Is Crypto Losing the Builder Mindshare War? - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Uh, welcome everyone. First off, um, like you guys already heard, we're going to be talking about Mind Share, whether crypto is losing it, um, compared to other industries when it comes to builders and founders. So, first off, I just want to go one by one and do a very brief round of introductions with AI and Yud and Merd and then we're going to get into the discussion. Yeah. Hi everyone, excited to be here.

Uh Giway, CEO of Intramutes basically one of well largest crypto native market making in the space and yeah us doing pretty much all people expect proper firm to do and not necessarily what you don't expect to do. Uh but yeah excited here despite pretty brutal week in terms of dinners and drinks. Hello everyone, my name is Yu. I'm the founder and CEO of Kito. K is building a information finance uh information sorry infopight network uh in crypto and some of the p perspectives I can bring today is maybe um my background of raising kao as initially equity basis now being a token business uh I spent roughly eight years in traditional finance investing in equity space but also at the same time obviously just launched a token in February um at the same time kind of pretty much working with all the uh founders in the space through their TG process as building mind share thinking about how uh the whole kind of a builder and and user landscape is uh is going.

Hello. Uh my name is Merch. I am the CE of Helios which is a developer platform the biggest one on Salana. So we help people build fast cheap scalable applications and I also post a lot on the internet. First question just to warm up for the topic and it's for everyone in the panel.

Um, and I I know all of us have been in the industry now for a lot of years. Um, so are we now worse off than we were five years ago when it comes to competing for top builders, for top talent, for for top founders? Um, and if if yes or no, then please quickly explain why. Then we're going to get into more with conservative again. Uh, I think we are like if we take five years ago, I if you would say like a year ago, we would be in the worst place.

five years ago. I think we're in much better place. Uh why like despite the competition from AI and like some other industries, I think it's much better. It's much better to build in crypto at the moment. Uh especially past 6 months with better regulatory clarity, better basically developed ecosystems like you have so much choice where to build on you can build on Ethereum, Salana, whatever.

It's basically just a lot more developed and a lot more safe in terms of like people basically don't expect crypto to go away anymore. Yeah. So from my perspective uh maybe just a personal experience I joined in crypto 2022 so starting kitetor and then previously I was uh invested in a hedge fund and at that time when I was kind of making making a switch crypto was very very attractive in terms of um there's obviously kind of a booming optimism in terms of where adoption is going to go uh there was no kind of a mass adoption of AI technologies is is today um and this is literally the frontier of every builder uh of where every builder wants to go. I think fast forward to today, I think AI is taking mind share from every single sub sector uh across the world. I think that's the reality cuz this is literally some of the most exciting stuff is happening.

At the same time, I also think that crypto does have some of the idiosyncratic incentive alignment issues that we need to go through and maybe we can cover that today. Specifically, I think obviously equity versus token and in terms of, you know, in terms of token, how do you, you know, how do you balance the expectation of community? How do you, you know, deal with all the counterparties, exchanges, market makers, etc. is creating new challenges for builders who are thinking about where to go into the space because there's so much um I think there's just so much incentive disalignment uh currently in the space. I'm happy to kind of cover more of this uh later today.

So the question was uh whether we're better off than 5 years ago or worse off. We're builders. I think pretty undeniable that we're way better off u for a few reasons. One is well 5 years ago nothing really worked. Uh things were just I mean you know things maybe still don't work that well but they work way better than 5 years ago.

Um obviously no chains really scaled. Um you know fees were a problem. There's a you know salon didn't exist. A bunch of these newer chains that are actually quite usable didn't exist. Uh but also uh during those cycles you wouldn't really know if crypto itself as an industry would make it.

Um versus now even if the market let's say is in a downturn it doesn't feel existential. It just feels sort of like a bump. Um you know the president has a meme coin in crypto right? Um and so it's probably not going away anywhere. Um and the regulatory um scene was much worse back then.

I mean it was much worse just last year. Um, and so as a builder, you had to also have a bunch of worries about the legal side, the regulatory side, which I know, uh, let's say kept away a few pretty talented people that I know from like the West Coast. Um, and that's not a thing anymore. So, I think unquestionably we're way better off. you you uh built a firm from the ground up, went through the entire motion of launching a token, you know, building a product that people were using, then launching a token, dealing with exchanges, market makers, all of that.

Is that a path that you would recommend to a founder that doesn't know crypto that well? Uh like how difficult it is to go through all of that, to navigate all of that. Yeah, I think it's pretty daunting for a founder who's maybe initially outside of crypto to start thinking about just tokenization um tokconomics all that kind of stuff from day one. So we actually started off as equity business but back in the day obviously there was also disadvantage in terms of raising money as as an equity business because inherently you know a lot of the investors only invest in tokens. um a lot of people are interested in u kind of a shorter kind of a you know um money return kind of a life cycle but actually I think that probably if if everyone in the space is thinking more in terms of long-term building and a simple example would be that you know for example open AI would essentially launch a token ages ago then I don't think it will be where it is today so that I I think that the part of the and and this as a founder there's al also kind of so much pressure in terms of whether investors want to exit whether you know all the other companies around you have already launched a token right your employees are looking at you as well so in the space if everyone's thinking about um you know tokenizing everything at a very very fast pace re basically launching a token before product market fit that sort of creates a um a negative flywheel I would say putting pressure on some of the builders who are thinking about maybe building something for the long term and it is so hard to manage a token once a token is out there in the market.

So we certainly went through a lot of that launch a token in in in February and naturally there's you know on the day-to-day you need to basically putting put aside a lot of the time in terms of um considering liquidity talking to investors all that kind of stuff obviously takes away some of the time from from building itself and I I do do think that there there are things uh in the space that we can we can sort of consider together. You guys uh come across a lot of projects obviously market make for most of the industry also have a venture arm. Um what are some of the challenges that those teams are facing um when it comes to building in crypto? Uh yeah like where do you start? I think it's like the biggest challenge is like the most of the use cases that it's easier to raise money to are basically trading based speculation based but only if you get token right if you if you're not doing a token it's maybe not as easy to raise uh like I don't think it's that difficult to raise without a token like if you actually think about I mean two main dabs from like last year which is basically poly market and pump that fun like they still don't have a token.

Um, but probably will in the next month. Well, maybe we'll see. But like I mean ultimately they don't have to have one. Yeah. And PM fund would have been like a fantastic company that would be able to raise money like if if they ever need to uh without needing token and the best VCs out there, they they do invest into like tokenless companies for sure like we do invest as well into like we don't require token.

It's a nice thing to have but it's more important that there is an exit in some shape or form and if there is a prospect of exit like IPO acquisition or whatever like it doesn't really matter if anything tokens are like not not always ideal I would say yeah where you you obviously come across with a you know obviously super prominent in the Solana ecosystem deal with a lot of users the most used blockchain by far um but a a lot of the activities is still relatively speculatory. So what do you think needs to happen for that to change and for there to be a lot of apps that are used by people for non-speculatory things? Well, I don't think speculation ever goes away first. So if you just look at the history of crypto cycles, it's always some speculative vehicle. So let's say Bitcoin and then ICOs and then NFTTS and then maybe you can say governance memecoins and then you can say real memecoins.

Uh and so I I just it's always a different form but it's always the same thing and that is obviously it has it negative effects in terms of let's say PR and interesting headlines but it is also fundamentally the technical side of this right from a builder panel token they're just tokens right it doesn't really matter what you call them or what weird picture they have attached to it but they're just tokens and crypto allows you to move, store, lock up tokens at scale, globally, composably, all these things. And so those things really help stress test the the blockchain that they're on. So for example, Salana used to go down all the time. I think probably everybody knows this uh in 2022, 2023 especially. And that was from the NFT craze.

Um and we took a lot of learnings from those times. And then we made the we made a bunch of improvements to the core protocol such that when memecoins happen this cycle um it wasn't perfect but it certainly handled it quite well. I mean I was sleeping when Trump launched a coin and when I woke up I didn't believe it. Uh but my co-founders were able to handle it. The chain was completely fine and so that was a big event obviously.

Um and once you build a stronger chain and a stronger community and all these integrations right you know Phantom uh all the dexes me infrastructure well then you can start paving the way towards different types of apps. So something that's quite large on Salana is also decentralized physical infrastructure. Uh so Deepen which I'm also the CEO of Helium. Um that's a joke by the way. Um, and there's a I mean like there's highmapper render all these different types of physical infrastructure projects that are on Salana.

Um, and then I think like the biggest thing that was holding all this back was just again regulation. Uh, when you have bad regulation, the guys who are who actually meanwhile will actually be affected by the guys who just don't care by definition won't care and they'll just release whatever they want. um and and generally those tend to be speculative in nature. But now that the SEC has dropped suits against most of the major exchanges and projects, I think the people who are actually building like real decentralized finance, um there's a lot of new stable coin companies popping up, all these things. So I think the fundamentals, the basics are what's going to come back now that they actually can, you know, wake up without the fear of being sued by Gendler.

Do you think that eventually when someone's building on Salana eventually it's just going to be abstracted away they're not even going to know they're ultimately for users that they're using Salana? Are you a believer that it's just going to be abstracted away completely or no? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it probably depends on the app. So, if if if it's if you're on PayPal and you know you're using PYUSD, then you obviously don't really need to know um where that is unless you're actually sending it to somebody's address and you're paying them in um so like I think that's like a very uh vertical specific decision.

I I don't think like stable coins need it. Um, but I think if you're using DeFi and let's say you are working with much higher risk than stable coins, so lending pools, all these things, I think you probably want to know the underlying chain. Um, because that's like your guarantee like that's your insurance like okay, how secure is this chain? How useful is it? Uh, all these things.

Um, but you know, I think one thing you can say for sure is within, you know, 3 to 5 years, certainly less people will be aware of the chain they're using than today. Right. Today, the UX is really bizarre for many things. Um, but I don't think it'll ever fully go away. Yeah.

You you obviously went through this. How did you guys go about deciding kind of what infrastructure would you use on the back end? Um, obviously, you know, where the token would be issued and all that. Was it a difficult process or was it was it obvious for you guys? I mean for us it's relatively straightforward because uh we're basically building an AI application.

So there's it's naturally kind of a chain of agnostic. So I think eventually we'll go multi-chain and then we you know you know first launch of the token on base uh that's kind of EVM compatible because there were there were a lot of uh historical kind of a social f projects either be friend tech or fantasy top etc that we can tap into the kind of the composibility side of things but eventually the you know I think the chain stuff will needs to be abstracted away for for you know essentially for the user experience. And again, if someone were to ask you kind of, you know, what they what chain should they pick if they're building something that supposed to exist fully on chain, um, is it a straightforward question or is it still kind of difficult because there's hundreds of layer ones? Now, in the last week, I saw there were five new announcements for layer 1's, seven new layer 2s just last seven days. Um obviously that gets confusing I think for people because there's not enough users and applications to even f fulfill all of that block space.

Um so is this still a difficult question or is it more obvious now if someone wants to build maybe Salana is the best place base is the best place depending on what they're building I think it really depends what what they will be building it's if you're if you can really abstract away the experience I generally think it almost doesn't matter like there should be some basic things on chain like it should be reliable it should not go down like it there should be some basic tooling around it but if you can abstract it all away for your users It's like you can get away with even well maybe not maybe not any chain maybe maybe okay maybe you cannot like build anyone on Cardano for example no offense to Cardano uh but like choosing between base and salana I think it's like they're both reliable they both like they both have adequate tooling both have adequate infra u so I'm like in a abstract in a way camp I think people like this amount of block space that that people keep bringing to the space is kind of insane and I think yeah it's definitely time to focus a lot more on applications that people are using instead you mentioned some of the deepen apps that already exist in Salana and some of them have decent amount of usage u do you have any guesses on like what will be kind of the breakthrough deepen app or breakthrough user app um that will get you know more people that are currently in the crypto space excited to using start using things on chain. Yeah. Well, if I knew that, I'd be a very rich man. Um uh so I mean so so the question is basically what's going to be the next breakout? Yeah.

Like what what what do you think blockchains are good for when it comes to actually going for the mainstream usage, right? Like right now we're talking about AI LLM combined probably have 500 million users. Crypto has maybe five million if we're being generous when it comes to some like active users, right? So, is it possible for Cryptocook to go from that five million to 500 million that LLMs have today as many users as as as possible with some app that exists that is only possible to do on the blockchain versus like, you know, on AWS? Oh, I see.

Uh, yeah, I think yeah, I think the answer is yes, though. I think everybody that and maybe this is somewhat unpopular but everybody seems to think that there's like this new magic mysterious app that we will come up with that will on board everybody and in the past I mean for a while now everybody keeps saying the next billion when really they should be saying the next million right uh and really understanding their customer segments and and who actually you know what's problems are actually being solved and crypto is inherently a financial piece of tech it it helps solve mostly not all but mostly financial problems and in the past and again I'm going to talk about regulation once more time um in the past like uh you couldn't do basic things like uh transfer money to certain jurisdictions uh or deposit your money uh or like even go on the front end of a website because the US government will block you for example or some other government. So I think uh the basics right I mean Bitcoin started and the white paper was about a system for P2P electronic cash and we still don't use crypto generally speaking for P2P electronic cash. I mean probably people here do but certainly the world doesn't uh at scale and so I think the thing that's actually going to take us there is not going to be a mysterious app. It's going to be executing very well on the basics and the basics are basically just moving money around right uh either cash accepting payments uh or doing finance.

San just announced um Salana Institute the the new policy arm just announced that they're working on putting stocks on chain right so like being able to actually trade equities and whatever different things you know as Larry Frink says everything will be tokenized I think that's basically going to be the thing that gets the most reach because I mean everybody needs finance right everybody needs LLMs too probably and and you know Google search and things like this but everybody also needs finance so I think the no-brainer answer is just to find uh the the the the fundamentals and that that's going to be you know in the past the biggest thing holding us back was scalability um for the past 2 or 3 years and I think that's mostly gone now I think there's still some work to do but uh certainly all the new chains coming out but also the existing ones that are improving will be able to scale uh pretty well and then is it going to be about execution who leads the charge it seems like the US based teams. There's a lot of new stable coin companies that are coming out from what I've seen, even like unsexy banking APIs and Rails and all these things. And that's generally what it takes. So, I think the thing that'll take crypto to let's say uh 500 million is just going to be the fundamentals, payments. If you um obviously deal with regulations a lot as one of the largest market makers and things definitely change like Mer said with the new administration.

We have Trump's Eric Trump speaking here in like 45 minutes. I don't think that that is something that should be taken lightly. Uh what has changed for you guys um as a market making firm and firm that works with a lot of projects when it comes to just the regulatory change how everyone um approaches it these days compared to 6 months ago. Yeah, I think it's primarily on US side. It's like the the biggest change is that you can have conversations with you can have conversation with lawmakers.

you can have conversations with uh well basically agencies like SEC for example it's it's a pretty big change uh for us but also for the whole ind industry as well uh like we all see in SSC doing the front tables we see Hester Pierce being like very vocal about like how she wants industry also to evolve in terms of disclosures for example which I think it's basically it's maybe not not the like the way forward that I know most like cyber cyber punk people want to have. that if if SEC ultimately becomes a force for good in terms of proper disclosure regime, yeah, I think it will help the industry massively because it should help us to basically weed away all the bad actors ultimately and just increase transparency uh pretty radically because currently just nobody no like we all thought that we will self police stuff but like we we just still failing at that. Maybe I just chime in from the regulation perspective because I think from a builder perspective now is definitely a much more favorable regulation backdrop because there's still kind of an ongoing process in terms of you know builders are thinking whether I should acrue value to my token or how should I how should that be addressed so situations such as like for example like the the the Zora launch it was a very explicit the tokens just for fun. I think over time stuff like that I think will be will be less and less if the regular regulation clarity um is improved. So over time then you can think about kind of the two camps of tokens.

One is just you know for speculation um for fun short cycled etc all that kind of stuff. I think people naturally have a need for that. But then the other camp will be long-term aligned tokens who are acrewing fundamental values um serious builders uh building for you know tangible use cases. And I think that if I think about kind of the build a mind share problem, I think for example for market makers, I don't think you guys um you know being being someone from social finance, I think crypto is still very very attractive for anyone from Wall Street or or the finance industry to essentially come uh and and you know essentially build things. But I but I do think that from a builder perspective there are certain things that needs to change.

Um even under the current regulation uh framework there are obviously more and more um you know fundamental projects are kind of aligning their uh value more with the token holdings etc. But at the same time from a founder and uh token design perspective there's still a lot of misalignment. So a simple example would be everything is um all the vesting is based on time there's nothing is based on milestone and for a founder you would essentially are incentivized to launch a token as quickly as possible and so essentially every all the vesting can essentially start and and maybe um but then you know handling a token in the public is is so difficult and it creates so many kind of a complexities between talent and talent traction um between managing kind of token liquidity, all this kind of stuff, but also kind of going through the TG process, you basically hand over your token to a large number of uh intermediaries and and a lot of the times nowadays you have to reward users who are never kind of your users. that for example you're working with exchanges and some of the times that the IDOs are uh are taken a much more much larger percentage than than some of the some of the users who have been using your product for a long period of time and if you compare this versus uh the the Silicon Valley setup if you launch a let's say AI startup there's high probability or there's a good chance that if the AI app is successful then maybe it's going to be acquired by one of the tech m uh giants in in the base in crypto is M&A is very very rare and everyone's you know basically thinking about either this is going to just remain a token business or maybe potentially one day I'm going to tokenize it but if you're already a very very successful and profitable equity business why would you then tokenize a business because u especially given that currently there's so much liability in terms of launching a token right so liability in terms of user expectation everyone's airdrop, but at the same time, no one's going to be happy at the end of the day. And at the same time, you're basically giving your tokens away to um exchanges and uh other counterparties.

And then whenever the moment that you have your team allocation being above whatever certain percentage of people, everyone's thinking that you're greedy. But that's kind of a the the the what should actually be happening. uh is is the complete opposite, right? Because if you think about convers value model, then you basically earn up to all the stuff that you're building and then trying to be as long-term aligned as possible uh with the value that you are going to be creating. So I think that a lot of the in incentive structure does have to change and expectation uh the way that all the intermediaries are intermediaries are working together etc or I think every every kind of a party in the in in the crypto space have to be working together on that.

actually curious on my side. Yeah. Kind of a Jason question like do you see well not not you maybe but like do you see employees and Kaido being like distracted by token movements once the TG happens like I I think productivity went down because like maybe token goes down and people are sad that day or something. I think it depends. So for I think there's a difference between protocols and chains because uh if you're building a chain then you're not just uh you obviously have your own team right so lab labs team but also you have all the other protocols are building on top of your chain so typically it's very you know it's you tend to lose apps if your token prices go down a lot obviously it's much easier I would say it's relatively easier if you're just a protocol yourself and that you can, you know, still come up with incentive.

Um, people have perfect visibility in terms of where the company's going to go in the future, your treasury, all that kind of stuff. But obviously in in terms of building a chain, I think is is a completely different um setup. Yeah. My kind of intuition is it's it must be pretty distracting. Like I think it's it's much easier to build while the token is still not out yet because you can just like laser focus on that.

Yes. And once the token is out, it's well, first of all, you lose like a lot like you do lose quite some mind share because people don't wait for your TG anymore. But internally like people there are like stories in normal web two world as well like once companies do IPO like people just start watching the stock charts all the time. Y and just yeah very destructive. But also from a builder perspective like the top talents on Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley is basically all going to be joining early stage startups for the upside rather than late stage you know mega tech companies because there's a limited upset is a token already or equity already in in the public and is it challenging that especially in crypto you have the mindset of like users is that there's this expectation of a token in the future so everyone's using the chain ultimately just like sibling or whatever just doing things so that they're rewarded with the token.

and as soon as you drop the token, there's like inherently less interest because all of a sudden there's like less ways to make money. Um, has that been difficult for you specifically where like there's so much anticipation into the token launch, so much interest, and then as soon as it happens, it kind of like starts fading away like how how have you countered that? I think just speaking of our own experience um our mind share has been very high post TGE but primarily because we are you know building a tangible product that people can use they're very very sticky uh user base so for us it's it's okay and it's actually kind of very very beneficial for for the initial phase the way I think about why tokenization should happen or uh why the token can exist and can can bring a significant value for to a to a protocol is it's it's the it's the most extreme flywheel that that that just doesn't exist in any part of the world. As for example, think about the the grass protocol. If if you get everyone to essentially, you know, download whatever the stuff and then um you know contribute your kind of a residential bandwidth or stuff like that.

It it just wouldn't exist in rest of the world. that tokenization is so powerful to essentially get the get the get the user on boarded get the user behavior uh shaped out and if if kind of that's like a wellthoughtout process it's going to be the most powerful weapon that any builder can have. So I I'm very optimistic in terms of like for example Solana is having this narrative of uh building the alternative NASDAQ right. So, if we solve some of the uh incentive alignment issues, this is the best path for any builder to essentially bootstrap your product, build a long-term aligned community and have uh a very easy to access liquidity pool that's worldwide, which naturally should essentially have a premium over any sort of a traditional equity market. One last question for everyone in the panel.

uh we're nearing the end is what's one thing that you still think should improve to make this even more appealing for builders, for founders, for developers. We can start with Gian and just go through the full panel. I think like what kind of like building on what you've said it's what we're missing is just positive examples like a blueprints for people to copy. Uh like we have positive examples of Ka for example like TG happened. People still use it like they definitely did something right.

like we have hyperlquid same thing like token is out people still use the user exchange so once we have enough of those blueprints on we have enough of those examples hopefully builders will start copying them in a good way and I think that's that's when we'll see like a lot more unlocks in the space yeah so in my perspective I think um every concert party needs to be working together within crypto to essentially build this long-term sustainable uh attractive industry for everyone to essentially come and And I think that naturally is it's if we can make it so that we have a speculative camp and we have a serious builder camp, the serious builder cam can always have a very easy access to capital. Uh once they launch a token, people can see all the proper disclosure how well you are managing your company and maybe have um a sort of a milestone driven investing so that you're you're not you know extracting liquidity but you're actually realizing value. After you realize value, you can basically uh choose to divest the ownership uh realize the upside whatever and there's going to be kind of a maybe like a liquid fund association whatever that has so much power is essentially optimized capital allocation post TG and only that way we can essentially build a space that's favorable and rewarding disproportionately for for serious builders. I didn't catch the question. Mhm.

Uh what's kind of a thing that you wish would still be better um so that we can onboard even more founders, developers, builders? Uh what's one thing that you think is still missing that we can improve? Oh yeah. Um solving real problems and making things people want. I think one of the biggest tricks in in crypto is that since the liquidity is so easy, people will just make up problems and say, you know, I'm now solve this problem, but that problem doesn't actually exist, you know, like, okay, now I made green tea, but except now the string is stronger or something.

And it's like, okay, uh, great. And then they'll ask for a token and ask me to get paid. Um but fundamentally what matters uh and I think what str crypto struggle with the most is solving problems that actually exist that you can actually charge for as a builder right fundamentally you need to make money uh otherwise you're probably not really solving a problem or uh you're definitely not going to be a cash sustainable business so uh one thing that I can see better is just solving real problems. Cool. Well thank you everyone for coming for listening.

Thank you toi you and Mer. Uh, thanks so much.