Transcript
A (0:02)
Third guy. Welcome to Bankless.
B (0:04)
Thanks man. I'm excited to be here. How are you?
A (0:07)
Really good. Really, really good.
C (0:08)
I'm excited for this conversation mainly because.
A (0:09)
I think you have probably the largest audience that is also the most non overlapping with, with ours, with mine, with mine here at Bankless. And I want to like learn a little bit more about what's going on over there maybe to get that started. Thread Guy is what you are known as. That's your pseudonym. I don't even know if people know your actual name.
B (0:30)
Michael Stocks, if you want to call him Michael.
C (0:32)
Michael.
A (0:33)
Nice to meet you, Michael.
C (0:34)
Likewise.
A (0:34)
I've only ever known you as Thread Guy. Would it be fair to call you the Gen Z face of crypto?
B (0:40)
I will take it with a smile on my face. I will absolutely take it.
A (0:44)
Yeah. Something that I watched slowly happened like in 2021 was there was like a lot of people that came into the industry that like cared about different things than like what we were expecting. We as being like there was really only like Bitcoin and Ethereum back then. And that kind of has slowly manifested into its own like pillar of the whole entire crypto industry. And it's really centered around like a new generation of crypto entrants, crypto market participants that have like a very strong like Gen Z, it's like very Gen Z coded. Very, very. I'm guessing that's when you more or less came into the industry around 2020 and 2021.
B (1:25)
So I have a lot of perspective on this that I. As time goes on I realize not everyone came in at the same, you know, people here for different reasons. Not everyone understands my side of the world the way I understand it. But I, I came here in 2020 for top shot to trade. Yeah, okay, top shot. NFTs on the flow blockchain. Because I was in the Internet reselling game and the hottest game in town was sports cards for all. Basically the whole summer into early fall of 2020, sports cards were the game hottest game in town. I should have been buying bitcoin trading crypto. I didn't even know it existed. And the sports cards community was up in arms over these fucking top shots. NFTs are stupid. They're not real, they're not real cardboard. The real connoisseurs. And I'm like, man, everyone's so angry and upset about these top shots. I should go buy a couple. And you know, one thing leads to the next and next thing you know you're, you're, you know, buying board apes and you're in the NFT scene full fledged. But I, you know, I wasn't here 2017. I wasn't here in the early, early days of crypto, But I think 2021 with NFTs and then 2024 with Salana meme coins were the two periods of hyper growth on chain of people that were coming like exclusively to trade. They weren't really necessarily here for the cypherpunk ethos or for stable coins or you know, decentralization. They were here to trade. And it's kind of like an interesting development, I think that's happened amongst crypto.
