Crypto’s Identity Crisis: Defining the Meta of This Cycle - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

how are we doing good good okay cool we I feel I uh forget his name but we we told him that uh Mert's company is helium and not helias and now I feel bad for mert but mert just uh announced a 22 $23 million raise today so congrats to Mt thank you thank you and Aus um okay so we are talking about crypto's identity crisis basically trying to answer this uh big question that you see on the timeline like is is this cycle cooked um and why is uh why why why are prices at sometimes alltime Highs but people are all salty on the timeline so we're trying to answer that in the next 40 minutes so maybe um uh Jason I'll throw it to you for this first one uh prices Bitcoins almost had an alltime high but people are upset on the timeline and there's this big question of like is this cycle cooked and can retail make money anymore you had this crazy viral thread in the last cycle about how to make money in crypto so I'm just curious what is your analysis of like what's happening this cycle so far yeah well I think there's a spectrum of what retail means like obviously you know my parents who don't really know how to even use coinbase are retails and then folks who you know snipe every meme coin launch are also retails so I think some of the retails have found pockets of opportunity but I I think if there is a theme this cycle it's been the maturation of the market so the understanding of the concept of fully diluted valuations so if you think back to like 2017 2018 I'm sure all of you guys remember there was a lot of unit bias right so folks would look at assets and basically say oh this mcoin is trading at 10 cents and this mcoin is trading at a dollar so to them oh that seems like more implied upside for the former so that was very unsophisticated type of thinking but I think over the Cycles people are now learning actually what the concept of valuation actually means there's slightly more consensus on value AC cruo and and kind of valuations for at least some verticals especially for things like defi um and then one of the big things that people have been talking about is also the phenomenon of like low float High fully diluted valuation coins as well so a lot of that kind of recognization that recognition that um a lot of projects in crypto are probably valued a little bit above where the fundamentals are are is basically now uh being resolved so I think it's a natural process that a lot of the alt coins basically got demolish the cycle um but it's you know it's just it's just crypto things my counterargument to uh it's uh you know we're we're re valuing these things and it's based on fundamentals is that there are only two ways to have made money so far this cycle owning salana and owning mem coins and if you didn't own one of those two things you have not made money so meme coins I I'm you know no fundamentals there so maybe uh Antonio I'd throw it over to you like what is your analysis of what's happened this cycle so far I'd say it's twofold first of all we have historically seen all Cycles be 10x bigger than the previous one but the issue is last cycle with FTX and all of that hype was so big and had so much Global attention how are we going to be 10x bigger than that that's affecting real change in the actual world and we're just not there yet so I would say it's going to take us a lot longer to actually get to that point and of course there's hype and then there's fundamentals but there does need to be some fundamental value behind these hype cycles and I just feel like we're not quite there yet I think um that's the main thing that's caused it yeah why do you think so I remember at the beginning of this cycle I was like buying tokens with fundamentals thinking like the you know the makers and ddxs of the world thinking that number would go up because of fundamentals and that's not really how it's worked so what is your analysis of like I I guess what I don't know if this is to Jason or to excuse me to Antonio or to Alex or whoever but you know Jason was talking about fundamentals are going to drive things what is your analysis of is that actually the case or not I think both are important and I think narratives are super important in crypto but narrative has to be based on something and if we just look at what is The Narrative of this cycle it's mem coin's main character being anom and that's great I definitely respect that but let's be serious here does that actually hold a candle to the world changing phenomenon that was at least a narrative form of FTX and SPF right I think it's just a different order of magnitude and we haven't gotten there yeah do you guys think that retail will be able to make money this cycle like they have in all past Cycles well I think your question about dispers uh sorry your question about like uh everyone being upset and uh fundamentals are sort of related um I came from web 2 as a traditional VC before before crypto and there's this traditional Finance concept called dispersion and dispersion is the difference between the relative like the relative returns between the best performing assets and the worst performing assets or the best performing like sectors and categories and the worth performing sectors and categories and um there's just massive dispersion finally happening in the last few years and I don't think that was really the case in the prior Cycles like I think if you look in 2017 and 2021 by the bull markets everything was just going up like universally across the board whole categories all categories going up basically the same and that's changed some things have have fallen uh more slowly in like the 2022 period some things recovered faster and uh so like you know salana is one of the biggest things to recover and that's great but the whole infrastructure category has done pretty well but there's just dispersion even within infrastructure like salana did the absolute best and then there's a few other things that did pretty good and there a lot of stuff that hasn't done as good um and then you have whole categories that have just been wiped out have never come back like consumer metaverse gaming um um and it's not clear if they'll like they're down you know some of the biggest Assets in in those categories are down 90 95 whereas the whole Market's only down 33% from from all-time highs um and I I think to cap it off like this is a good thing and this is a sign that the Market's getting more I don't know fundamentals are the word but at least more rational you know because in in web 2 like as a venture capitalist there's power laws which is to say that as a VC you expect most of your Investments to do really badly like to go to zero and a couple to do pretty good and then one or two to do like go to the Moon right and so you would think that crypto returns uh a portfolio of crypto assets should should do similarly and it's very sad and it sucks for all the people that invest in the bad stuff uh but it's probably net net good like it means the space is getting a little bit more sophisticated I think or you could argue that uh no new people have come into the industry so the whole the last 18 months have been extremely PVP in the industry and so and that's I could argue probably that's the reason there's some of this dispersion uh and that in 2025 let's say we go into a bull market uh numbers are going up let's say uh let's let's say optimism starts to go up like arbitrum could run polygon could run because now it's some of the more retail new money and I'm curious if you think curious if you think the dispersion continues or I hope I mean I think it's a good thing so I think um it's not quite true like the ETFs have brought a lot into Bitcoin right and and bit like you know salana mcoin and Bitcoin are actually the the best performing things I think category wise um the other way to frame PVP is like maybe people are getting savier and smarter and it's like people that are more sophisticated investing it's a trade-off right like um but I just think it's it's hard to imagine any asset class where everybody makes money and everyone's getting rich forever it's usually that's usually not how like actual traction and market share and highly Network effect oriented businesses work right yeah well I agree with that but I think it's also like how long can that continue I would guess that we have maybe one to two more real bull markets in us like there's only so many people in the world and there's only so much hype that crypto can get and I agree with after that cycle stops and maybe we're seeing the slowing of that effect we'll see more of this dispersion and a retreat towards actual value yeah just double click on the point about meme coins when I say that um there's a kind of maturation of the market it isn't necessar that people are focusing more on fundamentals it's just that the average participant is becoming savier to what the actual metag game is so I think saying that memec coin as a category has done well it also kind of abstracts away some of the nuances right so if you look at majority of the meme coins there's like 600,000 that were launched on like pump. fund majority of them just you know went to zero um there's like you know a handful that did very well but you could argue kind of that for things like with for instance a lot of people kind of saw it as a lever bet on so and the bet on so is basically the growth of the e ecosystem so there is like some basis in um kind of metrics and maybe some kind of more cynical awareness of narratives and how shortlived they are so I think the the it wasn't like 2021 where you basically just you know close your eyes and just you know that Meme where a dart and then everything goes up even in the mem coin land I don't think the cycle was like that at all there's definitely more kind of um apex predator type of PVP uh maturation in the market so I'll we'll close out this first part of the conversation but maybe to to wrap up this first part if you're sitting in the audience and you're like all right I'm trying to figure out how to like be positioned going into the end of the year and into into the next uh maybe into the 2025 there's there's probably two mentalities there's hey I'm going to try to pick these narratives that could be hot maybe it's dpin maybe it's L2 maybe it's consumer and I'll try to pick one or two things in each of those categories and I'll I'll try to get specific and it maybe AI rips so I'll pick a bit tensor or C or render or something you pick one or two of these things the other is like uh like I've no ility to outperform I have no ability to uh uh figure out the narratives it's kind of almost like how people think of the stock market today it's like just buying an an index basically so I'm curious if you're uh maybe not a professional crypto investor and you're just sitting in the audience today how do you start to position for 2025 is that you just buying Bitcoin eth and soul or something or are you are you are you trying to play those games um I'll take this I mean I actually it's like I'm just buying soul I don't get you guys don't understand AG Soul um I actually think the way most people think about this perhaps even including this panel is kind of backwards um I think the mistake is looking at a big macro Trend and then trying to work backwards from it and try to understand what happened which sort of feels like astrology to me but uh if you were in the let's say the trenches of salana um I think the the reason these meme coins and all these token launches and why salana and whatnot work worked at least for this cycle is that it's because it was actually the best place to do crypto like launch tokens distribute tokens Phantom is still arguably the best wallet in crypto it's still a first class citiz in support for salana um Jupiter is quite good pump is actually you know I mean it's a d gen UI but it is used obviously you can't uh uh uh argue with the demand and so I think the mistake is um focusing too much on the score as opposed to how the game is played right like you know what chains actually work who's actually building on these things um what is showing traction um and and actually traction like checking the data yourself on something like Dune or blockworks research um as opposed to plug great plug as opposed to letting like influencers say like oh this is going to go big just because I said so and it's like no it's generally [ __ ] you need to really think for yourself um I think like Kyle from multicoin does this pretty well and it gets pretty edgy and whatnot but like he's you know one of the best uh has one of the best returns for a reason and so I think you don't want to focus on the score you want to focus on uh uh the ABCs and it's like okay if you think there's a chain that's actually way better suited than salana for doing a certain activity maybe it's defi or maybe it's nfts or something like that then it's like okay there's obviously going to be people that use that chain and if people use that chain there's going to be attention on it and there's attention on it that's kind of the starting point of let's say a narrative okay so then the question I would ask you Mur is uh a year ago it felt really obvious to you that salana was going to be big before everyone else realized it because you mentioned the trenches because you were in the trenches so now September of 2024 take us into the trenches and what is starting to feel obvious what what maybe feels obvious to you as someone in the trenches that doesn't feel obvious to the rest of the industry yet well I I think there's nothing too revolutionary I would say maybe a few things um so one of the biggest and obviously I'm a salana guy so people think I'm biased but I actually believe this um like salana is getting a new client called fire dancer that is um they're doing a bunch of talks at breakpoint and they're actually going to be improving the network performance by 10 to 20x uh including the fee markets and all this um and I think like most people don't understand what that actually means uh it's actually never been done in crypto I mean multiple clients have been done but not rewriting a monolithic L1 in basic basally assembly and super high performant Computing um and then the other thing that I'm really interested in is actually social fi um so I actually this is uh I get hated on for this a lot but I actually thought frch was a good idea um I don't think it was executed good but I think the idea behind it is fundamentally makes sense uh things like fantasy top similar time. fun maybe um even farcaster in a sense I think like social to me is going to be the next big wave especially ask people start understanding that you know we need to focus more on consumer uh maybe mobile first like pwas that's generally where users are they're not generally on their desktops too much um and then you put that together with kind of the social layer of crypto which kind of keeps growing um and I think social F will be the next big thing Antonio I see you nodding your head a lot as MD is saying Social F what what are your thoughts around friend Tech and fantasy top and just social F in general I just agree usually we see the Trends in crypto start with one thing that blows up everybody gets really hyped on it and then it's Fades Away really quickly as well and I think that was clearly frch um with the social fi Trend and what are we talking about here we're talking about how fundamental value is layered on top of attention and that leads to a narrative well these things are fundamentally value based off of these narratives and based off of attention what do people pay attention to social it's like people it's content um it's all of that and if we can just make that tradable I think that is going to be a really big Trend in crypto I think you just see this with the expansion of assets of the number of assets traded within crypto I really think that this is a key driver of basically everything that's become big in crypto so far it's like back in 2017 with icos we had a thousand things that could be traded and then Unis swap okay wow we have 10,000 things that could be traded nfts 100,000 things now with things like salana things like l2s things like Sovereign l1s the performance has gotten good enough where you can have millions billions of assets traded and it's gotten to the point where we can create the products that people are already paying attention to and I really just think that's social I think it's going to take a while for this narrative to come to fruition but it always does um I think there'll probably be a hype cycle for this in two or so years from now and then we'll see more fundamental value driven from that in five plus years um can we talk founder incentive because I I think for the last four years there's been a strong incentive to launch an infrastru to LA to do something in infrastructure there's very little there's very little uh incentives to go build to do uh like a tra maybe a company that has traditional Equity structure not a token or a consumer app uh it's just much the returns for from a founder and a builder's uh perspective is much greater if you go even if you go do the H 100th infrastructure L2 you will probably make more money than at least in the last couple of years than if you went and did a consumer thing so I'm curious if you guys feel like that is changing or if that doesn't actually matter or yeah I'm just curious to get your guys' thoughts on those incentives yeah I I think there's probably two things that are happening that's self-correcting this issue so number one is uh the thing that I mentioned just now which is the maturation of the market people are realizing that oh If you bid a L1 with like four users at 10 billion valuation as the VCS are dumping their tokens you're probably not going to make any money so there's no kind of Public Market demand for a lot of the ghost chains start the launching so once that ARP is close once Founders realize they can't just start you know another kind of CopyCat chain and then instantly print a 100x on paper then you know I think a lot of the talent will start to explore other things um I think the other thing is also the bar for entry for competing on an L1 is much higher now especially with salana you know last cycle salana was still facing a lot of issues I think the past few years they've ironed out a lot of bugs and then with the launch of fire dancer as well um I think a lot of the kind of throughput or latency issues are becoming increasingly kind of closer to the limits that are set by physics versus just like optimizations so like if you look at um the current batch of L1 or L2 Founders versus like last cycle and then compare that to like 2017 2018 the pedigree uh and and the kind of sheer talent that the teams have have been growing exponentially so I think the barrier to entry to starting an L1 that will remain relevant after 6 months is also incredibly high so those two things are kind of correcting um and I think a lot of more of the talent will start to you know go up the stack and build the application Level yeah maybe I'll ask the same question Alex to you I also don't know if people call you Alex or Alexander so I'm sorry if I'm offending okay uh what what what is starting to feel obvious I mean I don't know how hack is a I mean one of the biggest funds in one of the biggest funds in the industry and you guys invest globally what is starting to feel really obvious to you that maybe you think others are missing right now yeah well to me there's kind of two indicators um one is what has traction and has like real adoption uh and then the second thing is what's the most interesting technology we're seeing so I think on the traction side it's still very clearly uh stable coins by far I mean everybody knows this story it's been for a while tether the amount of money tether makes and the adoption around the world and all this stuff um and so I think you can follow the money uh there and you could think about well maybe payments built on top of stable coins is really interesting and once you get to this world where many people around the world are actually using stable coins uh for payments and has dollars and has more than just a store of value like like you know maybe Bitcoin or or something is uh maybe defi is very there's like elements of defi that are very exciting all these sort of financial things that's cool and then for us personally just on a tech perspective I think like the crypto AI intersection is really interesting like it's really early and there's like a lot of probably the mo most of the big like crypto AI coins are actually just meme coins you know um which happens every cycle uh one of the biggest like exits in like 1999 was Mark Cuban's company and was like putting radio on the internet and it it was also just a meme coin uh it didn't actually have any Tech so there's a lot of that but it also gets added into the actual good stuff or lumped in so that's very exciting like there's really cool stuff there uh those are where we're spending most of our time I would say so you're saying anom is the new Mark Cuban that would be yeah that would be I mean that would be a great compliment don't you think you know he can own an NBA team afterward let's uh let's shift to uh just talking about ethereum uh wait I want to talk about the incentives thing I think I I I do think it is severely broken like incentives founder incentives for sure but I would say General investment in uh incentives are broken and here's kind of what I mean it also goes back to what we were talking about about social and narrative in traditional let's say closed off markets like private Equity you have a closed set of investors and the founders go to work to make the product work and get demand and users and maybe if they work hard enough they get acquired or go public or some liquidity event finally happens after years of grinding in crypto it's not even close right uh in crypto first of all everything is social and narative driven meaning that if um if everybody has a consensus bet on something and they fundamentally all agree that something sucks you generally tend to bet with a consensus because you're like wow like everybody's doing this and and so for example hating on salana was quite cool uh a few years ago cuz they like oh it's a scam chain it's centralized all one old the stuff um and you might not actually have looked at anything yourself but you're just social layers like reach some consensus that this is correct and you Outsource your thinking to the social layer uh but what what happens when you do that is generally the biggest bets the way to make money is to be contrari and to be right um and so if you have an environment where every everything is uh uh reliant on narrative and social consensus being contrarian and being correct becomes very difficult because you could actually be correct but the market might just say like we're going to scops you we don't care if this is a reality or fundamentals driven this suits our bag so we're going to do it and then of course the founder can get extremely rich with a token within a year and then maybe they'll think that they're doing something correctly because now they're super rich um including the team itself like the team might not have shipped anything uh like the early team members staff engineers and whatnot they'll still get rich and then now they're like we must be doing something correctly here it's just a huge contrast of startups work in web 2 yeah I think that's a great point and I think what does innovation require it requires contrarian thinking it requires you to be right and it requires absolute dedication and persistence right and exactly because of what you're saying I think that is quite hard to find in crypto because all the incentives as a Founder are pulling you away from that um so it really just takes a True Believer um and I think that's actually making the Innovation take longer and not have as much attention as it should so maybe the contrarian thought today would be that uh tokens are actually inhibiting uh or the way that teams and Founders get tokens is actually inhibiting some of the innovation in the industry because you have these quick Cycles like maybe what happened with friendtech you could argue friendch could have been a better and bigger company and a big a better success if they didn't have liquidity on their token so early what do you guys think maybe meron Anton I'd pick on you guys from the founders seats like what do you think about this this structure any world changing takes a long time to build takes at least a decade right and so if the incentives are just pulling you in a way that makes you short-term focused then you're not going to have that world changing type of innovation it's what aichel said on the last panel it's like everybody always overestimates what can be done in two years and underestimates what can be done in 10 years I love that saying but then what's the solution to that is it have Founders have a token lock of eight years and teams have no vesting I think there's some things on the incentive side but I think naturally we're at the point now where what like at least s plus years into crypto being relevant um I think that there's enough Founders now that have been around for a while and most of them have left but the ones that stay and there'll be a couple ones that come in that are the True Believers and say I just don't really care that much about the money at this point like who cares after a certain point look I just don't care if you guys believe in me or if you guys agree with me it's irrelevant I know that this thing is going to be really big and I'm going to go out and build it because that's the actual purpose of my life at this point can you find those people and I think those people are born um and they're made and I think that will start to happen and there's maybe incentives that hold that back for a certain period of time but that's just the way the world works and those people will emerge in crypto yeah do you think dydx would have been more or less successful if you guys didn't have a didn't have this token out live like yeah if you didn't have the token it's an interesting question I think that I won't speculate too much on the token in particular I think it on balance it was probably good for dydx and did drive a lot of attention and that's the problem here is that even if you are a True Believer you have to play the game like you have to probably have a token you have to probably care about narratives and marketing you can't just sit here in your Ivory Tower being like I'm absolutely right and I'm going to build this thing nobody's ever going to pay attention to you right so it's like you have to be that but then you have to play the game and you have to sit here on these stages and talk to people from that place and show your true belief at the same time and I think that does come through to people so yeah I think that was a reasonable thing to do on that situation yeah yeah I think actually a really good example is coinbase and Brian um and I'm sure Antonio would agree with me um like coinbase before they went public was grinding through some shitty markets for eight years things were happening you know FTX happened FTX was kind of just this kind of wild west they would just do whatever they want Brian's like no like we're going to do this the right way um and I mean coinbase didn't have a token right they actually went to the public market same with bass Bas doesn't even have a token right um and I'm not saying like not having a token is obviously the way or something but like you got to be in as a Founder at least I mean uh if you're not a founder or if you're not working on something it it doesn't probably apply too much but as a Founder you got to be in it For the Love of the Game right like you think there's something wrong with the state of some domain that you you're passionate about and you're going to say I'm going to fix this and I'm going to do whatever it takes long it takes because like if I didn't do it I would literally burst um and that's just pretty rare from what I've seen so far yeah it's probably a controversial thought but I think a lot of the incentive misalignments could be solved if you just extend founder vesting cuz right now most of the vesting that we see is like two to four years for a lot of the tokens um so obviously some teams take like maybe two more years to actually launch the token so it's like six years from when you first started but if you know you get a a mark to Market kind of liquid token you know two years into building a startup which is you know maybe even before product Market fit then your incentive is actually to engineer as much narratives and play the social media game you know pump your token as much as possible and cash out but that that's the kind of economically rational thing for our founder to do instead of actually build the product out and then kind of endure those Market Cycles so I think it's deeply controversial still to like extend founder investing because then the question is okay do do investors also have to extend they're investing in 10 years in that case you know what happens to the market you know is capital still interested but um it seems like a pretty simple solution so I'm actually surprised that not more teams have done this yeah I somewhat disagree with this like I think there are certain things that you can do on the incentive side but to pull back the point that Alex made before the returns and the value that we're creating here is so exponential that really the only thing that matters is what are the absolutely best Founders doing it's sort of irrelevant to what everybody else does around them right like there going to be a few products a few things that actually go out and drive value in the market and in the world and like I saying I think those types of Founders is what mert was saying it's like you're just bursting at the seams you have to create this thing you have to build it and those type of people they don't really care that much about incentives they're just like I believe so much in this thing and in this market that I must go out and do it I'll speak a little bit for myself because I have a personal story here so I actually just stepped down as CEO of dydx a couple months ago after building in the space for over 9 years was an early employee at coinbase building at dydx for seven years and the reason I did that is because I actually believe that it's going to take quite a lot longer than that like I'm really asking myself the question and I felt like I needed to step back to ask this question am I going to dedicate my life to this am I actually going to continue building dydx or whatever it is in the future for 10 20 30 years that's a hard question for somebody to ask themselves right and I think you need the people that actually ask themselves that question go all the way down and are like yes I will and I will do whatever it takes and I highly respect those people you know there's a couple of them you mentioned Brian maybe like vitalic um maybe a couple others like Hayden out there that you see that in them and you know they're not in it for the incentives or the money or the value or even that anybody cares what they're doing like Hayden just believed in amm Brian just believed in coinbase vitalic just believed in ethereum decentralization who are we paying attention to it's still those people 10 years later so ignore all of this stuff it's just go out and find those people you can see it in them and when you see one of them actually believe in them invest in them try their products and support them yeah all right I'm going to switch gears a little bit uh and talk about talk about ethereum so trying to bring it back to the the topic of this panel which is defining the meta of the cycle if you go on Twitter right now probably the big meta and big conversation is is ethereum cooked right you've got Bitcoins went up a lot soul has gone up a lot eth has not gone up a lot and uh sorry for the bankless boys um but one uh like one one question is like have the l2s been helpful or parasitic to eth and have the l2s been helpful for the network but parasitic to the asset or helpful for both or parasitic to both um and I'm just curious to get your guys' take on this this meta question that everyone's asking uh I I I I don't think they're parasitic um and I actually think people are overfitting on what's happened to ethereum because again everything is social narative and if a few few people say ethereum is cooked then they're like oh wow no [ __ ] like Mass isia uh but they're they're not parasitic uh because you got to kind of look at the reality here okay like what what are the three positive PA possible paths for ethereum well one is they don't add l2s and it's stuck at 12 TPS and then nobody's going to be able to use the chain right that's a nogo that's obviously not viable future um number two is um they they SC they maybe rework the L1 right they try scaling the L1 they maybe addback sharting execution sharting and all these other changes and okay now that's going to take 3 to four years at least like that's a very ambitious road map uh the EF guys will tell you this researchers it's a very hard thing to do I mean they can do it they have the talent for it but by the time it's done in four years it's like other chains have already stepped up to the plate okay so then the only option left is alus right what's the only possible path it's okay well you're going to do computation offchain on an L2 and then they're going to one use eth as money to interact with things on that L2 and they're going to post data to ethereum uh The Blob space right and the bet there is if there's enough usage on these rollups then they'll have enough uh uh activity going on such that the costs will meet uh supply and demand and then you'll start making money finally and and so I don't think like you could say it's technically um if ethereum were the scalable out one of of something like uh of a salano or like even a site you could say then it would be parasitic but since that's not the case today the reality is that's the only path and if that's the only pathw to survive it by definition can't be parasitic uh and and I just think people have completely overblown the fact that ethereum is like cooked uh I think it's still the ecosystem with the most attention I mean has the largest market cap by far the l2s still I mean ARB and base do quite well um and so I would not get sced by Twitter uh because there's also this thing where like you want to play the victim and you're like oh like we suck so much this is the most hated rally ever you know make ethereum great again and I feel like no no no etherum is already great don't say make eum great again keep making ethereum great again or like you know like don't scop yourself into this um that's what I would say yeah uh anyone want to take the the the other side of that I I think you make a good point when you mentioned that uh the the differentiation between ethereum and eth the asset so uh I very much agree with mt in that I think you know ethereum is the world's most you know biggest liquid Pro programmable collateral um and there is a healthy ecosystem of L2 is building on it um I know you disagree with the name but for instance like Mega eth U make ethereum greater make ethereum G again is L2 that's building on ethereum that's uh trying to you know enable similar performance as something like salana so there's a lot of interesting developments happening there there that's what Mega stands for Mega the I think they retrofitted it back in yeah I'm an investor I told I told her not to do it but but yeah I think the development is going but the reason why people think it's cooked is because of the price and I actually commented on this back in May so we did a podcast episode about why I thought ethereum as you know as an asset was cooked and I I think it's because of what's kind of happening on the ETF front which you know we can talk about um but effectively trfi was already fully positioned into crypto through Bitcoin and Bitcoin is very much perceived as a macro asset right there's like um The Narrative around digital gold around it versus ethereum which kind of launched their ETF shortly after the Bitcoin ETF so a lot of the appetite was already taken up and eth is kind of seen as this quasy Tech not really macro type of bent I don't think trfi really understands where to fit it into portfolio yet so the ETF in my mind was always going to disappoint and now people are using that price action to justify or retrofit it and say that oh this is a reflection of the fundamentals of e you know ethereum as a platform is losing developers but I mean if you look at any of the eth conferences I think it's it's quite easy to you know my extremely left curv take on this is that eth the asset has struggled simply l2s actually have hurt the E the asset simply because if you have 10,000 bucks or 100K or whatever it is and you're coming into crypto and you say I want to allocate to eth last cycle you let's say let's use 10,000 bucks last cycle you just put 10,000 bucks into eth now if you want to allocate to eth okay well do you put you know 2,000 into eth but then 2000 into arbitrum 2000 into optimism 2000 into polygon right so it's uh it's just basically Diversified people's allocation to eth yeah ex there's a fundamental argument too which is that uh all these l2s have taken significant fees and and revenue away from from eth as well and the I I think the buy and burn probably did actually contribute to the price in a meaningful way and that's gone now yeah I do think like I think the important question is to think about it um under best intentions as is this like a business strategy from ethereum Foundation uh that's like short-term loss for long-term gain and um and the short term is like well we're going to intentionally unbundle like this is a classic business strategy in not just like web 2 but everything like you could bundle things together you can unbundle so e like radically unbundled they unbundled execution they unbundled a lot of its infrastructure platform uh to this new ecosystem and I think the BET was we're going to suffer fees at least in the short term but maybe we are going to maintain market share over time and maybe we're going to Foster this like eth alined ecosystem um and yeah for sure jury is still out whether that is the ca like the counterfactual is hard to say like if ethereum I mean to merch Point like there was some drisking like what if ethereum never really executed well on like a scalability road map and at this point salana would probably be like 3 to 5X more I mean 10x more market share relative to eth yeah um but it's hard to do the counterfactual and we're still in the middle of the of the game uh but like but yeah maybe it's for the long-term benefit especially if you have the argument that like eth is collateral and it's different from like a private company right uh Alex one thing PE so one thing that we're people aren't talking about now but we will be talking about it in probably three months are all these new l1s are about to launch like mad's going to launch bar Chain's going to launch Mega e probably not this year but some point early next year I would assume they'll launch um at what point do we stop do you think there'll be a time when we're like okay we're done funding the new l1s or it's just like every cycle we're just going to get new l1s and we fund 50 of them and one of them makes it to the next cycle and then the next cycle there's new ones and what what do you think of this new L1 meta I mean I certainly think that every cycle like every time I'm on stage here people ask me that question and it's like when will it end and uh here are like every year it's it's uh it's still a pretty good category um you know for us like we look at the technology really closely and as long as there's still like really interesting new technology to back we'll we'll probably back it right um and uh and yeah well me e is an L2 but like a lot of these things that are coming out now are still pretty interesting new technologies um and so it's probably worth worth looking at and exploring I don't know if that the network effects certainly still grow over time right like the longer eth and Solana are the number one and number two the more likely they will continue to be um but also the Tam kind of grows over time especially if you think some of these uh layer ones can also have moneyness right so it's sort of this tradeoff yeah so yeah I think that's a great answer from a rational perspective maybe I'll take the emotional not investor perspective on this one I'm tired of it like I've been in this space for 10 years at this point and I'm tired of us just playing the same games with ourselves over and over and over I think we really need to start asking ourselves the question what are we actually building that the world cares about nobody gives a [ __ ] about the next L1 like it's not interesting at this point I'm not saying that there's not new technology there absolutely should be and these people should continue to build these things but we need to shift our attention as an industry to what are we actually building here what are the products that people are going to use what are our ideas for that who are the builders for that can we invest in that can we pay attention to it and I just feel like that's where we need to shift our attention as a space and I think it is starting to happen to some extent but we'll see that really start to be the case over the next 5 years well it's a good way to end it that's all the time we got please help me give them a round of applause thanks everybody