Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer (Electric Capital) on developer communities, raising institutiona...

Happy to be here.

My background, as Curtis mentioned, we went to undergrad and grad school together. Did our second startup together and then I also have an engineering background, but have spent most of my career kind of on the product side as a product manager or product leader. And then as Curtis mentioned, we sort of came at it from the distributed systems perspective. And Bitcoin was in many ways the gateway drug for us that opened up crypto more generally. And so kind of the story of how Electric Capital happened, I left Facebook at the end of 2016 and I'd been a pretty active angel investor in a number of companies outside of crypto and kind of in crypto. And so we were investors kind of in that vintage of crypto companies, companies like dYdX and Anchorage and Bitwise and Lightning Labs kind of of that 16-17 vintage. And a lot of the VCs here in Silicon Valley were reaching out to us and saying, 'Hey, I remember you guys telling me about Bitcoin like five or six years ago. Is it real this time? Should I be paying attention? Should I buy some Bitcoin?' This is early 2017. And then they started asking about ICOs. And so we were doing a lot of sort of information sessions with people that we'd worked with, we've co-invested with or people that had invested in our companies or that we'd worked with over the years. And kind of by the end of 2017, a lot of the existing VC firms here in Silicon Valley realized they're not really set up to do crypto. Partly structurally, like how do you do custody or how do you think about compliance or operations or SEC registration? There's just some complexity there. But also, it's just a different beast in a lot of ways like the way that you invest or you kind of don't want to own 40% of a network. You want to own 5% of a network. And so kind of the structurally the way that you invest in the space is different. And so a few of them came to us and said, 'Hey, we're not really set up to do crypto. Our firms are not set up to do crypto, but we trust you guys. Would you consider taking money from us and just do what you're doing with your personal money, just keep doing it and we'll give you money.' And that's how Electric happened. So in Q1 2018, about two and a half years ago, we formalized a lot of what we were doing personally in the space into Electric Capital and kicked off our first fund. And then as you know, we just closed our second fund. Maybe that's a good segue kind of into our high level thesis which from the very beginning we published a paper I want to say it was 2017. We wrote it in 2017. We may not have published till 2018 but it was the thesis behind Electric Capital which we call programmable money at the time. And our basic belief was what we've really done with something like Bitcoin is invented a new form of digital money. And of course the one of the unique properties of it is that you can write code around it. You can have computers natively taking custody of money for the first time and that opens up a whole new set of actions and behaviors that were previously not possible. So a human paying a computer, a computer paying another computer and to us that was kind of the critical unlock in many ways is so different from what you can do on the internet and we can dig into that but to us that's disruption. And so from the very beginning, that's kind of been our core thesis is things that involve money and moving money and computers and humans and computers and computers interacting around money are really going to be the sort of killer apps of this space. And so that's where we've been investing for the last two and a half years.

The sort of high level answer or at least the way we think about it is we'll know in five years if we were right or not. But at a high level the way we think about it is the line between company and protocol is kind of a blurry one. And so you can't really easily say should you look at companies or should you look at protocols. And so what we do is we think about things that we think probably need to exist in the world and then keep a very very open mind about really smart people coming to us and just having conversations about what they think is interesting. And so it's sort of half here's what we think this technology might be good for and some intuition around that. And so we can poke around with things like when we maybe a month ago or so we published 15 or so ideas that we thought needed to exist. And so for example, invoice factoring is a very large market and we think crypto infrastructure might be a really good fit for something like that. And so there are areas where we say there might be something here and will that be a company or will that be a protocol or will that be somewhere in the middle something we call community-owned networks that look kind of like companies and look kind of like networks is sort of TBD depending on how you actually decide to solve that problem. But I would say probably half of what we end up spending time on is somebody really smart, a founder or an engineer comes to us and says, 'Hey, I've been tinkering with this thing. What do you think?' I think as investors, if you look back at the history of technology, a lot of the stuff that ends up being the really the big stuff on a platform, the big outlier sorts of things like an Uber or a Facebook, when you look at it, it's often you can't predict those things in a lot of ways. And so what you kind of have to do is rely on really really smart people who figured out something about the world that nobody would have thought of and have them come to you and then sort of keep an open mind about it. And so probably about half our time is spent just trying to talk to people and see what they come up with. And a lot of it is very counterintuitive. And a lot of it is which is what one of the most fun things about crypto I think is you can't really tell if it's terrible idea or a good idea at first glance. It's a very thin line sometimes. To Curtis's point earlier, I think you have to kind of sit with some of these things for a little bit and get your head around like is that a terrible idea or is that a brilliant idea, which I think makes this space a lot of fun.

First off, I think we're very fortunate that we get to follow some folks like Andreessen, Polychain, Paradigm, like people who have raised larger funds than us even. And I think in particular with Andreessen, the floodgates opened. I think when Chris and Katie went out there with a platform like a16z where they have an amazing track record in terms of the crypto investments that they made, but also just generally as a VC firm that institutional LPs trust and has done right by that community. This was 2019. I think it made a lot of institutional LPs kind of sit up and say, 'Wait a second, somebody like Chris Dixon or Katie Haun is putting their career on the line for something like this. We should really pay attention.' And if somebody like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz is saying yes, we're willing to stand up a dedicated fund for this like we should really pay attention and I think that was actually a really important moment from the VC's perspective because that sort of made it okay like you open the floodgates with going out. So I think in a lot of ways we benefited from that. And so for us the conversation was a lot easier than it would have been in say 2018 when we were doing our first fund because as soon as somebody let's say you're an institutional LP you run some large endowment or some large nonprofit the conversation is really different when one of your peers has already invested in Paradigm or has invested in Andreessen. So in many ways I think our job was made much easier by that. I think the other thing that happened was 2017 really created this moment where a lot of people started to pay attention and they started to say maybe this thing is real and then to Curtis's earlier point people got to sit with it for a year or 18 months and try to get their heads around like was it a fad was it tulips or was it actually something real and sort of being forced to have to spend some time with it and think about that and really mull that question over a lot of people came to realize actually this is not tulips there's real technology here and the caliber and number of people that are going into it is very very high. And when you have Turing award winning professors and you have MacArthur fellows leaving tenure positions to start projects and you have the inflow of engineers that you do in Silicon Valley into the space, you know, you have to sort of pay attention to that. And so I think being able to sit with it for a little bit, a lot of the institutions, their job is to deploy capital and be ahead of these things, but the opportunity to sit with it for a year made that a lot easier. So I think there's sort of this combination of things between the market and some people who had sort of the ability to move the market a little bit being able to do that that made our jobs a lot easier and then a lot of what we had to do which is not easy as you know is convince the institutional LPs that we knew what we were doing and we were fortunate actually it wasn't by design but I think one of the things that worked in our favor was that so many of our earliest investors into Electric in our first fund were the VCs themselves and so when you're talking about institutional investors that invest in VC firms, the background reference checks became very easy because they would call the people that they already invest with outside of crypto and say, 'Hey, do these guys know what they're doing?' And of course, those people would say yes. And so that I think wasn't by design, but it sort of worked in our favor that all of our earliest LPs into the first fund were people who are deeply connected into this institutional investor community. And so it sort of worked in our favor for the second fund.

That paper that Marcos put out was fantastic and we hear LPs mention it all the time. So I think the reach of that really helped out the crypto fund space in general.

Yeah, it's kind of all of the above and it depends a lot on kind of the backgrounds of the investors. Generally speaking, the bucket that the institutional LPs are placing this into by and large is the venture bucket. They look at it as having a return profile of venture investment. It's very asymmetric. You can get 100x on some of these investments and short of if you're not doing anything too silly, you can't really blow up. You'll lose your investment money. And so they think of it as a venture investment. In terms of the narratives that resonate, it varies pretty dramatically. I think it depends a lot on the backgrounds of the people involved. It depends a lot on the background of the CIO at these institutions. And so we found generally speaking there are two camps. There's sort of this top-down macro camp. People who think about this as a potentially new form of money, a macro hedge, is this digital gold and sort of an ecosystem around that. And that's kind of the starting point. And then there's another camp which is much more bottoms up. And these are people that tend to think that if you follow where the engineers go, it's sort of that I think it's a Chris Dixon saying is what the engineers are doing on the weekends for a hobby or what you'll do for a job in 10 years. And I think there are a lot of LPs, institutional LPs that sort of subscribe to that sort of mentality of if there is really really great technical talent flowing in a particular direction, you probably just want exposure to that and then be smart about sizing into it. So don't have too much exposure and be too early and sort of time diversify as much as sector diversify. So for some institutional LPs, this bottoms up perspective really resonates. And the reality is both are true. There's definitely something to this idea of this being non-sovereign money and non-sovereign store value and appearing at least for the last decade to be uncorrelated and we'll see if that continues for the next decade. And there's absolutely something to the fact that thousands of engineers are coming into the space and there's real innovation happening all over the world and there is a new technology stack here and a new platform that is about building software in a fundamentally different way and every time we've seen that whether it was mobile or the internet or PCs or mainframes like every time we see a platform emerge like that that just has unique properties you throw enough engineers at it and you just get this new ecosystem that emerges that can be massive and so I think both are true and then which message resonates sort of depends on the DNA of the organization.

Just to jump in for a second, I would add sort of I think there's kind of two phases almost to these communities. Phase one is how do you just bootstrap the community? And I think at that phase, there really is no substitute for just hard work and one-on-one and it's just hand-to-hand combat. And I think Vitalik was in that zone a few years ago. And then once you've kind of got the kernel of your community going and you have a few true believers and a lot of that is emotional and psychological more than rational maybe they think in 2016-2017 ETH era was that they thought Vitalik was really impressive. They believe the vision the world computer like whatever DeFi whatever narrative was resonating and that opens the floodgates and then those people start to build and some of those things start to stick and once they start to stick if they can make a little bit of money other developers will start to see that and say oh there's actually there's a way for me to make a living here and that's interesting and so then the next tranche of developers who say well I don't need to make that much money I just need a little bit maybe it's supplemental maybe it's a side gig maybe it's a hobby but now I can come in and sort of play with this and so they're a little bit lower sort of on that like true believer spectrum, a little bit more rational and then they start to make things work and then the next tranche developers who are even more rational but a little bit less true believer sort of come in and sort of that's how these platforms get built and eventually the platform can only really scale if it's rational. If people can actually make money on it, if a developer can come in and make money on it, it can work. And so you saw really similar things with early internet, you saw early mobile work this way as well. And I think Ethereum is now hitting this point where you can definitely make money on it, but if the gas fees stay as high as they are and the barriers to entry for developers are as high as they are, can it really break out? Can it really go to the mainstream developer who just wants to come in and can it compete with the app stores? Can it compete with Apple, for example? And I think that's an open question. And so for all the other layer ones, I think they're still where Ethereum was in 16-17, which is just hand-to-hand combat. And so techniques like what Curtis is mentioning, using your foundation capital or your treasury to support those people and bootstrap them into the zone where the business models make sense is where most of these other people are right now. I would argue that so many more developers know about these ecosystems now. And the fact that you can actually launch something on Ethereum and you look at something like YFI or Sushi, the scale that you can get to in such a short period of time is compelling for developers, especially because you can't do that in many other places in technology today. And so I would not be surprised if one of these other layer ones is able to bootstrap a network and get into the later stages of community development around can you actually build a business here and something sustaining for developers much much more quickly. You might argue it took Ethereum let's say four years to get there. And I don't think it's crazy to imagine that the next set of layer ones might be able to bootstrap their way there in two years instead of four years just given how much more scale we're dealing with today.

One thing I would add, there's some like second order effects here that I think are really interesting as well. So one obviously is that the gas sort of forced this question of how do you scale Ethereum itself and there are lots of techniques to doing that. I think it opens up a question of well is actually the near-term solution maybe it's something like what dYdX is doing with StarkWare but in some sense maybe it's DeFi or exchanges in some sense just like a layer two on top of Ethereum and these centralized bodies that can custody assets and have no gas fees might end up being a short-term solution. It opens up the question of other layer ones as we were discussing and I think this is the angle that a lot of the other layer ones are taking is Ethereum isn't scaling and ETH1 is not scaling and you might consider ETH2 is hopefully going to happen in the next 6 to 12 months in some meaningful way but it's effectively a layer one competitor to ETH1 and so there are all these layer 1 competitors and then it also creates I think this psychology or this game theory with developers which is this has been a looming challenge for some time we saw similar issues in 2017 and they're still not resolved. And so putting on my developer hat, if I were the developer of one of these protocols that is hitting scale on Ethereum, what I would be thinking is, well, how do I solve my own problem? Like, how do I risk mitigate here? And what you saw the CryptoKitties team do is they essentially built their own layer one. They just said, we need something that's customized for our use case.

case. We're just going to go build our own layer 1, which is certainly something that I could imagine some of these DeFi chains wanting to do is just say, we're going to fork it off. We're going to go solve our own problem and make something killer that just works for us. And I could also imagine hedging. And so if I'm one of the killer apps on Ethereum right now, if I'm in DeFi, I'm absolutely looking at ways to bridge into these other chains just as a hedge just in case like maybe Ethereum can't solve this in any short period of time. And if that ends up being the rate limiter on my protocol success or my business's success, not at all crazy to say maybe I should be on a couple of chains. Maybe I should be in a couple of different ecosystems just as a hedge just in case somebody else solves this first. And so I think you're actually going to see a bunch of the killer apps built on top of Ethereum actually building variants of what they're doing for other chains and trying to bridge these two universes and purely rationally. I actually don't think most people here are operating philosophically because I think there's just so much value to be created that as a developer it's just a rational thing to do is to say well if this doesn't work I need to be on at least one other platform that might allow me to scale. And so I think you're going to see sort of a rush of people moving to these other platforms as a secondary backup option.

Totally. And I think the kind of back to that question you were asking around or that conversation we were having around developer communities. I think one of the other things that gets lost in history a little bit is kind of how these network effect businesses actually get to scale and kind of how they draft off of each other. And so in the same way that there's an incentive for developers to on Ethereum to want to consider other layer ones as a hedge, there's actually an incentive for all the other layer ones to work nicely with Ethereum because that's where all the developers are right now, where all the capital is and use that as a way to potentially slingshot their own ecosystems. And so a concrete example of this would be something like YouTube. I think most people don't remember, but the way YouTube got really big was actually on the back of MySpace. They were the easiest way to embed videos into MySpace and MySpace was at 50 to 80 million users at the time. And so YouTube sucked over a bunch of users and then a bunch of people said, 'Well, if YouTube is powering all this and they have all the content, why don't we just go to youtube.com and we can look at all the videos there.' And so you kind of hit escape velocity on the back of something like MySpace. So I think you're seeing a really similar dynamic play out here where instead of content creators, you have developers and instead of YouTube and MySpace, you have a bunch of other layer ones and Ethereum, but it's actually very analogous.

It's really easy to go deep and I definitely think you don't want to be starting a conversation with yams. I mean I think explaining DeFi yeah really depends on the audience and so like taking the institutional LP as one. I think explaining it as an always on financial system where traditional services offered by prime brokerages are now available to pretty much anyone at small scale. I think that seems to resonate well because then there's follow-up questions like, oh, like what type of services? And then you can start talking about things like lending or margin as well as getting leverage and being able to do trades. And I think the 24/7 nature of it is also appealing to people because they get it. They're like, there's all this weird stuff happening in the overnight market and being able to not have that is probably interesting in its own right. And then I think if you start talking to developers about what DeFi is, you can explain it as kind of like it's like a GitHub for finance and you can push code out any time and try experiments. And I think that resonates with developers. And then I think if you go to like a millennial or a Zoomer, I think you start talking about it like a massively multiplayer online money game. It's like a Fortnite where everyone's on the same server and there's heroes and villains. And I think that seems to work with that audience. There's probably more audiences out there. I think the hard one is how do you talk about DeFi to regulators, but maybe we could talk about that one later.

I think there's a belief because in traditional markets, liquidity is some sort of moat because moving money around is hard that liquidity is potentially a moat in DeFi. And we tend to think liquidity is probably not a moat because it is so easy to just move from one protocol to the next. And so that raises the question of well what does create defensibility and what does create moats and we think it's actually time will tell but we think potentially the ecosystem around all of that liquidity. So for example Ethereum and Bitcoin have really interesting moats, things like MetaMask or things like regulatory clarity can create a moat. We think that community could be a really interesting moat. And so if you have true believers that will stick around because they believe in a thing, they can will things into existence and they even though it is cheap and easy to move your money away choose not to. Extreme examples of this might be something like Chainlink where you have a community of believers that have sort of created a moat around the business. And so in this world actually we think unlike traditional centralized finance liquidity probably won't be a huge moat but it'll be some of these other effects around the ecosystem and the people around the money that actually create much more significant moats in time.

That's right. And in some sense it's very easy to unroll a trade. You make a trade, you move some money and then you move your money somewhere else. It's really hard to undo a belief system or it's really hard to unravel a career decision. And so if you've committed your company or your career to some ecosystem or to some space or some approach, unwinding that is much much harder than unwinding a trade. And so that's where real sort of lock in and network effects I think will come in.

I kind of have two thoughts about it. So one is you can look at the traditional financial stack. You can look at sort of your reserve currency, your sort of fiat money, retail banking, lending, commercial banking, equities, derivatives, and you can drill into any of those futures versus perpetuals versus whatever. And you can sort of parallel those to DeFi and you can say, 'Hey, look, all of these things need to sort of exist in DeFi as well.' And then you can just sort of fill in that market map. And that will probably happen. All of those things will happen in some form. And so that's the more straightforward stuff. I think the really interesting stuff though is the crypto-native stuff that can only be done in crypto. And I don't know if we're quite seeing those yet. I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of those. Even something like an automated market maker starts to scratch the surface of those. And those are going to be really novel and weird and you know it's not clear what those will be.

A concrete example of something like this in the short term might be something like a governance token. There isn't quite that notion in the traditional world of like how do you vote on these things and you can kind of look at it and say well doesn't shareholder voting kind of do that or yeah sort of but the idea that people can participate in these community owned networks and vote on proposals and change the protocol itself and have sort of this self-amending nature to it like maybe that ends up being this thing that right now we're all thinking of it through the lens of shareholder voting but actually there's going to be a twist on this thing what actually fundamentally unlocks new kind of behavior and all of a sudden we're going to realize governance tokens are massively valuable because they let you do a thing that you just couldn't do before. That's maybe a concrete example of something where you look at it and say, 'Oh, this looks kind of like a thing I've seen before, but actually somebody may come up with a twist on it because the search and design space has now opened up that unlocks a new sort of behavior altogether.'

Short answer I think is yes. They would still be as exciting. And I think the question you're asking is a really good one. And one way to sort of answer it would be to say, well, every protocol needs to do KYC. Let's say another way to address it might be to say what really matters is when you're moving in and out of the US dollar, when you're moving in and out of the fiat system. And we have really robust KYC and AML at that layer already. And so if we know that you're moving money into this ecosystem and then you're going to move money back out of this ecosystem, as long as you're KYC on the endpoints, that's okay. And I think that's roughly the position that the US government has taken, for example, is like if you're moving money in and out, like we want to know where it came from, you should pay your taxes. If you try to avoid those taxes, you can get in trouble. And that's all very reasonable. People should not launder money. People should pay their taxes. Like those are actually pretty reasonable requests. And in that incarnation of the world, what you could have is KYC on the endpoints and actually the crypto ecosystem can still operate through this sort of pseudonymous wallet addresses or a layer where you don't need that sort of baked in at that level. You just need to know that the person that's bringing the money in was KYC at some point. And I suspect that's the way it's going to end up. And I think if we can end up in that direction, actually, we'll get the best of both worlds. We'll make sure that you don't have money laundering happening. A lot of the existing tools that we have to prevent that sorts of behavior will still work. And at the same time, we'll be able to unlock a lot of this permissionless innovation and iteration that happens in DeFi. And so I'm hoping that's where we end up. And it looks like generally the US government, I use that as the proxy because I think a lot of other governments will sort of follow suit. Whatever the US government does, I think they'll sort of use a signal for how they should behave. But I think the US government has generally taken a we're not going to necessarily unlock all of this innovation and be promotive of it and sort of go in that direction, but they're also not necessarily trying to kill it off. I think there have been lots of opportunities where they could have killed it and they chose not to. And so they're somewhere in the middle right now. I think there are valid arguments to which direction they should push, but generally speaking, I think they seem to be taking the position that as long as you're KYC going in, they have the tools to sort of handle it at that layer and then whatever happens in DeFi kind of is okay.

This is actually a really important point. I mean there's sort of an interesting I think implicit assumption in what you just said which is that the government may seek to have more control in this space and there's I think an alternative potential outcome here which is that the government rather than trying to hug the crypto ecosystem to death actually says let's let this thing flourish and the thought exercise is well how might that happen and why might that happen and I think the thing that's really changed here in the last 6 to 12 months is more public understanding in crypto and increasing understanding inside the US government that the Chinese government is fully embracing this technology. In November 2019 when President Xi said, 'Hey, blockchain is a strategic imperative for the government and we need to really embrace this stuff.' I think that was a pretty important moment. And I think the resource allocation and investment that's happened as a result of that and the unveiling of the Chinese digital currency initiative that's going to get pushed through Belt and Road and has already launched domestically in China I think is a game changer because now the US government is not thinking about it's not US government versus crypto there's now player three has entered the game and I think that game theory of how does the US government think about crypto vis-a-vis the fact that the Chinese government is now in this case is really important because what the Chinese government is doing is really smart. What they're doing is they're saying, 'Hey, we have this thing. It's a really fast settlement layer. It works domestically. It can work internationally and we can now start to settle trade on this without needing the US dollar.' And if you look at, for example, China to Russia trade, they're increasingly not settling or denominating this in US dollars. It was about 70% of their trade between Russia and China was denominated in dollars about five or six years ago, and now it's like 40%. And so they can push this internationally. And if you're the US government, all of a sudden you're thinking, wait a second, how do we compete against this? Does China go to Africa? Does it go to Europe? Does it go to Latin America and say, 'Use our settlement layer instead of using Swift, instead of using the dollar.' And that's a real threat. And in that sort of world, it's not the US versus crypto. It's actually the US has this really interesting advantage to Curtis's point, which is we have individual freedoms. We have privacy, we have rule of law, we have freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. And to the extent that we can embrace those principles and allow crypto to sort of be offensive on those principles because those are things that the Chinese government will have a very very tough time embracing and baking into their settlement layer, that's actually a potentially very valuable strategic asset for the US government in order to be able to sort of push back globally and to capture this sort of layer of innovation that's happening here and make sure that that actually is captured primarily in the US I think would be much more strategic and a much better way to approach the crypto ecosystem than trying to sort of control it because actually when you look at it through the lens of the Chinese government has this really strategic set of initiatives crypto is actually potentially very very useful to the US government against sort of the Chinese government's push.

Yeah, agreed 100%.

I would add a couple things. I mean generally agree with what Curtis is saying. I think there's a fundamental question of do people want privacy? And I think the answer to that is undoubtedly yes. And so the question then is well how does that manifest and for whom and like what is the sequence of events through which that actually manifests and I would argue that for the people that it matters most today is either people who don't have privacy and really value it and that may not be people in for example the US that may be people in other countries that have more to worry about from a personal safety perspective but I think my opinion is the place where it may start to kind of what Curtis was saying is people who have more money likely care about more privacy. Like I think you're right that maybe the average person doesn't care that much about privacy yet, though I think that is increasing. People are increasingly sensitive to this. I would argue that on a dollar weighted basis, a lot of the dollars and maybe most of the dollars in the world actually care about privacy. And so I think if you look at the market through the lens of dollar weighted rather than user weighted, I think the market is huge and there is a real need for it. In terms of how it manifests, it could be at a layer one. It could be as Curtis was saying Tornado Cash on top of Ethereum or it could be as you were saying maybe at the wallet level. So I think there are a lot of different ways it might manifest. I don't think anybody really knows how that will play out today. What I will say is I think you made a really interesting observation around Monero and Zcash and Curtis highlighted some of the user experience challenges around using kind of that first gen of privacy coins and I think there are two worldviews on that. I think you could look at a lack of adoption there and you could say, 'Hey, nobody wants these things.' And the other way you could look at it is you could say, 'Well, maybe we just didn't build the right thing yet.' And so again, it's useful. It's always a little risky, but it is useful to reason by analogy because I think it helps illustrate these points easier looking back. So one analogy here would be Stripe versus Braintree. So you could have looked at the payments infrastructure space in like 2008 or 2010 and it was a brutal space. It was low margin. It was like not huge businesses. It was really really tough. And along comes Braintree and they bought Venmo and they sold to PayPal and you could have looked at and said, 'Wow, like these guys had a slog and they built the best product in the space and they only sold for $800 million.' So you could look at Monero and Zcash today and you could say, 'Wow, like these guys have been around for a while and they've been slogging away and they've built real tech and they've done a great job and they built real community and still such good people using them and the network values are what they are.' Or you could have looked at Braintree in 2010 and you could say, 'Wow, I can't believe this thing is worth a billion dollars.' Like, if somebody actually did this right, that might be a huge business. Like, if the APIs were actually usable and they were really good and fast and the fraud was easy and all this other stuff, like somebody did this right, this could be a hundred billion dollar company. And that was Stripe. And Stripe came along and kind of did it right in my opinion. And so, I think there's a worldview here which we subscribe to, which is Monero and Zcash actually are far more successful than you might think at first glance based on really how hard they are to use today. And that's not a criticism of the teams or anything. It's like they've solved real hard technical problems over the last five years. But we look at that and we say, 'Wow, there might actually be a thing that comes along that's so good and so easy to use and so fast and so on and so on that actually that is the thing that breaks up in the market in the way that Stripe broke up in the market on payments after Braintree was a billion dollar exit.' So there's actually I think a very inverse view here which we tend to hold which is we haven't really seen the layer one that can compete and people are probably working on it now in our opinion.

Twitter is probably the easiest. I'm Avichal and Curtis is Jubos. It's probably the best place to follow us. And we put out our research on our website and we also have a GitHub out there if people want to help add to our taxonomy of repositories. I think we're up to about 40,000 in crypto right now. So, let's push that number up.

Thank you for having us.