Threadguy Live
Stocks, crypto, politics, culture, and the great financialization of everything. Threadguy is live every weekday from New York with analysis, commentary, and interviews with leading figures across the space of internet markets.
Threadguy Live
Why He Sold His CryptoPunk For ZCash.. - David Hoffman
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
David Hoffman (Bankless co-founder) returns to break down why he sold his 62 ETH CryptoPunk for Zcash, the ideological split with Vitalik on whether ETH should BE the power or be a check on it, and why he thinks Saylor selling Bitcoin is actually bullish for stretch. Plus the case for a top-100 re-rating (crypto Twitter pumps it then hands it off to Bitwise and Grayscale for boomer retirement portfolios), why DeFi needs a complete rewrite from an aeronautics-redundancy perspective after the Kelp DAO + AVE + Layer Zero cascade, and how Claude-powered guest prep is changing Bankless.
Boom! David Hoffman, part two. Rustless Day, back on the stream. How are you, my friend?
SPEAKER_01Good, good, good. How are you, my man? I'm a license, dude.
SPEAKER_00I apologize for my uh my voice. It was a uh it's it's struggling, but we got the tea out. It happens. Um how you been, man? It's been a while.
SPEAKER_01Good, good. Um it kind of feels like there are at least some tokens that are alive, which is exciting. It feels like if like feels like now it does not feel like two weeks ago. Something happened between two weeks ago and now.
SPEAKER_00And what I can't figure out is if it is notable in crypto vibe shift, times are changing, or if we're just being dragged up as little as possible by the rest of the market, stock market, in particular, just re-rating higher and higher and higher.
SPEAKER_01Well, Bitcoin's definitely being dragged up because the the correlation to QQQ is at all-time highs. Like we just know that for a fact. Um, so to some degree, yeah, like like Bitcoin is is kind of getting cucked by the SP and QQQ, but then there are some like idiosyncratic tokens which are pumping, which I don't know. I feel like some people are saying this is what it would be like in the calm before a storm.
SPEAKER_00I will say at the very least, I agree with you on a couple select alts. There's been a couple, there's a couple spots which we're gonna talk about. Zcash, obviously, we talk about VVV. We're gonna talk about some of these coins that are getting flows, they do appear to be notable, and at the very least, it's a breath of fresh air. Like, yeah, okay, yeah, someone in crypto is getting rewarded. Um You guys had Michael Saylor on recently. Congrats. Really sick episode. I actually wasn't gonna start with this, but I am curious, uh, especially as a current or former, somewhere between ETH Maxi, where are you on stretch MSTR drama as it currently stands?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the the way we think at Banklist is we kind of think in content threads. And one thread that we want to pull on every you know, every now and then, just kind of check up check in on it, is Michael Saylor walking the tightrope between is strategy a Ponzi, or is he just doing a good sophisticated arbitrage between time frame investors? And really what side he's on is going to be determined by how much risks risk he takes. Yes. Um, and so that's that's the theme. Uh and then stretch, uh, it's a good product so long as he can manage risk. Are you a holder of stretch? Uh yeah, like a very marginal amount. Just just because, yeah, it's like I think of like $500 of it. Oh, okay. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. Very minimal, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a non-zero amount is the way to describe that. But like I can see myself owning more. And it's like I I really liked the thesis that he presented. It's just like Bitcoin is the collateral for this new like banking product where you are paid the interest rates, the yields that you ought to be paid that your banks aren't aren't paying you. And so, as like a new like neo-bank with a different denominator that is paying people yield in a fundamentally more true way, yeah, I like it. I like it. He just has to manage the risk. Uh, and I think I think when he goes and says, like, I will sell Bitcoin to fund the dividends, that's uh an example of him commitment uh committing to appropriately risk manage. So yeah, I'm a fan.
SPEAKER_00There's also an argument to be had there that Bitcoin for the first time and I don't know how long moves up or at least stays flat on what I would consider bad news, which is something we haven't seen in a while. Yeah. You're talking about like the Iran War and Well, the Iran War, but also Sailor talking about selling Bitcoin.
SPEAKER_01At least in my bubble, maybe my um I'm uh I don't think Sailor selling Bitcoin is bearish. I think it's bullish. I think more net Bitcoin will be bought by Sailor the more he can imbue stretch with more confidence. How how is he the interview?
SPEAKER_00Like what what do you what's so hard to interview from him when he's he's so hard.
SPEAKER_01He goes. He he's one of these guys that you just can't interrupt. Uh-huh. And uh I I talked to our buddy Alex Thorne from Galaxy because he interviewed Sailor. He went to his home and like he just gave us some advice. He's like, dude, he's just gonna, he's just gonna steamroll you as an interviewer. Like you're you're gonna get we got like a total of four questions in, five questions in. And and towards the end, I s I had to get like more on the edge of my seat and get more aggressive and like frankly rude about injecting what I wanted to say so he would like wrap it up. Like I wanted to play the wrap it up music at the Golden Globes or whatever they do. I think yeah, I think we got like a total of five or six questions, and that was it. Over what an hour, hour and a half? It's like an hour and 40 minutes, dude. It's really long. Wow.
SPEAKER_00Congrats on the interview. I I mostly just saw clips. We watched some clips on the stream. There was there were some good ones. Um, but yeah, TBD, how the how how the sailor situation plays out. But what what I'm most excited about right now are a few of these alts outperforming. In particular, Zcash is one of my favorite. It was one of my best trades in 25.
SPEAKER_01I've sort of you still have that trade open.
SPEAKER_00I've sort of found myself back in it in 20 this year, uh a couple weeks ago, and it's turned into kind of a monster. Um, you sent me a cool DM, by the way, thank you. Yeah, and it is a really fun one, and you found yourself in the Zcash discussion with a Crypto Punk sale followed by a Zcash article. So what what was that? You sold the punk to buy Zcash? Like give me the give me the rundown.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, those are those are two things that kind of had been happening separately that just decided to converge at the same time. Just like CryptoPunk proxy for ETH, um ETH momentum, ETH motion is elsewhere. It's just else elsewhere right now. Like uh the the investment case for Bitcoin is that Michael Saylor is gonna buy a ton of it. The investment case for ETH is that Tom Lee's gonna buy a ton of it. Uh which is like cool. Uh that's kind of like growing up, I guess, in a sense. Uh it's like the institutionalization of both of them. Uh but like the investment case for Zcash, there was like so much substance there. I can't write an article about the investment case for ETH because Tom because Tom Lee's buying it. It's like who cares? Like, that's a that's a tweet, not an article. The investment case for Zcash is like robust and and thorough. And like, first, like we're all in crypto Twitter, we're all investors, but I'm first and foremost like a content producer. I love telling stories. The Zcash story is a really good story, and I'm compelled by the story. And so there's just like story investor residence in Zcash, and so like me and a bunch of other people just feel compelled about that. And so that's what really compelled me to write the article.
SPEAKER_00Was it a big deal for you to sell a punk? Like what you have I would you it's took a loss on it for sure, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I bought it, I bought it in 2021. I bought it for 69 ETH and then sold it for 62 ETH, but then the ETH was a much higher price at the time that I bought it. So yeah, a dollar, a dollar denominated uh loss and then like a marginal ETH denominated loss.
SPEAKER_00And so you were thinking of the punk as just strictly a prox, like leveraged ETH beta, basically.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like I always kind of uh said that punks are uh like exposure to how cool Ethereum is. Like if Ethereum is cool, then punks will have an ETH denominominated premium. If Ethereum is less cool, then punks will lose that premium. That's a fun take.
SPEAKER_00Have you given up on ETH being cool?
SPEAKER_01I don't see ETH not being cool in the short term. No, no. I think like a lot of my frustrations come with like just the ETH leadership. Like something I tweeted out before I wrote that article was like the cool thing about Zuko is that he's like bullish on Zcash and like wants it to go up in price, and he's explicit about that. And to me, that was just like refreshing.
SPEAKER_00I saw I actually I saved that for the stream doc. I don't know if it made it. I actually liked that tweet of yours, which was like dev cares about price. What is your thinking on that? Like I guess it's a complete 180 from Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation caring about price.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that that's that's basically it. And like I don't want to like talk negatively about Vitalik or the or the EF Foundation, but it's just like they have diverging goals. Like I think Vitalik really wants Ethereum to be like a check on the powers that be, especially the future unknown powers that be that we can't really imagine. And a lot of, in my opinion, like what I'm here to do and what many others in Ethereum are here to do is for like Ethereum to not be a check on power, but to be the power itself. And that as an investment case, it's much more salient when Ethereum is the institution rather than being a check-on institutions. And you know, Ethereum is con consistently being positioned as like a check-on institutions, which doesn't really have a strong investment case.
SPEAKER_00You know, it's actually a fun take. I've never really thought about it this way, but I indirectly I I obviously do, which is like hyperliquid Jeff obviously cares about the price amongst all else, right? They just they take all of the revenue basically, twap the token back. Like pump hasn't done well, but Alan obviously cares about the pump fund price. Like there seems to be like a theme there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I mean, these are all different different people, uh, and like different cultures and and and vibes, but uh having some sort of notion of just like it's not even about you know, I don't want Vitalik to turn Ethereum into an ETH TWApping protocol, even though it kind of does do that with a burn, but just like a notion that like growth and you know, Ethereum is an economic system that if it grows, that's good for Ethereum, and Ethereum has certain goals cypherpunk values, decentralization, all these things, those goals are better achieved with a higher ETH price, which doesn't really seem to be like inside of like ETH leadership culture. It's just it's just only in the community, and the community is only so powerful.
SPEAKER_00It's a good take. I uh you're like 2017 crypto, right? Maybe pre.
SPEAKER_01That's right, that's right, that's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00What why what is why is like it was funny when Zcash first started pumping, it was so at 25, it was so hated because everyone's like, what the fuck is Zcash? What the fuck are we doing? Why was Zcash so cocked by like the OG crowd?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I remember in in the early Ethereum days, there was a big conversation about uh block rewards, dev block rewards. And there was a big fight in Ethereum. Like Kevin Awaki was on one side of this fight where he wanted to like, hey, we could like fund for Ethereum public goods, fund public goods, fund the dev teams by taking 10% of the block rewards, and then we can just fund them. And then like me and like Ryan, my co-host, and a bunch of other people were like, no, no, no, no, ETH is money, it needs to be politically neutral, don't do that. And Zcash kind of embodied just like a bunch of things that Ethereum disagreed with, like proof of work, a a block reward dev fund. Uh, and it looked like a sandbox for cryptographers to tinker with their cryptography much more than it was like you know, like a money or or anything like that. Um, but like as it's gone on, like that was the age back then, and then like the five years of irrelevancy is actually kind of like turning into an asset for it because like now it's just like everyone's stoked about Zcash because it's PVE, and the the f one of the reasons why it's PVE is because like no one believed in it until now.
SPEAKER_00I uh thanks for the lore. I I was kind of fired up to see you buy it, by the way, because I was like, alright.
SPEAKER_01I haven't bought it quite yet. I I I took a little bit of dust and I just like 10x longed at the very top, just as like kind of a that's awesome, as a hedge. But like my my actual capital I'm yet to deploy.
SPEAKER_00So, what's your thought process on like how and when to do that? Like, how do you think about these trades?
SPEAKER_01Dude, I'm not a trader. Um I'll start I'll just start TWApping in tonight whenever I get my money unfrozen from Coinbase.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, what happen what what happened with it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you send money up on Coinbase and then they're like, okay, we're gonna hold this for 72 hours and just just verify.
SPEAKER_00It's bankless, man.
SPEAKER_01You've never had that happen to you? No, because the coins are the worst. I uh yeah, it's it's brutal. I went I went into Kane's DMs and be like, dude, I would use Infinex so much more if they had an on-ramp.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, facts. Uh anything. Coinbase is tough, but we're sort of like forced into using it. Yeah, um, I I well, regardless, buy it, not buy it. To see you write the article, it kind of fired me up because you know, like one of the bull cases I like for crypto is that um even if no new inflows, like no meaningful inflows came into crypto, there could be this mass re-rating of the top 100, which is that most of the if you ever, I mean I'm sure you do it, coin market cap, coin gacka, whatever, top 100 is like brutal what is in that list, right?
SPEAKER_01It's like it's always been that way. It's always been that way.
SPEAKER_00It's horrifying what's in that list. And there's enough money in that list where you could just flow bad coins to good coins and make some very meaningful pumps. And to see like someone like you post the um the Zcash thesis is I'm like, okay, there's some of these not super trader short time frame like thinkers in crypto, it it basically taps, scratches the itch of a new level of capital, I think, in crypto, which is very interesting about the Zcash thesis. Like, what sort of got you fired up enough to write an article published about it? I don't see you doing that about that many tokens.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I write articles when I see an opportunity in like the content market where I was looking around for who who wrote the Zcash thesis and it was fragmented. Like, Mert had some good tweets, and some had some good tweets. No one really all had it all all in one place. And so, like, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I like my attempt was like, okay, let me collect all of these very good theses and put them into one big one one article where if somebody wants to just like get downloaded on Zcash quickly, they can just read this one article. That was that was the goal of it. And that's like kind of I frequently do stuff like this where I kind of just see as like a service to other people who are trying to get a grasp on things. Um, and so that was that was really the motivation. Um, to you to your point about like old coins or just like coins getting re-rated, uh, we're in the middle of scheduling, like working on because Mert is all the way around the world in Japan, and so schedules is a little difficult. But just like uh Mert and Touchar to come on the show to talk about Zcash. And like, I don't know if there's anything more PvE emblematic of like Mert from Solana and uh Touchar from Multicoin coming on Bankless to talk about Zcash. Like it's the ultimate like middle ground for like all things in history to just be ignored. Uh and so I I like as a just an illustrative example of just like, yeah, I've never seen I I really get motivated when like a bunch of the crypto community all agrees about the same thing. And like it's like, oh yeah, no, we are actually like as a community, as a cult, whatever, we're all here, and it's kind of just like heartwarming when we have an opportunity to do that together. And I think we got every what everyone sees is like, oh yeah, okay, so there's the argument that like this is just crypto, Twitter, hot money sloshing around, and this is the this is all we can do because we're all broke and so we can only pump it to this high. But like everyone's kind of positioning for like actually, no, we're gonna hand this off to Bitwise and to Grayscale, and like they're gonna sell it to Boomers retirement portfolios, and like we're all in this trade together. I think that's fun, and I want to be a part of that.
SPEAKER_00I'm excited to listen to that. Also, quick call out uh Roin Kitty, I think, is hacked, just tweet a CA. It's only at Roaring Kitty, yeah. The chat is tiny. You just tweet a CA, a Solana coin. I don't know, it's not like two mil. It looks like a farm, it's on so much volume, and the market capsula looks like a farm. So just calling it out to the chat. Um, what what was your take on Mert and like a lot of these Giga Solana bulls going so hard for another token? Like, do you do you I don't know, like yeah, what do you think?
SPEAKER_01Very smart choice by Mert. I I really want to know how and like what motivated Mert to find Solana or uh find Zcash so so cheap and so ahead of the curve. Um because it wasn't on my radar, obviously. Um uh it it makes sense, like I I don't know where Solana is. I think Solana has experienced all in the same way that just like ETH is kind of getting priced against Bitcoin. I think Solana is getting priced against ETH and Bitcoin respectively. And so like eh protocol wars seemed kind of over to me. Like Solana, Solana price is what it is, ETH price versus Bitcoin is is what it is. These things are kind of like where they've landed, and so from just like a social media strategy, Mert like hopping on to not to say he's hopped off the Solana train, but he's definitely hopped onto the Zcash train, and it is out as a it's like a trade of uh cult of personality. It's like yeah, he wants to grow his cult of personality, he's hopping on the Zcash train when it's opportunity when it's opportunity to do so. It's like a good move.
SPEAKER_00Someone has been your like 2017 crowd. What do you think of the Monero vers or Monero versus Zcash debate? Like, did you really consider a Monero article as well?
SPEAKER_01I'll I'll write any article that has like good enough substance to it. Um as far as I like the the debate as I understand it is which token is gonna go up in price more and Monero when it gets delisted from exchanges and it's like criminal coin and this institutions can't touch it, versus the Zcash thesis, as I understand it, is that the crypto community pumps this thing up, all gets uh around it, and then you know, bitwise and other asset managers sell it to boomers, that can't happen with Monero. And so, like, sure, I uh in the same way that like um Monero I think does represent a check on power because it is true privacy. I mean, maybe it's weaker privacy. I'm sure there's some cryptography people who would like to argue the merits of the privacy, but I'll I'll give Monero its like purity points, where it's like, yeah, it's true privacy, completely cypherpunk, um, but it's a check on power rather than like be powerful itself, kind of in the same way like my frustrations are with Ethereum. Uh, and so you know, Z Zcash is like a handshake with the powers that be is the upside. And so, yeah, is there a debate? No, there's just like they're in the same category and one's doing more than the other.
SPEAKER_00It's crazy that uh, you know, people always do the argument like my drug dealer has never accepted Zcash. Monero being so private and difficult to transact has made it like impossible to buy. Yeah. I think it's like this is a this is a serious because I like Monero. I also I like the vibe, I like the word, the way it sounds, the people that chill it, like it just like sounds right. And it's so difficult to trade it. I think that the someone uh put up some pay on hyperliquid at one point. I don't know exactly how that's played out, but it's gotten so difficult to trade that I think it actually keeps a lot of people away from it because they don't know what the fuck like they don't know what to make of it.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. Yeah, if the it's been interesting to see the Zcash conversation be centered around money, like Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin is private money. Uh money needs liquidity. Like it's it's great that Monero's literally better at privacy, but you like you need the moneyness.
SPEAKER_00You need the moneyness, it's a good take. On a complete like side note, just while I have you here, what do you make of DeFi? ETH DeFi, but DeFi in particular, like you are one half of Ankless. Right. And it's a DeFi's hard right now. Unbelievable spot. Um DeFi's super hard to be pro DeFi. Like, are you are you do you have some level of existential dread about to say DeFi right now?
SPEAKER_01Um I mean I don't like feel like I have existential dread, but I like get the argument for like why somebody would have existential dread. Um like there needs to be like I I think some like uh platforms are well positioned. Like Morpho is literally positioned to answer exactly why and how Ave got hacked. Um at the end of the day, like it's bad enough, even outside of the Ave hack, like with AI and all the other hacks, the vibe and like security is bad enough. Everyone is saying this. It's just like I don't uh Kane Warwick said this on his podcast. Like, I don't feel secure holding my assets on DeFi. And it's like that's the again, we're talking about money, it's like finance and money. We all DeFi needs to be completely rebuilt. Do you know Odysseus from uh Phalinx Labs?
SPEAKER_00No, what is that? Uh maybe, maybe, maybe what is that?
SPEAKER_01It's this crypto security protocol that is now getting extra attention because like he built his platform, his security platform, to like account for stuff like this. And so he wrote this article that like DeFi needs to be rebuilt from like an aeronautics industry perspective, where like on an airplane or like a uh the spaceship, rocket, whatever, so many things are redundant because the components are expected to fail. Uh-huh. And DeFi is not wired like that. Like with the Kelp Layer Zero Ave setup, like you just needed one thing to fail. And it all kind of fell. Yes. The Ave needed to assumed that Kelp DAO was going to fail at some point in time and needed to have been constructed as such. Layer zero needed to have assumed that like one of its components was going to break and need to be constructed as such. So like DeFi needs a complete rewrite of how it how it is built, which it all it also needs a complete rewrite because everything needs to be rewritten in a post-mythos era. And also everything needs to be writ written, need rewritten to be formally verified. So there's just like a ton of work to be done. Like the DeFi concept and idea is still out there, but now we kind of need to like rebuild everything, and it'll be better. It's just gonna take a while and be very hard to get there.
SPEAKER_00I had uh Robert Leshner on the other week, which was yeah, you you actually do another another leisure episode. It was fire, and his take was that um mythos is really scary for DeFi, but it also hard like just as easily as it can compromise existing infrastructure, it can build a better foundation for future infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. And so that I think is an is is optimistic. Because I I find myself like I was in a discussion uh with this guy Darren on Twitter, I think is is really smart. And we're going back and forth, and I am of the understanding that we could see this, you know, concentrated flows into five coins, maybe PvV. Tan, fuck it, Zcash, couple, couple alts do do very well. But he was asking about DeFi, and I'm like, you know, I'm a I'm kind of a giga bear on DeFi right now. And he's like, well, that's gonna make it very difficult to see flows go into other coins if DeFi like ceases to exist. And so I'm not of the nature that it's going to cease to exist, but I it would be nice if that could that kelp layer zero situation could have been sort of like you know, a local bottom.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, I don't know. They uh the assets that are moving right now don't have any dependencies. Like, I'm not an expert on like hyper liquid architecture, but like hyper liquid is just like its own thing, they kind of control that thing end-to-end. Uh Venice, well, that's a AI tech platform. It's got an equity pseudo-equity token on base, but the token doesn't have any dependencies. Zcash is like a money, it's zero dependencies. That's kind of its whole deal. So all the tokens that are running right now aren't they don't have like the the daisy chained risk contagion exposure that all the DeFi tokens do, which is nice.
SPEAKER_00Can I just put a side question? Sure. Um, how is the bankless operation right now? Like how how is it running and and how big are you guys? Because it's it's it's honestly, especially now I know how much work goes into this, it's really impressive how you guys are trading the way that you are still.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so like there's like the broader bankless umbrella, which has like a couple other like smaller media arms under it. And so we have the TDR, uh, the DeFi report, which is kind of like our like research arm. You know how like Delphi research has a like Galaxy research. Uh we have this guy, Michael Nadeau, him and Ryan do the the DeFi report, and they do like two episodes a week, some for bankless premium subscribers, some for the public. Uh, and so that's like our premium uh research content. Uh we have Limitless, which is uh Jaws and Josh. Which is crushing, by the way. Yeah, crushing.
SPEAKER_00Like really crushing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they're they're killing it. Uh and so that that's like our AI media arm. Uh then we have bankless, which is crypto, obviously. Then we have like our newsletter team. So everyone is like kind of creator first, uh and then we have like all the operations people to to support all of that. And so some you know, uh like COO and graphic designer and website guy. And so that's everyone. The thing that like has really changed up in like the last like two weeks is like Ryan and I have our clods uh ready to go. So like when I bring on a guest, I do like a slash command, slash guest um guest prep. I give the uh guest name, uh, who they're from, and like a little bit, and then they just collect all of everything that they've ever produced. It gives me a grok prompt to go to grok, 20 most viral tweets, exclude all replies, all this kind of stuff to get like a snapshot of what they've said on Twitter. Um, I'll go in and I'll do use Obsidian to go snip things on the internet that are relevant and feed that data in. And then it kind of like it just rolls agenda for me. And so the guest preparation and then also guest selection. Guest selection. Guest selection, because like we we really want to explore outside of crypto, we always have, but we also don't know who's out there. And so I'll kind of show or tell Claude about this concept of a podcast that I want to produce. Like, here's the subject matter. Give me the top five people to comment on these things, and like they're usually names I'm just not familiar with. And then I go and I go to YouTube and I check how well they can talk and if they have anything interesting to say, uh, and then I invite them on the show.
SPEAKER_00You had Rory on, which was awesome. Rory rocks. I thought Rory was he was such a friendly guy. He's so good. That guy rocks. What is uh I just got like genuinely curious, what do you think is the best business decision you guys ever made at Bankless?
SPEAKER_01Uh best business. Honestly, talking about ETH was the best business decision. Because like we we penetrated a community and like we told the story that like everyone like kind of felt, but like no one had really articulated it. Um and so that's where we kind of like rose. Um and then like in in sponsorship land, we have like a uh like two kind of philosophies on sponsors. You have like you lock in a long-term sponsor for a year, so yours are like Polymarket and Phantom, and then you lock them in at a stable price. Uh, we love the sponsors. Uh, and then the those kind of like uh pay for the foundation, and then you have short-term sponsors that like refresh, turn over a little bit faster. Uh that you also have like a and because they're shorter, you can pay them or charge them a higher rate. Uh, and that's that's where you get the profit from. And so when we came up with this like kind of philosophy of sponsorships in post-uh FTX uh crash because all marketing budgets dried up to zero. And so we're like, oh, we need to uh pay attention to this. And so that's when we like made a more intimate deal with like Kraken for 2023 uh and like a few others to move on. And so like having like uh foundation sponsors and then uh churning higher level sponsors, that's been like a model that's been worked out for us.
SPEAKER_00That was super based answer. Talking about Eve. Um David, you rock man. I I really appreciate you coming on. It's fun to hear you talk about Zcash. I I was fired up to see you write the article. Not so I didn't care that you like I didn't have a uh directional take on selling the punk, but it was like provocative to see you sell the punk. I just had had this punk for forever.
SPEAKER_01It's like, man, there's a lot of capital locked up in that. It's not gonna be a good thing. Yeah, it's a lot of capital. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I like content, so it's provocative. That fired me up. And I think feelings about it. Give us, give us uh on a way out, give us some some crypto optimism if you have any to share on what the next six months or or year or so looks like, you think?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's just like a just an inevitable conclusion to crypto and uh especially with the rise of AI and how fast things can move. The only thing, the only form factor of capital markets that can keep up with the rate of innovation is crypto. Um, I think internet capital markets has like a thesis, which like everyone kind of has their own interpretation of what that is, um, will make a comeback. Uh if there's gonna be if if AI is going to like completely invert what labor looks like and everyone becomes an entrepreneur, the capital markets just have to be on the internet because if we have 10 million entrepreneurs, none of them are going public, they're all gonna go do stuff on the internet, and that's where we live.
SPEAKER_00I fucking love it. David Hoffman, Bankless, everyone knows where to find you. I'm looking forward to the Mert episode. When is it?
SPEAKER_01Uh uh we're trying like Mert's running around the world, so we're trying to pin him down to record, but uh hopefully it'll come out next Monday if we can.
SPEAKER_00Pin that motherfucker down. I'm I'm looking forward to it, man. Um, you're awesome, brother. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time. Uh love part two. Maybe part three when it eats ATH, maybe. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe next year. Have a good one. Peace.