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The Wolf Of All Streets
The Hottest Crypto Trends To Watch In 2025, Straight From Coinbase | Hoolie Tejwani
00:44:45
The Hottest Crypto Trends To Watch In 2025, Straight From Coinbase | Hoolie Tejwani
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- [00:00]
A
That's the Internet. Like you're on the Internet, folks. This is what happens if you even.
- [00:04]
B
Have to get a MetaMask wallet.
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A
We've already lost crypto defi. It's awesome for the edge curves of the barbell for users of money. I think Telegram is really interesting. We're not done until we've got billions of people on chain and trillions, trillions of assets on chain.
- [00:18]
B
No company has been more pivotal in pushing crypto forward than Coinbase. One arm of crypto is Coinbase Ventures, led by Huli Tejwani. We had an amazing conversation about all of the things that are being built in crypto when we actually may see them come to fruition, and what it's going to take to get to mainstream adoption. You don't want to miss this conversation with one of crypto's greatest visionaries.
- [00:41]
A
That's dope. Let's go.
- [00:55]
B
I want to start with the most exciting topics. First, what's exciting you right now in crypto?
- [01:01]
A
Where to begin? I think 2025 is going to be a pretty epic year across everything in crypto. Couple areas. So one, stable coins. Whenever someone asks me what's the use case for crypto, I kind of just laugh and say, go talk to someone in Kenya who's moving through a tremendous amount of friction to get access for stable coins. I think that's. We're at a point where it's very clear that is a 10 to 100x penetration wave. We're going to. We're going to be riding. We were investors in Bridge, which is acquired by Stripe. We recently announced investment bvnk. And so the original kind of thesis around crypto starting to eat traditional financial. The financial system, it's happening. So that's. That's a big area. Second, where I'm spending a lot of time and the team spending a lot of time is around intersection crypto. Crypto and AI. AI is just this massive paradigm shift that's going to engulf everything. But we're already seeing, you know, if you go to that truism of where where the really smart hackers and builders spending their nights and weekends, a lot of them are focused on this intersection point. It's going to be wonderful and weird. It's hard to predict how it's all going to shape out, but that's one big area. And then third, I'd say we're finally at a point, if we think about these crypto cycles, the kind of Carletta Peretz framework of you have the big speculative runs where A lot of infrastructure gets built out up and down. We've gotten through all these waves now where all the pieces of the stack for truly Internet scale blockchain applications are here. We're at that convergence point and so the design space around onchain consumer applications, whether it's gaming or social fi, there's a lot of really interesting experimentation there. So I think we'll see a bunch of breakout kind of viral apps and that those are kind of like three big buckets, but plenty more.
- [03:06]
B
Yeah, that's been one of the sort of paradigm shifts of the last few years that I noticed as well is that we had this panic in 18, 19, 20, 21. Even where we said there's so many things that are being built, there's not enough block space. Now it seems like we have infinite block space and chains and need to actually fill them with some, you know, apps that are actually adopted by the mainstream or gain some traction. So I guess you mentioned a few sort of verticals there. I think we all know defi will happen in some, you know, maybe on one chain will be a defi chain. I don't know. NFTs I'm sure will happen. I'm sure the metaverse will come back around. We know that AI, we have all these different verticals. Which ones do you think may actually see some meaningful traction? If we're assuming this four year cycle exists, but in this cycle, in the coming two to three years, let's call it.
- [03:52]
A
Yeah, I kind of bring it back to someone's earlier point. So on the stablecoin, like traditional payments side of things, I think by the end of the cycle we're going to see a lot of applications where people are interacting. They don't even know that blockchain and crypto is in the back and will just penetrate whatever amount of GDP in the world is going through stripe and traditional pen and paper payment systems, we're already seeing real, real traction there. It'll continue to scale. It's hard to put a finger on particular use cases beyond that defi for sure continue, will continue to go and with the cheaper block space and what the friction points that have kind of held it back in the past are, are being alleviated. There's a clear, clear use case there. I came to crypto and around Bitcoin I think the store value thesis is as sound as ever. This, I think this will be the year where we start going increasing institutional adoption, but also the sovereign, like the sovereign game theoretic side of Bitcoin as a Strategic reserve asset has, like, legs couple. I'm curious what you think.
- [05:07]
B
Yeah, well, I definitely think on the bitcoin side, that we've kind of reached exit velocity as far as adoption. Right. That that's the first. And the game theory, as you mentioned, if we get a strategic bitcoin reserve in the United States or even continue to have the rhetoric of a strategic bitcoin reserve, I think people are underestimating. Just if the United States puts it on the balance sheet, everybody literally has to put it on the balance sheet. So I don't even know what a world of bitcoin price looks like if that happens, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a very rapid trip to a million bucks. Right. And I don't think that's as hyperbolic as it sounds, but it depends on that happening. I have always said, just like you did, that stablecoins are the killer app for crypto bitcoiners. Hate that, because I think there's some irony in dollarized and tokenized dollars being the thing that we use when you're supposed to buy bitcoin as a hedge against the dollar. But I am still curious as to how that shakes out, because you might have some deeper thoughts, especially with the regulatory regime likely changing legislation being more likely with the incoming administration, because it felt for a while like tether might end up on the outs in the United States. But Nick's an owner of Tether and is the secretary of commerce, so I think that's less likely. So I just don't know who wins or how many stablecoins we can have. It seems like now we're getting stable coins launched on a weekly basis, and that hype is kind of confusing to me. I mean, I think they'll be used, but I think there'll be one or two massive stablecoins that dominate the world.
- [06:36]
A
Yeah, it's definitely an interesting, even strategic question thinking about how the stablecoin landscape moves forward. There's something to be said about the power of liquidity, and liquidity begets liquidity. And so there'll be a couple standards. There's also a world where these things are fungible and they're programmatic, and every merchant can launch their own. Launch your own white label stablecoin, and we see thousands, billions of them in different flavors and formats with, like, pending regulatory clarity. I think things around how you can do, like, on chain treasuries and some of the RWA side of things start becoming interesting. That's pretty gated right now. Until that until that side clears up.
- [07:23]
B
How optimistic are you that our pie in the sky vision of what the world's going to look like in the United States as far as legislation, regulation is actually going to play out? Because I think that there's many who think we're so optimistic that we're going to end up disappointed, that maybe because we're in our echo chamber, it feels like the most important thing that's going to be legislated, but we might get sort of left out on the sidelines in that first hundred days.
- [07:47]
A
Yeah, I think Brian RCO is a quote that I really internalize. It's never as good as it seems. It's never as bad as it seems. And you go through these phases of euphoria and despair and it's like a elastic band that you lose all the elastic and just stays down through it. I'd say I'm optimistic things are going to be much more constructive. I mean, we're coming out of a period where we had this not principled regulation by enforcement. Basically gaslighting is not a workable regulatory strategy period. And crypto's persistent, right? It's not. Yes, we've seen developers shift from the US Offshore. There's pretty convincing data around that. But it can only get better. I think all we need is just constructive engagement, clear rules of road. No one is saying don't regulate the space. It's just provide constructive regulation that can actually deter bad actors, enable good actors and innovation. I don't, you know, with D.C. and politics, like I try not to over index on like what will get done, what can't get done. There's such a, there's such a process there, but the tone is certainly much more, much more constructive.
- [09:10]
B
I was going to say, I think that that's actually what matters. Right. I mean the feeling that you can actually do things when you didn't think you could before is all that matters. Because all those companies that were afraid to do, do anything in the United States maybe won't be for a while and we'll start to sort of see innovation come back. I just interviewed Raoul Pal and he had a really interesting take on the election. He basically said it wasn't as much Democrat as Republican as it looked, but it was actually the technologist finally stepped in and won. There was this just huge wave of anti entrepreneurship and anti tech in the United States. Brian, Coinbase and others were forced to step in and do their part and win and make sure that America remains ahead. You're at Coinbase Ventures, obviously so this meaningfully impacts you, I would imagine, as an investor, I'm assuming working with and consulting the startups that you invest in, having an active role in how they proceed. This seems like the biggest shift there could be. Regardless of, like I said, what those actual laws end up being. The fact that people are scared to talk to you anymore.
- [10:20]
A
Yeah, it definitely impacts in a very positive way. Ultimately we're doing early stage venture and we're driven by great exceptional founders and the technology. And if you have an environment where the talent is deterred from working on the technology, that is a big limiting reagent. Having that flip to the other side where we're already seeing like quality, really high quality builders and engineers who would have been kind of staying away from crypto because of just the narrative around it, especially coming out of kind of that post FTX period are warming back up and it's a safe place to build and that just catalyzes the formation rate and how many opportunities, how many ideas are being pursued. And yeah, folks don't need to think about domiciling and other geographies and can build in the US but zooming out, crypto's so global and candidly other jurisdictions the US is behind, there are other hubs that are just ahead. So I think the genie's out of the bottle. The progress is going to continue. Now hopefully we're in a place where the US can catch up a bit and play the role it should play, which is be the home for the innovators, attract village, have all the economic output and value here in our tax base.
- [11:52]
B
I have no idea how much you travel, but in the context of how many things aren't being built in the United States, I would imagine you spend quite a bit of time in Dubai, Singapore and other friendlier jurisdictions that you're alluding to. Maybe you'll get to travel less now. Maybe we'll just get to stay home and take meetings, you know, around the country.
- [12:11]
A
Yeah, fortunately, fortunately post Covid we can do a lot with the norms on a zoom like this, but you know, we're happy to invest wherever, wherever the builders are. Like India has a tremendous amount of, of like incredible web3 or on chain talent. I'll get on a call with anyone, anywhere, any time zone, but happy to have coffee with someone down the street too?
- [12:37]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious how much deal flow you're seeing, how many projects are pitching you on a regular basis and how much that's fluctuated through the more bullish and bearish cycles over the past few years a lot of people actually sort of joke that actually everything's built in the bear market and all the builders love the bear market because you're not influenced by price and community and hype. You can just put your head down and then that all gets lost in the bull market when tokens start popping 100X's left and right.
- [13:10]
A
It's a great, great question. I think about a lot. I think about it as we're looking for missionaries, not mercenaries in when we're in the euphoric phases that ratio skews for sure. Volume, you know volume on on pipeline and deal flow I would say right now is feeling kind of where it was going into 2021. So you know mark to market where we are in the cycle in the bears it's just much easier to spot the missionaries because they're the folks who stick around and have big ideas. They're actually there, they exist and you can filter on who's it comes down to intrinsic motivations like is are you doing this because it's intrinsically it's a get rich quick motivation or are you trying to build something that's going to change the world and millions of people are going to use and we're going to move trillions of dollars of capital. So yeah some of our investments, we've had great performing investments across all cycles. It's easier to filter in the bears at the sick you just gotta keep the signal to noise filter being much more just higher filter engine in the euphoric times.
- [14:23]
B
But numbers sheer quantity. 100 projects a month. Thousand projects a month. I mean I can't even imagine if you count all the random DMS on X or I see them just how many there are and how you filter them. What the process is where something finally reaches your desk and you take a serious look at it.
- [14:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, I don't have like really strong I just anecdotally like we're in those hundred thousand like zones for sure there in terms of how like we think about filtering one there's just like certain categories that we're more excited about or less excited about. A lot of it comes out to idea too. Like there's incremental things which is like okay the next nth derivative of this primitive that's already been done. But a lot of it's founder like a lot of it's just like the talent founder base and getting to know the folks even if they're anonymous devs that I can only talk to through a jpeg. What have they done before? Why are they doing this? And that motivation piece is a huge filter.
- [15:32]
B
I want to go back to the intersection between crypto and AI. I think you guys are relatively outspoken that that's a key focus. And you said that sort of first in the beginning after stablecoins. This is one of those where it seems like there's a lot of hype and a lot of nonsense. It almost feels like when Long Island Blockchain iced Tea just put AI in the name and your token can go up 50x even if it's not very key part of crypto cycles. But you obviously believe that there's something deeper that's there and being built. Curious where the signal is and how we cut through the noise. Because most of what I've seen actually pop off when people are looking at prices has been noise, in my opinion.
- [16:14]
A
Yeah, that's a great question. I think kind of the benefit of my seed is I honestly don't look at prices. I'm thinking in 5, 10 year time horizon. So what the latest meta or the latest kind of crypto Twitter narrative is, I can kind of ignore a lot of that.
- [16:32]
B
It's fartcoin, in case you were wondering. As we speak, it's fartcoin.
- [16:37]
A
I imagine it's going to go up in a lot of Christmas table conversations. It's definitely experimentation zone. The way I think about it is there's one side of okay, if this agentic kind of path to general AGI we all believe we're on, that crypto and blockchain is just a very natural complement to how that actually gets delivered and scaled to the world in a way that we actually want to consume it. Like do we want a single central point owning, controlling every single aspect of our lives in terms of our data or do we want users to have like self sovereignty over their data? Do we want all the, like the, the. The AI side technology is so centralizing and as like a force that it needs this natural complement in terms of delivery. We're going to need and all these unsolved problems like we're going to pretty soon need like a proof of humanity capability. Right? Like how do I know I'm even talking to you right now versus your.
- [17:39]
B
Your I'm deep faking you.
- [17:42]
A
Yeah, well maybe I signed, maybe I signed before I got on here with, on my phone and you know that a human with this thumbprint is actually who you're talking to. So those are like. And then actually delivering the, the compute, the delivering these AI models in like different different ways. And then on where all the, you know, kind of the narrative energy right now is like, okay, now we've got these really smart AI agents and they're acting on chain. And back to your early question, like wild, where's, where's the block space demand going to come from? Like, I think 99% of it is actually agentic and AI driven in not too, too short of a time. So. But it's experimentation, but there's really like really interesting things happening. I think both sides have like long term durability. Like, like, but it's, it's early. It's. Let me make clear, it's like, it's like very early.
- [18:38]
B
Yeah. The agents, I'm not quite sold yet. I, I know that that is absolutely the future. I, I agree with you, but this first iteration seems like it's just a guy behind a keyboard trolling us on X through his agent. Right. And maybe that's not the case, but that, that's sort of what it feels like. At least they're kind of a remote control car, you know, that somebody's behind and pulling the strings. But to your point, I mean if we all have agents that are going to effectively manage our lives and do everything for us, they're going to need to transact with one another. And so that, that seems like the most natural one to me. And then the one you said which is proof of humanity. Right. And I think there's actually some interesting protocols that are doing real things there. I don't know if they're, they're just the first iteration or if there will be others, but those seem like the most natural fits. But I'm sure there's exponentially more that I'm not even thinking about.
- [19:25]
A
Yeah. And you raise a really good point around this agentic economy. So I believe a meaningful amount of GDP is going to be flowing and being bartered through agent systems and agent networks. And if that is true, it makes sense that like Internet native money blockchain, you know, everything we've done in crypto is the substrate for that to happen. Like, an agent cannot go through KYC and get a bank account, but it can hit an API that is.
- [19:55]
B
And I don't want them with my American Express card and like open access without a cap. Right. So.
- [20:01]
A
Right. But then once you give agents wallets and their own ability, like their, it's like how much agency does the agent have if the agent can make, you know, financial decisions and has different optimization functions? This is like back to like the wonderful and Weird world where a lot of interesting experimentation happening. I think stablecoins, crypto, the blockchain rails, are going to be a big part of it. Maybe not all of it, but it just makes sense that that agentic GDP is flowing on chain.
- [20:30]
B
How is tradfi going to deal with agents, let's say, even outside of crypto, existing and proving humanity and transacting and the things we know that are coming with it. If that did not exist and I was still obviously proliferating and becoming. I don't even understand how this would work with traditional rails. They've got to be terrified.
- [20:50]
A
And I think that's why you see a lot of kind of. We've gone through in the crypto space. We've gone through our regulatory challenges and education challenges, and you see the same kind of reflex reaction from the powers that be around AI because it's going to be very disruptive. It's going to challenge a lot of the assumptions and. And gatekeeping systems. I don't have an answer on how they're going to handle it, but I suspect cybersecurity departments in every institution that we interact with are going to be very, very busy and critical places.
- [21:31]
B
It's been interesting to me seeing the rise of AI and how much the narratives, the negative narratives echo those that we heard in the earlier days in Bitcoin and not even that long ago, but boiling the oceans and using as much electricity as all of Venezuela or Argentina or whatever it is. It's almost like they've boilerplated the same stories that they had to try to kill Bitcoin in the early days for AI now. But maybe that's less of a topic with this new regime coming in than it would have been, I guess, if the old administration had continued, because it seemed like there was a whole arm of that administration that was anti Altech. But certainly anything advancing like this, you know, crypto and AI.
- [22:15]
A
Yeah. And I mean, on the human level, on balance, like, I get it that, like, change is scary. And the idea of Bitcoin, originally, it's very. It's threatening to powers of B. And the idea of AI is. Is threatening. If you are in the control structure thinking through how you're going to adjust if your impulse is to control and there's this technology that is going to reduce your control. I get, I get the psychology around it, but the first principle, it just comes out of first principles thinking. And I'm a. I don't know how you want to label the techno progressive. I just. I just believe we're on these secular technology change curves and you can't put the genie back in the bottle, you can't stop it. Yeah, I'd rather reason through. How does it manifest in like a ways productive for society versus that impulse of it's threatening to me. I'm going to try to, you know, squash it.
- [23:12]
B
You can't. And so obviously Defi, another area that you guys have historically been very active in, I think Uniswap aave. Right. I mean the biggest sort of protocols that have existed, you were very early on and behind. Do you think that those are going to be the ones that continue to win and build their new cycles or do you think that we're going to see sort of replacements especially? I was pitched an AI exchange somebody was telling me about this week that said everybody has their agent, they're in there, there's full order books and liquidity and we never trade again. Right. I mean that's Defi to some degree. Right. The things that I'm hearing could happen are crazy, but you also see a massive sort of more volume and interest coming to the dinosaurs.
- [23:59]
A
Yeah, I love Defi because it's just like the best experimentation zone there is. I think like an incumbency advantage for once you're an established protocol, you've been bulletproof, tested, you've gone through all the smart contract attack vectors, et cetera and you've just kind of become the platform. But there's constant innovation. Like one of our investors, Moonwell is doing super interesting things and I think UX and usability is a big thing for this cycle. My Moonwell card is great. I don't want to sell my bitcoin, but I want to be able to borrow against it for debit and pay that flow for a real user. I can finally see my brother in law can get value out of this. And it's not the small pool of onchain kind of hardcore, hardcore folks with regular. But that said like the amount of capital in Defi, it's still like a, in the global like you know, drop. It's a niche, niche kind of hobbyist world as the institutional like big pools of capital can unlock and get on. That's where there'll be an incumbency and manage but there's still just a ton of opportunity for, for shaping that and being the pipes and rails for that.
- [25:23]
B
I think people view Defi through somewhat different lenses. Right. They're kind of the original people that said wholesale replace tradfi, you know, like there would be no more Traffic, everything will be on chain, decentralized. Then I think there's maybe a more pragmatic view that it'll sort of be a parallel system for those who maybe are a little more willing to take risk or who just don't have access to that system at all. I mean, you talked about at the beginning, even just with stablecoins, I mean, good luck sending somebody five bucks in Niger from here. Right? You're not going to wire it to them and pay $15 and wait three weeks for the banks to clear it. I mean, do you think that what's being built in defi now, I guess, how do you take that view? Do you think that it eventually does replace the existing systems? Do you think that it becomes a tool that they use? Or do you think that it becomes sort of a separate parallel system?
- [26:12]
A
I think it's that middle lane where you've got a crypto economy. You've got a, a traditional like pre crypto economy. And I don't think everything on this, on one side goes all over to crypto, but there's just that nexus point of the two just grows and grows and grows. Yeah, definitely, definitely on that middle lane. Like there's always going to be biology. Srinivasan, who's our, who was our CTO and I joined, he had this really good framework of like crypto defi. It's, it's awesome for the edge curves of the barbell for users of money. So like power users of money. This is 10x, 100x better. The dis, like disenfranchised. You're not served by the financial system. This is 100x better now. It's like the, the shape of that curve is like converging. So you're getting more and more into the like the 80% zone of, of the bell curve where it's like, okay, this is 5x better because than, than what replacement? But that's, that's how I think about it. Like is this 5 or 10x better than the alternative and how much of that surface area or are we progressing towards? And it's a forward progression. I don't think it's ever going to be like 100%. There will be certain things that just don't make sense to do in defi and on chain, but it's going to be a bigger area to the curve.
- [27:23]
B
It is pretty wild to hear Larry Fink talking about tokenizing all assets though, right? Because it's accelerated faster than I anticipated, I guess in this cycle. I would say actually at the beginning, it was slower than I thought, which is, I think, a natural human tendency. You think everything is going to happen, but once it does, I think we also underestimate how parabolic it can go.
- [27:41]
A
That's right.
- [27:42]
B
I mean, it's been now over a year since blackrock's paper where everybody focused on the Bitcoin side, but the other side that nobody talks about was literally tokenizing everything. They're tokenizing Biddle. I mean, it's actually happening. It hasn't gained any sort of meaningful traction. A few billion dollars, again, a drop in the bucket. But these are the largest financial institutions in the world that are playing in this sandbox now.
- [28:07]
A
Right. And that's what feels so different this cycle than last cycle, is that that audience was either disengaged or just skeptical. And now there's every day just more believers and they see the potential, they see the benefit, they're getting involved. And again, we'll keep looping back onto regulatory, but as there are more clear, workable regulatory frameworks around all this, that just becomes a huge, huge unlocking catalyst. Like the interest is there, corporates adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet. Like that's happening, like it's all there. It's hard for me to predict when does the parabolic moves happen, but the potential is there once some of those gates are restricted or moved off.
- [28:55]
B
Specifically at Coinbase Ventures, it seems like you have sort of a different mandate than a lot of other VCs. I mean, obviously, like there's a widespread of how VCs approaches market from those who are pretty much just want to see, you know, crypto and blockchain proliferate and be successful and are willing to sort of take it on the chin, no matter what they need to do to make that happen. And then there's the other side that's just taking as many tokens they can, not helping the project at all and dumping immediately on every single unlock. Right. So I'm assuming there's a sliding scale in between. But it seems to me, at least from the outside, that Coinbase Ventures has been a bit more concerned with pushing forward an open financial system than with immediate profit. Is that a fair framing?
- [29:36]
A
Yeah, it comes back to time horizon. Like we're, we're long term greedy, not, not playing the short term games. And maybe it's helpful just kind of step through like the origin, like history. So like Coinbase venturestar really is an experiment. There's a blog post that Emily put out about half a dozen folks around the company Just working on it like nights and weekends, like kind of volunteering. And the whole mandate was just backgrade builders who are pushing the state of the art for the crypto economy forward. And we've just kept that ethos from the beginning. We are operating with financial ROI mindset, but on a venture scale time horizon. And so we're helping seed the ecosystem. I'd say the ecosystem now has been seeded and is much more mature from when we started. But yeah, we're not playing short term games and it's a very non zero sum mindset. We've really broad mandate. We'll invest in things that from the outside in people will be like, I get questions like isn't that competitive Coinbase? I'm like great, that's the point. We're trying to build an entire ecosystem.
- [30:49]
B
Here that was actually short term games completely my next question direction that I want to go in. So I'm glad that you said that. Right. I think, I mean anyone who's in technology knows that eventually you'll get disrupted. Right. We all know what the top 20 companies in the world were in 2000. Not the same as 2024. Right. So anyone who doesn't innovate eventually dies. But you guys have been very quick to disrupt yourselves. Not necessarily Coinbase Ventures, but Coinbase. Right. Launching base and pushing towards decentralization and web3 wallets. Really walking the walk of know using the technology but obviously the core business, you're still custodying the ETFs and you still have spot trading and you know, by the billions a day. I guess that aligns with what you're saying about Coinbase Ventures is that you're willing to disrupt yourselves to push this forward. It's a really interesting place to be I think as a company.
- [31:42]
A
Yeah. And I, I really credit like Brian, Fred, like all the, all the OGs at, at Coinbase like have instilled this DNA of we're not playing the zero sum game and we've got this like broader kind of, kind of abundancy mindset. Rising tide lifts all boats and Coinbase is I think a lot of very key decisions in how the company has been built. But we've always taken longer term approach like we're going to go work with regulators, be trusted, be compliant, not optimized for like the short term, the short term win. And so when you've got that like kind of, I feel like I'm part of building like a generational platform and company. And so when you've got that type of like stewardship mindset, then it's not that hard to make the next leap of okay, if this entire ecosystem grows and benefits, we don't know how it's all going to work out. Like, BASE started as, like I was around when Jesse was first kind of thinking through the ideas and from where it started to where it ended, like it was an experiment. Same thing with usdc. Like, so the rate of change is so fast that if you take like the, the Harvard Business School, like this is your strategy playbook and apply all the, all that stuff, just lean into the innovator's dilemma. Like, you know, you know you're gonna have to disrupt yourself. And part of that is like, yeah, invest in things that could be disruptive to you.
- [33:15]
B
I'm thinking back to the launch of base. I wasn't that involved, but I remember that you couldn't really get money in and out. It was sort of like an experiment. And there was this meme coin called Bald that was going crazy based on Brian's head. I mean, crypto is so ridiculous, right? You're building something very serious. But of course that's the way that the interest is piqued in the community.
- [33:37]
A
That that's, you know, an open, permissionless platform. It's going to bring a lot of irreverence and it comes back to control function and. But I, I view all that stuff as like, it's awesome. It's creativity. Like people, you know, the Internet gaming culture, meme culture, it's, it's expressions of creativity. And yeah, I try not to play place like any value judgments on this is on brand, this is off brand. Like we're building this for, for everyone. And if folks want to do bald, you know, I, I joke with my team. We have like an internal goal. I'm like, if, if we hit it this year, like I'm, I'm got me. Got to be bald to be based.
- [34:15]
B
I'm.
- [34:16]
A
I'm going to shave my head. Like it just becomes part of the, part of the culture too. Like the story.
- [34:21]
B
How do you, how do you frame this absolute explosion in meme coins then? Because it really has. There was almost this moment here for the last year where there's plenty of things being built, but it felt like it was a bitcoin and meme coin barbell and there was kind of nothing in between. Digital gold on one side, full speculation on the other, and nobody interested in anything in between.
- [34:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, I could really over intellect. Well, a couple ways to break that. First of all, why is this happening? What's new and what's different. And the memes have been around as long as humans have been around. Internet memes have been around as long as the Internet's been around. Meme coins have been around as long as Doge. This is just like human behavior. And what happens? Why this cycle? There's been so much more meme coin activity. Couple drivers One, the enabling infrastructure has made it. So it's just basically zero cost to launch a coin. Right. And it's basically infinite user generated content. It's inherently social. It's. It's like a social money game. People are playing with their friends and it goes viral. It has that capability built in. And then on, on the flip, because of the regulatory environment, it was like, okay, this is, this is what?
- [35:40]
B
Not a security.
- [35:41]
A
It's. It's totally. It makes no sense. But yeah, it, this is what you can do. I view it as, again, it comes back to that creativity user generated content expression mode where it's a new form of monetized attention and it's irreverent and things will come and things will go and I'm going to have to answer Thanksgiving questions about Fargoing, which I don't really want to do. But that's, that's the Internet. Like you're on the Internet, folks. This is what happens.
- [36:16]
B
I agree with that. Do you have a traditional VC background?
- [36:20]
A
I have, I do have traditional. I've kind of a crazy mixed background. I've spent some time in Hollywood. We've worked in traditional VC. I was a Bain & Company.
- [36:32]
B
I would say that counts.
- [36:34]
A
Yeah. But got orange pillow relatively early and have been pretty focused on crypto for a while.
- [36:42]
B
But it just sounds like the way that you frame Coinbase Ventures is more how a traditional VC would look at their investments than a crypto VC would look at their investments, which is this may take 10 years till we even are liquid. Right. So that just seems like that's the approach.
- [36:58]
A
Yeah. Long term mindset. We're not a hedge fund, we're not a trading shop. We're not mercenary about it. And that's kind of benefit of the setup and kind of having long term capital to deploy.
- [37:13]
B
Maybe AI is one of the answers. But is there anything that you're seeing really early iterations of that we may not know? That could be the narratives of a few years down the road or that could be the next cycle thing. In crypto we always have this thing where you get really excited about something and then it really happens three years later. Right. But is There anything that you're seeing that might not be on people's radar that you're excited about.
- [37:35]
A
So a couple. So you hit it on AI. I do think there's going to be like an AI influencer that every kind of creator just like a character that millions and billions of people are interacting with and it's that expression like the TikTok ice cream. So good thing. But to the like next level I think Telegram is really interesting and what Telegram is a distribution platform. Tom Blockchain especially I. I'm always, I'm US based. I'm always challenging like the US centric mindset and so then when you go talk to folks and other other geos like that's just an interesting substrate for where like developer activity is happening and then gaming like there's gaming is real. Like some of my team is like really hooked on off the grid which is like I think the like AAA.
- [38:30]
B
Game that Godzilla is amazing. It finally happened. Like it's not getting as much attention as I think it should but last cycle we were sort of like we either need a triple game. A triple A game that kind of has crypto in it and nobody knows about it or we need Fortnite to add NFTs or something. It happened like this is a blockchain native game that is fully AAA amazing and when you play it you have no idea.
- [38:53]
A
Yeah and I think it'll be both. But we've. We've now got proof points that both, both, both can happen. People place value judgments on like speculation and speculation can be bad, it can be good. Like I take a view like speculation is just a part of reality and it's how it is just like an intrinsic human behavior. This cycle. What I'm looking for is like where can. Where can the speculative hook to come in the door translate to some longer like more enduring if you go through like the Seven Deadly Sin framework like where's this hitting pride or greed or like other things so that folks show up and stay engaged and form like daily habits outsider price go up. That's just a mental framework to have. But yeah I think we've covered. I can't predict the future. I let our whole mentality is like the founders we're meeting are telling us the future. They're the ones who have it. And I'm kind of guided by where they're taking us.
- [39:52]
B
In your mind, where does building on Bitcoin fit into all of this? Because that has started to actually happen. Is that somewhere you guys are actively looking? Because there's some pretty exciting things that we've seen on other chains. Really starting to gain some traction on bitcoin.
- [40:07]
A
Yeah, yeah, we are. We've made. We've made a couple investments around I call like BTC expressiveness. We can go down a technical rabbit hole that I'm. I'm probably not the best to defend every point on. There are some fundamental changes that the protocol has to make to like really unlock the. Through opcat and stuff to really unlock what the design space is there. There's going to be bitcoin. I'm on the camp of this is like an eternal asset. And so as a. As a substrate for interesting things, we've been playing around with ordinals, runes, like all the stuff. It's just much easier to do the zero to one experimentation on EVM svm. Like the chains that have been designed from ground up to be developer platforms and port something over. I don't know if something like truly novel can come out of the way of bitcoin expression of the way it's architected right now, but we'll keep our eyes on it.
- [41:03]
B
Yeah, it's sort of like everything else is a test net for bitcoin if it ever gets there. To be able to program it and to do it. There's some pretty exciting things happening in layer two, but they remind me of the earlier it, you know, moments in other chains. I don't think it's there yet personally and I know we only have a couple more minutes with all of these chains. How do you see interoperability sort of developing? Like you talk about ui, UX and people being able to use it. Well, good luck bridging.
- [41:30]
A
Right. Yeah. We have a lot of debates. It can be like philosophical, like are we in you in this like infinite different blockchain L1 world? What's the reason for that? I think it's already progressed so far. If you look at super chain with OP and things being interoperable from the ground up, there's still too much friction. But I think a lot of it gets solved on the UX side and the end users should not care what chain they're on. You should know. You shouldn't know, you shouldn't know, shouldn't care. They're do need to be different chains that optimize for different things and different use cases. But we've seen a lot of the security issues and stuff around trying to solve it. It's a lot better now. It's not fully solved, but I think a lot of it is if you look at Coinbase, right, give that Web2 experience in the front abstract, you don't need to know which chain you're on or you're moving. Here, there in the back. That's where I'm really excited about what the Coinbase product team is working on. With stuff around base and Wallet is continuing to get this down TO this is two clicks and done, not 15 clicks and you're bridging from here, there and all that complexity, it's a trade off between giving the user robustness and power. And some users want to have that level of fidelity. But then there's also the average user that, you know, the Robinhood user, they, they don't care. They want to press one or two.
- [43:03]
B
Buttons and go, yeah, I don't think we reach full mainstream adoption if it's just the power users being focused on. It's still even, even the sort of most compelling cases. Sometimes if you even have to get a Metamask wallet, you've already, we've already lost, you know, like, yeah, you gotta sign up and do the keys and get some eth in there. That's not an easy process. Even if once you get it in there, it is. Right. So I think we're getting there. I agree with you and I'm really thrilled to see everything you're building and obviously investing in and the approach that you take. Because we need more people who are thinking about what this is going to look like in 5 and 10 years. Unless who are thinking about what meme Coin is going to pop in the next five or ten days.
- [43:47]
A
Appreciate the kind words and yeah, it's okay to have fun on the short term stuff, but I get up every day thinking about what's the 10 year goal? We're not done until we've got billions of people on chain and trillions, trillions of assets on chain.
- [44:01]
B
It'll happen. I appreciate you guys keeping your eye on the ball for us. Where can everybody keep up with everything you're doing and follow you after this conversation?
- [44:07]
A
Yeah, at CBVentures on Twitter@holy g ventures.com we're out there, we're active and if there are, if you're a founder, you're listening to this and you're thinking about building long term crypto. We'd love to chat with you.
- [44:26]
B
Thank you so much, man. It's been a pleasure. Speak to you soon.
- [44:28]
A
Thanks, Scott. That's dope.