m interested in. That the, the number of people, yeah, for instance, this surprised me when I was in New York. The number of people who heard about the tokenized Strat in that world and said, I understand it now, surprised me because, you know, you could argue that it’s an esoteric item, it’s very valuable, but you know how much you would know about this.

2:01:12 But actually they get it right. And that actually gave the inspiration to, well, what else can we tokenize that most people understand but are actually financially excluded? Student loans was one of those examples, right? Yeah, right. If you if you tokenize student loans, you open up a whole new world and you bring in essentially hundreds of millions of students the next generation and teach them about money in the way they should have.

2:01:35 Yeah, I love the student loan on chain. Like that’s mind boggling. But look, I think this is all a testament and A and A and a demonstration of the evolution of Animoco, or at least the world realizing that you guys are so much more than just a, you know, Web 3 gaming conglomerate. I mean, there’s a lot going on here and I can see how you guys could be the treasury asset for all coins or whatever, something like that. It’s it’s pretty fascinating. And this, this whole brand new future is something we really haven’t seen and we haven’t seen it embodying in a company like Animoca.

2:02:08 So I just want to say for the record that we are investors in Mochaverse and in Animoca and something that I’m actually very proud of because the future is pretty incredible. And it’s something that London Real ventures, we, we came in on with the Mochaverse investment of a year, year plus ago, but also with the Animoca shares. And it’s, it’s really cool to hear where you’re going to take that. And I don’t see anybody anywhere near you yet. That’s what’s really exciting. So it’s not like what you do and the knowledge you have cannot be replicated quickly at all out there where as you know, a lot of people can do Bitcoin treasury companies or can do an ETF.

2:02:46 But what you have is, I mean, how long you been doing Anamoka for now? 10 years. Well, Anamoka itself started in 2011, but really entering into the crypto space was 2017. So it’s a pretty in, well in crypto terms we are old, but in sort of general terms still a young company. OK.

2:03:06 Yeah. So stay tuned for that. Follow what you’re doing, keep an eye out for what you’re doing with Open Campus. Of course, Mochaverse upcoming IPO, let’s see. And then what happens in the US and then all coin seasons come in Q4.

2:03:18 You heard it here 1st and. And gaming coming soon as well. Right after that, because GTA is early next year. That’s right. Yeah.

2:03:26 Always a pleasure. This is #7 I always say that you are the, the next Elon Musk. People can say what they want about that. That’s what I always, the way I describe you. And today it really makes sense.

2:03:38 I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say the word love in an interview or quantum entanglement. So you’re also evolving, or at least I’m getting to know you better. But you’re right, all those things are important. And how I like how you look at the arts and the cultures and the delights, because ultimately, you know, the biggest asset class is culture. You always remind us of this. And that’s one thing I maybe will close with. People think the blockchain is about maybe tokens and money or about technical things, but it’s not really it’s, it’s a reflection of who we are as humans. And it’s, it’s an embodiment of who we are as humans. It’s one of the most, I’d say, human inventions out there is is really everything that’s.

2:04:16 Going on the world and and sort of sort of close that thought, the most things we invest in is actually cultural and context. Our communities, our societies, our networks, they’re all embodied essentially through the strength of their relative cultures. If you have a weak culture, you have a weak community and we buy things to be members of those communities. We buy things that are cultural icons, whether it’s a Rolex or board aid doesn’t really matter. And maybe some of them could really just be status objects that are also cultural forms of cultural capital, for instance.

2:04:52 But at the end of the day, and I go, that’s that’s why, you know, we talked earlier about money. Money is important and but for most people, it’s not a means to, it’s not the end in itself, it’s a means to an end. And that end is ultimately 1, where they care ultimately about their reputation, about their legacy, about the symbolic and cultural capital which sits on top, right. And then the money part augments it, right? And you see this, right, If you meet a millionaire and he meets another one who could be worth 10s of 1,000,000 more, they’re still just millionaires.

2:05:29 How do they distinguish themselves but what they own about what they do and what legacies they’ve left? It doesn’t matter that he had 10 times $1 million. We don’t talk about that, right? Even the billionaires that are out there, we don’t talk about the billionaires who made more money than the other billionaires. We talked about the ones who changed the world, who made an impact, who did great things, who helped society.

2:05:52 And I think ultimately that’s what we all want. Amen to that. Wow, yeah, thank you so much for another incredible conversation. I’m looking forward to our next year to see what happened. And just thanks for everything you’re doing at Animoca and thanks for persevering.

2:06:07 You know, not many people could keep persevering with all of the ups and downs that get thrown at you in Web 3 and blockchain and gaming. And you’re always on point, always out there at every single conference in the world on stage, putting out the vision for the future. So thanks for that. Thank you for having me, all right.