Four Moons: A $100m DeFi Fund, Liquid Staking, & How to get involved in Web3
Jason Hitchcock is back! Our first episode is the most streamed conversation I’ve ever done.
Today we have an in-depth conversation DeFi investing joined by 2 of his partners, Adam and Boz.
They partnered with Kingsly Capital to manage a $100 million fund to be invested in DeFi, called Four Moons Capital. It will be one of the first DeFi products available through an RIA to individuals and institutions.
Throughout the conversation, we chat about some of their favorite tokens, projects, and ecosystems. We explore the analogy of where crypto is in comparison to where internet was in the 90s, and we talk about OpenSea as the Amazon of crypto–and whether it will be disrupted or not.
Key ideas from the episode:
People talk about wishing they had the opportunity to get into Google and Amazon during their early days… new innovation is around us all the time.
If you are a brand new person to crypto, get a crypto exchange and start yielding on a stable coin. Make money while you learn.
The community you belong to dictates success because as a single person, it’s impossible to keep up in crypto.
Discord communities have become tribes of really smart people sharing edges. These communities give us access to experts of various protocols.
As “DeFi” turns more into “just a cool app” it will grow increasingly quickly.
There will be more demand for DeFi apps and that demand will flow create value for tokens such as Cosmos, Fantom, Near, Polygon, Avalanche, etc.
Liquid staking is an innovation on providing liquidity, where you’re earning liquidity yield and staking yield at the same time. Osmosis DEX just introduced liquid staking.
The first Defi innovation was collateralizing ETH, borrowing against ETH, and staking. Now, we combined those money legos to have self-repaying loans.
Block explorers (like Etherscan.io) will be the next Googles of the world. There are so many transactions happening all over the blockchain and block explorers help us see and understand the transactions.
OpenSea could evolve much beyond NFTs similar to how Amazon started with selling books to selling everything.
2022 could be a big year for Cosmos, according to Four Moons. Their coming NFT marketplace has “huge potential”
This DeFi fund under Kingsly’s leadership could grow to be in the billions–the Four Moons goal is $1B AUM in 5 years.
The way Jason thinks about his personal portfolio: have a goal portfolio, then build some portfolio that’s going to get you there faster through earning and selling yield, and compounding.
“I love ETH so much that I own none of it today… so I can own even more of it later.”
There are such things as “sub-managers” like Four Moons that partner with RIAs to manage assets, without becoming full-fledged RIAs or fund managers themselves.
According to Boz, Crypto is growing 3x faster than the internet grew.
Learn more about Four Moons Capital:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Jason Hitchcock: Your Guide to Web3 (DeFi, NFTs, and The Metaverse)
Shane Mac: Building Messaging Protocol for Web3 (XMTP), Company Culture, and Scaling Trust
Podcast Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome to Jorgensen Soundbox. The previous conversation I had with Jason Hitchcock in September on this podcast is still the single most streamed interview I've ever done. And I was very excited to have him back for an update on his portfolio and to teach us all the new crypto things he's learned. And when we started planning this conversation, it turned out to be perfect timing to bring in his investing partners in the fund that you're going to learn about today. He started sort of hanging out with them in a group chat, and now they're opening a hundred-million-dollar fund to invest in the DeFi space. So today we have, of course, the Jedi of DeFi Jason Hitchcock. We also have Boz the CEO or COO, I'm sorry, of Akash Network and their partner Adam, who's a crypto trader who writes at Ethropy.finance. These are three of the four partners of Four Moons Capital. And we get into it today, talking about how they found success in crypto, all starting from a group chat that they were all just really honest and candid in. Then they started a two and a half million-dollar fund to test the market for their friends and family. And now they're getting called up to the majors and managing a hundred-million-dollar fund with an RIA partner that we talk a ton about today. We also get into their favorite tokens, their favorite projects, and ecosystems. We just bullshit about crypto and all the new stuff that's going on. And we emphasize over and over again to each other and to you how early it still is. Side note, I'm creating sponsorship spots for my podcast and the newsletter. If you want to sponsor this podcast, please DM or email me, and I'll share the details with you there. I promise to write and read hilarious ads for you. Now, please enjoy this conversation arriving at your ears in three, two, one.
Well, the grand wizard, Jason Hitchcock, the most popular podcast episode I’ve ever done, is back with his friends, the other moon men of the To the Moon fund which had to be renamed the Four Moons Fund because they could not imply that they were going to go to the moon or be able to take you there. But I'm glad to have the whole crew here and excited to have like a party of a podcast with Jason and Adam and Boz.
Jason Hitchcock: Well, thanks for having us back. I'm glad that Boz and Adam could come with me. That was a really fun conversation we had last time, and a lot's happened since then. And I'm really excited for you and all your listeners to meet Boz and Adam. They're my business partners, and they're part of the reason why I learned a lot that I had to talk about with you on that episode. And we're doing some cool stuff now.
Eric Jorgenson: I know we barely fit me and Jason into a two-person conversation, so I'm going to be excited to see how four people goes, who are all equally enthusiastic about all of the crypto things.
Boz: Super excited to be here.
Eric Jorgenson: That's Boz. And we have Adam, too. Let's do little like intros for everybody. Do you want to go first, Adam? Alphabetically, the CIO of To the Moon, no, wait Four Moon's Capital.
Adam: We don't really have titles because we all have to pull so much weight in a new partnership. But yeah, I'm Adam Atkins. I met Boz personally I want to say about a decade ago, completely unrelated to our current venture, but thankfully Facebook connects the world for forever, thankfully or not thankfully, but we have friendships that follow us around through Facebook. I'm one of the guys that found crypto on my own. It's rare to find people like that. But I got in about 2016, just kind of Googling investment ideas. And Bitcoin came up in the headlines because the Indian rupee was being devalued or there was some kind of an inflation issue. And I was like, wait, this science experiment is still around? I thought it was like a flash in the pan and was going to go away forever. And that's when I fell down the rabbit hole. So yeah, Boz and I connected in like 2019 when we were talking about taxes for crypto and we kept chatting since then.
Eric Jorgenson: Boz, what's your story? How'd you end up with these clowns?
Boz: The circus, of course. Yeah so, I guess, I met Adam, like he mentioned, a decade ago, kind of kept in touch here and there. And then when I moved to San Francisco, one of my really good friends actually introduced me to Jason in the time he was at Twitch, and I was at a blockchain gaming like rewards company and just really interested in gaming overall and how Twitch sees things. And he was just full of energy, a really smart guy, and we just stayed in touch and continued learning about each other and developed this amazing relationship. How we all got together is I knew Adam was definitely into Ethereum from our Facebook posts and Facebook at the time continued just plugging away at life updates.
Eric Jorgenson: His face tattoo is a dead giveaway.
Boz: It says Meta on his forehead. And what was really interesting is when DeFi summer started, we were both pursuing a completely different path within DeFi, but it was complimentary of each other. And this is when Compound allowed us to collateralize ETH and unlock Dai onto the world, which released a flood of innovation. So, and Helium routers were for sale. And so, we were iterating on a bunch of different things at the same time the vampire attack on Sushi, or I mean on Uniswap came to be. So, I was definitely all about Sushiswap and was in the Discord when SDF was in there, just trying to make calm of everything. And Adam and I just kept like really, really close and were just sharing a bunch of ideas over the summer. And then I started seeing a tremendous amount of success. I mean, at the time Sushi was yielding 2-3000% APR all the way up to whatever. It was kind of surreal at the time. And what I decided to do at that particular time was I wanted to see if I could replicate these same strategies with one of my close friends, which is our fourth partner Ash. And he started seeing success. And at the same time, we're having these conversations with Adam, with Jason in these private group chats about how to build wealth and think about like strategically how we're all invested in each other's success and just sharing ideas to compound or accelerate our approach to achieving that success. So, achieved that success with Ash, then brought in Jason. We succeeded with Jason as well. And then Adam comes in and says, okay, here's how you collateralize ETH. And so, we were using bZx. We launched a considerable amount of collateralized ETH onto Harvest Finance at the time, saw a tremendous amount of success. And then we got into a shared group and we're just constantly sharing ideas. We couldn't stop thinking from morning until whenever Jason goes to bed. He never sleeps; he never sleeps. And so, at the same time, I'm currently the COO of a cloud infrastructure company, and there's a seed sale investor part of the company that was a chief investment officer of Kingsley, which is a digital asset fund that we are now sub-advising for the DeFi fund.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we have to come back to Kingsley because that's a whole like interesting- You're on chapter nine, Boz, we got to like catch up with Jason here.
Jason Hitchcock: From my perspective, it's real simple. We created a group chat. The whole point of the group chat was make more money. We're all entrepreneurs who have made money for companies. And so, we all get pulled into one group chat as we understand we all like crypto and DeFi. We start basically building what I like to refer to as the hot ball of money that you constantly roll around DeFi. And it goes from one high yield opportunity to another and work together, taking screenshots of Uniswap and LP positions we're creating. And we're like I put in X, I'm earning Y every day, look at what I earned today. And it just makes it more real to everybody that these are real moves that you should consider. We started copying each other's homework. Boz would- he's in the Cosmos ecosystem, so we would just learn so much about it from his perspective. We developed biases towards Luna and Rune and other interoperability plays that ended up being strong themes that emerged that year. And we all made really strong investments. Next thing you know, we're screaming about this to everybody, and a lot of our friends asked us to do a fund, and that's how we did our first fund. And we just took our same strategy that we did and applied it to that fund. And Boz just mentioned Kingsley, and so we can talk about that a bit.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, that first fund killed it. You guys returned two and a half X in five months, six months?
Jason Hitchcock: Yeah. We deployed it in the middle of summer. It was a liquid token fund. So, it wasn't a VC fund. We weren't angel investing. We were just doing what everybody does where they learn about tokens on Twitter and they go look on CoinGecko and you go check out the Discord. And is this a product that people like? You do the kind of gut feeling testing of a product, like is the revenue looking good, what open data is there? And then, we would invest in it. And we built out a portfolio of exciting tokens, and we earned a lot of yield off them. That's kind of like Adam was the keeper of our yield strategy. And we earned a tremendous amount of yield, and we're really proud of that. And we feel like that became- we proved that could be like a financial product that we could continue doing.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, all that in addition to like growing your own hot balls of money, which individually I believe, right? I mean, I know Jason's doing that. I assume you guys have your own side balls as well.
Adam: Boz has a job. So, I don't know how much of that he has to do. But we're fund employed. I was splitting my time between the fund and my own personal finances. So, I didn't always duplicate my efforts because we had to be a lot more pragmatic about our investment opportunities for the fund. However, Boz has an ape in his background there. We did a lot more aping with our own personal money then we would have with the investors’. We were a little bit further out on the risk curve when it comes to DeFi. We all have our own approach, which is kind of cool because we can contrast and compare and improve each other's styles that way. So yeah, this is just a great team. The fund was a lot of fun. There were certainly some stressful periods. I wrote a blog post about all the things I learned and the things that kept me up at night. But yeah, it's been like the most amazing career shift and like budding friendship that I can remember.
Jason Hitchcock: What was the moment that was really stressful? I'm trying to remember what was like peak stress of the fund.
Adam: I think, well, what I said in that article was taking profits. How many times did we talk about that in like our weekly portfolio review calls? It was like, hey guys, this is up 6X, I think we should take some off the table here. We could always buy back in lower. And it was constantly just butting heads. Like, no, we should let it run, our LPs just want exposure, like tax implications.
Jason Hitchcock: We would always argue against it because I would say we're not a trading firm. We don't know how to trade, I would say, even though-
Adam: I'm a perfectionist, I want to always do the best I can and I'm very competitive with myself. And when I see finishing at the one-inch line and not scoring a touchdown, or maybe scoring touchdown and missing the extra point, that's kind of how it always felt. But it worked out great.
Eric Jorgenson: It did. And you all made it, and you all still want to work together again after the first fund, so it can't have been that bad.
Jason Hitchcock: Well, the first fund was really just a vehicle. This is Jason talking. We didn't know what we wanted to do. We just were achieving personal success with these strategies that Boz is describing, borrow against your ETH, then do what with what with the stuff you borrow? That's where like a lot of experimentation came in. And once we kind of had this interesting strategy, we sort of got that a little quicker than we knew what vehicle we should put it into. And so, we created that initial one-year fund, which had this nice sort of escape hatch at the end of it could go to shit and we could still like, hey, it was one year, we tried our best, thanks for supporting us. And then also, let's say we knew what we were doing and we were onto something, we weren't over committed to a structure. We could then create something fresh, and we were like, oh, here's how you seize the moment. Like for example, we knew that we wanted to create a fund that could go in early if we wanted, we could buy equity, theoretically, this hedge fund that we work with, we could. We're probably not going to, but we have the option. We also know that like Four Moons wants to create a staking service at some point. We want to give ourselves some sort of flexibility to do more than just buy equity or just buy tokens. We want to do a variety of money-making strategies, which could even mean we want to make some software that maybe people use and we earn transactions on it. Who knows. And so, this particular structure is perfect for that.
Boz: It was essentially to validate our market thesis behind the service that we'd be providing. And keep in mind, this is in the context of DeFi, people think DeFi has been around quite a while, but that’s just because people are in crypto. So, a month- crypto speed, one year in crypto is like 15 years in a traditional company. But essentially the SPV, the special purpose vehicle fund was designed to just test our market thesis behind our strategies, if we can actually scale it significantly. And we did.
Eric Jorgenson: That first fund got bought, right? Is that the right verb for what happened? Like how did, why did that fund end, or how did it end, I suppose?
Boz: Yeah, so I wouldn't use the term like bought. So, at the same time, we're having quite a bit of conversations with the Kingsley team. And the interesting opportunity is that as a special purpose vehicle fund, you are limited on what you can and cannot do with how much you can actually fundraise. I mean, even solicitation could be really interesting and semi grave just because, A, DeFi is still largely unregulated and even the regulations around managing other people's money is very limiting depending on what your licensed as. Hence the special purpose vehicle fund allowed us the flexibility to tap into our existing network of really close friends and family. And we limited that explicitly. When Kingsley approached us, not only did they have the infrastructure, the licensing, the know-how, the experience of managing digital asset funds, but the culture and the values of each individual partner actually really aligned well with what our goals and vision were to generate and build a hundred-million-dollar DeFi fund, which in my mind is a starting point.
Eric Jorgenson: Give us the background of what is Kingsley.
Boz: Kingsley is a registered investment advisor, you can think of them that way. And they have a digital asset fund as well. But they approached us with an idea of us essentially becoming sub-advisors to their DeFi fund product. And allowing us to replicate essentially the strategies that we've succeeded and validated with success in our SPV but do it at scale because given with their infrastructure and their licensing and a variety of other things, it allows us to do more, pursue more opportunities, and not really worry about the backend operations that we have to shoulder ourselves. So, it allows us to move faster, allows us to scan for better opportunities, do more due diligence, and really focus on what we're good at which is generating returns.
Jason Hitchcock: And also, this is Jason, one of the things that we also talked about with them, they did extensive surveying of their like RIA networks and they found- and like who are the people that they serve? They serve high net worth individuals that are working with boutique financial advisors. These are not- they have an option of getting an account on Fidelity or Schwab and having someone go put their money in Vanguard. That's what 50% of people in this category do. 40% go to a boutique RIA who can invest in clean energy or something interesting. And so, what a lot of people are looking for, they want exposure to crypto, and they also want more than just I want to buy Bitcoin. And what they don't have access to right now, if you are a high-net-worth individual working with an RIA, they don't have something on their menu that's like all the cool crypto assets that are like taking off in DeFi and in web3 infrastructure. They have like access to Grayscale, which is like not even a good investment because of like the premium. And so, what we represent- we're going to represent one of the first products that they have, which is like, oh, this is going to get you in Osmosis and Luna and Convex and other interesting yield bearing strategies. This is going to have- this is basically a degen product for some of your long-term money, which that's pretty interesting. And that lines up with the surveys of what a lot of individuals want. And so, it was a good fit. We have a thing that works, and they have a network that's ready to buy it.
Eric Jorgenson: That's super interesting. Yeah, go ahead, Adam.
Adam: I spoke to- actually, before we launched our fund, I was looking at getting licensed myself, and I spoke to several RIAs who serve these types of clients, and none of them really knew much about crypto. I would say that this is probably the first time in the history of the financial markets that the end customer is more educated than the salesperson that they're getting their information from. It's really interesting how organic and grassroots the crypto movement has become. I mean, one of the partners at Kingsley told us that even grandma and grandpa are asking about crypto, and the RIAs that they've worked with have nothing to offer them. So, it's a really fantastic channel for Kingsley. I expect that to require quite a bit of education on Kingsley's part to actually make sure those RIAs understand what it is that we are doing. But it's an awesome opportunity. And they've done so much of the heavy lifting on the compliance, the regulatory, the licensing, the legal. It's a huge moat for them. So, we're really excited to get going.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's got to be a bear, I'd imagine, like so early in this, as Boz mentioned, like the regulations involved and stuff, so just getting people arranged. So, is this like Kingsley's got a pool of money already that you guys are kind of managing? Like what is the sub management relationship? Or is this like you're both kind of working together to raise a new pool from existing customers of Kingsley?
Jason Hitchcock: We are sub-advisors, and what that means is we go into a document called the PPM, think of this like a marketing kind of contractual document. They're going to go distribute our fund around. They're going to go knock on doors and raise money. And that will all flow into our investment strategy.
Eric Jorgenson: And you're targeting a hundred million for this fund, right?
Jason Hitchcock: That's where it'll- that's how much we sort of have in like soft commits. And then, so we're going to be onboarding that this year, and then beyond that, I mean, we're expecting- we have much bigger goals. We're never going to stop fundraising, and crypto is only going to get more popular. I mean, our goals are to get this into several billion under management.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, your initial tweet I think when you talked about starting this next fund was like we're launching a hundred-million-dollar fund. Our goal is a billion in AUM in less than five years, same degen approach, just a bigger stack in play.
Jason Hitchcock: Yeah. And it's just, we think that- what's interesting, when you talk to a lot of these people, these high-net-worth individuals and family offices, the way that a lot of people in your audience, like they have similar feelings about crypto that your audience does where there's a moment of before and then they realize, oh, that's what these are, these are apps, and like, oh, it's DeFi. They have the same feelings about it that everybody does. Which is why there's such this organic feeling of everyone's turning onto crypto. That's because everybody uses apps now and everybody of all ages, they're all getting news, they're all reading about it on Twitter too. And so, there's kind of like- it doesn't matter what your demographic is, everyone's hearing about DeFi to some degree, and they're very curious.
Boz: And keep in mind – this is Boz – this space is less than two years old and has a little over $200 billion in [TDL 22:55]. Now what can happen over the next five years, like when I originally was talking with the guys here about can we get a billion dollars in under five years, that takes into consideration time, which a lot can happen in those five years. A, institutional interest is gaining steam. So, I do see financial products or additional financial products tapping into this DeFi moment. We're beginning to see even banks making announcements about potentially offering DeFi products under their umbrella as an example. So institutional interest across retirement accounts from everything I think will tap into this DeFi movement. B, regulation and in between all that, I think a lot of family offices, a lot of people in Main Street America will begin tapping into this movement. And I think the people who are making moves today, like our team, like Kingsley, several other DeFi funds in the market, it's a blue ocean of opportunity. And the people that begin today will reap the benefits of tomorrow, which is mainstream adoption and mainstream demand. And right now, the demand itself is extremely overwhelming, but this is extremely early still. So, we can only imagine what can come tomorrow.
Eric Jorgenson: So, let's talk about the structure of the fund. I totally agree with that, Boz. I think like there's this weird gap between how many people know of it, like everyone has heard of Bitcoin. And so, you have this feeling that it's pervasive, but it's like the share of users who actually have a wallet that they interact with, like the adoption is still so drastically early that it's truly difficult to remember, and especially maybe for those of us who actually spend time learning about it. But let's talk about the fund. So, this is going to be obviously a little different since you're working with a bigger pool of money and some kind of registered RIAs then the first sort of initial tester fund. Like what are the terms? What is the- Does the strategy have to change? I don't know, it is just so different from a traditional VC that I'm really curious how this all fits together.
Jason Hitchcock: If I could summarize it really quickly, if the last fund was a one-year fund and it was like two and a half million dollars, we were throwing darts at things that we thought were going to pop in 2021, which is a difficult game. In 2022, what this fund is this is not one year, this is open-ended so forever, and it's entirely liquid, so we're not going to be investing in things that get locked up. We're going to be investing in tokens that are out there that have decent market caps, probably usually above like 300 million or so. And we're betting on a couple of themes – interoperability, alt layer 1s. Like we think there's going to be just more demand for apps. And so that demand is going to flow to Cosmos and Fantom and Near and Polygon and Avalanche. And those are going to be huge and there's going to be technologies that need them to inter-operate. And so, we're going to be investing in those. And then we're also going to earn yield on them. Every single one of these layer 1s, they all have money markets. There’re ways to earn more. There's an optimal way to hold all these tokens. And so, one of the other differences is we're going to have many more positions. We have a bigger pool of capital, so we don't need to place our bets so carefully on two very specific ones, we can spread them out and have more of an index that represents our point of view. And our point of view is alt layer 1s and interoperability. It basically just means more demand for usage of applications on blockchains and then everything that flows from enabling that.
Adam: Our point of view is going to change. Like that's the one thing that we can tell you is a hundred percent going to happen. Because our point of view started way over to the far- miles down the road from Titan, our first fund, and ended a hundred miles the other direction. So, the flexibility and maneuverability is probably going to continue to exist with this next fund. We will have to be mindful of, since it's a larger pool of capital, we'll be learning about how to deal with liquidity. Jason said $300 million, that's definitely a low end. If we're moving significant amounts of capital, fortunately we are working with Kingsley CIO, who is an experienced trader who understands time-weighted average pricing, how to get in and out of positions intelligently. And we're not just going to be shoving seven, eight figures into these protocols because that's going to really have an impact on the market. So, having their CIO is a huge advantage for us. It's like I say this all the time, one plus one is three. It's like our strategies were long only, hypothesis driven or thesis driven investors that leverage assets to make them productive. Kingsley CIO is an experienced technical trader with a vast network of founders and a really good understanding of the technologies themselves that we're investing in. When we combine our strategy from the previous fund with their liquid trading strategy, it's going to make the fund a much more effective vehicle. And I'm really excited to learn from them as far as what's the best way to get in and out of markets? How do you rebalance periodically? These are concepts that we did not exercise in the first fund.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's super- I mean, the combination of if you've got the flexibility that it sounds like you can and the number of just ways to win in DeFi is crazy. Like Jason and I talked a little bit about this in our first conversation, but like what does the optimal vehicle look like? It's like you're holding tokens, you're staking them, you're running validators, you're LPing. And like there's just so many- you're earning airdrops. Are all of these things stuff that the fund will be pursuing that then all of the value to that comes back to investors? That's awesome. I mean, the layers of complexity there, the gas efficiencies of like doing that in one thing-
Boz: Not to mention the new innovations around how yields are even generated. I don't know if you're familiar with the Osmosis DEX. It's the leading DEX on Cosmos.
Eric Jorgenson: Thanks to Jason, I am.
Boz: Yeah, thanks to Jason. So, they're actually introducing something called liquid staking. And so, today the user, in this case – just a brief- because I think it's a really innovative thing that is worth mentioning – today as a user, if you're on a proof of stake network, like you're staking Atoms or Polkadot or whatever, you take your assets and you stake on a validator and you're earning yield, whatever that yield is, or the user in this case could become a liquidity provider and basically get 50% of two assets and go into a DEX and then earn the yields from there from trading fees, inflation, what have you, but you're subject to a permanent loss. What they're doing is like a hybrid approach where you can become a liquid provider into a decentralized exchange, which obviously provides value for the DEX overall, more TDL stake there, but by doing so, you're automatically staked with your Osmosis and earning the yield from just staking alone.
Eric Jorgenson: It's like you're staking and LPing at the same time.
Boz: Correct. So, this is complimentary to another way we can think about it in terms of like capital efficiency. Previously, think of like DeFi summer one, 1.0, the real innovation was collateralizing ETH, borrowing against ETH, deploying capital, whether you're on a DEX or staking and what have you. I think today it's going to be liquid staking mechanisms where you are staking and borrowing against your stake, whether it's on a validator, on a DEX, like a liquid staking approach where you're still earning leads and having like a self-repaying loan, like Alchemix actually created. So, all of these, like DeFi summer 101 is, like they created like specific recipes, DeFi summer 2.0, I think is going to be about combinatorial innovation where you take the best thing of one protocol and then combine with the next, liquid staking, self-repaying loans, and a variety of other things.
Adam: It's the concept of rehypothecation where it sounds scary and it's a big word, but it's just a way to be very capital efficient, and the protocols do this for us now, which makes our lives so much easier.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, and if I know you guys like I think I do, there will be some leverage involved as well, and like actively managing and kind of borrowing against some of these things, re-collateralizing and re-collateralizing, some of this like fractal borrowing we've seen just go to crazy, crazy places.
Jason Hitchcock: Yeah. We'll probably borrow stable coins and put them on Convex.
Adam: Yeah, like I think we try to- I mandated the first fund, we're never going to take more than 50% loan against our collateral. Getting liquidated is the last thing any of our LPs would want. And as a number of us have already felt the pain of being liquidated, I would not advise anybody to take leverage if you're not experienced and watching this like a hawk on a daily basis, it's the most volatile asset class. Like I don’t know how many times we called each other in the middle of the night. Like, hey guys, crypto's down 20%, check your collateralization ratio. I woke up these guys each and every time. And that's the nice thing about having a three time zones covered at least.
Jason Hitchcock: I have had a 5:00 AM phone call from Adam about a loan that I had on Maker.
Adam: Yeah, we were texting Jason at like 2 or 3 AM, hey, do this, do that, pay it down immediately.
Eric Jorgenson: Is that why you guys sent Jason to Miami?
Adam: Yeah, he can take care of his own assets now in Miami.
Eric Jorgenson: Jason was so excited to get out of to San Francisco, he just left all his jeans in a pile in his apartment, moved to Miami.
Adam: He's now wearing a fedora regularly I've noticed on his Instagram. So, it's good look.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so let's do- well, I want to know before, how the fuck do you guys keep up? Like you are professionals in crypto in a way that, like it seems almost impossible to actually know enough about all this stuff and anybody that I've talked to who's not like 18 hours a day in it, and even the ones who are like struggle to keep up. How do you filter signal from noise? How do you decide what to pay attention to? How do you live your lives in this somewhat overwhelming industry with any semblance that like you're finding the right stuff?
Boz: I think that the community you belong to really dictates like success here because as a single person, you just can't, it's impossible. So, there's a few themes that we've constructed. A, we initially started out by building a community of a small close group of friends, and everybody's well aligned in terms of what they're doing. And they were focused on crypto. So, a lot of people- I mean, in terms of anything on Ethereum, I know when I have a question about ETH that I don't even understand, I go to Adam, he's the resident ETH expert. And so, we built it out like this tribe of DeFi people that are experimenting all the time. And we bring in like the qualified signaling back to us, and that allows us to just work smarter not harder because, again, it's impossible to keep up. Something that I do is I use Twitter holistically. I build- I use lists to segment blockchains or DeFi based on blockchain ecosystems. So, I have an Avalanche, I have a BSC, I have Polkadot, I have Cosmos, I have Luna. And anything that bubbles up as you're building the list, continuously pop ups. So, you're actually leveraging the internet for the power it was designed to be. And if those signals are strong enough, they're going to bubble up on your console and then you take that information, you do some due diligence, and then you begin asking your community, your DeFi tribe. And Adam and Jason took it even a step further. They built out their Discord communities and they have like sub-tribes in there of really, really smart people. So, these signals is just tapping into the community for people who either have exposure to that particular protocol, have a deeper understanding than you do. I know one of our guys in one of our communities, Bruce, he's like the resident Fantom expert and BSC expert. Anything on DeFi, we just default to him. He knows. And if he doesn't know, we immediately like this [inaudible 36:57].
Jason Hitchcock: I think that it's useful to have- like I found it's overwhelming, and the only thing that's helped to clarify it to me is my own selfish perspective of I'm only interested in making more money right now. And the idea- like when something new emerges – oh, people are talking about Dope X, or they're talking about GMX – I have to ask myself is knowing about this going to make me more money? And is there anything obvious about this in the first 10 seconds of me learning about this that's going to help me make more money? Is there a high APY for some early liquidity mining event? Is the token early and could go up? Like what's going on here? And if the answer is no to those two questions, I'm like, okay, cool thing to know about. I'm not going to know that much about it. And then I'm going to move on with my life and I'm going to be looking for something that is better than my current portfolio. And that's it. That's the only thing that's helped me stay sane. And then I also think like coming- figuring out that like that's what gets me excited initially, and then I start to notice other kinds of fandoms around tokens, and I try to pay attention like, oh, there's a fandom on this token. I wonder if they're right, or I wonder if it's like a bunch of retail people being duped into something. And there's a way to distinguish between Cardano and Ripple people and like people that are really into Tetra Node’s Gauntlet. Like as you kind of peel back the onion, Tetra Node’s Gauntlet, there's a lot more going on there, and the fandom makes a lot more sense, or the frog army around the Danny tokens. There's a lot more of a thesis to these businesses succeeding, like charismatic leaders that communicate a lot, they ship often, they take a lot of shots, some things work, some things don't, but they're doing a lot. And so, success is more likely and there's a lot of excitement around it. And so, the users are down to try stuff and pump tokens. I don't know. You start to feel that out to see what's worth paying attention to.
Adam: Jason, you've got it as far as like that is experience of like being crypto native and knowing what's bullshit and what's real, or what psyops and what's alpha. I mean, this is something that you must learn on the job. It's a trial by fire. Nobody can teach this to you. Obviously like Boz has his own methodology for filtering the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the [inaudible 39:25] versus pass. Jason's got his own due diligence framework that works for him that's super individualistic based on the DeFi user. I live, eat, breathe Twitter and Discord. I have been in this space long enough to know who the right people to follow are. I continuously update like my Ethropy alpha follow list and the community members in Ethropy have access to that. And hopefully I'm helping them generate high alpha. There's a theme in crypto, like an anachronism WAGMI, we're all gonna make it. What we all try to do is help each other succeed, and it can be competitive, I think, but it's rare. It's mostly a let's all grow the pie together theme. And I've decided in 2022 to kind of make that my motto. It's like I'm helping grow the pie. I want everybody to feel the power and be empowered by what crypto can offer and what web3 can offer. Because it's like the biggest revolution I think in our lifetimes in terms of tech, social, economic, employment, combining all those things into one technology is like amazing. So, yeah, going back to how do I keep up? You can't. You know where to go in and you know that you're going to miss some shit. I totally whiffed on the dog token craze. If you hit that, good for you, but that was a big blind spot for me.
Jason Hitchcock: I think a good tip to- it feels like you should be following a cast of characters that are both in different places. Like there's people that are- like the same person on Twitter might have a sub stack, might be in a Discord, and you might notice them in all the places. And it feels like you're witnessing a conversation in multiple places that evolves over time. That's what it should feel like. And I would say if it doesn't feel like that, you're probably not as dialed in as you could be. And one really good way to get into that mode is you find sort of “thought leaders,” people that are saying a lot that's very smart, a lot of people are like vouching for them in many different ways. Who are they following? Who are they liking and re-tweeting? And then, that's how you find the interesting people. Follow this industry through other people at first.
Adam: Here's a question for you, Eric. I don't know how much you're tuned into the crypto culture. I know you're in yield, but do you feel like email is becoming antiquated because of the new communication mediums of like instant chats, saved threads that you can do on like Slack, Discord, Twitter conversations? I don't know. Like, it seems to me I spend so little time on email anymore.
Eric Jorgenson: I think that email- I have like the reverse. So, I think crypto is underutilizing email currently. I think it is true that a lot more happens- a lot happens in sub stack. Like, I mean, your newsletter is a great example. Like there are really strong kind of crypto newsletters. A lot of times it's just like, hey, I wrote a new blog post, which is like, fine, that's what half of email is. But I think when you go only Discord and only Twitter, like both on the learner or the creator side, that's not a great- you are not reaching as many people as you could or creating as close of a connection. And you still have that kind of like de-platforming or like just missed message due to algorithm risk. So, I think you're right, but I actually think it's a missed opportunity on the crypto creator side.
Adam: Yeah. Maybe it's because it's so- like blockchain is very transparent and anybody can see what's going on if they know where to look. A lot of the Discord servers and Twitter profiles that aren't private, you can find these very public conversations. And a lot of our alpha is generated just from knowing where to look. So, maybe it's a web3 phenomenon.
Eric Jorgenson: It may also be, interestingly, like email was inherent in web2 because everybody was creating accounts in everything in order to use anything at all. And that's not true in web3. So, it may just be a distribution problem, like they don't have the email list. I know some people who are working on sort of more wallet messaging, and that might be actually an interesting- like we may see an email compliment or whatever come out that kind of serves that need between like project and wallet or project and user that isn't email but is something certainly new in crypto.
Boz: That's interesting point.
Eric Jorgenson: Actually, I just had a podcast with Shane Mac who's building XMTP. It's a super interesting one.
Jason Hitchcock: Also, Etherscan just came out with Ether Chat today. That looked really interesting. I want to try that out.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there's a few versions of it coming out, and a lot of this stuff will get more user-friendly I expect, including messaging.
Adam: Yeah, it has to get to the mobile apps eventually. I mean, we use Signal, and we love Signal because of the privacy aspect and like bigger conversations.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I just don't think Discord and Twitter are a good enough solution basically to like scale and bring everybody along.
Boz: Yeah. I think block explorers, especially ETH scans will be the next Googles of the world. And I say this if you actually understand the history of the internet. Because if you're thinking about like ’91 to ’93 and all the websites and all the data that was generated in between that time, there was really no search engine that was even remotely usable or even existent. And then Yahoo comes in, which is index and made sense and organizes chaos of data and allowed people to search for information. You have all these transactions happening, ETH scan comes to the picture and organizes the transactions. The CIC, these are like evolving in a parallel like way that's complimentary historically. But now you're introducing services on these block explorers. Chats is great. I think like some type of email client where you're plugging in potentially just your address as your sign-in. So, it's still privacy preserving, but you can still build the communication layer behind all the information that's generated from all your transactions. And now you have this informational dashboard that's kind of like the next generation of suites of tools on the internet. So just plugging that in because this is a thesis that I've had for a while.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you guys like the analogies to web1? Like, the where are we in the 90s?
Boz: We use it all the time, and Jason and I just did one. But we use it all the time. I use it with almost every pitch or every educational video or every onboarding session, for a close friend, or even some interest party. Because people don't really understand what crypto is, let alone what Bitcoin is. People say I know what Bitcoin is, but I don't know what blockchain is. But to connect with users that have minimal background, for context, you have to relate a story to something that they know about. So even with DeFi, we say, okay, well, do you know what a financial product is for lending at your bank? Here's how we do it. Do you know what banks do, how they make money? Here's how we do it. So, the more parallels that you draw, the analogies and the stories that you use that can connect with people with something that they truly understand, yeah, analogies are a powerful tool to get people to kind of just get it and not think about it.
Eric Jorgenson: I haven't heard somebody say before like we are pre the Google of web3. But actually, I think that may be correct and I like it. So where, like if you had to pick a 90s year, what year do you guys think we are at?
Jason Hitchcock: I mean, it feels like OpenSea is kind of like Lycos where it's got a bunch of categories of NFTs in the way Lycos was like, well, we got sports on the internet, we got entertainment news, we got travel blogs. That's kind of what OpenSea reminds me of. And yeah, in whatever, 1993, ’94, like when did we get search? That was good.
Boz: Yeah. So, the evolution of the internet, and Eric, I'll send you a quick blog I wrote about three and a half years ago. This is how I actually use my investing strategy. History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. Things had to happen in collective order, in standardized orders for things to actually unlock. So worldwide web happened in ’91. Nothing really happened in between ’91 and ’94. The Netscape moment happened around ’93, ’94ish. That was like when we generated millions of users with an easy-to-use QE system. But Yahoo came out in ’94. But making search easy unlocked commerce because the year after that, AltaVista was there, Amazon was there, AuctionWeb. So now you have search, what do people want to do? They want to buy, they want to shop. That's when the e-commerce came. Then a better search engine, came much better, faster, cheaper. That was Google a few years after that. Payments then became- that really unlocked web2 capabilities for the future, WordPress, LinkedIn, the Facebook, Liquor came out in time, and then YouTube. And remember like YouTube, Reddit, all these different things had in some way shape or form built on top of all this infrastructure stack over the last 10 years. So yeah, we're definitely pre-Google, we're pre- I think we're somewhere in the middle of Yahoo which is ’94 and like introduction of commerce, which you could relate to OpenSea. OpenSea kind of unlocked this whole NFT craze. But I see them evolving much beyond NFTs, similar to how Amazon started with books, and now it's like what can't you access on Amazon. OpenSea is the Amazon of crypto.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. Adam, do you agree with that?
Adam: I wholeheartedly agree with Boz. He is a student of history. I am much more left-brained, so I defer to Boz on this one.
Eric Jorgenson: Jason looks contemplative.
Jason Hitchcock: Well, the thing- I think that OpenSea will ultimately get disrupted long-term in every direction, like in the same way that like Craigslist is getting unbundled. NFTs are a really specific idea today that's really narrow, which is like these collectible JPEGs. And in the future, they're going to be more tied to more specific utilities, and we're going to have tons of marketplaces, but like I'm not going to go to OpenSea probably to buy like when Kyrie Irving has an NFT, I'm going to go straight to Kyrie Irving. I'm going to buy that through his social profiles or his- I'm just not going to get it on OpenSea.
Eric Jorgenson: Or you're going to search for it. Is that what Boz was going to say?
Jason Hitchcock: I'm going to build a video, I'm going to go- like I'm going to use the like what's it called? Like Unreal Engine is going to have like a library of NFT assets of like video game levels, of AI for characters and skins and weapons and physics and music, and I'm going to go to their library because it's a more tailored store for video game people.
Boz: Well, that is not to say, that is not to say, I challenge that. So, I don't think OpenSea will be disrupted. I think the current marketplace for what NFT serves or what OpenSea serves today is the V1 Amazon of just books. Books are like that's fun, that's cool. But now let's think about NFTs and innovation, dynamic NFTS that evolve over time. Ticketing, real estate, gaming, all of that can actually be hosted on OpenSea. Maybe not on Ethereum until Ethereum 2.0 comes out. But I definitely see OpenSea becoming multi chain and supporting other coins, other NFTs, interoperable NFTs, and then NFTs that pay that service specific niche within a market.
Jason Hitchcock: Are they going to be the best place to buy tickets?
Boz: I don't see why they couldn't be, just like if you asked me the same question of, hey, can I stream movies on Amazon in ’94? I would say no because Blockbuster at the time was rightly positioned to do the same thing, and they didn't. So, now can OpenSea do it? Yes. I think it's theirs to lose. They can also pull off a Blockbuster and say, no, we don't need streaming, and Netflix can come and take their lunch money. Beut I think where OpenSea is positioned today, not only do they have first-mover advantage and billions in revenue, but I think if they continue innovating and expand their capabilities to support- like I saw a proof of concept for these dynamic NFTs where you could like get a digital pet, like think of Tamagotchi, you feed the pet, you do that, and then like as it grows over time, you could see it growing, changing colors with the seasons and all these different things. Now extrapolate that to like gaming and streaming and music and tickets. I don't see why OpenSea couldn’t have specific modules that serve a particular market, no different than what Amazon does today with gaming, music, products, hardware products, and everything in between.
Jason Hitchcock: So, my skepticism of that is that they're going to have to pull out lots of miracles to have the right interface or whatever, a good user experience for each of those. Maybe they'll become some backend API and what they do is they index everything, but they're not going to have the best music player or the best movie player.
Boz: They've already pulled off a miracle, and they're walking on water. That's all I'm saying.
Eric Jorgenson: They have, if they've peaked, this might be one of them. They have raised a shit load of money. Speaking of NFTs, something I want to ask about, the sort of paradigm of the fund, is are you guys DeFi very specific focus? Can you get into NFTs? What about- is it only like revenue producing NFTs? Like as you mentioned, it's a super broad thing. Where do NFTs and metaverse sort of fit into the fund’s vision?
Jason Hitchcock: We’ve carved out a category for it. Like we want exposure to the big themes that we think are high growth over the next three to five years. And we think that those themes are alt layer 1s, so like Luna, Fantom, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, like all the demand is going to go to these things to build more apps, interoperability, and like we've also chosen DeFi. Like we've picked sort of a DeFi thing to bet on in each platform. Like for Avalanche, it's Trader Joe, for Cosmos it's Osmosis. I think we have an Astroport position for Terra. And so on and so forth. And like Spooky, Spooky Swap for Fantom. And then we're also we are looking at metaverse and there's going to be specific allocations in there that are still TBD because we still don't feel like there actually is the best- We're not really that satisfied with all the ways you can get exposure to the metaverse, and I think we're waiting for a good asset. We've also discussed, like we could buy some Floor Punks and some like Floor Auto glyphs, but we're actually not- we're kind of hesitant to do that, even though those are pretty liquid.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, Adam, I love your blog post or newsletter, the 2022 predictions. And one of them that jumped out to me, I pulled a couple, but one of them that jumped out to me that I thought was interesting in the context of the fund was the majority of metaverse returns will resemble DeFi from 2021. And that got me thinking how does that fit into the fund? Where do you see those emerging?
Adam: Yeah. I know from experience. I bought Merit Circle at like eight bucks and I think it's somewhere around three right now and I locked my liquidity for a year. So, there's really nothing I can do about that. Talk about worst move of 2021, there you go. I think there's going to be very few winners in the metaverse, at least in the next 6 to 12 months. I heard people say the metaverse is going to have the ICO moment where they can raise a ton of capital when markets are frothy, but when the rubber meets the road and it's time to put that capital to work, they have to pay their people. So, the first thing they're going to do is sell the ETH or whatever assets that they raised in the treasury. Something that's changed though, since the 2017 ICO bubble, was they're no longer just raising ETH, like they can raise stable coins. So, that's one way to kind of get around that, that liquidation. So yeah, it's a challenge picking the right metaverse or games. I mean, metaverse is huge. You could say there's gaming, there's NFTs, there's like social networking, lots of themes underneath this metaverse umbrella. And it is totally an arms race right now with very few kind of obvious winners. Like you have your Axie Infinity, they were the clear 2021 gaming winner. There's some beautiful UX stuff coming out of Star Atlas, that's a Solana game where the NFTs themselves are the spaceships you can buy, and they generate yield. It's a very cool concept. But that roadmap is like three years long until the game- the game won’t be ready until ’25. So, you have to take a very deep dive in the communities and the developer base. And that's something that we really need to sharpen our pencils on before we make significant investments.
Jason Hitchcock: It feels like it's investing in a hits business. Like the metaverse is almost like investing in IP and everything else is like investing in companies that like- and there's also just a lot of investing in stuff that's pre-product. Like there's a lot of interesting roadmaps, but like hits business. Like are they going to get users? Do users want to go to that? And then, even just a question to your audience, like what's the one token you can buy that is the metaverse token? And I know there's a metaverse index out there, but like is it a guild like YGG? Is it a game? Is it a specific NFT? Is there a piece of infrastructure, like arweave or something that like every metaverse thing is going to use? I think we just generally also believe the metaverse is going to get adopted. But it's like anything that's sort of like raising money on and then consumers will come here, well, we want to wait for consumers to go there and then we want to buy the token.
Eric Jorgenson: And you want the critical mass of users to show up at web3, right? There's only a hundred thousand wallets or whatever right now. Like you can't build huge numbers on that user base yet. Sorry, go ahead, Boz.
Boz: Yeah. One of the things I also look for is, I mean, this is kind of like building- you're right, gaming is a hits business. The metaverse and gaming kind of go together here. But there are also other hybrid solutions. So, I take a look at what gaming studios with hit games and how they can actually plug into web3. There is a project coming out within the Cosmos ecosystem, so we'll give a plug, something called Craft Economy, think Minecraft – it is Minecraft – and imagine a DeFi layer built on top of that. So, you have a critical mass game with 10 million daily active users, one of the most popular games in the world, web-based, and you're implementing DeFi into an interoperable ecosystem with a preexisting community of users with installed wallets. Can this become a hybrid approach where you're taking not something brand new, but something kind of in the middle with traditional daily active users and a massive Cosmos system that just flips a few other ecosystems like Solana and you have an installed user base that understands how to access tokens, how to use tokens, and a cult-like gaming community, and you mix the two, like what can actually happen? We don't know yet because it hasn't launched. But we're quite bullish on the experiment because the narrative behind it sounds almost too good to be true. Now, can that generate other things and like provide a pathway for other entrepreneurs in the gaming space to think about how they can execute their go to market? That's a whole different level or different conversation. But you're right. It is a hits only business, and even the games today don't really- like they’re hits because they generate the transactions and the yield, but like the games frankly suck.
Eric Jorgenson: What about- Adam, let’s do one more of your predictions here for the ETH expert. The Ethereum merge will be delayed by at least two months but be successful just like every other previous hard fork. What's going to happen around and after the merge? I know that's a little bit of a trillion-dollar question, but what's your perspective on it?
Adam: I have no reason to doubt the developer's capability of continuing on the roadmap that they've been successfully building for the last six years. The Taluk recently in an interview said that they're looking at July 2022 for the merge to happen. So, it's already- Q2 is what they said originally, it's now Q3. So, I think I can check the box on that prediction. And obviously, everybody's wondering, is that going to reduce ETH gas fees? No, it's not, it's going to create a proof of stake blockchain, which is going to have all sorts of other benefits. Obviously, ESG is a huge- like blockchain is under the microscope because it's extremely energy intensive. So, let's make Ethereum a little bit more efficient in terms of energy usage. That's great. In terms of cheaper transactions and scaling, I don't know if you've used Arbitrum or Optimism or Metis yet. Those are all optimistic roll-ups, and transactions are under $10. Some of them are now under $2. I think Arbitrum just rolled out a really nice upgrade. And there's some very, very high-quality projects that are developing on those roll-ups directly, not just moving their code on to the roll-ups from Ethereum. So, I expect those to be heavily trafficked. I see a lot of TDL growth on those roll-ups. And I think the Holy Grail of like ZK roll-ups, ZK sinks is going to get a lot of attention this year. So, there's these scaling solutions that are happening today that can alleviate a lot of the pain that Ethereum users feel in terms of gas fees. What's going to happen in the future once the merge is complete, we'll have a proof of stake blockchain. That's when the developers are going to go back to really focusing on ZK proofs, zero knowledge proofs, and starting to really build out the rest of the roadmap. And like I said, I have no doubt that they will accomplish those, the goals and the vision. Everybody should follow Danny Ryan on Twitter. He is like the project manager extraordinaire for the ETH dev team, super, super smart guy and very easy to understand. And that's a way to kind of keep up with the ecosystem. I'm an OG when it comes to Ethereum. And I, for sure, have taken some profits or moved some of my allocations to other chains, mostly because Jason and Boz convinced me. But it's certainly like where I'm going to be holding the majority of my assets because of its decentralization and the security of the network. You really have- there's really nothing that comes close.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I'm excited to see the L2s kind of get plugged into the on-ramps directly and see more get built out on those. I feel like that's an exciting thing. I know Jason, Mr. Maximum Exposure is like in a zero ETH position in the way that he was in a zero Bitcoin position a year ago now. Because he just- no one YOLOs harder than Jason, which is what I love about you.
Jason Hitchcock: I want ETH so bad that I'm willing to trade all of it for something that will outperform it so that I can one day return and have more ETH, and oh my God, it feels so- in our group chat, it's like sacrilegious. People will be like I can't believe it, but I'm swapping some ETH for something else. And people, they report the news, as if like, oh my God guys, stop me if I'm crazy. Boz did something similar where he swapped all of his- both of us have now swapped all of our Atom tokens for Osmosis, even though we fucking love- Atom is like the Holy Grail of the Cosmos ecosystem. Yet, we have like- in the game of making as much goddamn money as possible as soon as possible, Osmosis is a good car to drive you to get even more Atom.
Eric Jorgenson: Every time I think you're crazy, you just end up richer. So, I don't know what to do with that.
Boz: By the way, not financial advice. But with 94% yield or 96 or whatever it is, and the Ethereum bridge, got an ETH bridge coming this quarter, people are bringing Bitcoin, you have Evmos, crossing compatibility and interoperable smart contracts. And it's like, it is overwhelming with what's happening in terms of the development within the Cosmos ecosystem. But Osmosis is next level.
Eric Jorgenson: I also find it quite easy to use as a certified non-genius, like all the tools that I use on-
Boz: Easy, cheap, fast.
Jason Hitchcock: We're super excited about the next NFT marketplace that appears on Cosmos because Cosmos NFTs will probably have new capabilities and that could be a potential moat for that. And so, everyone should keep their eyes out for the next- for whatever the OpenSea of Cosmos is going to be. Do we know what that's going to be yet?
Adam: Stargaze I guess is the only NFT chain.
Boz: Stargaze and OmniFlix are the leading candidates. But I think Stargaze is essentially positioning itself as becoming the OpenSea of Cosmos. So, it remains to be seen. And I think they are launching their product sometime late February. So super excited about that.
Adam: What's interesting about this whole Cosmos Renaissance is I don't know how many institutional research papers I read last year that showed that the amount of VC capital that went into the Polkadot ecosystem, and I kept asking questions to our group, like why, what the fuck, what the fuck is going on in Polkadot?
Jason Hitchcock: It was because Polkadot did a good job of getting everyone to invest in their round. Like that was my only conclusion. It was like, oh, here's a well-run sales process.
Adam: Yeah. It's Gavin Wood, an OG Ethereum developer, who said I can do this better than Vikalik and co, and that narrative must've stuck. I mean, I've bridged some funds to Kusama and Polkadot. And honestly, it's nothing special, perhaps the shared security of like the Polkadot chain and all the para chains is cool. But I really feel like the Cosmos ecosystem, with it's soon to have shared security model and the IBC where you have inner connected applications, and then proposal smart contracts, people have no idea how powerful that's going to be. There really isn't even a very liquid money market in the Cosmos ecosystem yet. Like Kava just only recently implemented IBC functionality where you can leverage assets and then borrow, and then we use that liquidity elsewhere. So, the Luna Cosmos ecosystem connection, bringing stable coin liquidity, the ETH bridge, which is soon to be launched or has launched but soon to be functional. It's definitely the year of Cosmos. Another one of my 2022 predictions.
Eric Jorgenson: I will give you my small, smooth brain like Polkadot opinion. So, I have a very small position in it, and it literally my whole thesis is basically just like slow and steady, and they have a developer centric approach like because of Testnet. And so, I have no qualms or no belief that like it's going to have a crazy breakout year, but I think like over the long, long, long run, if developers really prefer that, there's a chance that it out competes over a really long-time horizon. So, I have a hedge in there, but I'm also like buy and hold forever because I can never bear to sell anything. Like that is how my brain is broken. But yeah, I will say, it is almost unusable. Like the wallets are terrible. The UI is terrible. Everything's confusing because it's for developers. So, I have some bags, but I have a terrible time using it, compared to Osmosis, which is actually fun and I look forward to interacting with and stuff.
Jason Hitchcock: It's always one big milestone away, one big launch of a thing that's going to make it all happen. And I'm going to let that happen. I think Polkadot is real. Cardona was not. And so, I'm going to let Polkadot become real at its own pace.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. So, one of my favorite things about- a question that I know is a Jason question that I want to ask to all of you guys is like, which is always also my favorite thing, is just like let's get fucking crazy and look out 10 years and how big could this go if everything goes right? And what is the everything that needs to go right?
Jason Hitchcock: What is the this? Is it crypto? Is it our fund?
Eric Jorgenson: It is your fund. It's your fund. I remember when I was talking to Squid DAO, this was the question that you had for me. And like, I think it is very fair to turn that same question to you. And 10 years is a long time.
Jason Hitchcock: If there is a Cambrian explosion of apps right now, we are going to get a lot of credit for allocating a lot of money and helping a lot of people get in right now. And that credit will compound over time. And where I see us in five years is we have a staking service that has several billion in proof of stake tokens on each, across them. And we might even be involved in governance in all these platforms. With Kingsley, we'll have several billion under management. We'll probably also have developed a reputation of just doing this properly and we'll have established other sub-advisor arrangements with other types of treasuries. There should be companies or maybe even large DAOs that we should be operating their treasuries and putting them to work. I think an emerging theme over the next five years is what are we doing with our treasury? And there's going to be a mix of options of put it to work in DeFi yourself or work with professionals that have a track record, and we're going to be in that mix because we are early. And gosh, I also think that we're going to have probably a stock ticker where we're going to securitize the yield on our staking service. And so, we'll be getting access to other types of entities that wouldn't be directly running a check normally, but they come in through public markets, and we'll start to provide exposure to our portfolio through that.
Boz: Just to touch on that – I don't want to take your position here – there is a fund already doing that where they're securitizing the yields based on their staking service, their institutional grade staking service, and taking those securities and actually providing access, all legally, all by the book. It took them three years of legal work and millions of dollars. But I believe it's- I forget the name, but I'll get back to you- Bridge Tower. They're one of the most innovative funds out there and it's led by their team. It's one of the few funds I really look up to in terms of leading-edge innovation around financials and what the future entails. Like what they're doing today is what is going to be the norm in 10 years.
Adam: So, Jason, you sound pretty convinced that we're going to make it. Eric, no one's ever asked me this question, but because I've been so confident in the industry and fortunately haven't had any sort of regulatory black swans yet. Everyone thinks about it, so let's not talk about it. I'm very confident in the Four Moons partners’ abilities to execute and be there, and our commitment is not questioned. Same thing goes for the Kingsley team. But what I fear, because I've been here before, is burnout. It is so easy to get obsessed and just immersed in this culture and this industry where you end up just like loathing doing something. I'm so passionate and I love it so much. I just think a healthy mix of like work and play and taking care of ourselves is something we neglect. I started working out again for the first time since like the beginning of COVID like last week, and I was a like total gym rat. So, I think it's something that I overlooked. And this is advice probably for everybody who's listening and everyone who's in crypto to take care of yourself mentally, physically. It's such a grind. This industry is such a freight train. You’ve got to keep up. So yeah, that's the way I think we're going to-
Jason Hitchcock: To minimize risk at our fund, his answer to the question of how good- where will we be in 10 years is I hope I don't die.
Adam: I didn't want to say it outright. If one of us dies, we've got an issue.
Eric Jorgenson: Minimizing risk, but addressing the downside first. That's what you want to see.
Boz: So, where I see us with this fund, I think similar to what we did with our initial fund, which is proving market thesis around DeFi, generating success for our LPs and us and apparel, I think this new format where as far as I can tell, and maybe your audience can tell me if I'm right or wrong, but as far as I can tell we're I think the first sub-advisors that is managing or co-managing a DeFi fund in the space. And I think this position for us, making Kingsley's fund successful, generating success across the board, will allow us to position ourself to replicate this same exact success around consulting and advising of other funds, whether you're a digital asset fund or traditional institutional grade fund, and allow us to actually scale our knowledge and strategies to hire out other or bring on other people, other core team members to essentially become general managers managing those relationships and those strategies but across a variety of relationships across the market. I don't think it's a one fund take all. I do think the DeFi fund under Kingsley's leadership will grow to be in the billions. I firmly believe that. But I also think there's quite a bit of need and demand for other funds to tap into our knowledge, our know how, and figure out a way to introduce DeFi products that cater to their investors and their book of business. So, I definitely see this as a way to- essentially creating a brand new market around DeFi fund managers or consultants or the sub-advisors for an emerging market. That's where I see it evolving in the next 5 to 10 years.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, when we think about 5 to 10, like 10 years feels like a long time from here, but if we use the web1 analogy like that would only get us to 2005, which is really like the value hadn't even really begun to accrue. Like Google was bigger than it started for sure, but all the real returns happened between like 2005 and 2020, frankly. Yeah, totally it's crypto time. Although like the adoption rates have been like- have you seen the graphs where they overlay like pixel for pixel? I can't believe- I think that they will diverge, like I kind of expect them to break out.
Boz: They are already diverging. It is actually growing three times as fast as the internet did at its peak in terms of crypto overall. So again, this is the early 2000s right now potentially for adoption, but in terms of like technical innovation, we are in like the ’94.
Eric Jorgenson: Is there- what I was trying to think about, Boz, you might know this, is there like a historical analogy for a fund that was like internet focused starting in like 1993 or ’95 or something and spent 20 years? Like Constellation Software's the closest thing I can think of. Sequoia, maybe you could say.
Boz: Yeah, those early VCs that were blazers, Kleiner Perkins, I mean, for decades and their track record speaks for itself. I would also say Andreessen Horowitz, like there's no better leader in the space then Marc Andreessen and his vision behind where this is all going.
Jason Hitchcock: Well, we've also talked about at some point, our fund would- at a certain point, we would capture enough fees from it over the long-term that it could fund- we could then seed another new fund from Four Moons that could become like a VC fund, and then we could go downstream. And then, so we could have this entity that's basically downstream, warming up companies, putting them on our radar for then all of our other sub-advisor relationships we have.
Boz: Yeah, but I think, back to your point, Eric, I mean, the big name funds would be the Kleiner Perkins of the world, Sequoia, the Andreesen Horowitzs of the world. And maybe, I'm sure I'm forgetting others in Silicon Valley, but those seeded the internet. Those VCs essentially seeded the innovation behind the internet as early as the 70s and 80s. So, it makes sense to just- I would have to do some more digging into more about like who were the most successful or top five VC funds based on the bets that they've taken, but you'd have to dig through the archives.
Eric Jorgenson: I hope this is planting the flag of the Sequoia of 2060 and that's how we look back at this. I'm curious, I wrote this note a couple of times as we've been talking, it is interesting, for a very DeFi movement, like you guys are all in DAOs, you know all of this shit, like why so tradfi? Like you're starting a fund, you're talking to RIAs. I know with your Discords and the networks and followings and newsletter subscribers that you guys have, you could just as easily go the like DAO route, start your own treasury, be anons and allocate crypto, just like Squid DAO does or something like that. Is that something you gave thought to? Why are you working hard to bridge this world?
Jason Hitchcock: There is such a huge opportunity that you just- we would be crazy to say no to it. So, like we were doing a friends and family DeFi fund figuring out what our next step was, and we had an idea, but then you have the opportunity to take your existing thing that works, and someone says here is a $40 trillion market that literally does not have a product being sold to it yet, and we already know that they want what you have, like we have to go pursue that. This is an opportunity to get big very quickly. And it doesn't limit us from doing other stuff. That's how we came up with the structure. We have total flexibility to go spin up other entities through Four Moons.
Boz: Yeah, I think, I mean, I have strong feelings about DAOs. This is just purely opinion-based, maybe unpopular. It remains to be seen around if they are successful in the long term. Because turn out for governance on DAOs, everybody wants a DAO, but nobody wants to govern. I think it is on average less than 1%. So, it remains- and yeah, and maybe it's early, I don't know yet, but it remains for them to actually achieve product market fit and generally innovate. I've seen tremendous amount of people create marketing DAOs and fail on execution. So, it's like everybody wants a DAO, but who's leading it? And leadership by committee, even at scale, is doomed for failure, I think. That's not to say that it won't happen. So, I'm generally against DAOs for where we are in the market. In terms of being anon, I'm also fundamentally about being anon, because the market that we're in is relationship driven and you cannot build a relationship if you're anon in this space, especially in the traditional markets. And we're going to attract family offices, serious capital. The equity market globally is a hundred trillion dollars. We're at the $200 billion mark. How do you foster those relationships to attract boring money or TradFi money? Well, you do it by doing it by the book, having a face, shaking hands, those relationships, going to meetings, going to conferences, having speaking engagements, those things, even in a remote first culture now, and especially with what's going on, relationships matter and hiding behind anon for this particular market isn't something that could yield to the vision that we're all pursuing.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, you guys hit it with the faucet. It's just a lot bigger and it flows a lot faster from the traditional markets. I also think a concern for DeFi native funds, whether they're DAOs or like in Enzyme Finance, where you can build your own index token and people can invest in that, is regulations. We haven't really seen how KYC or accredited investor requirements will impact DeFi. And that's one of the things Kingsley pursued ahead of time. And it was a very heavy lift. It cost them a lot of money, they spent a lot of time on it, and we're super grateful for that. It's going to, like Jason said, we're instantly going to allow ourselves to scale. It would have taken at least 6 to 12 months for us to end this current fund and do it all over again at a bigger scale. And Kingsley is a great conduit for us.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's awesome. I'm super happy for you guys. I mean, I've known Jason at least a long time, and Adam, it sounds like you share his philosophy of like, give, give, give, community, community, community. I can't say how many people have like thanked me just for introducing them to Jason because he's been so gracious and open with time and supporting people and bringing them along, and from career advice to allocation advice to troubleshooting a fucking MetaMask wallet. Like he has been nothing but like giving to the community at large. And that karma is coming back. I'm super happy to see you guys just grow into this amazing opportunity, like well-earned amazing sort of product market fit. I'm psyched about it on your behalf and hopefully everybody who invests with you as well.
Jason Hitchcock: Thanks, Eric, that means a lot. It's been a fun knowing you throughout this journey and going forward too, and I've enjoyed meeting people in your audience who reached out. Some of them I've invited into my community because they're so great. So, we'd love to keep meeting more people in your audience. Again, people can book time on my Twitter. I have my Twitter link. They can book office hours with me to talk crypto, down to talk about anything except for whether or not your NFT collection is going to be successful.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I don't want to wrap up quite yet, but like I know anybody who wants more can find you guys on Twitter all the time, probably too much. Your Discords, Adam and Jason both have somewhat private Discords. Adam, your newsletter is amazing. Boz, I want to see more of you on the internet. I don't know where to find you. I know you tweet.
Boz: Twitter. Find me on Twitter, follow me on Twitter.
Eric Jorgenson: I’ve got to get your blog too, it sounds like. So, I do know, I know that the fund is, unfortunately, not for everybody, right? Like people have to be accredited. I'm assuming there's minimums involved because you've got like real RIAs and stuff.
Jason Hitchcock: It is super straightforward. The fund is for two types. Like you’ve just got to meet two requirements. If you are accredited, check. If you are in the US, our fund minimum is a hundred thousand dollars and if you're non-US, due to just regulatory overhead, we have made that $1 million. And you can come in as an individual or through an entity, depending on which category. And ultimately, we would connect you with Kingsley Capital. If you reached out to us, we would just refer you to them, and they would walk you through the process properly.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, that is good to know. I think and just kind of standard-
Jason Hitchcock: To be bullish on crypto long-term. This is like, yes, it's a liquid fund, but just assume that this is the money that like when you normally buy stock and you're like I'm long Apple, it's like you're putting it in our crypto fund and it's like long crypto.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And there are seemingly more and more people, even kind of the money managers and financial planners and stuff that I talk to, who are like, yeah, totally like 1 to 5% in crypto makes a ton of sense. That might be where the next tech- I'm very interested to see if the next sort of tech revolution, the value accrues to tokens rather than stocks. Like that is a thing that everybody who is like a Vanguard index person, like I have been my whole life, should be like deathly afraid of that you just miss this huge driving factor of the next 20 years because it happened in tokens and not equity. I don't know if that's how that's going to work. Like there's still plenty of public crypto companies like Marathon and Coinbase and stuff like that. But a lot of growth in tokens and the tokenomics versus the stock equity is kind of a new paradigm.
Boz: Or tokenizing stocks. I think there'll be- I think crypto tokens will be at parody at some point with the stock market, generally speaking, just how fast this space is innovating, how fast it's grown. But I think there's also the opportunity for tokenizing stocks that can also- again, this hybrid, this combinatorial innovation. It’s not this or that. I think that the real answer for everything is somewhere in the middle. And that applies to all sectors, markets, companies, and industries.
Jason Hitchcock: And we talk about this too in my Discord, Eric, all the time. Like we are seeing assets, cash flow, using new ways, like with Convex. And so, I think we're just going to learn more lessons. Every few months, there's going to be a new way to design a token that clearly presses the buttons of token holders and gets them to want to own it or do something with it. And I think you can just imagine three to five years from now, the sophistication of token design is going to be really appealing. And we're going to be looking at like what was the point of a stock? What was that supposed to do? And we're going to see that the token achieves more goals for the company. Like Boz just said, we'll probably see stocks wrapped into tokens because like the one property those stocks probably have is governance for shareholders, but they're going to have other sort of superpowers once they're tokenized.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, they kind of- the bundle of a stock is basically governance and dividend distribution, right?
Jason Hitchcock: And basic cashflow, and the same kind of theatrical governance that's not real.
Eric Jorgenson: And for tokens, you already see- So like the Squid DAO interview I did, you already see governance, you already see dividends, but there's this other interesting mechanism of like, hey, I can lock it, I commit to lock this for four years and that gives me more privileges and more yield. And that's like I would a hundred percent lock my- I'd lock my Berkshire Hathaway for 20 years if it meant I got a higher share of dividend yields. And there's just so many interesting things that can happen.
Jason Hitchcock: And I think tokens are now a tool to deputize your stakeholders to do things. Like at a bare minimum, hey, have my token, get credit for being early, go pump your bags. You buy it, go tell people about it. You could lock it up, which that could even do nothing, but you take it out of circulation to help even more. Maybe Berkshire Hathaway says lock it up because if you lock it up, you get half off on your tickets to Berkshire Hathaway [inaudible 1:31:40] or whatever. They could have other fun incentives.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. So, for the people who are not going to be investors in the fund but like made it through this and are like, holy shit, I want to get smart about this, I want allocation to this, I can't go to the moon with them, this is not the only way to get involved and invest in crypto. Jason, I know in particular, I want to pull your string on your portfolio theory rant that you went on in Yieldopolis because I think it's an all timer and just like how you think about it. But like Boz and Adam, drop your personal hot ball of money wisdom on us as well for people who are just either not going to- don't have a vehicle, not accredited, international, whatever and are out there kind of like doing this on their own.
Jason Hitchcock: I think my thing that you're referring to, and tell me if I'm forgetting anything, but the high level was like here's how I think about crypto investing. And a lot of it came from a lot of what Adam and Boz and I discuss a lot, but you have this goal portfolio and you're going to throw out- it's going to be of assets that you're really excited about owning long-term. And maybe that goal is, I'm going to make up numbers, but a 1000 ETH and like 10,000 Atom tokens and like a million dollars in stable coins, that could be the goal. And then you have to build some portfolio that's going to get you there. And the DeFi strategy is to build a portfolio that's going to help you earn yield so that you can sell that yield to start buying your dream portfolio, or you can compound your yield back into your strategy so that you earn a little bit more yield tomorrow then you earned today. And this is kind of what you do. And like things that I think about along the way are I've always believed in having a concentrated portfolio. You only need to have three or four tokens because like there actually is enough information out there for you to take high conviction bets. It's not just rolling- It is rolling the dice, but it's also not. It's like you can do your homework. If you own too many tokens, you don't really get credit for being right when they all go to the moon, like you need them all to go to the moon. You want when one goes to the moon, you want your life to change a little bit. And so concentrated, and then, yeah, that's kind of how I think about things.
Adam: I would say there is a common characteristic across all successful crypto investors and it's they're all resourceful. This is a do-it-yourself industry. If you're not the type of person who wants to seek the required information to be successful in this industry, it probably isn't for you. And there's plenty of Vanguard stocks that you can buy like through your mutual funds. There's maybe the next level up, which is like Bitcoin and ETH, not financial advice, but that's a really good way to get started in this space. Beyond that, there's a great essay written by Ryan Sean Adams from Bankless, it's called a Crypto Barbell portfolio. It's must read. It's kind of the most important intro piece to constructing a solid portfolio for any new investor. It's very simple to understand, straightforward. It gives you the exposure to the stable coin concept, and stable coins are a revolutionary. They're going to be in everything we do within the next five years. So, start there, and then I think naturally most people fall down the rabbit hole and find their next favorite layer 1 or altcoin or community or NFT project. It's such a fun experiment and it's like a choose your own adventure based on where you want to spend your time. And most people I've spoken to find something that speaks to them that they really fall in love with and stick with for a long time.
Boz: Yeah, absolutely. So, I guess it really just depends on how, to Adam's point, it depends on- being resourceful just depends on how committed you are to participating in this ecosystem. No different then, hey, I want to learn the stock market or options trading, but I don't want to put in the time, I just want to think about passive investing. So, from my perspective, regardless of where you are on the spectrum of how involved or what your time commitments are and everything else, I would encourage people to start today if you know nothing about crypto, you don't even have a crypto exchange.
Eric Jorgenson: If they knew nothing about crypto, they would have stopped listening a long time ago, Boz.
Boz: Oh yeah, I know. I still get- my inbox and messages, Instagram, whatever, is flooded with how can I start? Again, we're super, super early. So, I guess my answer will be a three-part answer. For the brand-new person, get a crypto exchange, at least start yielding on stable coin. I know Gemini offers 8%. It doesn't sound like a lot like from our perspective, but something is better than nothing, and at least you can earn interest.
Eric Jorgenson: It's a lot more than a savings account.
Boz: It's exponentially more than a savings.
Eric Jorgenson: It is infinitely more.
Boz: It’s barely higher than inflation. It’s barely higher, but you'd be making money. But the point is at least deploy capital and think about capital efficiency. Make money while you learn. From there, I know we started with a company out of Korea, it's called [inaudible 1:37:22] Bank. And Jason and I were earning 15% on our ETH compounded daily. And that was something- this is well before like Compound came out, well before DeFi came out. But the thing is we wanted to deploy money or value of assets to earn while we're learning. So, earn while you learn. That would be something. The second is, yeah, begin subscribing to a specific podcast, follow, join the Discord of Adam and Jason, and then tap into the community to understand where to start. And there's a lot of people- I know I sent my wife there to learn about where do I deploy capital? And what's the easiest way to deploy capital? How do I install a MetaMask? And there's so much content out there that guides you through this process. And then from there, take it to the next phase of how do you get a stable coin from an exchange into a web3 interface? Where do you stake? How do you stake? How often do you- you should be learning about transaction fees. And just again, no different than learning how to ride a bike, these skill sets will all compound over time and so will your returns.
Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. That's an amazing sort of summary. Jason's first conversation, Jason and I’s first conversation is an amazing kind of like 1 and 201 of all that stuff to go actually get involved. If you still haven't, go listen to it again and let it compel you. Because it will.
Boz: Yeah. Jason and I share fairly similar investment philosophy which is like it's very Bill Ackman-like, it's very consolidated, not really diversified, really aped in and just optimizing for the narratives around the potential. Osmosis, Luna, and what's your third one, Jason? I don’t know. And Convex.
Jason Hitchcock: I’ve got my net worth in three tokens right now.
Boz: Yeah, it's considerable. I would say me as well. But just keep in mind generate the thesis, follow the thesis, and follow those projects, but also be a student of history because these things tend to repeat themselves with these investment cycles.
Eric Jorgenson: They do. Yeah, I went back and read the Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, the Carlota Perez book. And I was like you can chart all these things on it. It's amazing. And then you lose perspective, and it feels like, oh God, everything's new and overwhelming and scary and everything's moving so fast. And then like when you can zoom out and plot it all, and then the sense of relief I feel when I remind myself or like get reminded how inevitable this is, is kind of like you just can't be over- Like I feel like I can't possibly just open my sail enough to the wind of crypto that is coming.
Boz: Totally. I think like, I don't know how many of us have ever been around a conversation where it's like, oh, I wish I had the opportunity to get into Google and Amazon and all of these things. And I'm sitting there like you have innovation around you and it's staring you in the face. All you have to do is reach out.
Eric Jorgenson: It just looks a little weird because it's fucking innovation.
Boz: It's permissionless, it's decentralized, it's already scaled. It's these projects and networks.
Eric Jorgenson: I can’t believe I don't want to invest in Spooky Swap.
Boz: Well, how confusing was Thanksgiving last year? Like pass the yams, like what are we talking about? You can't even fathom how they're confusing.
Adam: When there's like a hundred-million-dollar net worth individuals with cat profile pictures on Twitter, it is a little bit weird to jump in with both feet, but everyone's very nice. They want to help. It's a little scary-
Jason Hitchcock: -anime avatars then I have from anyone else.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, nobody's taking themselves too seriously, but everybody really is- I think Adam, everybody that I have met in crypto really, with a few maxis aside, shares your like let's grow the pie, let's teach everybody, we're all here to build, we're all here to invest in each other. And really like all of the incentives of the whole community are aligned in ways that most people never have aligned. Even in Silicon Valley and startups, like people have this kind of veneer. Everybody is helpful and they do want to help each other, but there are very intense rivalries and competition. And I feel like we're not even close to that yet in crypto. Like everybody just wants to win and help win and bring everybody along and build new cool shit and teach new people how to use it. And almost every Discord and Twitter conversation that I've seen is just helpful and constructive. And don't be afraid to ask questions and people will help.
Boz: We've had people in funds managing DeFi reach out to us, and we do share notes because our philosophy, to Adam's point, is like a rising tide raises all boats. We want more people to grow the pie. We want more smart people in finance and tech to innovate these products and services. It only helps us collectively be more successful together.
Eric Jorgenson: Absolutely. I love that. I love you guys. Will you each drop your Twitter handle and/or blog and/or like wherever you want people to come find you and learn more about you or the fund or your writing or your projects or whatever?
Boz: Yeah, absolutely. I am at Boz_menzalji.
Eric Jorgenson: Don't worry, we'll put that on the show notes. We'll put all this stuff in the show notes. I'm glad you spelled it, like that will increase the odds that I spell it right. And I do want you to say it exactly like that. Your perfect, Boz, don't change a thing. Adam, you're next.
Adam: Yeah. So, on Twitter, I'm at Ace_da_Book. Don't ask me where that came from.
Eric Jorgenson: And you are the smoking doge avatar.
Adam: It's called the doge punk rocket scientist. It's my favorite NFT ever. It is- okay, plugging – I haven't done a plug yet. Doge Punks is like my favorite NFT project. They're boutique little doges that are popular memes. So, the meme that I have is the Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan podcast where he is puffing a blunt. And I think that's like the most epic episode. I love the Doge Punk. Check out their NFT project. I'm actually having coffee with the creator of the Doge Punk project on Friday. So, I'm excited about that. And then if you want to find my blog, you can go to Ethropy.finance and sign up there.
Jason Hitchcock: It is a great newsletter, recommend it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's an amazing blog.
Jason Hitchcock: And I'm just at JasonHitchcock, just one word.
Eric Jorgenson: And both of you talk all the time on Twitter, you share very openly positions, you answer questions. Like I think all of you guys are like active and helpful on Twitter. Highly recommend it. I learn a ton there. It's where you find people sharing great stuff. There's just so many good things there. Boz, you can come back next time, and we'll just talk about space the whole time, and we don't even have to mess with this crypto stuff. And we’d get into some space shit too, but I didn’t want to complicate this one too much.
Boz: Oh man. You're opening up a Pandora's box. It’s like if you think I'm passionate about crypto or passionate about DeFi, just wait.
Eric Jorgenson: That's why I waited until the end so I can hang up on you just in case you just start- We'll do that another time. I’ve got another buddy Max, he's really into space and I feel like that'd be a really fun episode and something to explore.
Boz: Maybe we could tweet Elon to join.
Eric Jorgenson: Let's do it. Did you see Lex Fridman say like, he's like manifesting, he's like I will interview Elon Musk in space. Hell yeah, I want that.
Boz: Did you see how easy it was to transition from DeFi to space?
Eric Jorgenson: The InterPlanetary File System is already thinking ahead, like we are all ready for it. It's going to be beautiful. All right. Thank you guys so much for doing this. I'm psyched for you. I’ve said it a thousand times, I'll say it again. Thank you. I'm excited for you. Can't wait to see where we get in 10 years when you're all gone to the moon, all four moons.
I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. I encourage you to go follow these dudes on Twitter. Check out the show notes and please leave a review. Know that I read every single one and appreciate every single one. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast and newsletter and reaching an audience of thousands of beautiful geniuses just like you, please DM or email me. If you love this episode, you will also love my first conversation with Jason Hitchcock if you haven't heard it already, the interview I did last week with Shane Mac about the crypto native messaging and where the future can go there, and the pseudonymous interview I did with a few of the members of Squid DAO, which is like a decentralized crypto native hedge fund, it is fascinating. My thought that I will leave you with today: When you see innovations early, they're always a little scary, a little crufty and weird, like dial up internet or car phones. But we can cultivate the skill of optimism and we can learn to look at the long arc of technologies to see what things could be and position ourselves for that.
I really appreciate you hanging out with us. This is all about laughing and learning, building leverage, and compounding our faces off.
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