Crypto Was Never Built For Humans | Yat Siu

Crypto is like Trump's tenth child, right? As in, you know, he loves us, but we're just not the most important thing, right? He has to deal with China. He has to deal with now Iran. We're not the top priority. So, we have to continue to fend for ourselves. Crypto and AI are probably the most important relation ever because they need each other. I think the issue isn't that we haven't built great technology. The issue is it wasn't built for humans. And that's actually where we think AI agents come in. Code is their natural language. You know, we talk about code as law. Well, guess what? For agents, it is law. In a future where agents are going to be transacting mostly with each other and with other platforms, it's all going to happen on chain. What really has value is...

Well, I mean, first of all, thank you for having me. I would say it's a little exaggerated. I think a little bit of dramatic effect here. Of course, you know, we have a conference. There are people here. The people who are here, the energy is good. I just, you know, was at the web festival in Hong Kong a couple weeks ago and also at sort of, you know, Japan had basically some events around there as well. And the sentiment is good. People are basically sort of excited about it. However, it's not sort of the same bullish feeling that some people had like say a year ago, a year and a half ago, particularly because people had high hopes because, you know, Trump was about to be coming into power. You know, regulation, you know, it was the end of Gensler, so everyone's like, yeah, great, great, great. But then we had a series of events. I tell people often that, you know, look, I mean, you know, sort of crypto is like Trump's tenth child, right? As in, you know, he loves us, but we're just not the most important thing, right? He has to deal with China, he has to deal with now Iran, whatever, so we're not the top priority. So we have to continue to fend for ourselves. And I think we're coming to that realization, whereas I think before a lot of people were like, 'Oh, puppy, help me.' Right? So, there's a little bit of that, right? So that's kind of one element, but I think the other thing also is that, you know, the other realization for us is that the entire industry has focused too much on things like memecoins. And we have to remember that memecoins was a reaction to a regulatory scenario that was hostile to crypto. So, memecoins had to launch into existence to say, 'Hey, this isn't real. This isn't whatever.' It certainly proved out the technology, but it basically put the wrong focus on it, right? In terms of it took away focus from builders. It took away people who were actually sort of really creating products that mattered. And in a way, I would argue also made us not focus on the thing that really matters, which is very much come to bearing now, which is that crypto and AI are probably the most important relation ever because they need each other. But we kind of, you know, we spoke about this years ago, but very few people paid attention to it because they were more like, you know, what's the next memecoin, what's the next thing to trade. And, you know, you talked about where does retail get an edge. I think retail's edge is understanding where the long-term future is and holding it and believing in it in the same way that if retail had bought Bitcoin early on, it would have been the best play rather than basically speculating on coins, which can be fun. By the way, I'm not against the fun and entertainment of meme coins. But if that's where you think you're going to make a big return, then it's basically gambling for the most part. And I think that's the part where we just have to be real that, you know, as we have seen afterwards, the disillusionment around, oh, looks like the house wins there as well, right?

I think Polymarket's a great example. I mean, frankly, even, you know, people might say, 'Oh my goodness, NFT is not working, whatever.' It's still $300 million of sales a month, right? So, it's not nothing. I mean, you know, you talk to most people, normal business people, and you say, 'Hey, this is an industry that is just a couple billion dollars a year. Are you interested?' Hell yeah, right? I think people in the crypto space sometimes are like, 'Where's my million dollar payout?' Come on, guys, right? Like most people don't think of it this way. I mean, you know, we were happy in the early days when Ethereum went from 100 to 200 and we were celebrating when it went to 500 and now we're just like, oh my goodness, like, you know, so it's all relative, I would say. There's that one thing. So, I think we need to sort of come back to our roots a little bit, understand that, you know, we've had humble beginnings. But I think the other thing is that, and I think this is the big point, is that the technology we built is incredible. I mean, stable coins, trillions of dollars of transactions. You know, seven, eight years ago when we sort of started in the space, actually nine years ago if you think about it. Wow. Crazy. When CryptoKitties first launched, the trading of digital cats melted Ethereum. Yeah. Could not handle it. Okay, we're talking millions of dollars here. And that's when people started talking about sort of, you know, how do we scale this? You know, do we do sharding? Do we do sort of, you know, L1, L2s and all that kind of stuff, right? And then Solana and all these other chains started to emerge and today we have an infrastructure that is good enough for the biggest financial institutions with BlackRock, Fidelity, Visa, Mastercard, all of that is coming in, right? And so I think the issue isn't that we haven't built great technology. The issue is it wasn't built for humans and that's actually where we think AI agents come in because basically, you know, an agent doesn't care about sort of the cryptography. In fact, they're comfortable with it. Code is their natural language. You know, we talk about code as law. Well, guess what? For agents, it is law. For humans, someone steals a bitcoin. Where's the police? Need to go to the government, right? That provenance is important for digital property, is important for agents, maybe less important for humans because we expect essentially, you know, our rights to be protected in a human legal framing, right? The other thing is of course efficiency. The banking system, an agent can have a bank account, but he has a crypto wallet. That crypto wallet is effectively his bank account. He can now transact with each other in the future where agents are going to be transacting mostly with each other and with other platforms. Basically, you need a wallet. They're not going to pay 1 or 2%. They're not going to pull Visa or Mastercard. It's all going to happen on chain. You know, on-chain credit, digital identity, all of that stuff matters. So, you know, we think that that's actually the real use case. And you know, maybe I can ask you this question and maybe the audience will think about it as well, which is how many agents do you think you'll have in the next three to five years?

Yeah. But it can also take context from other things and make it better. And you can share these skills and if you have a good trader, you can basically copy that skill for instance or import it. But I think the point is that you're going to have many agents, right? And if you have, you know, in your personal life and then you have many agents probably at work. And so you add them all up, you know, we think the world's going to have hundreds of billions of agents, right? The entire internet is going to be swarmed by agents. There's going to be more agents than humans, right? And the thing that I like to say to people, you know, just to be slightly controversial, is that, you know, we still think the metaverse is a big thing, except that maybe it wasn't about us going into the metaverse, but it's about the metaverse coming to us through agents because they're basically affecting our physical life. They do things for us, right? Everything we built on blockchain was the PC for agents to come, right? This entire agentic web, which you could call web 4, is essentially sort of we prepared for that moment. And we needed that kind of agentic intelligence that really only started to come into fruition probably late last year. Yeah. To be reality. And now that moment is here, right? And I think this is where our gaming roots is interesting too because I'd spoken much earlier around how NPCs are basically our primary interface originally, like gaming NPCs for AI agents, but you know, they were dumb and now you have that intelligence where essentially, you know, everything in the gaming world, everything in that area is going to interact with the AI agents, but on the back end, what are they going to be powered by? They're going to need a wallet, you know, it's going to be decentralized, they're the ones who basically find the most efficient way. I was just having a conversation with someone and I was like, you know, every application will change. You're not going to visit a website. You know, if you want to find a date, you're not going to go to Tinder. You're going to tell your agent, 'I'm looking for this,' right? And they're going to find you suitable ones for other people who have the same request and the agents are going to match each other because for humans, we have a friction of going to websites. You know, the attention, okay, I go to Tinder, I go to Bumble, I go to whatever the websites are out there. It's going to take like 10, 20, 30, 40 websites. That's too much. I can't do that. Agent doesn't care, right? It's just going to go out and look and look and look, right? And then it's going to give you an output from the best that's out there. So, I think we're going to have an incredible sort of hyperefficiency, hyper productivity kind of era. And to the retail guys, my suggestion is utilize it.

I actually think the opposite will happen, right? And the reason why I think the opposite will happen is because right now with the chat bots that we have like sort of OpenAI and Gemini, it's centralized so it is about basically consolidation of that top information, right? Just because it's in a centralized platform and the likelihood it's making assumption about what you're looking for in terms of why I want the best output and that output is democratized by the way, so that output is the same for everyone. However, when it talks about social agents, which is where we think AI agents have the real power, because you read agents with Hello Minds, for instance, what we can do is, you know, we can connect people over email, over Telegram, over chat, that actually enhances your human connection. It doesn't actually sort of just is just about the tooling. So most people when they think about AI, they think about the tools, they think about what it does, which is kind of how people talk about the early internet. But then actually what the internet became was completely changing how we connect, how we interact, how we relate, right? And that's what we think what agents are going to do. And so it doesn't matter that it's so-called the top 5% because I'm connecting with everyone else that's relevant to me in my location, in my area, in my areas of interest. Oh, you know, I'm looking for people who are into Pokemon cards in my neighborhood. Okay, fine, right? You're not going to go. It doesn't matter that, you know, he's a top Pokemon trader in Tokyo or in New York. I happen to live in Austin or happen to live somewhere else. I'm in that network, right? That's what you can do now. That's how you could connect as opposed to going to a Facebook group or going into Reddit and trying to figure out who's that. You could do it, but the agent does it much better. I actually think humans can connect faster and easier because now you're not dependent on a platform that tells you what to do. The agent does exactly what you wanted to do and will bridge it with someone else. So if everyone has several agents, they're going to make these connections. But right now, speaking of tooling, the reason why tooling mindset is holding it back is because you put everything into one agent. So that one agent, you won't share. I mean, do you, you know, if you have an agent that knows everything about you, are you going to give it to maybe even your wife, right? Well, you're certainly not, you know, your worker colleague, colleagues at work or maybe even friends for your alumni. You need agents for different communities as you do in real life, right? So that's the part where agents become social and they become your social agents and that to us is where it's going to change. But those social agents would still transact with each other. For instance, when friends come to Hong Kong, you know, they can ask me for restaurant tips, but then I bring my agent over email and connect them and they say, 'This is a restaurant you would like.' It's more than just an assistant. It actually creates a stronger relation that I have with that person because my agent helped them find a good restaurant that came from my data, right?

Yeah.

Sure. Yes.

So very, you know, multiple questions in that, but that is the big reason why, the big reason why tokens haven't appreciated, altcoins, which is a big part of our thesis, hasn't really appreciated the way that we had hoped it would, is because the user numbers on chain haven't grown. So let me just do it by the numbers. We now have around almost 800 million, like over 700 million people that own crypto on exchanges and we have less than 70 million people on chain, which is almost the same number as in the last three or four years ago. In fact, the largest number of on-chain growth that we've had for new users was actually during the NFT and metaverse boom. People came in and the people who, I remember, you know, when Sandbox, which is one of our projects, right, people joined blockchain because they were excited about the metaverse, they were excited about SAND, you know, the building land and virtual land. They were not from crypto, right? They were not finance guys. It was all the creative people, the artists, the musicians, they all came in, right? And then of course we had SBF and we had this and then we had Gensler, we had everything and then, you know, unfortunately Trump, you know, this year obviously wasn't sort of, some of the stuff wasn't that helpful either. As a result, basically killing off, you know, the sort of many people in that space. And so we basically not grown, right? That audience, that regular audience that's in there. And I think I do believe that if we didn't have those horrible events over the last three or four years that actually this would have been the base that holds, accelerate towards that. That's one thing. But that aside, right, that aside, I think it's about basically making it easy for people to basically go and use these tools, right? And basically add value and that to me is basically what AI agents will deliver, right? Because, but then the AI agents have to pay each other. So for instance, and in Minds, people are actually trading with each other on the back, right? And also when you build a skill, if I share that skill with you, I end up basically having a revenue share for that, the agent will just negotiate with that in real time, right? So online advertising today is a 900, almost $900 billion. It's actually $800 billion. This predicted to be $900 billion a year, right? That is a transaction, but it's a transaction of your time and attention. If that time and attention is no longer on TikTok and on Instagram because my AI agents are basically sort of making it more efficient, then I'm willing to pay for that in a different way. So that's basically where that transactional value will go. And that to your question is that's where tokens come in because I will give you a token of one form of your attention or other attention of value, but right now we're not on chain. So the value can't increase when the population doesn't increase.

That's the effect then, the network effect. So as more tokens launch, actually you have a dilution because the attention of the same number of users goes to all of them. Yeah. And so, this is the thing. The net value of the altcoin space is actually kind of the same.

Yeah. And so there was more concentration on this, which is why the value was more concentrated around it. Now it's more diluted, which, you know, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but how do you change that is bring more people on chain. How do we bring more people on chain? It's agents that need those tokens that transact, you know, even NFTs as proof of identity, these become relevant. So that I think is how we solve that. And I tell people that, you know, which are the projects that will most likely have that is what you have to pay attention to, because there's of course a lot of rubbish out there as well.

So I think the first issue that we have is that the audience has changed. So many of the people that were coming from the original days, including people in the NFT space, didn't come for purely financial gains. That has altered over the years, right? So the very first, okay, so when we started building, you know, basically NFTs and gaming, this was 2017, 2018. I mean, Bitcoin was like $3,000. Ethereum actually I think hit below 100 at one point, right? So between 2018, 2019, a horrible bear. All the guys that were looking to make money gone, right? So who was there? The believers, right? And I remember, you know, when we invested in those companies, we had a conference in Hong Kong, NFT.NYC, probably the first NFT conference. It was like 200 people for the entire conference and we were the hardcore, hardcore diehard believers, right? And nobody of us cared. But in fact, many people in crypto was like, 'What's this? Waste of time. Don't really care.' Right? So that was kind of that era, right? And, you know, and when we, I remember when we had the first month when OpenSea had a million dollars of volume, we're like, well, oh, billion dollars, right? That is a different spirit. Of course, you're hoping for stuff, but you're building for a better future. You're not thinking about the quick buck, you're not thinking about that type of thing. So that's kind of sort of where that's changed and over the years. And I do think memecoin culture has added to that where it's brought in a lot of people who are thinking for the fast buck because, hey, oh my goodness, this guy made a million dollars, brought those guys in and crowded out that space. And so I do think that's one element.

Right, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying that the audience itself has essentially shifted a little bit in that area and this expectation that, you know, well, where's my airdrop, where's my thing, right? But there's another thing which is important to note about where the growth is. In '21 and '22, when NFTs started giving airdrops, those airdrops were going on-chain and those on-chain airdrops basically created a network effect through every other DeFi protocol. So it wasn't just sort of DeFi summer that enabled the technology. It was that essentially those projects sort of gave it more life because none of the NFT projects thought that they were going to build DeFi protocols, right? That is my lane, I'm going to build community, I'm going to leverage Uniswap or we're going to leverage PancakeSwap or going to leverage, you know, whatever that might be, right, and grow that space. Today, what's the big success story last year in crypto? Polymarket, right? In Polymarket, a lot of users are coming in. Most people don't know they're using crypto. They might have a wallet, they're never going to leave the money outside of the wallet, they're going to cash it out. They're not going to put it in a DeFi because they don't even know they can. So that's another difference. And Polymarket has very little interest in telling people, 'Oh, by the way, you know that you're on a blockchain called Polygon, which basically most people don't even know, right?' We're a shame. And they go, you know, did you know that you could actually take your USDC and earn some yield before you make another trade? No. Do you care? I don't even know about it, right? So that's the difference as well. So it's become more walled garden, which means that the users are not thinking about it and they're only basically keeping the money in Polymarket to trade, which is what Polymarket wants, right?

So another area, for instance, that's also changed is like from a technology standpoint, like a lot of the growth in NFTs has come from physical items like Pokemon cards. So again, it's shifted, but that's not to say that the traditional NFTs haven't, you know, aren't invaluable. Like a CryptoPunk is still like I think 30, 40, 50 grand and a Bored Ape I think is now still 9 or 10, which is, you know, not small money, way less than what it used to be. But people forget that when Bored Ape Yacht Club came out, we were charging I think $400 for it. So it's all gave the opportunity for everyone, but nobody was there because if everybody was there already, the price would have gone up anyways. But that's the thing, that market was spoiled by the same speculators basically who used bots to buy it and then resell it rather as an extract, right? Especially that scalping sort of mentality. And I think these were all the lessons that we're sort of learning right now to make it better. And I think that's kind of part of what that challenge is. But you know, how to bring people back in? I think again, I think it has to be easy, it has to be one that's also manageable. And I actually think AI agents solve this, just to bring it back to AI agents, because if an AI agent can tell you, 'Oh, that looks like, you know, it's held by someone who's going to flip it.' That's not something that a human can interpret because he's dealing with emotion. That's an AI agent who can basically make the analysis and say, 'That looks like something you shouldn't buy right now. Even if you want it, wait for it to cool down.' Okay, you wait for that. But you can bring that better sort of that trust. And this is where I think digital identity comes in, where I could do business with agents or with individuals that I trust, which, you know, again, we went from an era where we prized anonymity, which was important, and then we ended up basically conflating privacy and anonymity to the point where anonymity became almost criminal, which is the problem. And now everyone's like, 'Oh, blockchain, anonymity, whatever,' when it's really about privacy. And again, with zero-knowledge, you can have privacy, you can preserve your particular anonymity without actually being anonymous, right? So those are things that again needed maturation. And the institutions understand that, that's where they're coming in. And I also think the introduction of the institutions, the big groups coming in to provide that trust as well. No, if it's good enough for BlackRock, it's good enough for Standard Chartered, it should be good enough for you as well.

Yeah. Yeah. It's also like the only way to verify things is through blockchains. Verifiability is just, yeah, the standards in order to open a standard way. That's more important for machines as well because if I want to do a fast transaction, I want to have your credit rating. I want to know if I can give you credit for that or if I want to sort of take your assets, proof of it, you know, proof to do it quickly. And I mainly need to have proof of all your assets that ZK can tell me that I have enough assets. Good enough.

So I think, I think it's a great question because of course AI is both a blessing and a curse in that sense because people can use AI to find vulnerabilities. And I think the thing is that those same groups have to use AI basically to make sure those vulnerabilities are closed. It's going to be a constant race, right? It's basically like sort of antivirus and malware, right? They basically just do it. I don't think that'll go away. But also I think the result that we're seeing today is the result, you know, like this hack didn't happen overnight. This wasn't like, 'Oh, look at this vulnerability, let's go.' This was long-term orchestrated with social engineering, all that kind of stuff. And frankly, this was something that should have been found by, easy. I mean, one validator, what the heck is that? Like, I mean, the whole, like, this wouldn't have happened if we had more validators, right? So there are fail points here, but those fail points are failure points where, you know, we could have discovered that, right? Whereas that shouldn't have been allowed, right? And it's just filtering through deeper, right? And sort of if you're restaking and restaking and restaking, it's just like there's a point somewhere at the end of the chain where you go, how far can I audit that? Should I accept that as collateral? Is that okay or do we say that's not okay? And I think we're not using enough of the AI tools out there to basically police that effort, but it's very easy to do, it's not that hard. So I think that could have been discovered by, you know, a protocol AI agent that basically does work for a protocol or even for you. And I think this is a thing where when you have an AI agent that works on your behalf and you tell it, 'Hey, can you please audit the security?' We're going to get to a point because they can read code and write code so well that they're going to be able to look at that and then they can also look at the sort of mechanism many filters down and say, 'Okay, maybe that's not okay,' right? And you know, our partnership with Neil, for instance, on Pump's blockchain, which is, you know, basically using the Helix products, right, is an example of a high-quality yield product that we think is going to give people that confidence who is not on-chain because they're not basically getting yield from Ethereum, which of course is valuable, but they're going to get yield from mortgages that is understood. That's how we're going to get people who are not from crypto to also go in and say, 'Okay, now I have access to that.' You know, I'm in the Philippines or I'm somewhere, I can't, is this a high-quality product? Because only Americans can. Oh, I had to spend $500, which I don't have to do that. But now for $1, $5, $10, I can do that. But that's how we bring people on-chain, I think, as well because they don't understand tokens, right? At the end of the day, you know, yes, Bitcoin and Ethereum is validated, but you know as well as I do that, you know, when you talk to people like my mom, they're like, 'I don't understand this and this is not gold. What's, how does this work or whatever,' right? But if we bring them things like things they do understand and we'll bring it on-chain and they see the benefits, which it does do, I think we'll convert them, right? And that's kind of, you know, regardless of how people think about NFTs, you know, that's what NFTs did in the original days where it brought people from the gaming and the art world and from the culture world around that potential. They were not from crypto but they were excited about what it could do and then they were breathing on it. And that actually is kind of what we need to bring back and I think agents will help us do that.

Yeah, real estate deeds, right? I mean, digital identity, you know, soulbound NFTs, all that kind of stuff. But I do want to sort of push back a little bit on your profile pics as well. I mean, art, but the profile pics is because these profile pics, not all of them, just to be clear, right? These profile pics are actually a form of art now that represent a kind of extra moment, right? So whether it's Mocaverse, Pudgy Penguins, you know, like BAYC, they represent a particular audience of a community that people are actually excited about and so there is a value there. How valuable is it? Don't know. And I also think, and let's take it, my hot take, right, is that I actually think the buyers of this in the future are not just going to be humans. It's going to be agents. Because if an agent wants to prove that they're part of a community, they had to own these NFTs because it's not just about, just like in the gaming world, you're not just actually interacting just with humans, you're interfacing with basically AI beings together with humans in one ecosystem. And if someone owns a Bored Ape, someone owns a CryptoPunk, you definitely will give that AI agent more respect than if he doesn't, right? Even though you know he's an AI agent, because, okay, this is valuable, this is important, he understands it.

Yeah, so I see it, I mean, there's multiple angles, but some obvious angles, for instance, if I wanted to buy some high-quality power from the US and I'm in, you know, Pakistan or Indonesia, I can only do it through a tokenized platform, right? You know, something like that that we've sort of co-launched as an example, but there's many other hard assets you could do that, right? So that's kind of one angle. But the second angle, which is kind of my personal favorite, is actually to appeal to asset classes that you can't normally invest in. So three years ago, we did this experiment where we tokenized the Stradivarius violin, right? And that Stradivarius made a lot of headlines. And the thing is, this is where my mom, who's a musician, would be like, 'Oh, I understand that that's valuable. I can never buy a Stradivarius, right? Because it's too expensive. However, I could still own a piece of it because I appreciate its value and it's meaningful to me.' How many people have learned about money because they're trading Pokemon cards, right? They learned about trading, about value, could be football cards back in the day, it doesn't really matter, baseball cards, right? That interaction is a game, but that game taught us about money. And that became a cultural symbol and an item in its own way. And now we can expand that to the world. So my point I'm making is that culture is what connects us. It's a thing that we have an emotional connection to. When we have an emotional connection to, we value it. And from that, we're willing to learn. But my mom will never buy Bitcoin because she's not going to care about it. Even if I could send her to courses, I could tell her why it's important, she doesn't care. But she cares about a Stradivarius, right? And then the other person doesn't care about a Stradivarius, but he cares about Pokemon cards, right? And then they learn about money and they become financially more literate. And then maybe they can have the argument, 'Okay, if you're financially more literate, then you can start thinking about, okay, why does Bitcoin matter? Is gold really important or not? What is all this thing? Is money in fact not a store of value?' I mean, we know this here, but other people don't, right? Because so many people don't understand it, right? So, we have to onboard them. And so I think RWAs play an incredibly important mission by essentially onboarding people with things that are emotionally important to them that they believe and understand have value and then learn from that.

An AI agent can make the market for you. Let us find it. So, it becomes way more efficient in a faster way. I mean, think about where we are in our own industry. I mean, it used to be that we can only be on Ethereum and Uniswap because all the other L2s or whatever didn't have any liquidity and now it doesn't matter, right? I mean, I could be on some L3 and if I want to swap out to USDC, done, right? It just does it. Now, of course, I have to wait and it takes a few minutes or, you know, whether I use LayerZero or, you know, whatever, right? These things take time, but I'm comfortable with the migration. It's no longer as difficult as it was five, six years. I mean, five, six years ago, it was a nightmare. I mean, you would have money locked in that chain because you just simply can't take it out. Right now, you know, basically, it's much more fluid, right? And now, of course, the fluidity when the agent says, you know, you could be on Arbitrum and you want to go move your money to Solana. The agent will just, you know, I mean, you don't even know it's Arbitrum, Solana. You're just going to go, 'Oh, I want to buy this thing,' right? And it just does it. It just does it off the back, right? The agent completely sort of moves that away. The user doesn't care, right? I, you know, L1s, L2s, and you know, these are all important but they're kind of like telco, that kind of infrastructure. Nobody cares about how the phone call was made, right? But it works and you pay for that. But you know, do you pay a premium for, you know, Verizon versus AT&T versus Sprint? I don't know if you care. You probably care if it's cheaper and that is a quality bar, but the premium you're not, is not going to be 10 times higher, right? But the premium that is 10 times higher are the things that we use every day, is what we engage every day, what's valuable to us emotionally as well.

Well, so first of all, generally, if you're first time to crypto, you probably should have a reasonable basket of the majors. So things like Bitcoin and Ethereum, probably Solana as well. I think you should have a basket of that because that's, let's call it, you know, the major asset class. If you believe in digital, you should believe in that, right? I do tell people that if you can afford it and that, you know, for instance, I think CryptoPunks is a better levered bet on Ethereum than Ethereum itself, right? Because actually that becomes that cultural status item. So it's kind of like, you know, if the French economy is going to do wonderful, then probably Picasso is a better bet, right? Because the value of Picasso will appreciate more than the net GDP per se, right? So those type of examples, but that's maybe a little bit more sophisticated. But I would also say, so take a basket of these, let's call them crypto conservatives. Just kind of like that. Yeah, just go for the majors first as I have a basket. I think you probably want to overweight a little bit on Bitcoin, Ethereum because that's easier for you to manage it. It's still volatile but that's something that you understand and has the liquidity, right? And then I think the way I look at it, and this is just my personal opinion, is that you should take a basket of things that you love. Don't care about the value, just that you love. You love the founder, you love the project they do, you love the product, just engage with something that you have passion for. And if you don't have passion, don't do it, okay? So, and if you want to gamble because you have fun gambling, do it. But realize it's a gamble, okay? Like, you know, there's no rhyme or reason why a memecoin does well because at this point I think, you know, a lot of people realize that there's a lot of funny stuff going on in the back that you really don't know, right? And so you're making assumptions, that's not calculation, that's just taking a bet, okay? But if you're having fun, for instance, you know, if you use our AI product and you like it, maybe you want to invest in that in the future when we have something there because you like the product and you can use it as well. So I think many of the token projects should be used like one, but it should be viewed like wine, which is like, you know, there is a utility that you could use it, you can drink it because you enjoy it, but it also maybe has value because you believe in it. But at the end of the day, you can still enjoy it. That's actually a good example of like how to treat most of the crypto protocols. And I think indeed, if you don't have a passion for the product that's being built, then it's not making sense to invest into it and you probably also do not understand what they do. Correct. I also give the advice to just go for the majors first and then see which niche you like. It can be DeFi, it can be gaming, it can be whatever you want.

I think so. Of course I would say that, but the reason why I think so is because the next level is that in order for those AI businesses to also accelerate and grow, the traditional ones as well, there needs to be a commoditization of their assets. And the commoditization of their assets is compute energy. What's the best way to represent that? It's a token. I mean, you're already buying tokens, right? When you're using OpenAI, when you're using Claude, whatever, you're buying a token already, right? And that token has a value that you can't hedge against, right? I mean, you can't buy advanced areas, you can't do stuff like that. It's kind of like imagine the chip industry if it hasn't commoditized the industry for, like, you know, silicon, lithium, gold, silver, whatever, right? So, that's basically what the digital commodity market is going to emerge. So, I think that that's just an obvious, right? But then, of course, it's going to extend beyond that because those are going to be the ones that on the utility side. You know, on the LLM side, that to us is the base back end. What really has value is the orchestration layer, is what you do with your AI agent. That's where the development is happening. You know, it's kind of like, you know, you've got the smartphone, but then you've got the people building apps and the AI agents are the ones who are basically building the apps for you, but they're just for you or for your community or for your network. And that's basically that next level of opportunity. And so, you can partake in those projects. And I also think it's healthier because, you know, people before, I remember when Sandbox first went out on Binance, I think it was in 2020. Yeah, it was a $10 million market cap by the way. Okay, $10 million market cap, right? And, you know, it was kind of crazy in '21, '22, but the point is not that. The point is that those were the days where it wasn't about just getting early. It was that was the fair valuation for that project probably, right? So, where do we come off thinking that every project has to be a billion dollars? Actually, you know, if an AI project or a game project or whatever project comes out and it's going to a 5 or 10 million market cap and you like the game, nothing wrong with that, right? You know, and if it happens to do well, wonderful, and if it doesn't, you enjoyed the game, right? And I think, you know, this is the thing where everyone's like, 'Ah, Web3 gaming is dead,' you know, that kind of stuff. It only did because you're comparing it to its peak, but you could say that's true for every memecoin and frankly a lot of protocols, right? But actually it's still a $10 billion industry that was, I remind the audience, a zero industry six years ago.

Yes. And I think this is the point, on-chain growth has been weak and all of those protocols, not everywhere, like stablecoins and stuff, they have been going up. And yes, stablecoins have been going up, but the net users, yeah. Because, so the point is that, you know, stablecoin usage has been heavy on institutions. The institution is one user, right? True. He goes in and maybe it's 10 wallets, maybe it's 20 wallets, but it's not 20 users, right? And I think that's the point that we're missing. When you're going for a consumer play, you need consumers using it. When you go for an institutional play, then you need the institutional whale. So yes, if you have one BlackRock, you're cool, right? However, if you're making a consumer product, gaming, any consumer product, right? Then you need to bring millions of consumers in. And that's basically what we've been lacking with on-chain, which I think will fix. But that's kind of why we haven't seen that growth. That's also why I think that probably in a few years from here we'll start to see the growth without actually retail being here but just AI agents doing it and just retail jumping on the ship again at some point where they see, 'Hey, this is actually beneficial for my life, I can actually use this, that's great, this is valuable, I can create something, a skill that also becomes valuable for other people, good, that's, you create them and you have other plays and stuff.' And you have that productivity that comes into that and then the value for the token becomes much more apparent.