The Next Billion-Dollar Ideas Are Already Here | James Wo | Maria Shen | Rui Shang | Ricky Mulvey |

[Music] all right next up we have the next billion dooll ideas are already here it's a panel being hosted by Ricky mulv host of The mly Fool money podcast if you'll please welcome to the stage our [Applause] speakers hello Welcome to The Late Show um we got starting closest to me is Maria Shen of Electric Capital uh Ray Ray Shong of 7x Ventures and James wo of the digital Finance group and we've got about 20 minutes to find uh your favorite investing ideas in crypto so want to make sure you're getting uh getting what you came for and this is a space you know I I came here with some skepticism curi I'm less familiar with it and honestly I'm not that invested in crypto so I'm excited to hear what ideas you're most excited about and uh maybe we'll start with Maria yeah sure so the premise of the um panel is that the billion doll idea is already here I think that's very true I mean ever since the first Bitcoin white paper um a lot of the ideas around payments a lot of the ideas around the benefits of decentralization have also or the ethereum white paper um a lot of these ideas have already been described um I think I spend a lot of time thinking about where are we in the adoption curve such that it's the right time like which which are the right ideas um that can gain traction and be expressed today um I this is a working Theory but I think really the money use case is probably still where a lot of the things that face mainstream consumers um can built so stuff around stable coin payments stuff around um being able to generate yield from stable coins and making these uis a lot simpler for mainstream users is probably where we're going to see uh the most adoption based on where we are today that being said I think the really exciting ideas that I would love to see but you know who knows if we're a little bit too early for would be stuff around um fan engagement with creators um being being able to split revenue on consumer facing platforms so you know think about how um maybe YouTube can have a decentralized version where early video creators can Garner money uh where live streams can have um uh live markets with tokens during the stream I think these things are super cool and super interesting uh just probably a question of when is the market ready to adopt some of these things go next to Ray yeah totally agree with that and uh I feel like for me it's mainly two directions one is compliance and the other one is crypto native so for the first one obviously was Donald Trump on the stage and SEC new president um there's going to be clear um like regulation framework coming up and I feel like in the future economy with the AI and lot driven you know millions of microtransaction um like per minutes and expecting more adaptive uh economy in the future and as Maria said I think stable coin can act like a DayDay API and uh I feel like this year not only payment but also a lot of like stab coin related business will take off such as on ramping on in those emerging markets and also uh custody for the founds and off ramping and allinone API such as like cross currency cross cran cross chains and also some rwas on top of the you know stable coin Reserve um this is One Direction I'm mostly bullish on the other part is like this year has been very extremely volatile the crypto market and uh for me it came from a Tik Tok background I was a product manager at Tik Tok and basically we were using the AI ability to improve the conversion rate of the platform so this year I'm being witnessing one Trend that's like Edge influencing especially we witnessing deep seek they introducing more efficient model and also we have uh Apple they have M3 chips and also ml Library um I'm expecting in the future if the agent uh eil will come and every one of us we do like Edge inferencing on our phone and by that time I think that we will compete with cloud um Computing and inferencing in that way um I think this is uh one company and multiple Direction I'm mostly bullish on so how can crypto and decentralization really combining with the idea and power of AI yeah all right I got some follow-ups but I want to go to James great so uh I feel like a uh a billion dollar idea is not that impressive because uh you can basically l a share coin on first day and have multi billion dollar FTV so it happens these days and in the past as well so I think which makes things very difficult in this space is you know your project survive for one more Circle basically four years then it's still popular you know in the next Cy cycle this is absolutely very very important and very difficult to achieve so basically you lunch a pro protocols with multi billion FTV but four years later the project do you know either above you know the the the price you do tge or like even go even the next level that's super super impressive I feel the based on the previous like track record I think defi is very solid you know if you just look at the data so we have def back to 2020 and uh at the peak of the market in 2021 we have around uh $180 billion TV in total but right now it seems like we we I mean and I know the market is not you know that kind of good uh Beyond Bitcoin so right now we have somewhere around like a 110 billion dollar TBL I mean defi is still still still very solid and a lot of like a I mean Blue Chip de protocols they haven't been hacked in the past four four or five years this is so impressive and it's in very important use cases this is the one thing I I trust a lot uh if you uh want to have some like a new ideas or new kind of Innovations which can potentially last for more than one cycle I think basically there are two things are big enough and could be sustain sustainable in the crypto Market the first is AI the second is rwa so we do invest into uh great AI project and we are start to look at uh good project in the RW sector because the the the you know the sector are big enough I think there so also the long-term you know narrative in instead of some like a short-term kind of hype all right I we got the AI stuff and we got uh stablecoin we got defi the stable coin thing okay so you lend out stable coins here's here's my question so if you are a if you're a retail investor you can go get High Yield Corporate interest bonds uh for about 6 7% a year that seems pretty good and you get the full you know you got you got corporate that produce cash flow behind that and and some regulations there what's the advantage that like what's the pitch for for stable coin lending that kind of thing then yeah uh well I think a it depends on where you are in the world um I think access to USD is quite limited outside the United States um in certain regions of the world and so that's already a benefit just being able to hold stable coins as a hedge against local inflation I think it's fairly compelling um I spent a lot of time working on something called the developer report which looks at the number of Open Source developers working on crypto around the world and one recent interesting um change in Trends is the uptick of open- source developers coming out of Nigeria for example um and speaking to developers there a lot of them within you know the younger younger people in already in Tech circles um they're working with crypto and they're working with stable coins uh precisely as a local currency hedge um so I think that's really interesting and then the ability to then save these stable coins into yield bearing vehicles um that uh you know it depends on where you are on the risk curve but in in certain in a lot of instances you can get quite quite a bit higher than six or 7% on stable coins depending on your risk appetite um but at the very least imagine if you didn't have access to us USD you can all of a sudden get access to USD you can put it into a safe vehicle that's backed by us treasuries on chain and at least get the treasury yield um so I think that at at minimum is already a great benefit okay so the two explanations I'm hearing one is if you are a uh if you're in an emerging market and um you can't quite access the markets that I'm talking about you go to your uh you have these stable coins that you're able to use and then the second one is if you want to go further out in the the risk curve and lend outside of what I just described the large corporations to uparts trying to do cool stuff in crypto then you can do that with the stable coin uh lending you described um let's go to Ray yeah on the AI agent stuff so the AI agents I know them on Twitter you know them on X they talk to you sometimes they're not people what what cool stuff are you seeing from the AI agents um so right now I feel like most of the AI agents they're just like merily like like automatically cre Twitter KS but what are we uh most excited about is actually this ability imagine like um agent in real world that they cannot access to a bank account or anything but in crypto like AI agent they can own a smart contract wallet or something they can manage their own private keys and also you have this like as I said stable coin as a you know like the currency API just flow like a data on the internet and uh also you have this like ability to you know whenever we do like multi-agent authentification this is a huge problem because whenever you delegate your agent to like multiple apps you need to log in and how you communicate and I feel like there's a lot of company uh dealing with it and also reasoning within the whole process of like uh conduct the risk and uh also risk assessment I feel like this is what uh real crypto agent is like heading too not only about like you know ship hosting and do the promoting then we'll go to James 3 five years from now what's happening in defi that you're excited about or you're optimistic about uh I see uh every Circle we see very good defi Innovations right so I think uh during the defi summer and 2021 we see unit swap we see maker we see Ai and during this cycle we see e uh we see hyper liquid there's a bunch of like a new things came out I think we are good at Dex and Landing right now I think that's pretty you know solid safe good liquidity so easy to use uh I think we can make more improv among other sectors uh maybe more like option tradings uh as well as insurance you know there's some sort of like a financial tools which you use in your daily life haven't been covered by by onch defi protocol yet so I think that's the the part we should discover more in the future all right and then we're going to go down the line starting with Maria so this is the Uber driver question this is an Uber driver tells you should I buy Bitcoin and honestly i' I've looked at this space a little bit I'm not as into it is probably this entire room but I wonder you know if I'm investing you know I'm just if you're putting a few hundred bucks a month into into stocks and I'll put crypto in there as well shouldn't you just just buy Bitcoin or buy Bitcoin and not worry about the rest of it for a lot of people I definitely think so um I think it's a great idea to just buy a little bit of Bitcoin at a time and um you know it again it depends on where you are in the risk curve how much uh and the corollary to that is how comfortable are you with losses um I do think the you know investing in bit Bitcoin is certainly a very safe way of being able to participate in the crypto Market um if there's more risk appetite then you can Branch out into other tokens I think another big part of um you know investing is really trying to understand where you have a lot of conviction where where do you believe something that perhaps no one else does and I IDE it's because you have differentiated data that tells you hey this is the right thing to believe in um and if you feel that you have this differentiated data and this conviction then that's where it makes sense to invest outside of Bitcoin as well but I do think for the normal person um buying a to like whatever is your risk tolerance bit of Bitcoin every single day every week whatever every month um is certainly a great approach Ray I'll go to you with the same question the Uber driver is asking you I'm interested in crypto what's your investment advice to them depends on who they are like can I ask you more questions like um how much you know about crypto I know uh you know they know of Bitcoin they know of ethereum maybe they're investing let's say uh 300 bucks a month okay let's just St in Bitcoin just stay in Bitcoin don't worry about the rest of it CU if you really think about it is uh the concept of money and value so a lot of people feel like okay I have a 100 buck and I just like store in my bank account I'd be good right but actually counting this inflation rate you actually your value got dilute through time the whole concept of Bitcoin is like we have this like immutable money that we can haging against any inflation but like we can have a fixed um schedule so for anyone that don't like I told this to my roommate literally she worked in the investment banking and she was like I was trying to onboard her to like uh ethereum salana and by the end of it I was like you know what you can just stay with Bitcoin cuz that probably the most value attracting and also you don't need to worry about you got scammed or to volatile okay so James I'm going to I can ask you the same question but if you have a similar we yeah for for the average person stay in Bitcoin or someone is knowledgeable about the space they want to get super risky and you want a flyer give them a flyer what's something they should look at someone want to become super risky oh okay I I saw people always want to super big return without taking the risks so I don't first I don't suggest they become super risky cuz you may lose your entire networ I don't think that's a good idea from a professional investment persp respective n this Uber this driver I'm sticking with the Uber driver thing I don't know if y'all like it this is um it's 100 bucks whatever they're not they're life isn't going to change based off of it or you can just St we can do the Bitcoin stuff we can stay with if if that is your if that is your answer I don't want you to to force you and do a different answer yeah I I did actually been asked by The Uber driver twice during this conference uh uh uh uh I I think I gave them the answer is first bit Bitcoin is a a very good investment for you even at this stage right so just imagine if you inves into stock and Bitcoin Bitcoin may have more further upside than the stocks right so it actually give you uh much you know uh potentials for have higher returns than than other traditional asset so this is actually very good the second you know I give the suggestion to to the driver is you know you have to be you know kind of confident about losing some of the money C the volatility could be high even Bitcoin have more than trillion dollar market caps too you know you can see these Bitcoin goes down loud so price goes down loud so can you can you need to be prepared for the volatility so you don't need to put your entire network into Bitcoin right now I don't think that's that's worth a try I think it's more like a put part of your asset you know you're doing what you are doing for other investment pull them out and invest in Bitcoin that's a that's probably a good idea the the the third part is be very cautious about using you know your custodian platform right so if you do this in FTX back to 2020 2021 that's not a good idea even if you own enough Bitcoin right they they they replay the you know after the bankruptcy they do replay your money but on a on a Bitcoin perspective you actually lose a lot of the money right so you know be be really cautious about you know your custodian platform trust only reliable platform or do you just buy Bitcoin ETF I saw you know they may charge some Annual fees on you but it's probably more safe for you all right we're going to land this plane on time um Maria Ray James appreciate you being here thank you for your time thank you for your Insight and thank you all for uh for hanging out and watching this [Applause]