Investment Meetup & Q&A: Raising & Building in a Bear Market | European Blockchain Convention 9

[Music] 3 2 1 go afternoon [Music] everyone good to see so many people still around uh it's always a bit difficult towards the end of day too um my name is Gareth jenkinson I've been working for coin Telegraph as a a reporter since 2017 uh full-time for over a year now um a broadcaster from South Africa so if you're wondering where that accent is from that is where it's from and I've really been looking forward to this panel um obviously the world the The Wider cryptocurrency space has been in a bare market for a good couple of years now since the Bitcoin L hit $67,000 back in 2021 it's been a little bit downhill from there obviously token prices have been depressed uh we've seen some major collapses in the space Luna Tera Midway through last year and then obviously FTX towards the end of last year and uh we've seen uh major crypto lenders fold we've seen companies um decreasing their workforces downscaling massively and uh it's really been uh uh tough for The Wider industry in general and on stage with me are people in uh investing in cryptocurrency uh projects and companies so they're really at the calace when it comes to uh deciding who gets the money and who's building interesting projects and uh for me it's massively interesting just to hear how they've been approaching it over the last two years because of course if you've been in the cryptocurrency space it has been difficult so I'm going to start from my immediate left with Natalie I'm going to let you guys introduce yourselves the companies you represent and a little bit more about that I'll turn it on and then it'll work hi everyone my name's Natalie Usman I'm with outlier Ventures we are an accelerator so so we take web 3 companies only web 3 companies uh and we put them through our our acceleration which means that we will help them to do 18 months of work in just three months um and right now uh in this down Market we really believe that Builders will build uh and we've now become the number one investor this year in web 3 companies uh with over 100 investments in a portfolio that's reaching 300 uh web3 companies so really EXC exced about the space and not at all scared about the bare [Laughter] Market I'm so bored of talking about the bare Market um can we talk not talk about the bare Market another 50 minutes that's it that's it just a little bit more by the way I feel like you felt yesterday now welcome to my world bit ropey if I'm being honest uh so hi everybody good afternoon I do I actually do appreciate there being a lot of people here at the end of the second day um so I'm CEO of DSX Capital we're a billion dollar fund we have private Equity Investments we have Venture Capital Investments uh we we are Venture Builder so it somewhat different to Natalie's model like we're going to be very focused on building one to three businesses a year uh from scratch uh and then strategically figuring out what to do with them and then we're an allocator to funds as well so we have a pretty broad purview especially really is in fintech digital assets blockchain and and now ai not just cuz it's cool cuz we know I wore a shirt today because I always sit next to Tim and he looks too fresh for me so I'm trying I'm trying something different today because I knew I'd sit next to him again my name is Alex and again thank you for coming out uh we we'll probably if you guys were here yesterday Tim and I like I I don't know how well prepared you are but we'll probably cover some points some points we talked about yesterday yesterday we talked about uh are we still investing in in web 3 and the short answer to that 30-minute panel is yes but now you're up to speed to continue this today so my name is Alex I'm the founder of Angel block um I think I'm going to provide a slightly different perspective since everybody here is more of an Institutional Investor um what Angel block does it is a non-custodial fundraising protocol so we're a defi protocol we're connecting investors and startups and doing the whole shebang on chain with Milestone so hopefully the 2017 Ico boom doesn't repeat where people raise hundreds of millions of dollars and 5 years later six years later there's no product or service to show for it um I'm a small fish when it comes to investing compared to my co-panelists I'm uh LP in two funds and I'm a more Avid angel investor so I probably do 5 to 10 checks a year something like that and smaller hi thank you for having us uh my name is ignio Fon I'm a managing partner at Inari we're a general asset manager not the stress in the world General we do things uh very broad from SE capital in digital uh the digital economy all the way to uh private equity and uh so our approach to to blockchain is from from comes from that angle not one of of a generalist uh kind of a investor so very looking forward discussing uh about the bare market and stuff yeah up um hi everyone um I'm D doubling down on being amazed and having this ped uh at this time of the day or the second day uh my name is arlav um I'm from yard Hub which is a web three focused venture studio and accelerator as a venture Studio we build uh projects from scratch with our in-house product teams and um then see if they fail or succeed if they go through the validation stage they raise the seed round we help them grow with separate companies um we have also launched an accelerator this year to increase our pipeline um and access to to teams and projects in web three because we're raising our seed fund um so yeah um bare Market is is like the the worst that we have heard too much this year uh late this week everyone is a bit on a positive note uh given what what is happening let's hope this stuff continues but still let's let's discuss what we can do if it doesn't yeah uh we'll definitely take it from there I know you guys are very tired of talking about the bare Market but as a journalist looking into the space it's very interesting for me because uh a lot of people make their Fortunes in a bare market right that's when uh your Investments pay off because things might be uh worth a lot less than they should be so my first question to you is and and maybe we'll try and keep it as brief as we can in our answers just so we can give everyone a good chance to share their thoughts is has this been good or bad for your firms in particular these these two years of uh bare Market that we've been through and uh do you see the Investments that you've made paying off in the next 2 to three years yeah we can go down uh I I Yeah Tim you take it first cuz you got 1 billion 1 billion in your War chest and is it paying off well actually we don't just to be clear I get asked that we don't have a billion of like fresh Capital we've got quite a lot of it already deployed um but we do have Capital uh so I'm I sort of have a slightly different view I suppose because I've just taken the job and as far as I'm concerned this could be one of the best job moves ever in terms of timing right like they OPP opportunity set is now I was saying on the other panel earlier like the the the the the the really high level take a step back smart way of looking at it is you sell into a bull market and you buy in a bare market like that actually is really what you should be doing like you should not have been buying in September of 2021 right we can all agree with that so I.E you should be not buying now so to me this bare Market has shaken out a bunch of useless stuff really raised the bar on quality and the and and the need to see real traction whereas you know we all saw the stuff that people were investing in a couple of years ago was like well that's never going to be a business um so it's a sort of a level of healthy rationality that I think has come out of this bare Market but also the fact that the institutional adoption has continued underlying it I think this is a really exciting moment like I'm actually I'm not calling the end of the bare market and if there's any press out there don't write this that's not what I'm saying but I'll my record off this of the was obviously on the record but like the I'm not looking at it like a bare Market anymore I'm looking at it as like the what are we going to do to make sure that when the bull market comes we're really well positioned to take advantage and leverage up because I absolutely agree with you this is where fortunes won and lost yeah we we we have a bit of a different uh I mean I I I agree I'm going to be boring I agree with Tim but my my perspective is a bit different and I I'd like to kind of Leverage that during this panel because we've been building we've raised in a bare market so the majority of our seed was raised last year um and we've continued to build throughout the bare market and uh yesterday we talked about a bit during that panel about you know VCS flip-flopping and now you have this new shiny thing called Ai and you have some VCS that are saying oh no web 3 is dead let's go to Ai and in six months times they're going to say no AI is too crowded they're going to go back to crypto um but you see a lot of this flip-flopping and we also talked about the fact that you do have builders that only want to build in a bull and you have VCS that only want to invest in a bull and those are obviously the people you want to stay away from but we've been we've been seeing a lot of that in the last few years so basically uh the tourists that come into crypto always get washed out in a bare Market but a bare Market when it comes to building I think it's really interesting if you play your cards right um I don't think a bare market is when you should deploy crazy Capital to do marketing um you know and let's differentiate community building and like actually going after user base it doesn't have to be you know 100,000 per month campaign on Twitter or whatever but I think a bare Market is amazing to really solidify your product focus on things like UI ux which in crypto has been a huge problem for the last you know since Inception like we've had amazingly huge ux UI problems so that's kind of what we've been doing at Angel block over the last year specifically we cut down this is the third panel I'm I'm doing this year because we're just heads down working we know the market is going to turn and basically we want our team and we want our product to be as highly optimized as possible to to actually do what we're here to do in a in a bull run but it doesn't mean we stopped working it doesn't mean we stopped doing raises or working with startups or talking to investors we've never stopped that but our priorities have shifted and we really want to double down on the product when things are slow and I think it's a good approach to have okay so maybe bit contrary and I'm not going to say that the Beer Market is uh is good I think it's h it's it's somehow worrisome not because uh the impact of uh of the prices of crypto because we never invested in in in crypto but uh mly mostly because what we see is that the ecosystem is not evolving at the speed that we were all uh expecting we've made investments in exchanges avatars uh nfts and and Defi and in all those which were mostly b2c thesis we we there was a predicament no that uh that a lot of people will be onboarded into web 3.0 and and those uh businesses not which are doing uh fairly well we're very happy with our investments but they could be doing much better if the on boarding of the general public into web 3.0 would be at the stage we thought it would be a couple of years ago so there is a big I would say the big tax that we I mean the the the overall web 3 ecosystem is paying the big tax that we're paying for these Beer Market is the fact that the general public no is not in boed on boarding and therefore the technology is uh is lacking its potential that's that's what we should be looking at not so much whether the blockchain Bitcoin goes to 50,000 but whether we know we get a a billion more uh customers in that that's what we should be looking at just uh just to add to double down on that idea of um the general public being tired of of the bare Market but also Builders and Builders qu it um because like this bare Market is quite long this time and um a lot of good teams good Founders not the tourists that have been mentioned a lot of them of course been washed away but there are off teams that didn't manage to raise enough money when they could or didn't didn't want to raise more money than they needed and um being in the situation where you really struggle to raise money these days raising even like a few hundred K is is a challenge for for prod projects and um with it's being very difficult and at the same time being constantly you know like fed uh criticize whatever you do uh this pressure um well I I'm witnessing a lot of teams quitting I mean like we are tired uh this this Market is too difficult for us and I think this is something that web3 loses in this market because last year and the year before that we've seen a lot of good teams coming from traditional it to join web 3 and now they're like oh no we're going to do this classic stuff so I think we uh it really there is some tall on on on the market from from the bare side can I C can I ask a question is that allow of course wait can I answer the question yeah I just wanted to know like if if you can answer this question though if you'd like but I I just wanted do do you think that's because they've never seen a bull bear cycle so if they're coming from web 2 and into web 3 and burning out is that strictly because they don't know that it's about to get better like there will come a time when it's better a short a short answer to this is that because this industry is so immature the level of hate fud and criticism is also immature and like a lot of people from classic they just don't used to this P of around them and then they're just wow sorry sorry for that it was no I actually confused me it was a good question because really 2008 was the last time there was a real crisis that's equal to this and I don't know if everybody on the panel was there for that but anyways uh what I wanted to add is um what we've seen is professionalism right um we're see so 20 beginning of 2022 I don't even think web 3 was the media term we it was just starting and now web 3 is the term that we're using um what we're seeing at outlier is that uh there the companies web 2 companies now that we have the term for it are coming to us and they want to play around in this sandbox so actually those web two companies that have been through these Cycles are saying hey now is the time where we can learn for much less than before so we're partnering with a lot of big brand names actually who are saying we want a cohort of our own so that we can try things out so that's what I've seen in this and that's really positive um as an accelerator maybe you can just touch on um how difficult it is for some of the companies that you're working with to build through these past two years has like has it been as as tough as as years before it so it's uh I mean it's tougher than years before right before you got money easily and people were tripping over themselves what we tell our companies please just build a product that's working product Market fit I mean it sounds you know repetitive get traction and if you can bootstrap a bit longer because it is going to be hard to uh get investment when you come out of our accelerator we're going to do everything we can to help you but make sure you're sustaining yourself and do things to sustain yourself and I'm seeing so much creativity with what they're doing um and we do have a low closure rate actually not as many companies as you might think in our 300 portfolio have uh have shut down so um I want to throw this over to you with with Angel block you guys are using blockchain technology to essentially allow people to invest in web 3 companies so don't make me sound like a financial adviser though no no no that's that's not what I'm insinuating um but you are essentially one of these blockchain companies that has had to build in the market yourself right uh creating infrastructure for other people to invest was that difficult for you to put your head down I mean like you said the last year you've focused more on building than doing any marketing or anything like that es especially when it comes to raising it was um not not not to like talk too much about angel block but it was difficult because we don't really fit a specific narrative and we kind of went in depth on narratives and what 2024 can can have in store s uh when it comes to you know Investments but we don't really fit a specific narrative this is more this is like a angel block is a passion project of mine I've had uh I've seen seven figure Returns on some Investments personal Investments that I I basically got dumped on by uh team with team allocations that you know I had no clue and it turned out that was the case like a year later right so again we aled about Ico boom 2017 um I'm very tired of the BS in this market and I've been in this market um since 2015 I've been involved fulltime since 2017 so I've seen a lot of these Cycles I've seen a lot of this BS and I I think this kind of hits the point that ignasio was saying earlier where it's like why you know I thought we'd be further along why are we still dealing with the same problems and I think Angel block is kind of an an answer to that we just want more transparency uh you know bare Market a lot of these launchpads which we we we don't we we don't call ourselves that um rmos totally different but you have essentially you have something as predatory as in my opinion launchpads are which don't do anything in bare markets they spin up sometimes it's the same founders with a new project spin up during a bull run um and then dump on unsuspecting retail investors uh to the point where I was doing a deep dive on one Launchpad and what they actually do is I mean and if it's centralized it's often is just the black box like what they show you on their front end you need to take it at face value because they're they if it's not on chain it's very hard to verify and I remember one uh raise that I was doing a deep dive on that this let's call it Launchpad XYZ had and it was they they supposedly raised 1 Mill $1.5 million for a project I've never heard of which that in itself is kind of weird um and it was across 34,000 participants and coincidentally it was this two weeks after FTX blew up which is kind of weird that wasn't a really good you know investing sentiment in November of last year uh the project launches and they currently have 559 holders on chain and you know you can check charts there was never more than a thousand so there's a lot of sketchy stuff like that um when it comes to just building um you know it's I kind of agree with some of the things that y roav said regarding you know teams being burnt out because you're kind of waiting for this influx of capital to come in and you're wondering what when is it going to happen uh right but I think if you're building and you're achieving some kind of product Market fit like if you do have some users like 10 users is still users people in this market they think if you don't do a 20x upon launch you know then you're a failure that's that's not the case um if you have some users and you're building for those users I think you're going to do very well I I think if we enter when we always enter bull markets 10 users turns into a thousand or 10,000 users and I think that if you haven't seen these Cycles before it's very hard to imagine like how fast and how quick Things become in terms of growth during bull markets and being in this space for this many years you know it's sometimes even I get like I do get burnt out during some bare markets because you know two years in our industry is like a decade or two decades and and most web two industries and I I I truly truly believe that um I'm going to turn this towards how you've approached investing over the last two years because obviously you're all pretty Discerning when it comes to to putting your money where where it's going to work ignia maybe we can start with you first just in terms of how you described your firm as a generalist approach have you looked at exchanges have you looked at infrastructure providers what is what has been the focus of your investing when things have been looking Bleak yeah first of all we decided what we didn't want to invest in no which was mly anything which looked speculative like uh like crypto so that left us with uh things that would mat The Narrative no of the dent Ledger is going to create is going to disrupt uh Industries so we we invested from that uh from that approach what new business opportunities will this technology bring and uh and and that's where we wanted to put a uh mostly uh our money no and uh and and this not led us into no things like uh no we would like uh to have invested which we haven't into digitalization of assets we've invested in a in nfts that had a know a promise to change the way they advertising agency the advertising world would uh would work or or would invest in um in avatars that can change the way identity uh happens or or or or avatars that that change the the gaming experience things of of that nature in in summary know the reinvention of of existing Industries Jam well let's say um our investment strategy and sentiment really changed like during the last year not the two but the last year and um this is something that I've heard from many fellow like we see is not the bigger one but the smaller ones is that you should be really considerate about deploying the remaining Capital you've got so we've actually uh what we've done is that we have identified the portfolio projects which we thought and still think have the largest chances to survive and um then we just like preserve the capital to help them live as long as possible as it might be needed uh until the market sentiment changes so that's our current uh Focus just we we we made some bets and uh now we're like focused on letting them breathe and and live uh as long as possible guarding those Investments Tom you said that you guys have been focused on you know um identifying a potential project starting it from the bottom up and building it and then letting it do its thing has that been the case over the last two years and what is what has worked for you so far well we've got I I I love that that Venture building kind of concept be because well one important thing about us is that we're operators as well as investors like we have operating businesses that we own 100% of therefore we are also at the cace also dealing with the the the challenges that some of our investments deal with and I think there's value in that for us in our particular area um so that makes us active in a very particular way when we engage but also if we're also starting stuff from scratch uh and investing in all of it and and owning it that zero to one moment I think that also gives us a different perspective on what the same people you know at the same stage are trying to do right so that was always the concept of data sex which is we've got all the way from PE all the way to doing it ourselves and we're investing and operating um but I think that and I I apologize to some of you who heard this on the previous panel but like my rubric I think what I said yesterday is I make it I make my career is made of trying to sound clever but I'm not that clever so I have to come up with simple rubrics to help me remember stuff and my simple rubric for investing is people uh commercial and structure and so in that order so if if the people aren't the right energy if the deal atmospherics don't feel right if I don't trust them they don't seem to align with our values then I will not go further there's no point talking about your business there's no point no matter how the valuation might good the valuation might look I just am not going to invest if I don't like like and engage with and really respect the people I think that's really really important and I think that alone is likely to give us 2x our portfolio I'm going to stick with that rigidly but if that works and then you go to the second one which is uh which is commercial does it have a good strategy product Market fit what about our portfolio how will it engage in that um and then we have to believe in that and if both of those are are good then we'll talk about structure and if the deals wrong price won't do it right and it's sort of that that tends to be I I I find a really good rubric to kind of pass through the opportunity set and then you overlay like in terms of our thesis institutional adoption anything that that allows for bigger institutional adoption I will invest in that all day long because that's the Big Kahuna I I confirm that rubric that's what we do um but we're well look we're large numbers right we invest in a lot of companies 42 uh in q1 we then calmed down a bit because that was a lot so we've been doing on average around I think we have 26 right now uh in our cohort uh in our cohorts but what we do is we change our themes so we decide we're going to do something different uh every quarter so it gives us a you know three to four new thei a quarter uh so that makes it really exciting so for example right now just to give you a range we're doing something with polygon we're doing something with near we're doing a zero knowledge proof thesis uh and we're doing something with Walmart KPMG so you know it's really and that's around decom Merce decentralized Commerce new term uh and then in in q1 we've already announced we're going to do something on bitcoin did you say DC Commerce decentralized Commerce you heard it here first there you go yeah decom put it in your article um you touched on zero knowledge proofs I don't know if any of the other panelists have thoughts on it I've I've covered it a lot at length this year especially in the ethereum ecosystem zero knowledge proofs allow you to scale um Layer Two protocols to essentially give you very low fees High throughput uh which is very very valuable to ethereum and they're already taking that technology across to bitcoin and they're looking at how they can use it to improve bitcoin's um processing uh capacity essentially um not just on bitcoin though yeah yeah across the ecosystem of course a number of smart contract protocols um how important is investing in uh infrastructure like that I mean that's what's important right you you're trying to look for something that's actually giving value and a use case to the industry right yeah so in for us infrastructure has been doing well for followon funding uh so I think there's a real appetite for that um we do think I mean Bitcoin has been rallying but also it seemed to coincide with us announcing that we're going to have a Bitcoin cohort I don't know if they're related I'm joking but anyway so look um we do think the infrastructure again has to do with uh usability um and and being able to kind of go cross chain and be able to kind of interact in a way that's usable so yeah doing well um I also want to talk about managing your Investments because as a as a a journalist I've always been curious you part ways with money how active are you with the projects and companies that you part ways with your money to because I mean if it's you know uh tens or hundreds of millions of dollars surely you're going to be knocking on their door every week saying hey give me an update what's happening here this one's free for anyone to take I've got some of my Founders here so we stay in touch definitely yeah we are also we we tend to invest in uh not following the old V rule of being close to your uh to your companies some of the companies we can travel no for within the day and uh and we normally have a seat in the board of directors if they have one and uh and try to know help them uh not only knocking to see how you doing but also how can we help well I think the you know I I ran a startup and it failed right um which everybody in in the entrepreneurial game will tell you if you haven't done that you're not ready to invest right like you have to have gone through the pain the scrap uh and had at least one big failure before you can be really successful and I think I know for a fact like I remember from my experience and other experiences not my board was actually quite engaged but like there's nothing worse than than like disengaged investors there's no value in money per se right like like and if if all you can do is get money for money's sake and there's no strategic value to it I really think that's suboptimal on every level so therefore the the implication has to be fewer Investments more activity more engagement active board participation or chair participation or advisor ship but the other thing that we're really really important for us which is where the name DSX Mac up come like DSX comes from which I'm actually amazed no one's asked me yet in a month what that me why we chose that so you heard it here first it's just this idea of spirit through the machine so all of the all of the the elements of our portfolio should be working with each other like we can't look it as a portfolio of singular Investments they all have to engage to get the greater than the sum of the parts so there's not only active with a portfolio company but looking left and right to all the other ele ways in which we can sort of lift the ecosystem view that that's our two c um maybe you can just touch on Angel block because obviously it's decentralized right people have the ability to invest through it I mean how do they I actually love I love the fact that you started this question with you know you said you're saying figures and like you know it's usually tens of millions of dollars I'm like yeah I can totally talk about that with these guys hundreds hundreds no but actually I I think my my experience I I'd rather take the the angel route here because um I I like to be Hands-On with my investments and um I like to help you know I've had many advisory roles and advisory is another really weird thing in crypto like 99 % of advisers are zero value ad which is which is really weird and um I've had one advisory gig where I felt like I was Zero value at not because I didn't do anything but because nothing that I brought to the table was actually utilized and I think there's a lot of parallels when it comes to investing if you're in crypto if you've been through you know a bare a bull cycle uh so that's probably going to be like four years you know people especially if you stick around through a bear you met you meet some of the best people when you stick around through a bear so you have contacts you have a network and when it comes to investing even if it's if it's a smaller check it doesn't matter if it's 50k or if it's 50 million if you have value to add but the project is not willing to use that value whether it's a contact or you know maybe it's a bis of opportunity uh that's one of my red flags and that's usually when I kind of take a backseat that's why I'm okay like you your Network's big enough you know you've you've done enough where you don't need to meet this investor or uh I had that happen actually last year during during a bear where uh a company I invested in actually they just ghosted one of my um payments contacts which which I still have from when I was running a centralized exchange it's like it's a really good like you you don't want to burn that contact but when something like that happens is usually when I know I'm taking a backseat and I I I don't have high expectations for it if you allow me to add though there is always a flip side not to this adding value to the to your investe which is the willingness of the founder to listen and I I found through no years in the industry that one of the biggest lies in the e in the startup ecosystem in general is a we want a smart money and i' say it's a it's a big lie because no I don't know six out of every 10 they don't really want to listen uh so pledge people to kind of think wisely what is really that you're looking for in your investor and are you willing to listen for something maybe that that you don't want you're not going to agree or how do you actively listen or actively challenge I don't want dump entrepreneurs who say everything say yes to everything I said but but active listening is sometimes uh missing a little bit yav you look like you're about to add something yeah we we as a venture Studio we naturally own big Parts in the company so we just can't can't disengage but uh on the founder investor side what is really common is that Founders are not actively engaged in trying to extract value from from from the investor so very often often you as an investor or as advisor need actually to Ping them all the time hey how can I help you I can make an introduction here and there and things like that so that's something we try to educate Founders on so that if you have some context some intro you should utilize it like within 24 hours and double down on that and just ask the investors whenever you need help so this this is education actually because a lot of people just are not used they don't know how to ask for advice how to ask for help because they think if they call their investor or write an email and ask for help the investor will think that they are not capable of doing these things themselves and that's they're afraid of like creating that bad image so uh but this could be could be tackled and educated but but it's we're we're talking a lot of what we're talking about now I feel it really strongly pertains to equity type Investments I think it's a bit slower Pace you know the exit isn't clear especially earlier on because you know in this space which is super highly liquid doesn't sleep I think one of the best things a investor can do is you know when it comes to Value ad is not dumping tokens and they can't even do that you know like like and it's I know a lot of Founders who are amazing Founders but it's exactly what you say Y where it's they don't want to reach out because it's like no they're already dumping tokens what kind of value ad can I have because they already showed that you know why that's why you need to have good stfts and investing protocols so that you don't have such investors yeah um I I was just going to move on to that I mean um icos in 2017 were all the age and and uh Alex you touched on it earlier some of them raised tens of millions of dollars and they never came out with a working product right and just sorry to the investors but these people either ran away with their money or you know they just they weren't able to come out with something that's working uh in the last two years uh you as investors have you been Focus fed on investing or building companies that have a working product or a business model that looks good what's the most important thing I mean does there need to be a working product or or business model uh is it worth the risk if it's not actually there and something tangible is is already on the table for for a token launch you mean yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um there haven't been a lot of token launches so you know I think we've we've been we've been waiting for them a little bit I think they're going to look a lot more like uh crowdfunding to be honest in uh in the traditional world where you you need to show your investors the same thing that you would be showing institutional investors um I'm not sure what it's going to look like going forward if I'm honest we have a token launch advisory we do this for our more advanced companies that are going to launch their tokens um and I'm waiting to see the space I think it's going to look a lot different it won't be a smart contract and idea and a and a launch and like hey come take this ride with me I think I think everyone's a little savier which is again I'm going to go back we're more professional it's a professionalization of this industry well let's face it 2017 was a goat Rodeo of just nonsense right like the amount of money that went up in smoke it's frightening you know like that's no way to that's no way to do this like let's let's all be sensible right and the funny to the tautology I find in this token space is like I'm I'm such a believer in all of these new tools and I'm a Believer in that route to raise Capital but I'm massively skeptical about anybody who wants to launch a token and the bar as far as I'm concerned so I want to in like I by the way I really like structures that have equity and tokens because then you then you're really talking about building a real business anything that's tokens only I think I'm kind of calling it from here on in no interest probably but if you've got a real business model this goes back to your point like there's got to be something real like that the fact that we went through this period where a white paper was sufficient is just like in retrospect it's like well there no wonder what happened happened you know like what what were we expecting you can't that's no way to do it like there's got to be traction there's got to be re realism but I think I'm excited about the the the the new wave of really strong token projects that will succeed because I suspect there's ways of leveraging that as a capital raising mechanism that we haven't really harnessed yet but I think it becomes more institutional I think you're right yeah there's a lot of work to be done in the in the token world right and I I feel like we're with Angel block we're adding our two cents to it but it's exactly as you said them but you know there there are projects where it's there's not going to be Equity right because it's a for example Swiss Foundation it's an L1 right and the token is the Tok you either like the token or you don't like the token right yeah I'm going to agree with you you shouldn't say no to everybody just because they're token on don't Tim don't say no to me just yet yeah I we'll talk we'll talk after oh sorry just one more thing when it comes to when it comes to tokens and you mentioned um the Ico boom uh there's one really important thing even if you have a token because a lot of projects I'm not calling anyone out here because I think it's just it comes with a territory and the space is sometimes I'm talking with people and it seems like they confuse a token with a business model and they start thinking like the token is the business model so everything is going to be great if you launch in a bull market and token is going up but what's the company doing when it's bare and things start going South right I think that's one of the most important things because if you if you tie all of your expectations with a company with token going up like the music's going to stop and what happens then so is there an actual business model right A lot of times uh fee generation is an amazing tool to look at you know we had during onchain summer you know there was a really interesting project um called unibot and at its height they were doing as much fee generation I think it was per per seven days for all summer as GMX right which is huge decentralized perpetuals exchange So that obviously really really interests me because if you can launch in a month and you can do that kind of volume you can generate that many fees like it's pretty easy to to verify your valuation right so business model is having a token is not enough yeah I'm I'm I'm going to second that uh totally the I think the the token model is is is broken it's completely broken for 99 % of the tokens that have been uh launched where whether there was or wasn't a real purpose in the company know like team said the the company has to make sense even if the company has has had sense people would launch tokens with be no relationship with what the company was doing and and what they call tokenomics no you you like a project and uh so you're all excited and then you go quickly to the Token economics page not to see okay how how is this going to come up and then you realize that the token the token economics is just a chart that shows who's going to get the tokens when which excuse me but has nothing to do with token economics that's not there is no connection between how the company creates money and how the token uh uh no attracts this money or captures this value as as you saying so this guys needs to be fixed because it's it's it's not there for the large majority of the tokens and people continue see token no launching of tokens away to fundraise which is okay and it's very interesting and and I hope that we can figure it out because it would be a true revolution in the fundraising process and we're all looking forward but please fix the the token uh economy and and and it's not there because that's actually something that happened like I totally agree with you because that's something that happened uh I think in around 20 2018 where I remember for all the bad that happened with Ico boom back in 2017 when you said token economics it meant something different than it does now and I remember uh I asked for the token economics a few years back and they sent me total Supply and the vesting schedule I'm like whoa whoa this is not what we're talking about so there was it used to mean what it should mean but the switch happened a few years ago and it seems like every like not everybody but a lot of people are on board and it's very confusing yes um doubling down on what Jasio said is that in 2017 and 18 tokens were primarily used an investment vehicle um it was not integrated into into the economy as well and a lot of projects didn't have any any business model behind um but um what I want to say also on this topic is I think we will have it once again at least once again uh this hysteria around investing into whatever seems to bring value shortterm value because when markets start booming um the common sense just leaves the leaves the room completely and um there there is no way to fight that actually and um I think what legit projects should do and that's one of the most important roles I guess of venture Studios accelerators and incubators in the space Venture builders in the space is to filter uh these kind of teams and these types of projects so that when uh like not the retail money but some institutional some Venture big uh large Venture money comes it comes to the legit projects with legit um business model tokenomics if there is token integrated into the business model and having sense uh but I I I think we will see 2017 2021 at least once again and maybe even in bigger scale because the whole scale will be uh will be huge we've only got about 2 minutes left I don't know if there are any questions from the crowd I just want to gauge it very quickly we got one hand up there um two hands I'm going to just jump down quickly and go to you please keep it brief two minutes uh was it you there we go yeah hi uh very good panel I think this is the best panel uh here today so very very good uh short short question short question for uh yeah well done guys yeah short question so do you see anything change from 2020 2021 And in regards to how the uh tokens are launched because I don't see I don't see that and why so many VC funds are like backing still the projects that are like launching right now you see say you see sui you see all these project up TOS with very very bad economics in my view why are so many VC funds are still like uh putting money into that that um and and one more thing do you agree that VC funds are coming in to exit or is it not fair uh what what I said Thank you with withu and Aptos it's because the VCS are not you know uh there's always like a public round and what's most important to remember is VCS are not investing in the round that you're investing in right and that was the case with salana that was the case with a lot of these l1s that are predominantly based in the then there is some uh Cayman or offshore entity that is the token issuer right so it's it's it's all about the valuations it's I think everyone wants a piece of the L1 pie and everybody wants to pick their horse and especially with everything that happened in the last bull market you know if you guys were here if you if you remember like the the multiples on Avalanche the the crazy multiples on salana and I and I just think that um not not to talk down about VCS because again it's VCS are like regulations like we talk VCS like there's one VC or the same group of VC's investing in everything it's the same as talking about regulations we talk about crypto regulations like there isn't you know options various different jurisdictions that are interested in crypto right so Nuance can I offer the short question uh the short answer to the question why easy money that's why yeah I'm I'm trying to offer nuance like I just mentioned sure sure no but it's it's true because again a lot of VCS they look at what did well I'm a hammer I see a nail I you know that's what I know how to do if that did well maybe it's going to do well again and that's why you're still seeing a lot of VCS are actually late on Trends right like I think we can agree on that like that's not it's called it's called formo yeah exactly so you know what's going to be the next big narrative and I can promise you whatever the next big Narrative of 20 24 is you're going to see 2027 bare Market Investments by VCS in that narrative yeah there you have it I yeah I think it goes without saying that most VCS have invested in a preed that you were not aware of and they're going to make a lot more money than you are unfortunately I think this has been an absolutely fantastic panel thank you very much for all your insights you guys are very Discerning and clearly you know what you're doing with your money thank you very much sorry fantastic thank you so so much Gareth Natalie