Good now revolutionaries and welcome to this special edition of Rise Up. We are here live at East Denver with our friend Michelle. How you doing Michelle?
Morning. I'm good. It is freezing outside. It's like 22 degrees out there and windy.
It is windy. I'm so glad I brought my winter jack.
Just texted me a picture. It's like almost 70° at home and sunny and she's like on a walk by the ocean and I was like cool.
Yeah. My girlfriend's up home opening up the windows. So nice to have warm air and like I'm in Boston. I'm like now it's warm. Now it's warm. We just had like 2 feet of snow.
Yeah, exactly. We are here to talk about the conference. We're going to cycle in and out so you can meet some of our favorite friends, people who are actively building the future. It's been such a great energy and we're excited to share it with you. But first, in case you don't know Michelle, I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself to this new audience. Who are you? What do you do?
I'm Michelle. I'm the CMO at Octant and on the board. I've been a lot of things. I've been an entrepreneur. I used to run a media company, scaled it to millions of readers. I've run startups in D2C, in FEMA as well. And then I found my way into crypto through NFTs, through DAOs. I was one of the first researchers to cover grants programs in this industry and to really take a deeper dive into there's all this funding that goes into the space, what is happening with it. And then now at Octant, I've helped both shape programs and operationally run grants programs as well as just bring more visibility to the work that we do.
And we know firsthand because we were in Epoch 9, the creator cohort. It was excellent to work with you guys and it made a real difference in helping to tell our story, hopefully helping to tell a better story about crypto and congratulations on your recent promotion to a CMO.
Yeah. It's funny. I'm so used to us having like a sound like hand applause going. I'm just like, where is it?
Somebody clip it. We'll put it in post. Um yeah, you know, I've had light talks with Oct before. I was fortunate enough to know you through meeting James serendipitously on Warpcast vibing together about really public goods initiatives and at the time I was working on an ETH staking yield for charity kind of thing which was one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on and he was immediately just like we should put something down and immediately I was like dude I first thought of you I was like Evan would love this guy.
100%. And then yeah, I've been a huge fan of the work that you guys do ever since.
I think it's so important. It's both a privilege and an honor to work in a space and in a project in a space where we feel like we actually are making a difference and it's so impactful. And I think in a space where there's all these camps uncovered every day, I feel like we're one of the few that are contributing to the positive headlines through a lot of the work that we do. Still very much the unsung heroes of Ethereum, but I know that that's going to change this year. And just with everything else that's coming out, we've just quietly been doing work. And for anyone who doesn't know what Octant is, we have been funding impactful projects on Ethereum. Over the last two and a half years, we have funded over $12 million in grants funding all through staked ETH. So it's literally the model is yield funding growth sustainably, which is not really the case in most crypto projects.
Yeah, you could say that again.
Yeah. And now a lot of what we're going to be focusing on is not just funding projects through DAOs and foundations, ETH treasury, but really opening up the tech so any ecosystem can do the same thing and a lot more focus on how do you more effectively bring on capital, onboard it, allocate it and evaluate what you're spending on so bringing a lot more of that.
I didn't mean to talk over you there, but my first experience with Octant was our involvement in Epoch. And my favorite thing was realizing that there's an organization in crypto that's actually still championing the things that match the ethos of what crypto is here to do which is helping people and in the Epoch there was a group who was trying to build the developer community specifically in China but in Asia across the board and there was another group that was helping green industry and sustainability particularly out of Latin America. I forget what country the gentleman is from, but he had really great interesting content. I was just focused around really good things in the world.
Yes, exactly. NFD and then ourselves and a whole bunch of other people, but the span of focus was so across the board, but all coming from this ethos, like, hey, we're here to make the world a better place, the finance better place, we're here to help people and help the people around us just like do good things, be good people, and make a bunch of money. So, it was great, you know? I loved it. I love the model too when I first was introduced to it because I was just like wait and I'm from a community where again we try to do a lot more of charity donations trying to do work on the ground right but the one challenge you frequently come across as donor fatigue because there is often limited capital so the fact that you know you're not going to experience that with a model like Octant it really is yield funding your principal stays untouched it's really the yield on top of it that is funding all of it and it's such a great way to distribute matching funds so I love this model. I can see it working out in real world even outside of crypto. I hope we see that day very soon. And one of my favorite rounds, I loved the Epoch 9 one because it was so great and everyone was working on these incredible different areas and geographies too. But two Epochs before Epoch 7 was a climate Epoch and that's when we had traditional climate projects who had no experience with crypto but for the first time were being introduced to a model like this and got funded and it was such an incredible experience to really onboard them and to help them understand the beauty of this technology and how impactful it can be.
Now I want to ask you about the future, Octant's future, the future of funding public goods but also we're at this conference so we're seeing a broad swath of the whole space. What are your takeaways from the conference? What do you think about the next six months, the next year? What are we going to see? Predict the future for us, Michelle.
Sure. I'll start with how this conference has been. I was hearing a lot of bearish attitudes before traveling here, but we were hearing that from last month and the last couple months. So, it wasn't new. Definitely. I was curious about how it would be because I've seen the last couple of Denvers and this has always been the go-to North American conference. And I think this time I've definitely felt like it is quieter, it is smaller, there are a lot of perspectives that are quite bearish and I'm kind of probably on the moderate front, but I think the timing is unfortunate, the lack of coordination with ETH and a bunch of other conferences a couple weeks later. So in a bear market when budgets are tight and you've got yeah you're not really timing things properly I think it's a little bit of a missed opportunity and I think we're seeing bearish attitudes not just at Denver but all across the board. I'm speaking to conference organizers for a multitude of events and I'm seeing pricing going down as well for a lot of them because the learning lessons are that budgets are tighter and so people are trying to focus more on outcomes too. You're not going to see the splashy spending that you have in the last couple years. I think people are a lot more focused on what results are we getting. We just did one activation which was an institutional donor that we co-hosted with the foundations funding coordination team and framework labs. But that was the same feedback that I got from a lot of other leaders in the space too is that we're a lot more focused on results. So what is this getting us to? It's not just about visibility. We're on to the next stage. And I guess that was normal with crypto getting to where it is. It kind of made me a little bit sad to see it be a little bit quieter because one of my favorite things to do at a Denver is go to every single booth, get all the cool merch. I'm a merch maxi, so I love that.
I'm a merch maxi. Yeah. Yeah. So is this guy.
Yeah. And this time I can feel such a big difference in the merch quality, which is a different topic, I guess, but not as many activations last time. I mean, I was just so blown away with the activations from last year and this time it definitely feels a lot quieter and there's a lot of reasons for that which I'm sure other speakers will get into as well. But, I do still think the people who wanted to attend still did attend. People who want to get work done and are very specific about what they want to achieve, this is a great opportunity for that, for meeting in person, for continuing those business relationships or getting work faster, you know, in ways. So, I think for a lot of people it's been fruitful and in ways nice because it is less crowded. But in other ways it does feel smaller and I am curious where it goes. I personally a little bit biased but I hope we start seeing some bigger ETH conferences in New York because everyone is already there. It would be so much more effective and I think there's one in the summer ETHCON which seems like it might be the big one. We'll see. But definitely hearing some chatter around that one being a bigger one. And then DevCon at the end of the year. I mean everyone convenes for Devcon, right? So even if you don't go to the other ETH events, etc. I'm curious about too because I definitely know a lot of people who skipped this one to go to that one. So people picked one or the other.
Um and that's I mean we have so much talent in Europe. So again accessibility wise it makes sense and budget wise it might also make sense. So curious to see.
I think overall we're going to start seeing more curated events for certain sectors and we'll just start seeing that over time. It won't be events land like it has been in the past and I think that's okay.
Yeah. My impression of this one because I haven't done ETH Denver very many times. Not as many times as you.
It's like my home conference.
Yeah. I frequent Consensus a lot more often than I do anything else. And but I've been here a couple times and my impression of this one was a lot more that you know this was like I don't know like it's crunchier. It's smaller in the sense that like the people who come here are the everyday people that actually use all of this kind of stuff more often. I felt like this was the one given that tickets are free, which is obviously, you know, if you're paying to get into some of the other big ones, you can spend hundreds if not a couple thousand dollars to get into some of those. And this year I feel like people are kind of beaten down by the like over corporatization of the industry right now and it just kind of feels worse. And then of course, you know, as markets are down, people are bedraggled, you know, and it's less exciting to go out and I mean, I love coming to these things just to see all of my friends. You know, but I don't know the like the people who are here, the companies who are here, the booths that I see here, it's not like anything is poorly put together or whatever. It's but it is a very different feel and I can't help but think that maybe it has something to do with just like how corporate crypto feels right now that like everyone just wants to talk about which gigantic institution is doing something somewhere now and there's less about some, you know, fringe DeFi protocol that's changing the game in this sense or innovating over here whereas this was new or whatever. I mean, I think organization wise, it's always tough to put any kind of conference together or any event, virtual or in person, but I have been hearing some nightmares about speakers, too, and just logistics and ops-wise. So,
I guess expected, but yeah, it's never great to be a speaker and to constantly have to deal with the blowback of that, right?
100%. I will say this is my second ETH Denver. I've only done a handful of crypto conferences. really only started working when we were started working together. But I will say this is the first time I've been on the conference floor the entire time and otherwise it's just been all side events and just like last time like if anyone's thinking about coming to ETH Denver ever at any given point in time like the side events are where it's at. Like that was what I took away last year and this year also especially like even in a bear market you know I've heard some mixed things particularly with the floor. But like the side events were awesome. The energy is great. The vibe is great. People are meeting chatting. They're optimistic about what they're building still. They're optimistic about the space. They're concerned still, of course, some commiserating about market conditions and all that and lack of funding. Honestly, that's part of the vibe of a market conference otherwise like all the side events felt like really productive, nice, you know, like moods were good. People were building and they're going to keep building. So, like, you know, I walk away from this and just go like ETH Denver side events and then, you know, I've done consensus too and like consensus there's kind of more to do on the floor, but like if you come to ETH Denver, it's side event, side event, side event side event.
And then bear markets are where the real builders stay, right? the ones who stay around when you've crossed the bear is really the ones who you know are going to continue and outlast. So
I want to give you the chance to share a final thought last ask of the audience anything you before we swap out and swap in for Haseeb. So it'll be like a tag team effort. What should we is there anything we can do to help you?
I think keep talking about the yield funding growth model. It's sustainable. It's impactful. It can make a world's difference. And I think more projects need to start thinking more serious about it, especially with budget cuts. And so I think that's one that's very important to think about. And I think it kind of serves as an alternative, right? I think there are a lot of tech innovations and the speed at which things are changing is fascinating. So I just want to kind of leave with like the world can be sustainable. Crypto does have success stories and positive success stories as well that are impactful. I think we're one of them and I hope we see more in this year and just in the future too.
Friends, that is Michelle Wakar, the CMO of Octant. I need some canned applause. Uh thank you so much and will you tell your wonderful husband to swap for me?
Oh yeah, let me go grab him. Thank you for having me guys. Have a good one.
Thanks Michelle. What a delight. Yeah. If you want to learn more about Octant, then you need to look them up probably on X or their website. Octantapp is the X. We'll put the links below. And Michelle is at Rur. A R L E R Y on X. And I know she'd be glad to hear from you. Welcome, sir.
What's going on, guys? Man, good to see you.
Always good to see you. We have not met. I'm Azim. Pleasure to meet you.
Nice to meet you in person.
I like the hat, by the way. It's really nice. I thought it was a Giants hat at first and I was like, wait a second.
It's modeled after the Giants hat. It's specifically modeled after actually the Tokyo Giants hat if you've seen that.
So, the Tokyo Giants hat, it's very similar in colors and everything like that, but secondarily, it's the San Francisco Giants as well. Random story about it. I was on a panel at Abu Dhabi Finance Week with someone who's a vice president at Franklin Templeton. It was like a privacy panel and we walk in and the guy sees it and he goes, 'Yo, that hat is awesome. I would love to get one.' actually the owners of the fund or something like they own the Giants and so we and I was like that is so random.
I was just like he was like yeah like the brother of the owner manages or owns or but like they own the Giants somewhere along the family line of Franklin Templeton and then other family members are the management for it and so yeah very random.
Wild I love how consistent of a conversation starter that hat is for an ice breaker. That hat gets a lot of play. I see every picture of you at any conference, any speaking engagement. You got the shoes to match.
Today is the shoes to match. All black with the orange. It's You know what it is is that I found it's just important to stay on brand when you're like a new company, no one's heard of you. And I get all these great opportunities like with you guys, let's say, to come on and there's an audience there. And so I'm like, just always wear your brand. Just always wear your And I got these custom made from New Era in Japan. And so like great high quality hats that like everyone does the dad hats in crypto. Yeah. And I was like, 'No, I want to do like proper snapbacks.'
I'm so glad that you said that because that is my biggest beef with the crypto industry.
Is the fact that I have yet to go to a single conference to get a single piece of headwear merch that's just a Richardson 112. So listen, if someone's making hats, make me a Richardson for the
This is a snapback maxi, but only for Richardson 112.
Yeah. Interesting. That's the one.
We'll get one made for you.
That would be incredible.
Good. And black is the color obviously. So, or hot pink or hot pink. So, you know what it was? I ordered a sample where actually I wanted to bring it to Denver because it's February was I put the Miden logo in pink and I got hearts around it and it just the quality of the sample came in so terribly. I'll send you guys a photo later. I was so upset because I was like, 'Oh, like this would be the perfect hat to wear like right around Valentine's Day everything like.' But yeah, it didn't work out.
Azim, you've been on the show before so folks will recognize and remember you. For anybody who doesn't know, do you want to take a second and just introduce yourself?
Sure. Happy to be here again. I'm Azim. I'm the co-founder of Miden. We're a privacy blockchain that's looking to be able to offer compliance and privacy and primarily these days looking at onboarding institutions on.
Excellent. And we were on After Dark together. It was you and me and Alex. So, if you want to see it, you can find it in the profile wherever you are, whenever you listen. But we've been having conversations backstage. We've hung out a little this week. You had an excellent event, the privacy salon.
And we were there. I especially loved watching friend of the show Evan McMullen and the other debaters in the should privacy be permissioned or should it be completely free debate. It was excellent. It was great programming. So congratulations on a successful event.
The entire premise of the privacy salon came together back in October. The DC privacy summit happened and you know I know all of the other folks in privacy. So I put together a breakfast the day that the event was happening and I was like hey let's everyone get together and we had such amazing conversation. And it was, you know, Aleo was there, Aztec was there, Zcash was there, Predicate was there, Incognito was there. And I was sitting there going, wait, a lot of people would love actually the insights of the debates that we were having with each other. Why don't we turn this into an event? And so we thought when ETH Denver is coming, why don't we create something but very intentionally have completely neutral branding? Because in that way, we sort of decentralized ownership of the privacy salon. And so, you know, the sponsors who came in last time, it was a $1,000 sponsorship in Buenos Aires. We got the place for dirt cheap and because there was no like this is Miden's event. Aleo came, IO came, everyone spoke and everyone ended up treating it as their event when they marketed it. And so, I wanted the event to be successful. So, to me, decentralized ownership, if you're speaking there, you talk about it. If you're sponsoring, you talk about it. If you're just going, you talk about it. But it's almost in a sense where like everyone has ownership because it's just the privacy salon. And we ended up, you know, very successfully getting to put the second one together the other day. And now we're thinking the next one's going to be in Miami for Consensus. And for that one, a little bit of what we're looking to do differently. And what I assessed this time was, you know, we had some folks from Fidelity come by, Silicon Valley Bank come by. And the one perspective that I thought was missing was actually the institutional perspective of, hey, you guys want privacy. Here's what you're not thinking about. Here's what you're not building. Here's what you need to understand. Here's how you're going to get the deals done. And so, I already started chatting with some of them and they're open to it. So, hopefully TBD, we have to look into venues and everything, but Miami should be the next one.
We'll be there. Okay. We'll definitely be there. We recently had some travel in and around Central Asia recently, right?
I know you had a you were telling us you were talking to a number of different banks and stuff over there just kind of about
Yeah. So I was in Uzbekistan and then Kazakhstan. It was the week before Denver. I flew in to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. We were there for 2 days. Then I flew to Astana which is sort of the Washington DC of Kazakhstan. And then we went to Almaty which is sort of the more urban center of the New York of Kazakhstan. And then I flew it was a 30-hour transit with a 12-hour time difference to come directly to Denver.
Shout out to Ambien. Shout out to Xanax. Yeah. Shout out to Flexeril. Not sponsored by sponsored by Ambien.
It could be the move. Wait, I want to sleep till the next bull market.
It's going to be a while.
Yeah. So, something we were just railing about that Alex gets on often as he should be concerned is like a lot of crypto people seem overly enthusiastic about just let these institutions come. Who cares what the rails are? We want their money. And you've taken a much more thoughtful approach and we should be thoughtful about this because, you know, we're kind of ambassadors and what do you think?
So, I would take a step back on it first and say I've been saying this for a while and one of the big questions I've been asking people privately is, did Bitcoin fail? And the reason for that is that, you know, the idea of Bitcoin came about with the white paper after the financial crisis of 2008. It came out in 2009 as a direct response to basically all of the big banks doing something that caused so much harm across the world and the idea was something that was basically anti-big bank and the 2024 bull run primarily started if you look back at it retrospectively when BlackRock started their ETF or the ETP right and since then so many of the large inflows that we've seen from an institutional perspective have literally just been ETFs which is really just for anyone who doesn't understand that is just please buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana on my behalf, right? It's not BlackRock is not buying Bitcoin. It's just that you go with your account, you say I want $100 worth of Bitcoin, they buy it on your behalf, they hold it, right? And the idea of that I've been asking everyone is that we went from this is supposed to be anti-big bank to we can't wait to have all of the banks be part of this and do everything. And I think that alone I mean like you know Michael Saylor owns a what is it 3% of all 3-4% of all Bitcoin. And so you know the idea of this sovereign decentralized ownership and value like it's a question I ask a lot of people. The way we've been approaching it is more so that you know when it comes to bringing institutions on board, we've recognized that they simply can't do it without privacy. And a lot of the conversations that we've had is that if they wanted to be able to offer solutions or anything outside of just like ETFs, they need privacy. They can't hold balances on public ledgers. And so for us, a lot of it is what are the kinds of interesting applications that come about when you can offer compliance and privacy. And it's been awesome. I mean, Central Asia, we had conversations in both countries with the central banks of each country. Kazakhstan at the moment is setting up a crypto city in the north of Kazakhstan in a city called Alatau City, bordering China. and they want to build in tokenization for purchasing property, for identity, for tokenized commodities, for everything. And it's supposed to be akin to sort of Hong Kong in that China since it borders China and China's very interested in certain aspects of it. So without being on mainland, they get to experiment and I thought that was amazing. And they've been they also have taken all of the money that was taken that from illegal activities and they're using it as sort of a private equity fund for the country of Kazakhstan to invest in crypto.
I think shout out to Kazakhstan because I don't know if we go back in time just a little bit and we remember when there was the mass exodus of Bitcoin miners from China. quite a number of them landed in Kazakhstan and there was a huge influx of mining infrastructure that ended up there and so that honestly doesn't really surprise me given that they strike me as a country that's kind of just been like there you know like
It was super interesting, super interesting like every single meeting how dialed in everybody was from the banks to the central banks to the credit card providers everybody understood where things were going how they thought it could benefit them they were educated on it and I thought I would be going into something where I would have to do the primary amount of education and instead it ended up being intelligent opinions on how privacy could benefit them.
Yeah. In a minute I know Will you've got to swap out. Will is using the most of the conference. He's a working man also. Yeah. What's the
I don't know if anyone can hear this like an extra long extra loud sound bath that's going on. So don't worry, they have a noise filter, unless they don't, in which case enjoy the music. I want to give you the last question and then ask you to go tap Haseeb and swap him in. And we'll keep you for a couple minutes. That'd be great.
I guess kind of like the question because I do really enjoy the question of like did Bitcoin fail? But the next question I immediately have from that is like it's the dual debate. It's did Bitcoin fail or did people and our greed fail Bitcoin?
Totally. And you know like because in that sense just it's like this entire industry that we're in has really just been like oh institutions for years institutions are coming it's gonna be great it's gonna be this amazing thing then the institutions are here and it's like oh it's not so great anymore what is happening and part of that I do feel like there's a big kickback in the past I know 12 months or so where it's like privacy privacy privacy privacy because you have this huge wave of regulation coming and big brother coming
Well and clearly privacy has been a defining narrative here at this conference thus far. It's the most prominent one.
It's the most prominent one. So you see I'm seeing this like natural kickback and just kind of like with everything whether it's like culture or social or finance or the game of empires or whatever like it's a pendulum and there's always like an overcorrection and an over movement in one way totally and like I don't know I kind of look at this conference as like seeing like the embers of that like pendulum swinging back a little bit in the crypto space where it's like pumps.
Yeah. And if that happens, hopefully the, you know, greed that kind of resulted in us going towards the institutions kind of pulls back and cools down a bit and we can get back to like the true ethos of the space.
I'm hoping you're right. I want to hear your response, but I want to give you your flowers and say thank you Mr. Will Watson. Let's get the canned applause. Thank you for joining us.
