What the spreadsheet? Yeah.
The calendar.
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast on the Cosmos from
independent validator teams.
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast on the Cosmos from
independent validators. And now sponsored by Coca Cola. We're
here with the uptown funk, the funky drummer,
funky. And we're going to be talking, we're going to be talking
a little bit about polka dot, obviously, as well as our usual
subject, the Cosmos as I mean, I literally actually said that
like, it was in the title of the podcast. So that shouldn't be a
surprise for anybody that Cosmos can come up. And yeah, apparently
the spreadsheet is mess. And usurper is in Key West and
somehow I actually make that rhyme. So doxxed. If you want to
go meet usurper face to face to get some rhino swag, you need
to get your ass down to Key West right now.
What do you think he's like, got a trunk full trunk full swag?
I know, having now got this fine, fine, needle cast apparel is
that the American word that I carry, I carry swag on me at all
times, just in case there is an opportunity for your ping to a
key stakeholder, you know, and expanding our burgeoning.
Are you being legitimately serious right now?
And does it include a shirt cannon? Like is it handing or is
it like?
It's not going to kill more than I'm not interested. That would
be my policy or merchandise. I am actually, I'm closer to
serious than I should be in that. Yes, I do carry stuff around
with me. Do I carry like a hoodie in every adult size? No, that
would be that would be like an extra rucksack to carry it all
times. usurper has a stack of hats with him from the chat. So
there you go. Also, the question is he's in the chat. So he
literally isn't a bar. He's literally in a bar with probably
maybe like one Apple Airport in while he's just doing something
much more enjoyable like drinking beer.
Pretending to listen to the misses. He said he was like doing
a jet ski tour around Key West. So I guess that's finished.
That sounds ridiculous and fun and a completely legitimate
reason for not being on the podcast this week. It's more
legit than being at the pub. Commodore's Boathouse usurper.
Go check that place out. Great happy hour. Good food. Awesome
drinks. So this is happy hour now too, I think, isn't it?
This week's episode of the podcast also sponsored by
Commodore's Boathouse.
Look, we are allowed to say we're having now just Shield Coca
Cola and Commodore's Boathouse. I think we could actually get
sponsored. Be picked up by the algorithm. Yeah, I mean, I think
maybe we're missing a trick on doing actual sponsorship
sharing at a more semi-professional level. We just need
there's just I think one thing missing that sponsors will be
looking for. It's viewers. It's viewers. The answer is viewers.
So can you get in trouble for saying someone's a sponsor if
they're not? Because like what if they're like embarrassed and
they're like, whoa, whoa, we do not sponsor them.
I'm almost certain. I'm almost certain that sounds like sort of
shit that somebody could sue you for in America. That sounds
really fucking likely. I think you're covered by parody. I
would think you're covered by parody in the UK. Is parody a
law now? Well, we don't have it like you do freedom of
speech, but you do have like the boys would be boys. We don't
have freedom of speech. In the UK, we literally do not have
legally enshrined freedom of speech, but we do have that if
somebody tries to do something particularly fucking stupid.
It will it kind of depends. Like sometimes you would get it
depends on the judge, I guess that's the problem of not
having these things enshrined right in a constitution is
that yeah, a judge will probably be like this is fucking
idiotic. I'm gonna throw this out. And then like you on a
different day might get a different judge and they might
go, ah, but the person who made the complaint is super rich
Russian oligarch and I happen to be given money by or have
political sympathies that leave me in that direction and then
I am actually going to fucking charge you with a crime and
then you'd be like, what the fuck? So that's why you need a
constitution and Bill of Rights folks that is written down
rather than implicit like the British one. Wait, wait, what?
Hold on. Well done America. The British don't have an actual
constitution like a Bill of Rights. It's implicit. Of
course not. It's it's there's an entirely but this is the
thing like about all all this British political process is
basically based on an imagined set of this is how we
conduct ourselves to the extent that there's like this to the
height of government, right? So there's this idea of things
like parliament collective responsibility, which is that
essentially like the cabinet makes decisions for the
country and they need to own those decisions collectively
and if there's a mistake made on your watch, you're the
minister of constable, you resign like over pretty minor
things historically like embarrassment and what it turns
out that because that's just like you know, it's just an
honor code like what happened in the last 15 years with all
the insane political stuff that we've had just like you folks
have had is that ministers went, yeah, I fucked up but I was
just checks notes thinking about the will of the people and
I don't feel that embarrassed. I'm not going to resign and
then it turned out that you know, people can just it basically
turns out people do whatever the fuck they want because there's
no rules about anything and then people have gone, oh, fuck.
Yeah, actually it turns out writing stuff down has some value
and we've also seen that the like, you know, right to protest
is the big one in the UK where essentially like the government
did loads of really unpopular shit. So people protested and
then like, yeah, we're just going to say you can't protest
within like 500 minutes of parliament, then a mile of
parliament, then blah, blah, blah, blah and that's why like
you know, stuff like the fucking the toad pony fuckers
that they've just you know, the new guy the fucking valent
yeah, King Charles fucking. Thank you for the fucking history
of not laws that exist. Your microphone has an issue by the
way. So sure, most of us only caught about fuck all of that.
Yeah, it's like, yes, it's it keeps cutting out
micro cut ads. I want it known that history time with the fray
is like my favorite time of Game of Nose and this half the
reason why I sign on at least half the reason why I sign on.
Now you're muted so can't help I mean half the reason that's
that's very, very generous, you'll see but but yeah, okay, I mean I
would I would I think I think might be working anyway, we've
got we've got the real funk here. Let's let's let's stop talking
about British political process because it's really depressing
and the fact that we don't have a bill of rights. So we did have
the only okay it's the only bit bill of rights we did have we
had like the European one and the European Human Rights Act
and then we brexit and now they're just trying to throw it
out. So we we we don't we don't got shit. No shit. Yeah. Have
you even brexit it yet? It's like yeah, it's a whip right?
Yeah, it's it's yeah, it's just fucking yeah fuck those guys.
People want to break so fucking stupid. That's the TRDR. But
a lot of people who wanted things like that basically wanted to
erode personal rights and liberties and freedoms because
the only place they were written down was in European law.
So they go like oh well we can just we we don't want workers
rights. We don't want working time directive. We don't want
that stuff. We just leave Europe and then we can just
abolish those laws. Environmental standards being
another one food standards and other one that people get
pissed off about because they have mates that run big
multinationals where the food standards are shit. You know,
it's it's always key bono, right? You know, not the guy from
the YouTube but anyway, the YouTube the YouTube and then
hey, aside, but the story of the construction of the YouTube
very, very interesting recommend looking up. I'm going to
drill through the week and that's talk to funky when we're
still less than 10 minutes in. So if we can get to talking to
our guests before 10 minutes are up, then Bendy won't won't
give me loads of shit via via. We haven't even done the news.
I'll say what? I'll do drill to the week. You can do news now.
Then we'll talk to funk deal. Let's do it. All right. Okay.
Okay. The tweet of the week is from the section marked sorrow
and it just says belittle me call me shit throw hair at me.
I mean that's like a way of life. Did you know that the what's
it called the furry con in Pittsburgh had like 50,000
people there this year? That's kind of unrelated but
throwing something about throwing hair and belittling me
like those two connected for me. Is that your persona?
Furry con is like we're a bunch of furries go to you know a
conference and have like orgies and stuff. So this year in
Pittsburgh, there was like 50,000 attendees. For those of us
who don't know, can you just like explain just a little bit
what a furry is like? So you have no context for what a
furry is. Oh my god. Okay. So I'm the people who don't know.
People know. Surely. Surely. The real question now is what is
your first owner? Ferry persona. Now I'm making some guesses
here as to what a furry actually is but if anything I
would have to say I'm probably like
what are those like rat looking things with the long beaks but
they're pretty cute and they fucking roll over when you pat
them? A possum? No. It's like a capoeira. A capoeira? That's
like a Japanese thing. No. No. No. Capoeira is like South
America and they have quite a blunt snout. There's in fact one
in the end in the end title card again. No, it's the capoeira
that's the capoeira. There is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be a
capoeira. But but but you'd also be like you're
incised right because the the the outfits. Yeah. They're not
particularly they're not really like supposed to be like
um what's the what's the word that I'm looking for about
accurate to a to the morphism of a creature anatomical
anatomically correct. They're very impressionistic. That's
that's a way of putting it. So, liberties have been taken
with regards to design. Yeah, would you not like I don't mean
this is like a route that is not a rude hot take now but do
you not think that you would be more of like a bird than a
mammal? Or maybe a marsupial? Why a bird? That might be a
bird. I'm sure we see that last one there. Australia.
I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing the context of what
furry is. I don't I don't fucking know what a furry is.
Okay. So, a furry is someone who basically like dresses up
like an animal to because they're like sexually attracted
to them. I guess. I don't know. It's necessarily like
they're attracted to animals so much as like the idea of
like having sex with a anamorphic or yeah, looking
fox. So, if you look up like a furry costume, they're
basically like in cosplay but intended to be like
semi-sexualized. It's super fascinating like subculture.
And the fray you think I would be a fucking
bird? Yeah, maybe. I could see that. Okay. All right. I mean
it's very common. Fox is very popular. I don't know how to
reflect this conversation in the spreadsheet. Good luck. I've
actually lost the spreadsheet this week. It's it's been
it's been it's been renamed to something absolutely
ridiculous. It took a little bit to find it. It still says
game of nodes but it's podcast corporate goals in okay arts.
I don't know what a fucking okay I read. Oh, that's thanks to
Rama. Oh, an okay. It's an objective key result, I believe.
Oh, I feel like we may have also been on the end of some
okay ours in this time. Oh, you better believe it at acorns.
Like every literally every week we talk about okay ours at
null hands every week. So my answer is easy. I'd be a quaka
because that's what Rama said my animal would be for the
corporation. So if I'm going to be a furry, I figure a quaka might
be what a perfect one. That's an Australian Google it. So
like actually it was a first a friend that suggested it and
he said just something about the way you constantly smiling and
laughing. You remind me of a quaka and I was like what the
hell's a quaka? It says you Google wow see the image you're
going to laugh and then so Rama made the quaka for me for my
corporation PFP my first time the corporation as a lowly
intern. That's glorious. Those are those are some good
animals. Wait, is this this is like a little marsupial?
I think I think it is a marsupial but I'm not 100% sure.
It's yeah it's a marsupial from Australia right that's the
this is such an Australian word as well. It's the Q.
Q is a small macro pod about the size of a cat. It's a
marsupial. It's just like that Simpson's episode isn't it?
Where they go to I think they go to Australia don't they and
they say like they're trying to like Bart or Lisa sees like a
bird or something goes oh that's a you know a name's the bird
what it actually is a sparrow whatever and this Australian
person goes like you call that a sparrow I called it a
chas was a and you're like that's about right. No, okay,
now this I see dollars tiring with this. Would you like to do
the news now? Oh yeah. So, uh well, I mean, we've never we've
never done the news before but you know, I feel like I feel
like you know people might want to know about the news. I
mean, I don't have any like news that's really don't have any
news but like I'm extremely irrelevant to like anything but
so in the supermarket last night, a local resident went crazy
and just started assaulting people. Oh, we mean the news.
You know, someone said I think it was I can't remember who it
was the other day. Someone sent me a a video like you know,
just to my my messenger and they sent me a link to a video of
like some woman just going fucking batshit nuts in like a
local supermarket from my hometown and they're like, is
this what people are like in your town? I'm like, so people
like everywhere man. Everyone be crazy these days. But I know
so I mean the the the big news in crypto in like the last
day is that Bitcoin breaks $30,000. Yeah, I just learned
about that. Juno bags in the slide. Are we are we rich again?
No, no shitcoins are still worth. We're still in the poor
house. Yeah, yeah. But I believe that you know, after Gary
Gensler fucking took a nuclear bomb to everything, there are
now like some what do they call them like investment houses?
What do they call like BlackRock and that really called
just hedge funds hedge funds hedge funds. Yeah. So they are you
know, what's I don't know what the word is like quietly
confident about getting through their Bitcoin ETF because
apparently they've got a pretty good hit rate. So anyway,
everyone got excited about that. And so ETH and Bitcoin are
up, which is handy. So I think I think ETH's back to about
where it was before the Gary Gensler bullshit. What is that
because Gensler basically said the one the one thing you
literally can't regulate is Bitcoin. So everybody went
Bitcoin's YOLO. Full YOLO. Like let's speculate. The whole
casino's back on the whole market. The whole market. The whole
market sort of went up with it sort of like a lot of things
did. Even ETH went up with it. So I think that answer
specifically called Bitcoin a commodity, which is easier to
get through as an ETF than you know, security. So if the head
of the SEC says, Hey, it's a commodity that you can just be
like, Oh, well, funny thing. I go for an ETF for that. And so
then that pumped that which put everything else up with it,
I think. So there is like I've got a friend who's a Bitcoin
miner and like he likened it to cows. He said like, you know,
a Bitcoin's like when you've got cattle and then you get a new
cattle born. It's like not out of anything. It's just new. And
I didn't quite understand what he was talking about. But
apparently there's a lot of farms out there making Bitcoin.
So I've just been to a bunch of I'm going to say altcoins rather
than shitcoins. Oops, I said it anyway. You're right now,
almost everything is positive because everything's positive
you correlated to a Bitcoin anyway. But like actually almost
everything is, you know, even if it's 2%, 3%, 1%, lots and lots
of things have had a good 24 hours actually. Like literally
if you go in your trading, not that you should trade, not
financial advice, whatever, but like in whatever you use to
look at crypto prices, if you have a view that sees all of
them and you flick it to seven days, you'll see, and then a
little sign of life at the end. So no, you're right. Fair play.
Yes, but you know, this happens occasionally and it'll
probably be short lived. There's the pessimism we needed.
I think it's going to give us some footing. I mean, BlackRock is
the largest asset manager in the world. They got like 9 trillion.
Their hit rate on ETF approvals is like 570 something to one.
And I think that's why you immediately saw all the others following
their lead. Like there's a bunch of fast follows from other ETF
companies piling in trying to get in on the action. So
whether or not this is, I'm not saying we can't go lower, but I just see it as a
sign of a new higher low and maybe beginning an uptrend.
I mean, if they do get one through, I feel like it would be
great. It'd be like a pretty good step forward into
crypto becoming more mainstream with investors, I guess.
Or like, you know, seen as something a little bit more legitimate than
nerds playing with imaginary money. So what you're saying is,
buy Bitcoin, not financial advice. I'm not saying anything of the
like.
Welcome to Game of Thrones, a weekly podcast on how to speedrun going to jail.
Imagineer a narrative with me here,
short C. If it's a commodity, can you still go to jail for saying on the
podcast that you should buy Bitcoin? Hypothetically, not financial advice.
Well, I mean, I think there's different levels of going to jail, right?
There's you're an enemy of the state and we don't like you. So we're going to put
you in jail and not give you charges yet so that you kind of aren't on the books.
Like we have a large history of that in the US. And I think you could still fill
under that category if you pushed Bitcoin enough. They'd be like, all right, well,
he's trying to like undermine the dominance of US dollar
in the world. So... So do you think that's what happened to CZ then? CZ?
If they could get their hands on him, it would not surprise me if that happened.
But they generally do that for more cases that are less public. So maybe they wouldn't. Hard to say.
Toborra aligned from Monty Python. Nobody expects the extraordinary rendition.
That was quite a niche war on terror joke, I guess. So Bitcoin, $30,000 happy days.
We're maybe not in the poor house forever, but still are in the poor house now.
Still firmly, firmly in the poor house. Good to know. I mean, to be fair,
I'm also looking at this chart. And then if you zoom out to one year,
and that percentage is not in... It's a big L, fellas.
CB All right. Did not register?
CZ Yeah. I think in general, across the assets that we have some exposure to as a company,
it looks like we're down 99% in value over the last year, give or take. So...
CB No, none of you guys hold any Bitcoin at all personally?
CZ Cosmos. I sold my Bitcoin years ago. So almost all of my ETH as well.
CB Oh, wow. Funky, do you hold coins in the bigger ecosystems?
CZ Yeah. I'm still a Bitcoiner, I guess. I mean,
primarily Bitcoin and ETH that makes up the majority of our portfolio. I used to get teased
a lot during the bull run because I'm grandpa and I have like, oh, you have Bitcoin Ethereum,
and I'm like, who's laughing now? I mean, you're shit melted down completely. Mine's
melted down a little less. CB Yeah. Some people have melted to the ground.
Yours is like, you know, like one of those toys that sort of melted, but it's still like vaguely
a shape of some description. You're like at that stage as it's just a pile of goo on the ground.
CZ I mean, I guess the thing is, it's worth, I always think of this as like, when I first bought
Bitcoin, well, I first got paid in Bitcoin actually for some work. Bitcoin was £145,
which at the time would have been about $200, right? I had like a Bitcoin, something like that,
I don't know. And then when I next bought it, it was about $1700, I think. And then
sold that some time later, blah, blah, blah, blah. But no, but like, if you look at the macro,
there's obviously, so if you look at the micro, there's obviously times when it was below each
of those prices after I had that asset. But like, if you look at the long-term chart, like it just
the interest in the asset, because it is just the name, so like, even like, it was around that time,
around 2013, I bought a bunch of Dogecoin because I was like, ah, I've got cracked this crypto thing.
The asset doesn't matter, it's just about brand recognition. And I bought like 10,
20,000 Doge, something like that for like about three quid when I was drunk. And then,
but then it's all about holding it to the right fucking time, right? Because years later, I was
like, this does thing really, it really isn't moving. And then of course, fucking it did.
I have never traded into a winner ever. In my life, I have not ever made a trade
on crypto that has like yielded me any kind of profit.
And as a company, every time we've shifted from one cryptocurrency to another to change our risk
profile, we have in fact, in the long term, made our situation worse. Every single time we've tried
to calculate something. But on an individual level, I have only made money from crypto
and including trading. But then I'm not a trader, I am like,
get a thing, hold on to it for three, five years. It's just some of those trades like,
I sold my Doge for a profit, obviously easy when you bought it for three quid.
Did I sell it for the whatever thousands of pounds it would have eventually been? No, no, I did not.
So partial match says, look at pay pay and pay pay is up 57%.
Is it?
Wow, that's a huge leap.
It's the top performer out of the big 100, pay pay.
Here come the memes.
I mean, yeah, we have done notoriously bad in crypto trading. But I am at the moment
trying to build like a little bit of an ETH bag because we've never really held any of the top
cryptos as a company. So sort of just like DCA-ing into some ETH at the moment.
But maybe you like, we'll look at some Bitcoin. I don't know.
So Jesus, ETH at the moment, the price is like the price I sold it for in like 2019 or something.
Or something when I got rid of most of my ETH.
So I bought ETH back in like the last bull before the last one.
So it was like 2000 and I don't know, 17 around there or something like that for like two grand.
And then I held it all the way through the bear market and just sort of forgot about it.
And then I do this, I used to do this thing where like every month I would just like add up
the total equity of each of my investments and house and retirement fund and everything just to
like keep an eye on my position that I'm trying to grow, see if I'm going backwards or not.
And yeah, like around when COVID was around like 2020, I noticed that like my XRP and ETH was like
starting to come back up again. And I think I actually sold them both at a profit,
which the government was really happy about. But anyway, I did get out of them and then only
just recently decided to get back in. Seems like we're like a fairly way into a bear market now.
So it might be sort of around, you know, an area where it might be okay to buy it.
Yeah, but I did almost buy Bitcoin like back in 2000 and I want to say 15, 16,
17 when I'd just gone back to like my hometown and I was just, you know, meeting up with some
people. This is like I came back from the mines and I went back to my hometown. It was like just
about the time when... Yeah, hey, the Yabba. The Yabba. First time in the Yabba. The Yabba.
Anyway, I was working in the mines over in Western Australia and I came back home and I was just
meeting up with friends that I hadn't seen in ages. And one of my mates at the time, more still is,
was a Bitcoin miner. And I met up with him at the pub and we were just having a yarn about
investment and stuff. He's like, oh, you should look into Bitcoin. And I'm like, I don't know about
that. And anyway, he convinced me to make an investment into Bitcoin. And with the exchange
over here in Australia, like there wasn't many at the time. And probably the bigger one was
BTC markets. And at the time you had to like sign up and then they would send you a thing in the
mail with a code on it. And then you had to enter the code. And then you could make your account.
I guess it's like some sort of proof of address bullshit. And so I did that process. And then
I signed up and then I went away to Queensland for a little bit. And I came back and I got the
code. And at the time, I think Bitcoin was like $200 Australian. And I put the code in. And then
it's like, your code's expired, you got to do it again. So I went through the fucking. So I'd
committed to make like a like a $50,000 Australian investment at the time. It was like a probably,
you know, a good portion of like my portfolio, not half, but like a good portfolio portion at the
time. And anyway, so I was pissed off about that. I did the account thing again. I waited for the
fucking thing to come in the mail. I put it in again. By that time, Bitcoin was like $2,000.
And I'm like, ah, missed the boat. And so I left it. And then that's if you've got those at $200
right now, you wouldn't need this. You wouldn't need this validate a bullshit. And we wouldn't be here.
Look, let's face it. So in some senses, right, the validator thing is you missing the boat on not
only Bitcoin, but also Bitcoin mining. And it's the FOMO that drives you now. So let's face it.
You up first thing in the morning with a fiery tight heat in your belly. You're like, if I had
bought that Bitcoin at $200, I would almost certainly have sold it at $400. Yep. No, that's
what I did with my Ethereum that I bought for about £100, something like that. I had a bunch.
It got, I saw it go up to £1,000 that first time in like 2016, 2017, which ran up like crazy and
then like crashed overnight. And then it was like four years or something until it went up again.
And the second it went back past that marker where I was like, that's as high as it got last time.
I'm like, I let it go up a bit more and was like, we're at the edge of my risk here. Dump this
shit coin. And then obviously it went up to four times that amount. So you're like, well,
but you're like, it's still a fucking 100% 1000% return 1000% return. So yeah. Yeah. So 1000%
because 100% would be if you've made it had $100 and you got $200 that'd be 100%.
Right? Yeah. I feel like the plebs have a hard time conceptualizing 1000% though.
Yeah. It's much easier to say 10X for them. Yep. 10X if you like.
I got some, the best one I got though is, you know, did you ever use Keybase back in the day?
They just air dropped you like a few thousand stellar years ago. I didn't know.
Yeah. Like like like 2018 maybe something like that. Just totally for free. You just had to
claim it. You just had to have a wallet. And then I literally just immediately threw it over into
Kraken and was just like price notification on my phone. Maybe we were worth something someday.
And then that was one where I did actually sell it at a profit. I think, yeah, I mean,
yeah, obviously it's from zero, but the based on where the price was when I got it to when I sold
it, I think that would have been 100, maybe even 1000X. Partially, I remember the Keybase claim.
The only airdrop I've ever gotten in the like, you know, big crypto sphere.
When I say big crypto sphere, I mean, you know, basically everything else other than Cosmos.
Even Tina had Miss London Dame from Mad Max. Yeah. So I did get an optimism airdrop.
So here's a funny story. I used to listen to this podcast called
fuck. What was it? Game of Nose, a weekly podcast on the Cosmos by independent validated teams.
Don't forget to like and subscribe. Plug. So this was a daily, right? This was a daily podcast.
And I honestly can't remember what the fuck it was called anymore. But I used to really like it.
It was just like a little bit of a snapshot of, you know, the previous day really in crypto and
what was happening in the big crypto sphere. And it was actually Yuri from friends validator was
like the person who did this every day and his business partner, who I can't remember the name
of right now. But it was really good. And one day is like, so optimism got released. And he's like,
optimism is released. And if it's like anything, like anything else in that sort of sphere, there's
a good chance that if you use it at some point, you probably get an airdrop if they ever create
a token. And I was like, huh, that's a good idea. So I pulled over in my car, which I was driving.
So I always listen to this in the car and got out my laptop and like sent across a dollar in
from ETH to optimism, which cost me like $10 and then made a trade and then couldn't send it back
because I didn't have enough money to send it back to like Ethereum anyway. And fast forward,
like a year and a half. And optimism had a token that they launched. And we got an airdrop of like,
I think it's worth like $3,000 now. US. So I mean, that was cool. Thanks, Yuri.
So wait, that's like, that is literally like a hundred extra 10,000 extra 10,000 extra 10,000
extra 10,000. That would be like a 3000 extra 10. Right. But it wasn't based on the dollar value.
It was more based on like, Oh, you used it here. Have some, it was like, I think it was a function
based thing. Like he got a certain amount for like, having token on there, you got like a
certain amount for making a swap, you got like a certain amount for providing liquidity, etc.
One of those type type ones. And I just got, I got pretty much the base, but I've still got it.
I don't know what's worth. I guess it was the interesting thing that you kind of realize,
like if you've been in crypto for a while, like, you know, I've been holding various since like
2011. So I was like, you've been in it for a long time. I think, I think everybody in this
podcast has like had some touchpoint with with the stuff for quite a long period of time is you
realize like, you know, no matter how much, say Bitcoin goes up, right? It's you if you have one
Bitcoin, you're not only in terms of follow this. So I guess people in TradFi have traditionally gone,
Oh, well, you know, it's super, super volatile. But like I saw when I was buying in, you know,
with no real strategy over the course of like seven, eight years, and never really seemed to lose
money as long as I didn't sell it emotionally. You're upside, you're so you're downside risk is
actually pretty, pretty capped like it never seems to get like as long as you as long as you assume
it will eventually recover, which eventually after every bear cycle it does based on name,
recognition alone, this is not financial advice. The the problem is the upside risk is also so the
upside bonus is also like super, super capped because you're only ever going to hold like one or two
Bitcoin at most. And even when you even when you bought in in like 2012 or whatever, I mean,
at that point, I was fucking broke because, you know, junior engineer, like what was it gonna do
with didn't have any any profits profit, right? You're like, I need this to fucking beer and toast.
Yeah, I need to fucking, I could have my fucking, I've only got a PS2 and it's bloody 2020, whatever
it was, 2020, 2012, I need a PS4 or whatever was the latest there, I probably still only have a PS4,
but whatever. Anyway, not important. Like you look at Bitcoin, you're just like the Bitcoin is
less important than PS4 or gaming PC or whatever, clearly. Well, that's that's kind of relevant to
me. Well, you can finish storing, then I'll I'll tag in. Well, so what I was gonna say, but this is
the thing you realize when you get more into the alt Z ecosystem. And like the thing Noel was saying,
with these air drops or like stellar, which was the air drop of a very, very low value token,
that ends you end up getting these returns that are like, yeah, 3000 X or something like that.
And you make a couple thousand dollars, but it does make you realize that in order to replicate
that success, you would have had to go very big on an incredibly risky altcoin very early and hold
like 30,000 40,000 or something to get to the point where it's because there's like a very big
difference between like life changing money is like really cool. Like, like, bear in mind,
I think 10 pounds is quite a lot of money because that's still just about two points of beer in
the part of the country I live in. If I see 10 pounds on the ground, that is my week fucking
made. That's the caveat, right? That's that's a lot of money to me. I am a fucking stingy bastard.
But like a lot of money is like if some if you if you were able to earn with a trade or like
holdings and coins, your yearly salary, that's insane. But what's when you start looking at
like what's actually life changing money in terms of like what real estate costs near to you if you
want to like buy a house or something like that. It's crazy how quickly you get from like where
Bitcoin was in 2012 where you could just like buy because there was only one or 2010, you could
have only one coin, you had to buy that and then hold that versus like now the incredible
unlikelihood of you being able to pick a token, buy it early enough, buy in the quantity enough,
and then actually like Null says, not sell it, not sell it when it doubled in value and be like,
fuck, fuck, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out, I'm done. That's the thing that always like the level of
optimism of retail investors in crypto always astonishes me whenever I reflect on that pattern
that I've seen and like how big those bets would have to be. I mean, I guess I'm also projecting
a very like living in an expensive country viewpoint onto it as well. But I think if you had a bot
that just bought like $100 of every new token that went into like the shitcoin reactor
and then never looked at it, never even looked at what the bot was buying and then just had like
notifications set up for the bot when those balances exceeded a million dollars,
I reckon you'd hit one at some point. So like the million monkeys, million typewriters approach.
Yeah, exactly. But they're just automated monkeys.
Shit, I think you've basically described venture capital investment and that shit works.
That shit works. Yeah, but we're throwing fucking bananas. This is financial advice from Null.
It's deaf. That sounded like ring that set off the financial advice klaxon,
it's financial advice. That was using by Null. So I'm just entering an entry here,
4100 financial advice. Oh, right. So you're updating the spreadsheet to make it clear
that was in fact financial advice. That's a break for you, sir, but I have to deal with Paul
Bastad. So, what were you saying? Funky with my, oh, sorry, she'll see you go. Then I'll ask Funky
the question. Oh, I was going to say the description of like the comparison to like a
PlayStation is super apt for me. I don't know if I've really talked about this on air before,
but I've actually been in Bitcoin since like 2010. I used to trade it on for Diablo 2 items. So
there was like, there's like this, this forum called D2JSP, which had like internet gold basically,
but it wasn't like Bitcoin. It was like all in this one form. Wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm sorry.
I didn't, I'm not going to jump ahead. I got super excited. I made a connection with things I know
about you. And I was just like, Oh my God, is this going to be a block list? And now I've realized
that that might be the plot to it. So I'm going to shut up. Okay. So it goes D2JSP. And through
that is how it kind of got into software. Cause I used to be like one of the like people who would
write bots for Diablo. And then there was like the cyberpunk version of these guys, which would
use Bitcoin. And I was one of those. And so at one point I'm in college for this. And I think I got,
I got scammed out of like, like three or four Bitcoin, which at the time was like a dollar.
But in college, that's like, that was like, that was like, you know, a quarter hour of work or
whatever. And I was like, this is some bullshit. Like I should be better than this. I've been playing
this game for so long. I can't believe I got scammed. And like I scrapped my wallet and I've
actually looked back on it before. I don't even know what it is now. And like it's got like 150
Bitcoin on there. So like my history of Bitcoin actually went really far back. And then that
led me to, I mined Doge in 2014 and I had a little over a million of that and sold that in 2017 for
like $600 or something. So my history of Bitcoin is actually quite far and goes, rolls back into
gaming and is kind of in a way like the start of the trajectory of my career.
I thought you were going to say, I thought you were going to say something about,
because I know you're into collectibles. I thought this was going to be a plot twist
around magic, the gathering and Mount Gox. And I was going to be like,
no, no, I got out before then I got out before then no. And I never was into magic, the gathering.
I have Pokemon cards, not magic cards. But that's a whole other.
Do you have a shiny Charizard? I'm sure I've asked this question before.
So yes, I have. I got rid of all of that stuff. I actually have like, I'm one of the few people
with a couple of complete sets. So like there's kind of two versions of Pokemon cards. There's
the Wizards of the Coast ones, which are the original ones. And then there's the lake after
second generation. There's later ones. And afterwards the Coast soul, they made like one set
and printed a very limited printing. So I have this one set that's like obscenely rare. I've only
ever talked to one other person. I used to be super active in like Pokemon card forms of like
this one set of cards that is basically impossible to find. So is that set of Pokemon cards worth
more than all of your collective crypto holdings? No, but it is quite close.
You did have to think about it though. Yeah. And I get offers on it on eBay very frequently,
even though it's quite expensive. What you get offers on eBay? What?
Yeah, because I sold through eBay. It's not listed anymore, but I had it listed like two years ago
and people still have it like somehow saved or something. So they'll still send me messages
like, Hey, I know you had this posted. I know you didn't sell it. So yeah. So we're we've hit the
45 minute mark and I haven't talked to funky yet. So I mean, sort of following on from the
conversations we've already been having funky. I mean, you haven't interjected, which is kind
of what you have to do to get a word in edgewise on this podcast. I would like to ask you so that
you have the opportunity to speak. What was your entry point into crypto? How was there a sad story
like the rest of us? Or did you actually nail it first up? Yeah, I have two sad stories because
Frank clearly was a Magic the Gathering player. And in 1998, when I moved to Florida, I basically
financed my move by selling all of my magic cards. And I'm talking I had Mox's Black Lotus,
Forge's Amps, you know, like, I mean, that is sad for sure. Ponds of money now. I found a library
of Alexander one day in a deck that I didn't even think I still had. And I went and sold it for like
800 bucks to a dealer that was near me. But anyhow, yeah, my crypto story was one of the smartest
kids I was a teacher for like 20 years before I came to my full time role in the Web three. And
one of the smartest kids ever taught he was chosen out of a dozen students in the United States to
go it was like a state department estate sponsor of these 12 kids go to China full immersion for a
whole year. He was speaking Mandarin in ninth grade, like he was on the second semester. He came back.
This is like circa 2012. Maybe comes back in the spring of 2013, which is probably like that first
real big bull run for Bitcoin. And he tells me he's like, Have you heard of the Bitcoin thing?
And I had just started investing like open Roth IRAs, maybe like a couple years earlier. So I'm
like, I tried five kind of like, I don't know anything. I look up stuff. I see Silbrode, I see
drug dealing on the dark web and like, Nope, not for me. So then in 2016, when I was teaching
different group of kids and everything else, and this one kid who was explaining, he wanted to open
a nonprofit and he wanted to do micro loans for people who didn't have any kind of money. He
hated like, am Scott and all these services that are just do this predatory lending. And so he
wanted to do something on the blockchain. He explains to me blockchain, he explains distributed
ledger technology and I like the concept immediately clicks with me. That's really cool. Like, you know,
you're taking away all of the, you know, just having these nodes all over the place where the
data can be found and whatnot. And he tells me about it. And so I help him set up his 501 3C
here in Florida. It's called, it's called Fair Pact. And he wants to set up the nodes and stuff
with him and his friends. Well, then in springtime of his graduating year 2017, now we're well into
the bull run. And he comes up to me, he's like, Hey, have you seen the price of Bitcoin? And I
was like, No, what's why do you care about Bitcoin? He said Bitcoin, like that is the original,
you know, distributed ledger technology that is like the original working blockchain. And it was
like, that's when it clicked. And I was like, Okay, I understood sort of this powerful tech and this
idea of decentralization, that was really cool. But I didn't have the connection that it was Bitcoin.
And so I just, you know, typical pleb bought some Bitcoin, bought some Ethereum, just kind of
FOMO it in, you know, like everybody else, just the euphoria takes over you're like, Ah, yeah,
I'm making so much money. I'm never going to sell my buddy. So like the day at the peak and went and
bought a boat, he was smart. He's like a Bank of America vice president. So he's the trad buy guy
who's like, I don't trust this shit. Like, I made a ton. I'm buying a boat. And so
I had a similar friend who I worked for like one of the big American tech companies, did math and
physics at university, real big brain guy. And literally, he bought on the way in on the FOMO
cycle. And then literally, like within two weeks, was like, this shit's going to collapse again,
like like like your man got out like bridge at the top of his like, shit, I can take two
big ass holidays this year. I'm a fucking legend. And he has never touched crypto since.
Like it's just like, he's like, what are all your kids doing over there? And you're like,
we're busy making money. He's like, you're busy making L's and I know it.
I think I bought XRP at the peak, like for a three something and I even had to trade some
Bitcoin to get XRP at the time. So and then I just hobbled it into the ground, didn't really pay
attention. And I would randomly, it's funny, I go back and look at my Coinbase history and I
would just must be bored at school or something. I'm like, oh, I'm just gonna buy a couple ETH.
It looks cheap. Like, I mean, you know, I find these random buys in 2019 and 2020. And then I
just kind of knew a little bit about, you know, COVID comes and I start having, you know, just
like everybody else on board, there's a lot of time on our hands. So I start really researching,
like, what doesn't Bitcoin have this having thing? And so I knew the cycle was coming. So then we
started to seriously invest and we were buying, like I would say probably our average buy for ETH
is, you know, our cost basis might be like 400 bucks or something like across all time, just
because of we did a lot of accumulation in 2020. Same thing for Bitcoin. And then the biggest genius
play was buying options for all the Bitcoin miners in the summer of 2020 for like pennies.
And just watching that shit absolutely explode in a Roth tax free. And it's like, oh, okay, 50
grand. Thanks. Like just breaking money off the table is kind of insane. So getting ahead of the
curve. And then I was just getting to Polkadot for that same reason, because I was just doing research.
And I just happened to find sort of like this video, what is Polkadot with Dan Reeser and Bill
Labune. And I read Gavin's like vision of interoperability. And that's kind of what drew me to,
and this is why like cosmos right at the end of the day, I feel like we're all hurtling toward a
multi chain future where like all this stuff's not talking to each other, right? And people are
probably even going to know the names in 10 years about like what does what. And so I just started
with dot. And then I actually had I started buying cosmos when I was like four or five bucks. But then
I sold it all in the bullrod because I was married to my bags, like because I was just like, oh,
oh, never I locked up most of the crowd loans. And, you know, now it's like I'm gonna get staking
rewards. It's done and unlocked. So now then when the bear came again, we just started like DCing
into Bitcoin and Ethereum for the most part. And then when Bitcoin got past like 25k, we just started
putting our DCA dollars to Adam and now a vax and getting a little bit because the subnet's
are coming. So anything that offers interoperability is kind of I'm a big fan of placing small bets
knowing that one of them is going to have an asymmetric payoff, right? Like I would still
say that in the bull run previously, the two best bags that we had, which were not big allocations in
terms of money. In the winter of 2020, I bought Matic for like two cents. And I bought Solana for
like two bucks. And those ripped well above anything else that we held through the bull.
And then of course, to do stupid things to like the mistake that I learned a lot during the most
recent bull run was by the dip because of being a Bitcoin or my wife's like, we need the next full
coin. And so like it would dip and I would just be like, and I had been peeling profits into stables.
And then it's like, oh, buy the dip. And you know, you spend like five grand to buy like a tenth of a
Bitcoin. And I was like, I was dumb. Like I look back on my now, I was like, that was dumb. But then
there's also like this really funny disconnect when it's magic internet money, like when you have
stable coins and the same thing explains my NFT degeneracy, because it's like, it's not real money.
Like if you said, oh, this costs X and I was going to take it on my checking account, I'd be like,
you're fucking kidding. Like you must be insane. But if it's magic internet money, like your brain
is just like your reptilian brains, the only thing that plugged in is like, okay, that works. You
know, it's just I'm just like, if you found like 50, if you found like 50 bucks on the floor, you'd
be like, holy shit, this is the best day. And if somebody was like, hey, you can, you can spend that
50 bucks on this NFT, you'd be like, go fuck yourself. Yeah, I'm going to the pub. Yeah.
If it's Fiat, yes, I pretty much and that's why like, so my even I was bad and I was guilty,
like when I first came to Cosmos back in January and started like watching you guys and just like
meeting people and I got to Stargaze and it was game over because I was like, I'm in the coffee,
the Cosmos coffee house. I love that little social group. They're a great group of folks.
And like every time I would DCA into Adam, I just kept converting it to stars and buying NFTs.
Like it was terrible for the first few months. And I finally like, just like, okay, I got to stop
like buying NFTs, have my little wallet, and I'm just going to put this Adam on the stake and let
it do its thing over, you know, the course of time. So there's my story as condensed as possible.
So when you say you're like, and sorry, I don't actually know much about you, funky. I haven't
like researched you or anything. But so when you say you're like full time in crypto now,
what does that look like? Are you like, are you a full time investor or are you like you work for
actually some crypto company somewhere? Yeah. So I'm the director of fellowship and protocol
relations with Lucky Friday Labs. And Lucky Friday, we're an infrastructure provider like you guys.
So we run their metal that we own in SOC2 data centers. Like we have a secondary brand that's
kind of more positioned toward institutional investors. And now when we run a lot of ETH validators
and we're starting to test out Eigenlayer and stuff like that. And so the Lucky Friday brand
is more like just community support. So we started in the Polkadot ecosystem because our co founder
same thing, we're very bullish on the whole idea of interoperability. And then we just thought like,
okay, cosmos is the next most logical step. So let's go over there. And so part of like my interest
in cosmos is both personal and professional because like that's my job like, oh, go meet like all
like, if I were to sum up my job, it's like, I'm the super friendly dude who shows up realizing
I'm the dumbest guy in the room and just likes to ask tons of questions. Because like, I am the
least technical person on the team, but I'm a self profess nerd, I cannot tell you how much joy
it brought me to know that I was going to be on episode number 67, because it's a prime number.
And I taught math, I'm just fucking weird like that. So I mean, you're too off, you're too off the
one that everybody wants though. But I don't even care, because that's not prime. It's a dirt
composite. Like I just, but yeah, I just think at the end of the day, like that's kind of what I do
is just go in meet a lot of people. I mean, I was a teacher for 20 years. So I'm just very much like
a people person. You know, I do a morning meditation. So Ramra can fall asleep to my soft
quack of voice. You know, so I was a yoga teacher, I don't think guys can see it. There's like,
pads and blocks there. So and, you know, we're doing a lot of other things like we just launched
our first NFT. So like the hat I'm wearing is called Teddy Dow. We actually got covered in
coin desk yesterday was a big day. And so it's strictly for charity. Like if you guys have heard
of Just Giving, it's a big online platform. It's the second biggest online donation platform. We've
been partnered with them for almost a year. And it's just so time consuming to and just the little
things that they want all the eyes dot and the T's cross and you're dealing with a web two company
to kind of integrate all this where so now we have it's kind of like a pilot, we're going to launch
on Friday where people can bid on the teddy bear, they can choose the charity of their choice and
the Just Giving network. If they win the bear, all the money, we don't take anything, all the money
goes to the charity with the exception of like a 1.9% cut for Just Giving because they, you know,
for the B2B feet have run their network and whatnot. So we're just trying to do things where
like our my co founders, Rich and Tom, the two guys who started the company, they've been,
they run a small VC fund. So Lucky Friday is like the operating company of the VC fund. And they
started like when the dot com bubble burst, these guys met in the late 90s together. Super
interesting guys, great mentors, little older than me. And they basically a big thing for them is
just giving back. That's why we did this first NFT project as charity focused, like one of the
co founders loves digging walls and developing countries and he's a big proponent of education.
He runs a couple of charter schools here in Florida that do language. So yeah, I mean, my job is now
to just sit on discord and telegram and all these other things all day. And I get to hang out every
Wednesday. I mean, as you guys have seen me laughing, like that's me like every Wednesday
when I'm watching this show, I'm like cracking up to myself commenting. And sometimes I wonder,
like, am I annoying them? Because I'm commenting so much. But you know, it's been, you guys have
been such a huge, you go enough, you go on the show. That's that's pretty much how it works.
It's just we the thing is, right? You live the York. Okay. You know, we, what we're doing is
your ping. If other people are your ping, we, yeah, where is our York merch? I'm pretty sure
this was on speaking of okay, ours. I'm pretty sure this is one of usurpers okay ours for this
quarter. I think you're right. I literally I saw a mock up as well. I fucking it looks so good. I
saw it was like I'd buy that right now. I'm like, I'm like, literally, we clearly have t-shirt
peep. We have t-shirt organization. We have places we can buy this shit now. It's the question of how
a mock up exists. You surfaced other work and yet we still haven't got it printed. I don't know.
There must be a breakdown in our process here. We should get in some management consultants to
work out where the blockages are in our organization here. You know, really fucking
streamline that guy. So funky. We need more stand ups for sure. We just need more stand ups or the
gamer nodes. Maybe, maybe, maybe Hartnell's right. If game of nodes was a doubt, we could just put
up a prop and get this all resolved. Get some, get some, do you know what actually, I hate to say
about it, but actually if we had some stablecoin and treasury and all, if it was possible for us
to get to the point of laziness of just firing over a few stablecoins to print.com or whatever to
get the t-shirt, we could probably just about all sign with a ledger in a week or so, can we,
to get that shit printed. I feel like we should do it just for the fun of it.
It feels like, it feels like this should be a thing. Is this the dump shit coins mock up? Is
that what we're talking about? No, the Yop-up shill down. Yeah, there was like a Yop-up shit down.
There was, you've set up a posted a thing where it's like an old school, almost like an Olympic,
like a 1980s American Olympic style t-shirt with a bunch of shit. It was very fun. It was like,
was it just like Yop-yop? Was it just like Yop in multiple colors or was it like, and I had some
other, I don't know, I can't do it justice. I can't do it justice. It looked fucking cool.
There is Game of Nones Verge. The shit does exist somehow. We've not finished it and printed it.
So apologies to those that do. It exists in conceptualization only.
It exists in, in Adobe, what's it called? What's the one that's not in design, not photoshop?
Illustrator. Illustrator for vectors. Yeah, it exists in a usurper's copy of Adobe Creative Cloud
Illustrator and thus could be. No with Veto. No with, usurper's just jumped in the chat.
It says no with Veto. That's what the t-shirt says.
So, but back to my question. I got very excited about the merch and then
forgot the question that I was going to ask Funky. So Funky, from a business
perspective, there's like business development and stuff is like a big part of kind of what
you're doing. So what, when you look at the Cosmos as an organization, like what, what do you see as
the primary opportunity for yourself as a business? Is it the, you need to evaluate further to work
out what the angle is and what the value add here is? Is it more about knowledge of the
of the ecosystem so that you can guide the institutional side of the business? Like what,
what part is it that you, I mean, if it's not like privileged business. No, it's not. It's not.
It's not at all. What is that? What is the kind of thing that you guys, you folks are seeing kind
of as the opportunity or like the thing that you're most interested from that side of things?
I mean, ultimately, I think it's going to be big picture, just a marketing opportunity, right?
Like the more chains that we can demonstrate to clients that we're on, we're active in,
we're participating. I'm a huge like governance nerd. And so like that's why I went,
Schultz brought up the stuff about Aptos and, you know, separating the validator. And that's
something that I've talked about, like Jake was on a space. So you guys would acquire a bag on a
chain to participate in governance, like to be there or would you run infrastructure as well?
No, run infrastructure. So like, but that's the one thing that I think I like about Cosmos is just
that much like Polkadot, like governance is a serious issue. And I think that our co-founders see
on chain governance as something going to be very important in the future. So like a future
business unit that I think they want to develop is having sort of a consultancy for institutional
players who don't have the time, right? Just like we delegate votes now to people. If you're an
inactive person, but you want to kind of take part in governance, like in Polkadot, you can
delegate to certain groups or individuals, you kind of do it by default, by just staking with a
particular, you're delegating your stake to the validator, which you can still go of course and
override, you know, the validators, but with your own, but most people don't even pay attention,
right? Like if it's something like it's a hot issue, I'll sometimes go on Kepler and like,
oh, you know, I'll read about it. And then I'll maybe sometimes go against the validator, but
it's very rare when I do. So I think it's just for us getting our name out there. And we're not on
many chains. And I, you know, and I actually really want to kind of just say thank you to
Schultz, like he bailed us out one time when we fell out of the active set on stride. And I was
just like beating the bushes, looking for delegations. And so does anybody have any to help? And I
know stride is eventually going to be an ICS chain. And so like the validators aren't going to be,
they're going to be called governors or something else, right? I think so. But you know, and I emailed
Schultz, that was another thing too, like we're just looking, we always try to go into any ecosystem
and add value however we can. And so like, we're still trying to wrap our heads around that in
terms of like, what can we do to help the cosmos? Like you guys, for instance, we're talking about
an episode way back, probably around the time that all the stuff like the confio stuff was
happening is one of the first episodes I was listening to. And you guys were talking about how
like, Pocotu is the only one that has like, all the snapshots for like, the different chains and
stuff like that. And RCTO, you know, and Pocotu, you guys probably know this, you kind of, I think
got to start in Polkadot and it's the polka. And RCTO will, he actually wrote like the polkadot
wiki for best validation practices, like how to avoid slashing and everything else. So like,
he sat on the Kusama Council, he knows Pocotu. And so like, I said, why don't we do something
like that? Like have a redundancy, like let's create some kind of repository where we can have
snapshots for people just, you know, we want to do something. And that's why I was asking Schultzie,
like, how do we run relayers? That seems to be sort of an important piece of the infrastructure
that people kind of ignore, you know, and I just picked that up from a few tweets that I had seen
on, you know, my TL from Schultzie, you know, that people that not everybody who runs validators
runs relayers because it's not directly incentivized. And of course, then you're having to spend your
own money, which eats into your own business, of course, because, you know, I mean, just look at
the state of the market. And I think what's tough for you guys to swallow, you know, is just like,
how like, I don't know if it's because the tokens are so inflationary, but just some of them just
continue to bleed and bleed and bleed and bleed. And so, you know, like we're not on many chains,
you know, we have aspirations for the hub, of course, but like, we know that that's a big,
like we try as much as possible not to do too much delta risk, not to like buy our way into a set.
A few times we got really lucky, like where I pointed out things ahead of time, like stride,
when it was still relatively cheap, I'm like, get in this one, like we could. So we, you know,
I think they bought like $6,000 worth of stride when it was whatever it was, 30, 40 cents or
something like that. And so we got into the act of set. But, you know, if you look on any of the
ones that we're running, we're tend to be lower down in the set, right? Like so quick silver,
persistence one, I think that was like the first one we were on stride, we're not very high up in
the set. Canto for some reason, like somebody plunked down a ton on us, like we were low in the
set and then we went up to like 30 something on Canto for some reason. So, but at the end of the
day, that's what the Lucky Friday brand is all about. It's just, I think, so we can kind of
support an ecosystem in a way by giving them, you know, I mean, there's tons of cloud providers,
it seems like that's sort of a differentiator just offering like a bare metal service and then
just trying to have that institutional grade hardware where we're running in those SOC2 data
compliant setters. Like that's kind of, we just hired a guy from Coinbase, you know, a few months
back who's our institutional strategist. So he has all these relationships with custodians.
And so he's organizing deals with us and we're having conversations with custodians. And then,
you know, to become a preferred staking provider, we're about to open like another data center in
Phoenix, like on the West side. So we have Phoenix, we have more on the East Coast, Amsterdam's coming
online soon. Our mission is to, of course, be global, you know, just decentralized from a geolocation
standpoint, but then have everything like, and the guys who because of the legacy of the co-founders,
like the people who run our infrastructure, these dudes are no joke. Like they've done stuff for the
Department of Defense, for the FBI, these guys are like, I just feel like, how did I get here?
That's like every day I wake up and I'm like, how did I get this job? Why am I here? So, yeah,
I guess that's the big picture is just trying to get in to kind of get on other chains. And that way,
we can turn around and market to larger players like, hey, we run on X chains, you know, we've had a
ton of growth, we run on more than half the parachains in Polkadot, we have Polkadot validators,
Qusama validators. Yeah. So you also said that you've got like institutional stuff as a part of the
business model and that's like, ETH as well and stuff. Like what do you reckon is like the rough
like percentage split of like, of ecosystems is it like 80% Polkadot and then 20% ETH and then like,
wait, that would be 100% already, like 10% ETH and then like 5% miscellaneous stuff and then by
the sound of things like 1% Cosmos or something or? Are we talking like in terms of just market cap
value, like the actual amount staked, for instance? Good question, actually. I guess like
a change of percentage. Yeah, probably like a number of chains slash parachains. But actually,
yeah, I mean, I guess a more indicative business metric would be like what the
custodianship or what the assets would like staked are, I suppose, by ecosystem, I guess
overwhelmingly Polkadot. I mean, if we're going numbers wise, it's probably ETH. If we're talking
the number of validators, it still might be ETH because that the global state brand is it's got
its own website and stuff like that. So that's the other name global state. And but if we're talking
about just like, I would say breaking down like in terms of just number of projects, instead of
like as if you just count ETH as one, for instance, then it's Polkadot, then Cosmos, then Ethereum.
And then they're trying to think if there are any other like one off projects or there are some
things that we're being invited to to become part of like Genesis validator set stuff for projects
that I don't know if I should say or not say, you know, but like we have things that are coming
online soon, I guess, that are outside any of these ecosystems or standalone L1s, if you will.
Right. Yeah. So when you like, I'm guessing as well, in your role, you do like some aspect to
the due diligence side of this stuff. What do you use like metrics for like, you know, within the
Cosmos outside of the cosmos? Like, what's your feeling on how you look at something to evaluate
it as whether it's worth time and energy, because this is something like, I mean, we've talked about
a lot on the podcast, as you know, because we, you know, a lot of us kind of just aped into
everything in terms of running it during the last during App Chain Winter, particularly in Cosmos.
And to varying degrees have pulled back our involvement from certain chains. I know that's
I think all three of us currently on the school. And in fact, everybody in the kind of wider
validator circle that we were in, I think almost everybody apart from Polkachu maybe
has has sunset their involvement on certain chains.
And it's funny that you bring that up because I was just updating a sheet of potential like targets
for us. And I was saying to them in our meeting today, because Wednesday is our weekly cadence
call. And I was like, I don't know if we want to pursue running infra for these chains, because
it's clear that validators are leaving. And some of them, because now like I was shocked when I was
looking at the bottom of active sets, just to kind of get a number so I could say like, hey, we could
buy in and spend X amount of money and get on active in the set. And a good example of this is
Axelar, right? Like right now, we could probably buy in for like under $2,000, right? And you could
be the lowest validator on the set right now. Now, one of our co founders loves Axelar, right?
Because I mean, it's sort of this original GMP kind of bridging solution. And again, being bullish
on interoperability long term, like I think that's one that he does want to run. But at the same time,
because we're waiting for these new data centers to come online, like our NVMe apparently is like
reaching saturation with how many VMs we can spin up on them and whatnot. So like we're running into
those kind of challenges where we're having to because we've been onboarding so much ETH. And
though you can run a lot of nodes on like a single one, at least again, this is just what I'm told
because I'm not the least technical person on the team. We're just starting to get saturated on some
of the servers that we've got up and running. So it looks like July, we're going to start getting
some more servers online and everything else. So we're kind of trying to pick them. I think at
the end of the day, though, we really look for, you know, like what seems to have a viable community,
like a support system, you know, that they offer something that people are going to use. Like we
got into Juno, for instance, by default, for instance, like this is another one where people
were bailing and we had like a small self-stake and we were like hanging out at like 106 or something.
And then one day I looked and I was like, oh, hey, we're like the bottom or second to bottom on Juno,
we're live. So, you know, some of the ones that we, and it was when you guys were talking about
EvMOS, for instance, I think two weeks ago, and you're talking about how much of a pain in the
asset is like we finally got live with EvMOS with the help of Notionall, they gave us the
delegation to like get us live. But then we keep missing blocks. And like it's just so like difficult
will constantly complain. It's like this chain is a nightmare. Like we just keep adding more
resources to it, thinking it was going to fix it. And then I was talking to one of the Cosmos
Spaces guys, and it's probably just even latency. If you're running this out of the U.S. and you're
running on bare metal, like it could be just a latency issue. Like we got it down to where
our uptime is maybe like 94, 95%. But it's still like you'd see those white spaces on MintScan,
every once in a while. And so I think at the end of the day, we try to stick to the bigger chains
that are well established. We're also very big into LSTs, hence running persistence one. And
because we know that like LSTs are probably going to be a strong narrative for DeFi going into the
next couple of years. So it seems like stride, persistence one, Quicksilver, Neutron obviously,
but being an ICS chain, it's in a different boat because it doesn't have like its own token. But
you know, I mean, that's P2P, right, that is doing stride, I mean, Neutron. So you know that the
Lido folks and everything else are going to do a lot of LST stuff, I would assume on Neutron.
So I think it's just looking at what are the narratives, what is going to probably hold up
and be durable for the next, you know, say the medium term, maybe three to four or five years.
And at the end of the day, too, I think part of it is that our company, like our co-founders, excel
at building great companies and then selling them off too. So I mean, that's like, that's what they
did from when the dot com bubble burst for the last 20 years. And when they sold like this big
podcast company to iHeartMedia, one of the co-founders said, because he was a telecom
infrastructure guy, and when Fiverr was being rolled out in the 90s, he was saying like,
this is the future. And people are like, we have telephone lines, like when we get on the internet,
we don't need Fiverr, that stuff's crazy expensive. And then the markets collapse,
and they rush in and they bought some Fiverr companies for like he said, the Fiverr alone
is worth more than the company. And so that's how they started like this process of building
and flipping companies coming in. So he kind of specializes in distressed assets. And so,
you know, I think the end game for us ultimately is probably to build up the company and then
possibly sell it off because this is kind of what they do. But we want to, you know, that's not going
to happen tomorrow, right? Like this is something that's a long term vision that might be, you know,
by 2030, if we grow this company into something that's sizable, we're a very small team, right?
Those just literally a few of us and all wear different hats, you know, like one of our guys
who's a principal at the VC fund, he actually was a Goldman Sachs guy, and he was Deloitte before that.
So he's got this, his name's David, he's probably one of the most savvy financial minds I've ever
seen, like I would say something like I'm a D gen, right? Like, and he's like, oh, I wouldn't do
that. That's a terrible idea. You just like the fees you've paid on Ethereum, you've lost your yield
for the next three months. I'm like, I don't think that way, right? It's just like, oh, steak, you
know, like, so it's just, we have a lot of different people and a lot of wear different things. And so
we have someone who's coming on board soon that I think is going to also help bolster our relationships
in the cosmos. And I'll just leave that at that. The intrigue. Sorry, I've been having my whiskey,
so probably a little too loose. No worries. I mean, it's kind of the dream, isn't it, to build a company
and then get it profitable enough that others are so, see it so desirable as to buy it. I don't
know if it's true for everyone, right? Like it's been what it is. If I built a coffee shop, as I
intend to do one day, my goal is not to sell it, right? My goal is to, you know, heart create community
around it and, you know, get back everything. But for a tech company, I think that is traditionally
the dream. I think it is kind of funny how a short sees like, it's all just like a trojan
horse fat. Actually, I just want to really run a cozy coffee shop. But in order to get the capital
to run my cozy coffee shop, I'm going to have to spend 15 years doing something completely unrelated.
Yeah. I mean, well, so turning back to Artifact for a moment, since we talk about him often,
he's always like, hey, have you reconsidered now because crypto is not really in a great spot right
now. And I'm like, you need to shove off before you start making sense to me.
Yeah. I mean, at the same time, Artifact is still around. They're still running operations. But
yeah, I definitely feel like it's like funky description of like somebody telling you, hey,
do you realize like you've just shot your yield? That's like every time I speak to Artifact,
like anybody from Artifact, the way they think about business is you just like, wait, what?
It's also like, I think the journey that I know I've been on, and I think you've been on
Chelsea too, which is as more of like a business owner, I guess, and taking that, doing that journey
from being I am an engineer and what I do is write code to realize that you've made a series of
decisions that mean you now run a company. And sometimes the most profitable thing to do,
the very, very least profitable thing you could do is to stretch yourself by writing code. And
when it's like such a strong part of your identity, it's very hard to stop doing the thing that got
you into doing the thing that you currently do because you're like, ah, but this is why I'm here.
And it's like, no, no, no, we run infrastructure now. That's primarily what we do as a company.
It's not like, we've obviously launched a couple of dApps, but it's a very small part of what we do.
That's the thing like you talk to somebody like the Artifact folks and they're just like,
why are you spending your time worrying about this thing where the maximum upside is like,
let's say your time costs $10 an hour, you'll spend $3,000 of time on this thing. And the
maximum you'll earn on that is three times a return. You'll make $10,000. Great. If you
wound down the company tomorrow and when it got a contract at a bank, you could make that in two
months and do a nine to five. And you're like, fuck, that's a good point. Why am I working seven
days a week to do this thing that's orthogonal to our address as a company? And they're like,
yeah. You're like, I see why you guys are good at this, huh? Yeah, talking with them, I'm like,
yeah, there's a reason why they're so up and coming. I will say though, for the first time in
a while, I've been writing actual software to help some of our systems work better. And man,
the last two weeks, I've been the most fun last two weeks because I'm back to actually doing
what I've been trained and spent the last decade doing. And I am loving every minute.
Well, not every minute. I had some crap with Docker and the right image and everything,
but that's not the human there. That's tooling. Other than that, God, I've loved it.
I'm very jealous. Very jealous. The closest I got to that recently was I rebuilt our company website,
which is basically just wrangling a bunch of fucking JavaScript. But it was one of those
where we were waiting with all these, you know how you try and get something like that done and
you get some designers and you get some people and you get some clients. And it was just taken
so long. And in the end, to just woke up one morning and was like, I can just have this done
by the end of the day if I just do it. And then did it. And you're like, that's why you get,
because that's the way you get into tech in the first place, isn't it? You find a thing you need
done and you're like, well, nobody else is going to do it. I can't afford to pay anybody. So I'll
work out how to do it, right? It all comes back around. I'm working on that right now doing a
Resight redesign. Well, I should say, Erdeman is heading it and I'm paying for it. And I'm really
excited for like what happens because I haven't really been seeing incremental progress
and like what the vision will be. Because I'll get all persnickety and like, oh, we should
change this color or whatever. And I'm like, I know that I shouldn't be in persnickety. Yeah,
I'll get all persnickety about it. Could you define, could you use it in a sentence that's
not that sentence? I'm not sure this is admissible in Scrabble. That's what I'm saying.
Is it not an actual word? I think it is an actual word. I'm 99% sure it is. Persnickety would be
like being overly, I am persnickety about the correct temperature of my coffee in the morning.
It's like needlessly precise. I can test that. Yeah.
Oh, so informal North American, the equivalent I think in English, English is just
picky. We just say picky. Yeah, that's fair. Like picky to an extreme. Yeah. Yeah, persnickety is like
almost needlessly so. It's almost like you have an itch, right? It's like a pet peeve kind of thing,
but not. Okay, I feel like we've deprived the viewers of Cosmos Drama this entire episode.
And I have to ask you guys, because I see it all over my TL this week, what the hell's up with
this Cosmos millions thing? I just see people talking about it. It's something where you can
deposit tokens somewhere and win a lottery or something. And everybody's up in arms about
it, or at least the things I'm seeing people are upset. I have no idea what it is. Like it's
because we've been like in our final spring with Teddy Dow. So like I feel like I'm really
out of touch right now with some of the stuff that's been happening in Cosmos.
When everything goes to shit, they turn to gambling. Fair enough. I guess that's a good
summation. Actually, when the Australian economy turns to shit always by stocks in gambling companies.
But yeah, I've never heard of Cosmos millions. No idea. So I think Cosmos millions is on
Lum network, right? And I think it is. I think it's basically that network has something happening
on it. You know, they've actually never stopped doing development as far as I could tell. I think
they've always been doing stuff now has there been a lot of adoption? No, but I think they have been
developing basically since it launched. They're like one of the few in the proud. So they've but
are they the only chain that has more developers and they have users then because they they launched
in like Lisbon 2021. I feel like they literally launched at the conference. It was like what
fucking hell I almost certainly have a Lum Air drop. In fact, as a result,
Keychain big investor in Lum. Oh yeah, that's right. So it was a big thing because they were
that they were like 20% voting power for a while. I forgot about that. Do you remember Desmos?
That was okay. See in Rama said something about it. And I think Rama, I think I saw a tweet
from Rama this morning about this stuff. Yeah, I honestly don't know. I know that there's
validators involved in somehow like lavender five apparently is like being voted in as one of the
select validators, but I don't really know why or how chill is another one. Do you want to be voted in?
I don't know whether you like it or not. Once like the Hotel California, once you check it,
wait, you can check out. Yeah, I feel like in some of the real wheel sitting around here with
their fingers crossed hoping to be voted out. To be fair, actually Cosmos is the definition of you
could check out, but you could never leave no matter how much you try to ignore that shit.
You still get the counter tech notification to your phone and you're like, well, it's like,
you know, the Grand Theft Auto meme where it's CJ from Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and it says,
oh, shit, here we go again. Every time, every time I was talking earlier today though about how
the thing about in the rearview mirror of like all the stuff would you know, like,
which is now over a year ago is that the volume on literally everything else has turned way down.
You're just like, at the moment, we're doing a bunch of other stuff that's outside of Web 3
just to fucking do something that's a bit less insane for a little while.
And it's funny how you can go into meetings that are like quite consequential for these quite large
businesses as like a consultant. And like because people are like doxing each other on Twitter and
screaming at each other, you're like, this is very calm. This is very orderly. And somebody at the
table is like, what would happen if we just eliminated this entire business department?
And you're just daydreaming being like, it's so nice. It's so harmless. The stakes are so low.
And they're like, that's quite. Yeah, there'll be 120 job losses. And you're like, yes,
how quaint job losses, like not physical threats of harm not addresses posted on the Internet.
And you're like, you're like, I've just been away too long from the real world.
Wait, there's a real world? Yes, you've been there. We met one day.
I hide behind this this blind here. I got a fucking like a roll up blind that takes up the
entire wall. It never gets opened. I think there's a world out there. Wait, hold on a second. Aren't
you in closet? Your closet has a blind? Your closet has windows. I'm in the closet right now.
And it has windows. So this is like the room layout here is a bit weird that's on that side.
It's like the whole wall is a closet. And on this side, the whole wall is a window.
But it is like a route. It's like a spare bedroom, right? Yeah, it's like an actual bedroom.
No, isn't like Zeke just ripping bong hits in a closet. No, I thought it was like a walk-in
closet that's like kind of narrow because like you have the mirror on the side there. So I was
like, okay, so it's like pretty narrow. Yeah, it's like three and a half meters by three and a half
meters, I suppose. I don't know what that is in feet. So about the size of an entire flat in San
Francisco, probably. Yeah, in New York. I once went to view a flat like in a British city where it
was like, you know, obviously super crammed in. And I was like, it was like two bedrooms and I
like walked in and like this is the first bedroom. And then I was like, okay, cool. I was just like
the estate agent went to go and check something in the kitchen and I was just wandering around.
And I walked into this like really small, what I thought was a built-in closet, essentially,
like it looked like a closet. And there are these two kind of weird mirror walls. And I was like,
oh, these mirrors must slide. There must be a closet behind these mirrors because this room
is super fucking weird. And there was like this weird chair at the end as well. And I was like,
this is a very strange room. But I guess, you know, some people are really into walking closets.
And then the estate agent walks in behind me, is like, ah, I see you found the second bedroom. And
I was like, that's like, you fucking what, mate? And they were like, yeah. And I was like,
there's like a John Travolta gift. And they were like, oh yeah, they turned out one of, not both,
one of them slid back. And there wasn't a true bed behind it, like a single bed. And then the other
one had this weird semi-opening thing where part of it was actually like an old chimney breast. So
it wasn't even, there was nothing behind it. And then there was like a tiny bit where you could
put some, you know, like a little cupboard for t-shirts and shit. It was tiny. I can't even describe
it. It was probably like from here to here, I guess, like just slightly out of shot. It was just
enough for a single bed, then space to walk. And then this weird semi-cubby hole cupboard. It was
the smallest one, the smallest ribs I've ever seen in my life. It was wild.