Boxer  0:00  

Welcome to another episode of the Weekly Wizard, and today, I'm joined by Tom Schmidt from Dragonfly Capital. I hope they got that right. So, Tom, can you quickly introduce yourself and your crypto journey? How did you get here? What brings you on this podcast?

Tom  0:19  

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Tom Schmidt. I'm a GP at Dragonfly Capital. We're an early-stage crypto venture fund. We've been around since 2018. We're a normal veteran fund, but we only do crypto and crypto companies in crypto-related projects and back teams at the very earliest stages. I think people notice two things. 

One, pretty much everyone on the team previously worked at a crypto startup. So, before Dragonfly, I used to lead product at 0x. I was there for two years. So, I worked on a lot of the core products that people love from 0x. 

And other folks on the team have a similar background. And then we're also sort of split between Asia and the US. We've got half the team with us, half the team in Asia. And so we do a lot of investments on both sides of the world. 

We think crypto is very global on Web2. So teams really have to think about sort of a global go-to market and the global presence. But I guess, maybe more to your question, I was usually on product at 0x. I was there for two years. 

And before that, I was on a team at Instagram for about three years. Yeah, working on a couple of different products there and doing the traditional Silicon Valley thing but actually got into the crypto during undergrad. I did CS undergrad. 

And I think a lot of folks in the CS department at the time in 2012-2013 were super into Bitcoin. I actually wrote an ethics paper on Bitcoin. Did you take an ethics class as a graduation requirement? 

A lot of people, obviously, were coming at it from a sort of the technical angle, and I was getting excited about it from something you'd like to know what are the implications of having this sort of stateless money. 

And then I kind of got more into it. And I started actually mining Bitcoin in my dorm room with some friends of mine, one of which was actually a renewal rumba accouterments audience. So sort of a small, little group from there. 

And then, yeah, I think after the Bitcoin crash in 2013, I kind of forgot about it. But after I left IG in 2017, I got more excited about what was going on in the Ethereum space. 

And it felt a lot more, to me, like the early internet. And that's when I got more excited about it, learning solidity hacking on a few things, and you've got to 0x. And the rest is kind of history.

Boxer  2:30  

Well, how's your research from 2013 holding up nowadays?

Tom  2:37  

You know, I think it's funny. I think I was excited about it in concept, but I wrote it off a little bit, despite money or like, oh, yeah, thanks, we'll implement this. And it'd be like dankie infrastructure, and maybe a little bit like the ripple thesis to today saying 2013. 

And I think your part of it was sort of the lack of programmability. And just the fact that with Bitcoin or Litecoin or Dogecoin, they're also around at the time, there wasn't a whole lot to do. And I had friends, at the time, who were working on crypto startups. 

And really, you had very few options. It was basically starting an exchange, which is a payment service, and the payment services all didn't really work. So really, the only thing you could do was start a centralized exchange, and I personally didn't find that to be a very exciting business. 

Actually, I almost worked at Coinbase. In 2013, I was on an email thread with Fred and Brian. They're like, hey, we're taking on insurance for the summer. Why don't you come work? 

And I was like, I don't think this is really for me. But yeah, I appreciate the offer. So maybe that was a mistake, but I ended up in the same spot regardless.

Boxer  3:40  

Yeah, yeah. Who could have foreseen that there's a global financial infrastructure being built? Other than Vitalik himself, I guess? Yeah. 

Looking at Bitcoin in 2013 was a very different experience and thinking that in the system that we have nowadays, where you have a lot more permissionless infrastructure around it, I guess. 

Yeah. Interesting. So, I'm always wondering, there are general partners. There are limited partners…what are these different positions in venture capital firms?

Tom  4:13  

Yeah, I think you mentioned that you wanted to demystify venture because it seems a bit mysterious. And it's not that mysterious in my mind. 

GPs are kind of the people who run the fund, and they can have some of their own capital into the fund. LPS also commit their own capital. They're basically the investors into the fund. 

So, we have a lot of great investors who basically give us money to then go back to early stage teams and help them build and ideally return a good return on their capital. So, that's kind of the main distinction, I guess. Not super mysterious.

Boxer  4:50  

Yeah. Okay. How many people work at Dragonfly?

Tom  4:55  

Yeah, we're about 35. And part of that is our back office. So, you know, our legal team, compliance team, etc. Part of that is obviously the measure investment team. 

But then, over the summer actually, last year, we also launched a hedge fund, which is separate from our venture fund. They do more active trading, separate team, separate capital days, different strategy. 

So, I think crypto…there's always this weird conflict where some people are traders, and they're very short term thinking. They trade fanatically, and they hold positions on a few months’ time or a few weeks’ time horizon. 

And then, there are venture investors who are events on a multi-year time horizon, you know. We were doing an investment, and we have a holding period of five to eight years when we're doing an investment. 

And so, we often don't have liquidity, we're locked up for a very long period of time. And it's a very different style of investment and mentality than I think what most people are used to, which is sort of this hedge fund actively traded thing. 

So, we have sort of different teams and different capital bases that have these different strategies.

Boxer  5:58  

I see how many of the people do operational research and how much or more like back office people?

Tom  6:08  

Yeah, I think we're also maybe a little bit different in that we don't have a designated researcher or analyst team. I think everybody at Dragonfly is gonna say maybe 80% of the team is technical. 

And everybody has this operator background where they previously worked in crypto in some capacity. So, like a seed, who’s literally the only other partners with me, he was an urn.com, which credit card got acquired by Coinbase. And he was an engineer at Airbnb before that. 

Mia, she’s also on the on the investment team. She used to run BD at Amber. They're one of largest market makers in Asia. So, we kind of have this sort of disparate background, but it’s all sort of connected to this idea of working in the crypto industry. 

And so you know, what we're publishing research through Dragonfly Research or when we're diligence deals, it really comes from everybody on the on the investment team. We certainly have some researchers in house, so Yvonne Bugatti is one of our researchers. 

He published one of the first front running attacks on Vancouver back in late 2017, sort of talked about this idea of sandwich eating and and the issues with M&Ms. So, very OG in that regard, and he recently built mining doubt, which is like a decentralized version of a flash bots. 

So pretty cool stuff. And then we also brought on max wolf recently as a researcher in residence. So, he is actually very OG he invented flashlights. We built Margo protocol, which is the very first flash loan thing on Ethereum. 

We built the first uniswap to Oracle armies that compound for a while, so they do solely research, but everybody on the investment team, for the most part, you know…we do our own research. We dug their own deals, and we had that technical background and operational understanding to be able to look at deals from your own experiences and perspectives.

Boxer  7:49  

Yeah. Do you think that gives strength and a unique advantage in the markets? 

I think I've heard in the past that the flow is pretty dense…like lots of investors are trying to compete for the same spots, and coming from an operator perspective and having lots of operational insight, is that kind of a unique selling point that you can make to projects that you're trying to invest?

Tom  8:14  

Yeah, I like to think so. I think certainly the space has gotten a lot more crowded versus 2019 when we were doing deals, then you have a lot of traditional Silicon Valley VCs, who are now starting to dabble into crypto. 

And that's more capital funding for the same deals you have growth stage funds…Tiger and Cotu. Also doing crypto deals or use crossover funds. Rather, if for us, we're crypto native, we only do crypto. And so you really sort of speak the language of these entrepreneurs, I think if you look at a lot of funds, even within the crypto space, a lot of them are people who come from a finance or investment banking background. 

And I think that's fine, you can certainly do super well with that background investing in crypto, but for us, I think venture it's a bit like getting married, when you do a deal. 

It's like, hey, we're gonna be seeing each other several times a month for the next four years. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs want to work with someone who's been in their seat before they've worked at a startup. They've built a startup there. They may be technical, so they can actually jam on product and work on that. 

And they had the network in crypto. We know everybody and all these different corners of the crypto world. So, if you helped to get connected to person XYZ, we know those people can speak to experience when we do an introduction. 

So, I think that's a large part of the selling point. And again, with Dragonfly, we also have this additional cherry on top that we had this global presence. 

If you want to do…if you're a US team or a European team…you won't do anything in Asia. We can help you really have an incredible network out there. And we're investors in four of the five Asian unicorns. Yeah, we have some quiet time. Anchored are fun too. 

And so we have deep roots there and vice versa. If you're a team in Asia, you're thinking about, hey, how do I reach US customers and European customers? We can help you with that as well. That’s one of the things that makes Dragonfly unique.

Boxer  10:13  

Yeah, certainly the Asia and American focus. That sounds very interesting because I think little teams are bridging that gap very efficiently. So, that's a very interesting thing to consider. How does fundraising in your markets differ from fundraising in bull markets?

Tom  10:34  

Yeah, I would say, for the most part, LPs are very procyclical, which is unfortunate. Everybody wants to buy Bitcoin when it's at 62k. Nobody wants to buy Bitcoin when it's at 10k. 

I think, luckily, LPs are getting more educated about the value of crypto and investing in the market. When you invest with a venture fund, you're tied up for a very long period of time. And we manage a lot of that cyclicality for you, we're not going to be selling the top end or find the top and selling the bottom, we help you hold, which is the concept of illiquidity premium in some regards. I think ventures tend to outperform and in part for that reason. 

But yeah, it's certainly…we raised our fund to in 2020. And a lot of it was…it was a doc, a lot of LPs were not interested in investing in crypto. It was a whole slog, just to get the cap together. 

But this time around was actually much easier. And I think a lot of LPs are warming up to the idea of crypto and are much more excited to deploy. I think it's also just become more institutionalized. You see a lot more services and a lot of more traditional funds that are dipping their toes into crypto. 

In so many ways, it's being derisked, and LPs are understanding it better. I think it's always a bit scary when you're the first crypto investment that an LP has made, and you have to do a lot of explaining. 

But that's becoming less and less the case. A lot of them own a Bitcoin, or they own some Ether, or they've invested into another fund. And so they're familiar with a lot of the core ideas of crypto. And so it's a different sales process this time around than it has been for other funds.

Boxer  12:18  

See, interesting. And how does that whole spiel basically translate to the founders you are reaching out to or who I didn't know…default is always a mystery we see. So, I'm not going to try to dig deeper into that. 

But I guess the types of founders and projects that emerge out of bull markets and projects that get built in the deep of the audit…Yamakawa don't even need to be on record in market downturns and in the market upturns.

Tom  12:47  

Yeah, yeah, certainly. I mean, we do see the types of founders now that are different than we saw in 2019. I think a lot of those founders have stuck it out through the bear market. 

And they were very vision driven. They rock and build toward something that was kind of intangible. And I think what we're seeing a lot now is a lot of Web2 founders or Web2 talent, who are trying to get into crypto and navigating the crypto idea maze. I see a lot of people zeroing in on the same idea. 

A lot of this is the most obvious stuff. It’s being built by Web2 factors, which I think is great. But I think we're looking at more and more people who are doing more cutting edge stuff…the kind of things that you discover after spending some time in this space and exploring the fringes of the space versus, “Hey, we're gonna do crypto tax accounting” or something like that. 

It's like something that is very safe and very unrightable. I think there's also things that traditional Silicon Valley VCs love to pie. But I think the generational companies are the cool, weird shit that you really only get if you've been in the crypto space a while and understand all different components and all different actors. 

But I do think something to maybe underscore is there is just so much talent flowing into this space right now. We see a lot of teams coming from Fang companies. 

A lot of teams and a lot of people leaving big crypto projects and leaving big crypto companies to go start their own thing, which I think is a really healthy sign that the ecosystem is maturing, and people aren't just sticking with a small number of companies. 

So, there is definitely a startup explosion right now in crypto, which is great to see.

Boxer  14:28  

Yeah. So, recently, Andre Karunya announced his departure from the crypto world pretty much. Do you think that might be a sign that the OG devs are too rich and/or maybe a sign that the space is really hostile toward deaths, or do you think this is just a very special story?

Tom  14:50  

Yeah, I think there's a lot going on in here. Certainly, one hot topic these days is just around vesting and liquidity period. It's for early stage teams. You know, in a traditional company, you might not see liquidity for your equity for 7 to 10 years, which is the timeframe that Trishal VCs also operate on. 

And I think, in many respects, that's great because it gives founders an opportunity to build for the long-term. It incentivizes them to build for the long term. And I think there's a worry that when you give teams liquidity on your time horizon that hey, maybe people are too rich and the cash out. There's less of an incentive to build on when we're doing investments. 

For us, two years is kind of the minimum that we like to see for investing. But you know, oftentimes, the profitability, we're seeing for three, four, or five-year vesting schedules, which I think emulates what we've seen to be a repeatable path to success in traditional markets and interest for traditional companies. I think that whole space is still being figured out. 

And the market sets the vesting schedule in a way as well. And I think, oftentimes, you'll see teams voluntarily agree to longer lockups or longer vesting schedules as a sign that they're committed long-term to doing something reopens. I don't think you can really create a whole lot of value in a year. 

I think that's just way too short of a time horizon. To the Andre thing, specifically. I mean, I totally respect Andre. I think obviously what to do with with urine was incredible, and frankly, it spawned this entire segment of the market that is around fair launches, and it stoked this conversation around are VCs necessary? 

Should we just build their launches a lot of financial products emulated by your…obviously, he's an incredible builder, right? You just ship so many things. 

And that is also just somewhat rare to see in the crypto space, I think I am maybe more of a skeptic or a critic in that. I think shipping something is like not necessarily the hard part of building a startup, I think a lot of people have an idea. 

And they can build the idea and they can ship it. But the The hard part is finding product market fit. And oftentimes, most of the time, that's not going to happen on the first iteration of the product, that's going to require shipping something looking at feedback, looking at metrics, you're iterating. 

And eventually finding something that people really love and is super sticky, and is going to build a great business in the long term. And I think outside of urine, I think most of Andre stuff has not really hit that mark, it's kind of like you ship something, and metrics look really bad. And then kind of move on to the next thing because it's boring. 

And it's hard to do iteration and to find product market fit. And that's kind of what we see the best entrepreneurs really grind it out, they're willing to, you know, work and ship something for years and years and years until they find something that sticks. 

And I think in many respects, you're launching something. And the kind of abandoning it and then moving on is like, it's a cool, it's cool to be able to hack and build that quickly. But it's less impressive. 

And it's it's not really I think, emblematic of what we want to see in a successful founders successful startup.

Boxer  18:03  

Yeah, very interesting. Take love to hear that. It's so similar to what the founders of a project sometimes, sometimes after that, like the market is too liquid. There's recently been kind of dismissed out of the V talk model. 

And that was also kind of championed by Andre and I think pickle finance, implemented it first. So if you could quickly explain it, and then maybe give your take on it, that would be great.

Tom  18:33  

Yeah, V is, I think it's vote escrowed is what it stands for. And the idea is, normally in a governance process, you get a pro rata weighted share of the vote, depending how many tokens you have. 

So that's how like the maker governance process works, the compound governance process works for conference or MKR. But you know, people can easily buy you a bunch of tokens and use that to manipulate the vote or people don't like what's going on, they can can easily sell. 

And so the idea with with D is basically you can take your governance tokens and you can lock them up and you get more governance power depending on how long you're willing to lock your tokens up for. 

So if you're willing to lock for two years, you get some additional bonus multiple on your tokens versus somebody who's only willing to get a lock for a week or something to mitigate governance. 

In theory, the people who are most long-term aligned and are willing to lock up their tokens get more share in the governance process and then correspondingly a lot of teams are doing liquidity mining as well and so oftentimes you're getting a bonus on liquidity mining for lucky if your tokens for a longer period of time. So curved is where you get more CRV for locking up your CRP and governance and for an LP and in curve written did just recently they launched the E RBN. 

Um, you get more RBN on your deposits depending on how much rvn you have locked up. I think you'll see what we've seen in curve though, is Like, you know, crypto really loves liquidity. And people will always find ways to create liquidity on top of the things that you are going to create them and want to be a liquid. 

Sam actually talked about this a long time ago, you'll probably drink DeFi summer about how quitting mining is a failure because the big funds will come in deploy a bunch of cash into the farm and then hedge out the token exposure on purpose. 

And so their P&I is locked in. They will short the shit out of your token, and they don't actually care those farm and dump their P&l is locked in, and they'll leave. And I feel like there's maybe a bit of a similar thing here where people are now creating liquid layers on top of these V tokens, and users create a tokenized interface that deposits into the V. 

So, you get maximum returns if I'm just a normal LP, and I don't really give a shit about curve. I can borrow somebody else's curve effectively to get the maximum rewards. 

And so, a mark is always going to form no matter what, and I think it's admirable. I think an attempt at creating long-term alignment and creating a line between LPs and between token holders. 

But I think in practice, the mechanics gets gamed, and people create these metal layers to give the actual mechanic, but it touches on this idea, which is governance is an unsolved problem in crypto. 

I think liquidity mining incentivization is an unsolved problem in crypto. This leads to iteration. We'll see it seems to be popular with teams, and I think some version of it will probably stick around people probably getting iterated on a little bit more. 

But I think, in the current version, it's not quite achieving the goals. I think it's actually achieved.

Boxer  21:35  

Yeah, I'm actually on the curve a bit as this is the Dune dashboard, or the doing the weekly wizard rather, I got somewhat flamed recently for pointing out that with curve in particular, I'm maybe broadly speaking a bit of a tokenomics. 

Tom  21:36  

Bear, I think tokenomics are often used to cover up a lack of product market fit in a particular product, I think somebody like Britain, for example, actually has incredible product-market fit. 

They're growing really organically. They're really sticky, great retention, without doing any incentivization. Because I mean…like curve, which is supposed to be a…yeah, the optimized stable swap. 

In reality, they've really been bleeding out stable swap market share to uniswap, specifically for the head assets…tether, USCC die. And really, they've been dependent on us, T and MYM, to make up some of those volumes. 

I'm kinda like, look, you guys are bike shedding over all this? Yeah, all the tokenomics work and the V curve, and the convex, which is kind of metal. They're like your product is dying. Nobody is trading status swaps on on curve. You're bleeding out and giving up market share to uniswap. 

And I'm kind of a product fundamentals in some ways. I'm like, Look, you have to build a product that people want to use that is market dominant, and you haven't done that. That is the tokenomics is…I'm covering that up a little bit. 

And people got mad about my Dune dashboard. I admittedly, you know, iMin and USD were not included. So, I probably should have done more of a data audit. So, maybe that's a tip to all users out there. 

But yeah, for the core assets, that’s the biggest stable coin. Have they really lost all their market share? And I think that's kind of the core thing that they focus on? Not that tokenomics.

Boxer  23:15  

See, yeah, we are currently fixing all the current contracts. Kerf is the only project out there that uses Viper a lot. So we had to find internal processes to properly decode these Viper contracts. Because, if you just run them through the usual decoding tool, they just appear as Viper contract. It's like, what was happening here? 

So yeah, that was quite a real fast to solve. And it has been a long time in the making, but we're currently working on it. So hopefully, soon, we can fully see the demise or the continued success of Kirsch. 

We don't know yet. Yeah, we shall see. Yeah. Isn't there also an argument to be made, though, that curve is mostly good at helping stable coins keep their pack instead of providing this? 

I mean…yeah, you just put up a large block of liquidity, which is basically through the curve mechanism where you stay in the range of pretty close to being able to pack way easier. So isn't that kind of the thing that Curry does well today?

Tom  24:22  

Yeah, I think that's a counter argument. Why is it's liquidity for hire? So, if I'm fracks, I can pay them to maintain the peg for my thing. I'm a bit skeptical of this argument. I don't think that's actually what people are getting compensated for. 

And I think ultimately, if you're running an exchange, your exchanges live and die on volume. I think of it a little bit like you're paying a bunch of market makers to show up and you have deep liquidity. 

But how valuable is that to some of these stable coin projects versus you having an organic market form on something like Unity 3. We're self-sustaining, right? 

Like the top protocols that have projects have pools on Unity 3, they don't have to pay people. They're so naturally in demand that people just naturally want to trade on them. 

And that sort of creates self-sustaining revenue. Right now, we're in this point where these projects are trying to bootstrap up. I'm a new stable coin. I really want to bootstrap my peg. I really want to make sure that people believe in me, and so I'm willing to compensate people by buying convex or buying curve token to vote for rewards for my pool. 

But I think in practice, that's kind of unsustainable. Unless you're actually able to sustain, you're able to generate volumes on that. It's like how much money can you actually pay per year to maintain this peg? 

And you also have this issue of mercenary capital, as we had been discussing, which is like hey, you know, it's actually way better just to either own your own liquidity or have this thing be self-sustaining versus having people show up to farm, and then leave as soon as the API's start to go down, which ultimately is going to be the case, unless you actually generate the volume to compensate. 

So, maybe I'm a bit of a boomer in this regard. But I do think, if you're building an A&M for the building index, you need the volume to make it happen.

Boxer  26:08  

Yeah, I see. Yeah, that's very interesting market takes. So, let's segment to actually being on the Weekly Wizard. So you said, you joined the Oryx product team back in 2018. Is that correct?

Tom  26:25  

It was right at the end of 2017. Okay, so like December 2017.

Boxer  26:29  

Okay, so how did crypto data look back then?

Tom  26:34  

Yes, I remember this actually very vividly. So, coming from Facebook, Inc. Owens owns Instagram. Um, I don't think it's controversial to say Facebook has some of this incredible data infrastructure of any company on the planet, period. 

I think unless you work there, and you've seen it, it's hard to appreciate. But basically, you can query pretty much any piece of data that, within the overall Facebook Inc, company super easily.

It all runs run super quickly and all the data is super clean. It's uniform. It’s very easy to pull out analytics and insights for products that you work on or just to understand what's going on with any of the companies and or any of the products within the company. And the company's also just very data driven. 

Everything is sort of drill down. Super, super deep. So, really understanding on a user level what is actually coming up with all these products…you know holding pretty aggressively on metrics. And I think that shows up in the products. They're very growth driven. 

They're very data driven. And there's a trade off to that, but it's core to what they do. And so that was a large part of my product training. And that was kind of what I tried to bring him to Xerox when I joined. I think I remember joining and talking about, hey, you know, what are the KPIs? But he has tracking for a couple of metrics. 

And will Warren who's the CEO pull up as your x tracker? Which was a community-driven data analytics site for 0x. And we're just somebody's made it. And it's cool, right? It's like back in that day, having the ability to show volume and users like that is great. That really was kind of a pain in the ass. 

This was before…even if your ETL existed, which is what a lot of these systems run on now. Is this what open source software is for? You're pulling on Ethereum log data, and you're turning it into some relational database that didn't exist? 

So, this is all manually done. But you're for me. I think looking at that L1 metric is never really good enough, right? You have to actually understand what's going on under the hood. That's driving volume is driving the user, right? Who are these users? 

What are people actually trading and why? And so one of the first things I did as your excellency…as you build our very first version of the internal data pipeline…I started to build a very basic cron job ETL thing that would scrape 0x events and join them and put in like a MetaBase. 

And that was really the very first version of data at 0x. And I remember actually, I was at ETH, Berlin, over that summer that a couple of Xerox votes went over. And that's actually where I met Mots and Frederick from Dune. 

I was like, hanging out outside. We were hacking and coaching a few teams on how to use Euro X. 

And somehow we started talking, and I talked about data. And I obviously love data. I showed them the dashboard that I had built that at 0x. And they had just starting to work on Dune at that time. 

And so, I think it maybe inspired them a little bit to go deeper on Dune and to tee the whole thing up. And the other is funny story. At a certain point, I was unable to keep sustaining the internal 0x data pipeline. 

And because I'm a PM, there's a lot going on. And I actually got connected to Alex Spanishdict of NatCen, who was doing data contracting or data engineering contracting at the time. 

So, Alex was actually when the very first data engineering contractors at Xerox, and he helped build basically the second version of the Xerox data pipeline. So, I think Xerox is very, very sophisticated when it comes to data. 

I mean, that's what's driving a lot of the product development is just looking at what are people trading on-chain? What kind of liquidity are we seeing across different exchanges, which was not really a thing two or three years ago. The whole pivot actually to Xerox API and mancia was was actually driven by looking at on-chain data. 

And seeing that aggregators are rolling up the market is 2018 Dex egg and one inch every single week that we're adding to their market share, and the percent of the dex volume that were going through an aggregator, and so to me, as a PM, this is growing like crazy. 

Clearly, you know, there's this whole aggregator thesis that that's where the kind of capture value, and that's where they have pricing power. And it's at the same time we've seen that it was, it's really hard to get that liquidity flywheel going for an order book. It's just really, really tricky. 

And there's also there's a lot of liquidity fragmentation. And overall, there was like Khyber and Oasis Dex and uniswap, and then quark. And so that really, I think, looking at that data and looking at that there's on-chain Insights is what spurred 0x, to build your x API and build Macia and operate on this on this aggregator level, which is been your visit, it's been great for them. 

And it's super well, and I think they do want a million dollars in volume every day, which is incredible. 

But you really only pull up those insights and are able to adjust product direction if you're going deeper on-chain and understanding what people are actually doing versus just looking at volume or looking at users and not going a level deeper, which is what's using something like Dune allows you to do.

Boxer  31:33  

Yeah, well. Yeah, data-driven insights right there. So, were these kinds of analysis done with Dune? Or was it just the week’s internal API, or it was…?

Tom  31:45  

it was a mix, I think, sometimes when we were looking at 0x data. I think, oftentimes, the first party data was a bit better than what was available on duty at that time, especially because, for us, a lot of the data is off-chain. Right, we have off-chain order books. 

And so we're scraping a lot of these Relayers. And that data isn't available on Dune. But when we're looking at the market more broadly, we're looking at Dune to cite what's going on. 

And I think a lot of the feedback that I gave you, Martin Frederick also helped evolve during product development to get to the point where I think a lot of Xerox — now certainly — had their own internal tooling as well. But they still use Dune to do a lot of internal insights and whatnot. 

And certainly, if as a VC or as a public-facing company, there's a lot of expectation now that you you have to do dashboard, right? Because it's auditable, it's editable, it's workable. 

I don't think people really settle anymore for just the, hey, here's our closed source data dashboard, trust us on the numbers, not only because you don't really get the insights, you can't say, well, who's actually using this? Where are these numbers coming from? 

But it's also just…it's a bit hard to trust somebody saying one thing without being able to audit it yourself.

Boxer  32:56  

Yeah, so if you think back about kind of this evolution of crypto data that you've gone through, I mean, you must have seen it all back in 2017. Tthere was nothing. And now we're in this vast world of data. So, if you think about the specific points where you think, hey, this was really a big unblocker? Could you walk me through those?

Tom  33:18  

Yeah, I think the big shift happened in 2019 where there are a lot of very OG, crypto data companies. There were things like coin metrics, or Glassnote, that are kind of more conventional data as a service models where I pay you, you give me market data, or you give me network data. Then, I'm going to integrate that because I need that for compliance purposes. 

Because I'm Fidelity, and I need to know what's going on with Bitcoin. And I think with this latest wave of crypto headed companies, a lot of those teams were based and founded around this idea of teams of products being Layer 1s. 

So, every blockchain is a currency, and you need to understand what's going on with every single blockchain. And that's what you see with them being oriented around it, right? It's like how many Bitcoin holders are there? 

When was the last Bitcoin move with the hash rate? It's also centered around these Layer 1s and the currencies and all the metrics that you want to care about if you only cared about Layer 1s? 

And obviously, you'd love to say that metrics would apply to something like Litecoin, Manero, or a lot of these OG blockchains. But I think around 2019 people start to realize that, hey, there's actually a lot of activity happening on-chain. 

It's not just Ether moving around. It's not just the hash rate of the Ethereum network. But it's all the things that are happening inside of smart contracts that, at the time, were really inscrutable, like Ethereum. ETL was just coming out. There was like this BigQuery dashboard or BigQuery database that also had your 3D tailpipes into it, but they weren't really great, great tools at that time. 

And I think, if you think about the crypto data Unicorns of this era, it's doing a Nansen. It'll go a level deeper and help you understand what's actually happening on-chain because this whole play happening of all the different people doing different things and contracts. 

And unless you have the data and you have the indexing ability to help you understand what's going on on-chain, I just don't think it's super valuable in 2022 to be looking at some of these higher level metrics. 

There's a lot more interesting stuff happening when you actually understand what's going on with a smart contract.

Boxer  35:28  

It’s very interesting. So, where do we see this going next? We are already at a point now where we can look on-chain. We can spot certain trends. We can categorize all those. We can look at an individual wallet and really see what he has been up to and all of that. And where do we see us going with this?

Tom  35:52  

Yeah, I think one of the reasons that…so maybe I should mention this for people who don't know. It's a Dragonfly led Dune students seed round back in 2020. And so yeah…we've been very deep with that the Dune team for a while. 

And I think what I liked about doing this more a GitHub approach to data where you're not reliant on a single company to spit out insights and massage everything. Crypto moves so quickly. 

And there's such a massive longtail of data that I think it's really impossible for any single company to have really high-quality data for the latest, hottest, newest thing that just came up yesterday. 

But with Dune, that's what we see, right? Like Constitution now. The day after it launches the Constitution…that dashboard…you can see all the depositors you get all the metrics that you that you care about. 

And even for some of the nicer projects, you can create a Dune dashboard for that. So, I think this approach works really well for crypto where you have this incredible long tail of projects that just can't be — I think — massaged or analyzed by any single company. 

And it speaks to the open source manager of the data within crypto, which is very, very different than Web2. When I think about what's kind of missing right now, it's about adding more context around what's actually going on-chain. 

I think one of the killer features that NASA has had that very few people have actually added on well is while it’s labeling and address analysis. So, it's one thing to say hey, here's all these people who are in this farm. Here's all the people who are trading on uniswap or whatever. 

But it's another to know, hey, this person is Alameda or this person is a big LP on sushi. And that insight, I think, is actually really valuable when it comes to understanding what's going on with these projects. 

If you're a fundamental driven investor, is it just the team depositing into their own pool again? Or does it actually have this nice, diverse longtail of users? 

And I think that's what's missing from the space right now. There's certain people going around who are selling some of this data or maybe labeling some of the data, and it could be great to see a more community-driven approach to understanding addresses. 

The other component that I think is missing is mental-level data. This is the killer app right now for people who are doing MeV work or people for people who are understanding what's going on the mempool blocks, right, which is another Dragonfly portfolio company in terms of providing mempool level data. 

But I think for a lot of folks who are wizards, maybe like myself, a lot of that is out of reach? I don't think most people are your opinion blocks, right? To start scraping mempool data and understand, hey, where does transaction come from? How long has it been the mempool? Is this person using flash bots? And what's actually going on? 

So, I think that's probably the other companies that are bringing in the more of this off-chain data that is related with giving an on-chain, but maybe the inscrutable are a bit difficult to parse right now. So, that's where I see the space going. 

But overall, I really like your juice positioning. I think doing your metrics looked crazy, and it's built again…very sticky retentive product that is kind of unlike anything else in the market right now.

Boxer  39:05  

Yeah, unlike everything in the world pretty much. Because this crypto data is just special. There's nothing like it in the world. 

There's, I mean, government databases to some extent, and websites like our world and data…that's not really the data you can really trade on or make very interesting analysis on. Although, there are some interesting pieces of data there, but no open databases, so you couldn't run queries on it. 

So, you're basically saying all the infrastructure blocks are in place except for off-chain data on, and it's mostly just people doing cool stuff with generating content with the data that we already have.

Tom  39:51  

I think that's probably more of it. Obviously, there's gonna be different customers for different types of data. Your traders are gonna want something different new sites are gonna want something different. 

If your teams are going to want something different, but I do feel like bringing more data into this kind of environment allows people to create more insights and add more value than to be able to do…just by trying to stitch together strictly on-chain data. We see a lot of stuff happening off-chain, and you’re too blind to see that if you're only looking at what's going on-chain. 

So, I'd like to see more of that as well. I think…maybe professionalism or higher standards around how data gets used. I feel like a lot of people are kind of misleading around how they cite data for their projects or how they cite data news articles. 

And I think it's gotten better over time in some respects. But in some respects, it's also gotten worse. So, I think I'd like to see the community almost pull those projects in these news outlets to a higher standard around how they actually use and cite data, and ideally, bring you some open sourcing into publications and media as well.

Boxer  40:54  

Yeah, I recently had the idea or the revelation that he was kind of like Wikipedia, and we should probably do most of it. Yeah. Like whatever. So, first of all, how did you become a Dune wizard? 

Did you kind of have this knowledge from a past job? Or is it something that you kind of picked up along the way? Just for like, actually querying on Dune?

Tom  41:25  

Yeah, I knew sequel just from being a CS major and doing some SQL in undergrad. And I actually got more into it at Facebook because all the Facebook data systems also run on a SQL interface. 

And so I got pretty good at that there. And so, yeah, I think once SQL is pretty easy to transfer over to new data set. Obviously, there's a lot of quirks around dealing with crypto data that you have to be cognizant of and made the data isn't as clean. 

But once you get used to it, I think it's largely pretty readily transferable. So, you're knowing SQL allows you to do a lot of different cool things in the world. So, highly recommend everyone. Take some SQL courses and get pretty familiar with it. 

Obviously, I would love to see more of a Gui or WYSIWYG Style Editor, those are also pretty, pretty popular with analytic services, or they have this at Facebook, where you can select a couple different group eyes or order visor or metrics. 

And it's not required to write code or anything that would make do and also a lot more approachable for retail users who are trying to understand this class note. I think it does a decent job at this. 

But I'm imagining more of an amplitude, or Mixpanel style approach to analytics, where, hey, if I'm a new project, maybe I don't know sequel, or maybe I don't… 

I can't hire someone to do sequel, or maybe I'm just a retail investor, and I'm trying to better understand what's going on with the project, not being able to easily select a couple of items from a drop-down and have the graph that I want to have. I think would be great.

Boxer  42:53  

That's a very interesting insight. So kind of like a no code or low code solution to doing great analysis on Dune.

Tom  43:04  

Yeah, I think that's kind of the thing that's missing right now when I think about it. It's one thing to be able to write sequel, but there's a lot of rough edges around it, right? You get a lot of weird error messages. 

Maybe your query takes forever to run. I think it's more approachable than a lot of people think. I think it's actually a pretty straightforward language to learn compared to a lot of other programming languages. 

But it is still a barrier to entry. And I'd love to see more and more people. I'm used to answering their questions, to citing their sources, to presenting their analytics about their project. And so, I think lowering the barrier to entry be great.

Boxer  43:40  

Yeah, yeah. What kind of skills would you like? Rated very high on what you need to be a Dune wizard scale.

Tom  43:51  

I mean, I think at a base level, knowing SQL will be good. And I think understanding a little bit about how Ethereum works and how blockchains work is also pretty important. 

There's obviously some weirdness to the transactions and knowing how receipts work and knowing how logs work and everything like that. 

But beyond that, I think a lot of the best wizards started not even knowing SQL, and they learned on the job. 

I think it's really just about being inquisitive. And you're asking that second layer question of, okay, well, here's some data, but what's actually going on under the hood? 

How can I audit this data to make sure that it's actually accurate? What's actually going on with this project? Who is this person? 

And I think having that your detective impulse is probably like the key. I think, the key leading characteristic of successful analysts that I've seen where they're not really satisfied. Just looking at roll up, they want to actually see what's going on under the hood. 

And I think that's where a lot of the best product insights come out. You're finding those interesting pockets of activity or cheap pockets of users, and saying, Well, hey, maybe we can make a product around this or maybe these people could be served better or not. 

Um, this is going to impact how I think about the valuation for this project or whatever it actually is. So, be curious is maybe the answer.

Boxer  45:09  

Yeah, that's also always the answer. If somebody asked me, follow your curiosity and work on stuff that you really want to know, because then everything else you'll figure it out along the way. 

But if you really have this intellectual curiosity, I just want to surface this data, you'll get there somehow. And if it takes 100 messages in Discord to figure out this problem, it's going to work eventually. 

Do what you recommend people to dive into solidity or a few articles about how the EVM chain works enough?

Tom  45:42  

Yeah, I don't think you really need to know solidity. And obviously, not every contract is even written in solidity. So, I think just some basics around how the EVM works, how event logging works, how transactions work is probably sufficient. 

And then I think also just looking at inspiration. Look at some of the top dashboards and see how they write their code. And I think that's often understanding that your head-to-tail is often one of the best ways to hone your own skills and often have to look at other people's careers and say, hey, are there techniques that they're using that I should be using? 

Very minor example but I remember Alex Kroeger another well-known data wizard. He was a First Data Scientist at 0x. And we work together pretty closely. 

His whole thing was putting commas in front of new lines as opposed to the end of the line, which is my base thing that I've now adopted. I think it just makes everything feel so much cleaner. 

You avoid a lot of syntax errors, and cover a really basic thing, but really, you only learn from looking at other people's code, which is pretty standard. 

Yeah, I guess that'd be my main piece of feedback. Just learn from example. And just try some stuff out. That's really it at the end of the day.

Boxer  46:52  

How many certified Dune Wizards are there in drink, fly?

Tom  46:57  

Um, I don't know, I think everybody uses Dune. And we actually use Dune a lot. I don't know if you have any certified wizards. But I think pretty much all my investment memos have a good doing screenshot in them at some point. 

So we definitely look on-chain to see what see what's happening. And, again, it's where you find a lot of the best product insights. It's an understanding about what's going on under the hood and being able to speak intelligently about different projects and the different metrics. 

I remember actually, at 0x, one of the things that we did was basically go on-chain and look at a lot of the people who were market making 0x, which was a very strange thing at the time, right? 

Like, if you're a market maker, on a Xerox relayer, 2018, you're a very strange type of person. And so, we were going through and finding those addresses on-chain, and I was really just tweeting like, hey, if you own this address, please reach out to me, and I actually met a lot of the top DeFi market makers who run pretty large firms just by giving a layer deeper and understanding what's going on on-chain. 

And a lot of these folks are, you know, some of them will know now, or maybe some are still not well-known. But it's a pretty powerful network to be able to see who's actually using these projects. And, you know, the company point…

Boxer  48:19  

So, is this public research? Or do you keep most of these queries and dashboards private? So, that's kind of…is there information? 

Because I wouldn't…like it wouldn't immediately come to mind. There's like a big Dragonfly activity happening on Dune?

Tom  48:39  

Yeah, a lot of it is some of it is public. I obviously publish dashboards and share it on..

Boxer  48:44  

You’re exceptional…you're like…you're desperate. Yeah, exceptional.

Tom  48:49  

Thank you. Some of the stuff is private, though. Or I also sometimes do it on an alternative account so people don't know that it's me doing it. So, there's a desire when you're doing an investment to keep it private. 

So, you can get the deal done, or you don't want to leak Alpha. But sometimes it is abundantly Kalfa. We talked about this recently with Genie. Genie is…we let their seed round recently, and they’re in this battle versus Genie. 

And now we see that Yogen is massively overtaking Genie in terms of the volume, in terms of users, in terms of retention. And so, we're happy to share the gym dashboard and talk about gym stats. 

It really benefits them in some ways, but yeah, those are going on-chain. You see those interesting insights such as saying that Genie was the top taker on on the open sea for a while that informed our thesis around grant jam as well.

Boxer  49:38  

Yeah, well, yeah, you can go all the way up and all the way down and encrypt the data. It's really amazing. Man, I had a question just…no. Okay.

So, a very special property about crypto data is that you can't hide. So, recently, we've seen a lot of dashboards around looks where…and that whole spiel with the volumes are fake and those kinds of things. 

Is that something that you guys kind of actively track as well? So, you're trying to make a case for whatever investment you're doing. So kind of analyzing failed projects and trying to learn from those.

Tom  50:30  

Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of LPs asked us about looks rare or other teams. We would talk to you and asked us what looks rare. And you look at the Dune dashboard. I think Dobby put it together or Camera. 

Yeah. It's pretty damning. Right? Like, again, don't take the metrics at face value. Do you see what's actually going on? I thought, I mean, I think just the volume activity alone was pretty damning, where you see these huge spikes right at the end of an epoch where people are trying to collect all the fees right before the next epoch starts. 

So, it's like you see these weird hourly, once a day spikes, which are clearly very inorganic, and then just very few users. But the most creative metric actually thought to assess wash trading, which is hard, right? 

Like, how do you know if two people are the same person, and there's some basic heuristics you can use? They're not perfect. But the most damning one that I thought was basically looking at the percent of looks for a volume that was on zero royalty projects, versus the percent of open sea volumes, zero royalty projects. 

So, which ones are people trying to minimize fees on? Right, many NFT products, maybe most anti-products have a royalty that goes back to the creator. But if you're trying to wash straight, you want to pay that royalty. You just want to move the NFT back and forth as cheaply as possible to collect the fees. 

And that was just clear, bipolar distribution. OPC is like 98% royalty so pretty legit trading. Looks fair. It's like 1% royalty. It's 99% royalty free, which just speaks to the fact that people only want to wash trade to collect collect the Lux token. There's not a lot of organic activity going on. 

So yeah, I don't know. It's pretty open and shut but also not thought to ramble too much. But I think it's another great example of bringing an opportunity that will be super interesting here. It’s one thing to look at volume. 

But if you actually look at the very Orderbook, it was super apparent. There's basically no liquidity at floor price, everything was being marked up. And so, that's an off-chain order book. It's not gonna be accessible just by looking at its on-chain fills. 

But if you have that data available to you, that was also, I think, a pretty compelling case that nobody's actually trading this. Nobody's actually treating this as a legitimate project. 

People are trying to collect the looks token because nobody's actually trying to sell something about posting widget orders on looks rare.

Boxer  52:46  

Yeah. We'll see what happens with it. It's actually, I think, the marketplace is really not bad.

Tom  52:55  

But it's a great product. Yeah.

Boxer  52:59  

The way they've lost talking about the whole thing is to start off with and now we kind of run into the problem that we were talking about. At the beginning of the deaths now, we have like a 70 million fund. 

From there, look. So instead, they staked, and now they have 70 million in Ethereum. And now, it's like they've made it…what keeps them working? So, it's a very weird situation, although so far, they've kept chipping. 

But yeah, really go into like and see a bear market? Like, is it really that likely that they will keep shipping against the open sea engineers who are all locked up or in equity for five years? Or I don't know, the vesting schedule of OPC? But yeah, I would imagine that open to you at least is like four years or something. Yeah. So yeah.

Tom  53:48  

We'll see. We'll see. I think it also speaks a little bit to the point I was making earlier on Andre, which is one thing to build a great product, right? Looks great. It feels great. It's a well-designed product. 

But that's not sufficient to build a great company and to find product market fit. And so, in reality, if they were locked up, and they weren't doing this weird token thing, it would require a lot of iteration to find what it takes to build a competitive environment, see, thrive, find sticky users as well as a product-market fit. 

But there's not really…wait, what's happening to launch the product? To be able to cash out and now there's not really an incentive to iterate and do the hard work to…you know? Find that sticky product.

Boxer  54:26  

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they actually had found a product they were just did an open see very clearly has the network effects. So, it's very hard to like break through this network effect. And I guess that was there.

They had one shot, and they pretty much failed. So, now they really need to dig into this product thing and make something that truly innovates or something like that. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, certainly interesting. Yeah, I think that all my questions. Maybe, what is your favorite dashboard on Dune that you visit the most? 

Tom  55:05  

My favorite dashboard on Dune? Honestly, my favorite thing I have I think I had bookmarked actually just looking at the trending dashboards. I feel like that is actually a great source of alpha every day. 

What are other people looking at? And is there anything interesting going on there? And so, obviously, dashboards that I like decks metrics dashboard that I think Fred put together. 

But for the most part, I think it's more this meta-level question, which other people are looking at? And is there anything interesting going on there? And are those the kind of questions you are asking, as an investor, to keep up to date with the latest in the space?

Boxer  55:40  

Yeah. Yeah. So often, they go into the training, desperate sound like, what has happened today? What is this project, and especially for some of these NLP projects you'd like go in there…you see the first picture? 

And you're like, what is this thinking? But yeah, I fully agree. I also…we didn't ship that feature too long ago. And it's really a source of alpha. It’s always pretty much up to date of what's happening currently? 

So, for the last few days, I think the Ukraine doll dashboard from mica sibling has been up in there. And it's just like, what is it like? You don't even need Twitter anymore? 

You could just like…yeah, just look at your trending. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Um, so yeah, that was all my questions. I think we'll let Thomas join us, and he'll ask us the questions that came from chat.

Thomas  56:37  

Hey, guys, how you doing? Thomas? Pretty good.

Tom  56:41  

Doing well. It's been fun.

Thomas  56:42  

Yeah, really fun. Really interesting. So, we got a few good questions. First one from Drew. He says Tom mentioned meeting with the Dune team earlier while hacking. What does he believe may have been the key thing or quality of his dashboard that they really liked?

Tom  57:00  

Hmm. Good question. I'm trying to remember this meeting now. I think it was, frankly, more budget. The fact that we had this kind of dashboard, and we were actually doing the work to understand what was going on with 0x at the time. 

And I don't think many other teams at that time had any traction, a lot of them still weren't shipping, or they're they had products, but no one was really using it. So, being able to have some activity that you can look at was valuable. But also just, yeah. 

One thing that I do appreciate in crypto is a lot of people don't come from Silicon Valley background. You go to a lot of these Silicon Valley startups, and a lot of people have the same kind of background. 

They're hopping from company to company startup to startup crypto. You really get this incredibly diverse set of backgrounds. People from academia, finance, and different parts of the world, whatever. 

And that is great, in many respects, you get a very different perspective. But it's less right in that. If you are trying to do data-driven product development, you often don't have the training, to be able to look at data, get feedback, use that to refine the product roadmap, and so on. 

And so, I'm gonna get through as we went one of the few teams that was actually doing that. We were actually looking at on-chain, seeing the activity of how our critical use and use that to inform the next iteration of the product, where we should be shipping. 

So, that was maybe the key thing in 2018, which is kind of rare, sad to say, but it was a core part of the culture at 0x.

Thomas  58:31  

Okay, awesome. To what degree do you weigh or take into account dashboards or analysis from Dune and the valuation of protocols that you're interested in or targeting, and those from cats?

Tom  58:51  

Very heavily, I think a lot of our investments, to be candid, are also preceded and seed stage where the product doesn't exist. And we're mostly backing going to a team and an idea and a market that we are hoping the team will figure it out. And that is a little bit of our bread and butter. 

And we've helped a lot of teams with product iteration, ideation, and getting to market cetera. But for things that are series A and beyond, we're really looking deep at the metrics and the data to make sure this is something that has product market fit, and it's sticky and working. 

So, we're looking at things like user retention, things that look at distribution of volume, distribution of deposits, looking at where those volume and deposits are coming from. 

And I think all those things inform how we think about attraction and giving something that nice valuation so yeah, it's pretty key. If it's not coming from Dune, it's coming from another source. 

For these later stage investments, we really have to be confident around traction before we underwrite something. And maybe that's a bit unique to Dragonfly. I think we have a different investment criteria and process than other funds, but we are product fundamentals at heart, and that's kind of what we look for.

Thomas  59:58  

Okay, great. If you were receiving a job application for role, a crypto-centered role or a role at Dragonfly, what's the top of the totem pole for things that you look for? Would it be Dune work education? Discord activity? What would you really look for?

Tom  1:00:18  

Yeah, I think the number one predictor of success for people I've hired at 0x but also people that I've hired at Dragonfly is just passion. And crypto is sort of unlike other industries in that I think people do have a lot of genuine passion. They're working weekends, not because they feel pressure to because it’s just generally super interesting. There's a lot of stuff going on. 

And so, a lot people are also very self taught. They're self-motivated. And so when we're looking at your application, it's hey, did this person ramp themselves up on crypto? 

Or are they hopping over because it's the hot new thing and expecting to be taught everything from scratch at a Dragonfly. There's a really low barrier to entry right to writing super interesting analyses or blog posts or interesting tweets or interesting dashboards or interesting hackathon projects. 

And so, all those things are things that we look at, I don't think education or work experience is really super valuable. Someone's work experience can speak to their passion, where they've been working in the crypto industry, or in another place for a couple of years. 

And it's really driving them. But ultimately, I think we try to approach everybody on it as objectively as possible and to say, look, is this person really passionate about crypto? And are they going to succeed in the job? Just on the basis of that?

Thomas  1:01:34  

So, another one from Ben, what is Dragonfly most excited about for 2022?

Tom  1:01:41  

Good question. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things going on. We're doing a lot of investments in DeFi. I think, at this stage, it for us. It's a lot about that this next generation of DeFi. 

I don't want to say to you are tripping out because I think it's a different thing. But it's kind of more about more complex derivatives. 

And frankly, the overall derivatives market are getting a bit more liquid and more exotic by things like unsecured lending and real-world assets. I think those things like DeFi…I get really excited about, and I think are very nascent. They're primed to explode. 

But there isn't quite that really clean product market fit and growth loop yet. So, those are things that we're investing in that I'm pretty excited about. It feels like the next generation of what's going on. 

We're still doing some Web3 and Dow stuff. So, I think one of the more exciting trends I've seen recently, and I feel like after being in the industry for a while, when you see something that's product market fit, it's so obvious to you. 

It was constitution now. It considers that, in some respects, a very basic process, right? It's like a smart contract with juice box. You put your money into it, and we're gonna go by the Constitution, but that the fact that was able to get $42 million, a very small amount of time and get this incredible, massive community around it. 

People are really excited this idea. I think of crowdfunding to buy other things. Now, we've seen a lot of people who are building products in the same spirit links down or perhaps house or whatever. 

But right now, it's a little bit janky. It's not super easy to take outside capital to crowd fund and then go buy something, but I think the first project political that allows that to be super simple. It’s sort of in the same way that compound with the comp liquidity program inspired so many different projects to do liquidity mining. 

I think the first team that nails that process for buying real growth assets is going to absolutely crush it. We've seen there's so much demand for this kind of thing. But the process right now is kind of janky…making that super smooth. 

I think it's gonna be a great product. So, things that are usually in that day are things that we get excited about.

Thomas  1:03:49  

Awesome, really interesting. That's it for questions. All right, cool.

Boxer  1:03:54  

This has been great. Thank you so much for coming on, Tom. Yeah. Great. Great to have you. Always great to see your great research on Dune. Is there anything you want to leave with us?

Tom  1:04:08  

Thanks for listening. And, yeah, shout out to all the wizards and aspiring wizards out there. I think I'm looking forward to seeing everyone else's work on Dune as well.

Boxer  1:04:16  

All right. Thank you, Tom. Bye, bye.

Thomas  1:04:18  

Thanks, Tom.

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