Jason Calacanis: Hey everybody, welcome to Twist. I am sitting down today for another great crypto roundtable with Sunny and Vinny. We're breaking down all kinds of things, the future of Twitter and payments because of news that the executive in charge of rolling out micropayments has been laid off. Then we're going to talk about the latest Yuga Labs NFT dropping on the Bitcoin blockchain. If you've already lost interest, don't worry, we're going to tell you how much you need to care about this or not. Coinbase is trying to diversify its business by building sort of a developer AWS for big businesses. And Spotify is doing what might be kind of a cool NFT experiment. It's going to be a great conversation. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vanta.com slash twist. Squarespace, turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Contra. Contra is a commission-free

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SPEAKER_06: Contra.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to Crypto Roundtable. Every time

Jason Calacanis: we do this, it feels like it's been like more months since we did this. Is it just because we live every day twice and then in the interim with the news? I think it's because everything

SPEAKER_10: moves so quickly that, you know, we have to consider maybe making this more frequent. Maybe

Jason Calacanis: a spin-off show. Yes. We'll just make all the decisions while Jason's skiing. Vinny Lingham and Sonny Mandra. Welcome back to Breakdown, what's been happening in the crypto world. I want to start. Thank you as always for sending us an amazing selection of stories to work with. Although I would like to start with Twitter because at the end of last year, I think I pinged the two of you and was like, what, what do we think is going to happen next year in crypto writ large? And a big part of the conversation about what was going to give new, breathe new light kind of into Web3 or crypto or payments was whatever happens at Twitter with payments. And then now this week, we found out that Twitter has laid off the executive who was working on that payments integration. And I want to

SPEAKER_16: know what the two of you are making of that. Well, thank you. Thanks for having us, Molly. I don't know what to make of Twitter right now. I think it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a show. And, you know, it's like, I think it's clear to everyone, no matter whether you support Elon or not, it's, it's not, I don't think it's in a good place. I've, I've used it less now. I find that, yeah, I've got lots of, lots of complaints and issues. I'm just going to be whatever, you know, if it, if it doesn't serve my needs, I don't use it. I think the payment stuff is, is payments are hard. People don't, people don't appreciate how hard payments are, but there's just so many angles and ways to view

SPEAKER_19: things and look at it. And, you know, what, what I think Elon's trying to probably do is trying to build some sort of like, you know, QQ style app, you know, what, you know, one app to, to rule them all

SPEAKER_22: type product with Twitter. And, you know, that was the thinking, I think like my thoughts around

SPEAKER_19: this was like, he would integrate Doge and make Doge like a, you know, key part of the strategy for Twitter. I've yet to see that. And I think that I just think there's just too many moving parts of Twitter. And I think that it's just hard for him or anyone else to get their heads around things. And quite frankly, I'll be honest. I think that the Twitter people that are working at Twitter these parts this past decade probably weren't, um, you know, the ones, you know, the ones that left recently, I think they weren't like probably contributing too much to, um, and that's why Elon, you know, I think cut it down a bit. I think they went to new product innovation. Like we just didn't

SPEAKER_22: see. Yeah. I'd say this one part was interesting is that the crypto stuff they were doing was actually

SPEAKER_16: pretty cool with like being able to have, you know, like a hexagon, NFT profile picture. That's the thing. There's some cool stuff happening, but on payments, I don't think Twitter got anyone payments. And so I don't, I don't blame him for saying, Hey, let's go to the payments

SPEAKER_24: person because what are they actually done on payments? So anyway, do you think our payments

SPEAKER_10: are hard? Um, look, I think, I think we're going to see something with crypto and Twitter. I think there's some natural intersections, uh, everything from tipping to, uh, you know, creator payments to, um, like the NFT stuff. I, I do think, um, you know, if, if you were to kind of sit back and, and this is probably a good transition to you, Molly, but if you were to sit back and look at all the things Twitter has to work on right now, payments probably, and crypto is just not top of the list, right? They, they've had to really deal with, uh, all the advertising, um, fall off. Right. And they've had to deal with all the changes that they've made. Um, there's some core product features like with the algorithms, right? There's been a lot of news around that. Like even, uh, you know, one day Elon made his, uh, his Twitter private to see how it affected the algorithm and came back to being public. Um, and so, and then he unblocked a bunch of people around the algorithms as to see how the, that was impacting the algorithm. So, um, what I think is there's probably just, uh, um, a need to focus on the core product. And, you know, if you think of the product in these like concentric circles with like sort of tweeting, being at the core payments and crypto just comes a bit later. And so I do think we'll see it. I just, you know, they have to probably resolve the core product issues. I will say, you know, something that reader with Vinny said, and I'd love to hear what you're saying. It feels like the, the, the energy that, you know, around Twitter is down a little bit in terms of, um, uh, like I don't find myself. And maybe it's the tweaking of the algorithms as engaged as I was before, but you know, I, I want to make sure that's not anecdotal. Like I don't have any kind of data behind it, but I'll kind of pass to you that that's sort of my take. I think they'll get to it, but I think they have core product features to figure out. You know, that's my thing.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah. I wasn't trying to trick you guys into talking about Twitter to be clear. Like I really want

Jason Calacanis: to know what you think about Dogecoin and payments. So we'll come back to that, but I can tell you that purely anecdotally, I feel the same way. I have gotten back double digit hours in my life per

SPEAKER_38: week. Cause I'm just not, I'm never there. Yeah. And on the Dogecoin front, like maybe we'll just double click into that. Like, you know, it is a really nice, um, you know, potential integration

SPEAKER_10: because, uh, you know, one Elon, he has this really great thing. I think he did with like, maybe when he did the time interview, um, for time person of the year. And he calls out like sort of the two cryptos, he calls a, you know, Bitcoin as a store of value and Doge as a transactional system. And so, um, and the Doge team has done a lot of work in, in the last few months, right. In terms of, uh, continuing to innovate on the platform, they now have an integration where you can do payments, uh, or, or sorry, they can support transactions through like a, like the SpaceX network. Um, and so there's some really interesting things that they were a Starlink network by more accurate. Um, so they've done a bunch of really interesting things. There's offline transactions and such. So I, I feel like we'll see it happen. I feel like Doge will be what it is. Cause Elon has just pretty much said that very clearly for a number of years. Um,

SPEAKER_32: just not right, right away. Right. Vinny, why are payments so hard and how important are, I guess, you know, secondarily, like how important are payments as we build out functionality? Like,

Jason Calacanis: it's just feels like at the end of the day, everybody wants to understand what the functionality still of crypto is other than store of value. I know you're big on identity, but where do payments sit in that kind of Maslow's hierarchy of utility?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. The, the payments, you know, getting in the payment flow is, um, it's a very lucrative business because the amount of money that gets moved around and the payments world, if you look at, um, you know, first data, Pfizer, I mean, they're a gorilla, two or $3 trillion a year in payments,

SPEAKER_46: they process, um, on credit cards and other transactions. Um, you know, it's, it's a good

SPEAKER_16: business. And once you're in that payment flow, you effectively control it. I mean, Apple, look at Apple play, look at the app store. I mean, they take 30% cuts, um, in the app store, the Apple pay where they make some interchange there as well on transactions.

SPEAKER_19: It's a, it's a booming business. So everybody wants to get into payments because it's just a very lucrative business. And the, you know, the thing about payments is that like the marginal cost of a transaction is zero. So you're just making free money once you get to scale. Um, and so, you know, the, the, the, the downside of payments is it's, it's really run by the, the bureaucrats, right. Cause it's, it's, it's highly regulated. It's, um, and so if you, if you have a situation

SPEAKER_16: where you, you, you, you're, you're, I'd say trying to get into payments. If you're a big company like Twitter, your revenue, um, prevention department in the company is going to stop you from making money out of it because they're going to put a whole bunch of, um, rules in place. And I always call the legal department, the revenue prevention department, because that's

SPEAKER_22: what they do. Um, and so, you know, legal and compliance will be all, all over it. Um, making sure you can't, you can, yeah. And then also, you know, then they, that informs how the

SPEAKER_16: products built as well. If you look at successful products, like, you know, cash app and that was, you know, built by Mike Brock at square, um, you know, that was a very successful product. And I think they, they got to scale quickly and then they sort of tightened up the, um, the regulatory side of it. Venmo did the same thing. Venmo was flying, you know, you know, very low to the ground, uh, when they got bought by PayPal for 20 million bucks, same, same story, right? They, they broke, you know, they even paid fines off to pay people for paid fines off. They acquired it because they broke so many, um, you know, money transmission laws, whatever else, but that's why startups are better suited to doing payments than big companies. Cause well, if Venmo messed up the investors lose some money and if they succeed while they get bought by PayPal, it wasn't a huge outcome at that point. But, um, they were able to disrupt payments in a big way. And then, you know, we see the regulations and taxes and reporting and Venmo now has come in, you know, years, years later, but they've already used the, the time they've had to build a big lead. So it's really hard for a company like Twitter, which is a public company or was a public company to go innovate in payments, um, and, and beat the existing players out there without having to comply with all the onerous regulations and the risk to the, the mothership is just too big. So the revenue prevention

SPEAKER_19: department steps in and stops you from getting escape velocity.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. I, I double on what Vinny said there. Like, I think there's a lot of promise around the simplicity around payments that exist, you know, through crypto infrastructure. Right. But the reality is like, once you kind of, um, start interacting with, you know, regulators and everyone else, like it's less of the technology around making payments happen is the actual rails of moving money around. It's more around like support and I didn't get my money and all the infrastructure around that. And like, Hey, was this a fraudulent transaction? Did this go to someone that shouldn't go? Um, and, and so, you know, conceptually on a blockchain, you can build a peer to peer payment system very simply, right. With like, you know, probably under 200 lines of code. Um, it just the peer to peer payments bit. And there's some apps that, that do that really well. I think the minute you try to turn into a large company and you have a revenue prevention department, as Vinny calls it, then you end up with millions of lines of code that are dealing with all the customer support issues, all the regulatory issues. And then you end up having to build all this additional

SPEAKER_51: infrastructure, which is, you know, what exists at PayPal and every other place that.

SPEAKER_14: And unfortunately somebody sues you eventually, and then you have to call in.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. Or just someone calls in and says, I didn't get my payment. What happened? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

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SPEAKER_16: slash twist for $1,000 off your SOC 2. Well, this is the biggest problem that Twitter hasn't solved yet is identity, right? And until they solve identity, they can't solve payments. And I, you know, I think there's just, I've spoken to people at Twitter over the past decade about identity, eight years since I've been involved in Civic. And I just say there, I mean, I'll be quite insulting. I'd say most of them, it's a bunch of low-grade people who don't understand how the space works. And they've bumbled along for way too long at the company. And I've never been impressed with anyone I've met at Twitter who told me they understood identity. It was always, you know,

SPEAKER_22: trying to like, you know, the bunch of hacks. And I can say that now because they're probably all fired. But they never really, they never really got identity.

SPEAKER_63: You can say that now to add insult to injury, you can just like get your bag of salt and rub it in the wound.

SPEAKER_65: I was never impressed with anyone. And I met a bunch of them. And I was never impressed with

SPEAKER_22: them. They never really quite got it. They like pretended to get it. They, they did the whole corporate thing, which people in corporates do. But they never got it. And, and, and, you know, Twitter never solved identity. They just didn't.

SPEAKER_69: David, can I tee up something to you? Just, and I think it's a quick, it's outside our show notes,

SPEAKER_27: Molly, but I think it'd be a good one. Vinny, help us understand like what an ideal

SPEAKER_10: Twitter identity system looks like, because I know it'll involve crypto from your perspective. So can you give us like a, like your pitch on, you know, identity on Twitter or not even be on Twitter,

SPEAKER_73: but just give it to us.

SPEAKER_22: So Twitter, Twitter shouldn't, Twitter should move to ingesting, um, verifiable claims and credentials, uh, in a decentralized way, um, from, you know, you could, you could, they could even go as far as saying, Hey, if, here's an example, if you've got, um, if you, if you've got your idea established with, um, even Experian or TransUnion or whatever, or a bank, you should export those credentials to Twitter and Twitter should be able to rely on third party credentials to verify who you are. Twitter shouldn't be trying to verify every single person in the world, because it's a global service.

SPEAKER_16: They don't have the ability to go and dig into every single service. What they should do is say, if you want to get verified, these are the tools we use, we use open source, we use DIRDS, we use verifiable claims, whatever it is. And these are the providers you can use. And we'll, and then just

SPEAKER_22: basically look at that entire web, this is a global basis, allowing people and companies to do attestations for people. So for example, Sunny could come to civic or, or his bank and, and say, Hey, can I just get a credential that says I'm sunny and we could issue it to him and he can go to Twitter and Twitter could read that credential and verify it. And the thing about this system of verifiable credentials is that when Twitter reads that credential, civic doesn't know it's being read. And so the, the privacy is, the loop is between sunny and Twitter. So you solve the privacy issue because you're not, you're not letting people, um, you like, for example, you're logging with Google using OAuth, Google knows every time you log into everything using Google, because the service is pinging Google, asking for the token, and it's going back and forth. And Google knows that every time Sunny logs into every Facebook as well, every time OAuth is used to log into any single website or service, the Facebook knows about it, there is centralized authority. With verifiable claims and credentials, you can basically present stuff. And as long as the cryptographic proofs are there, and it hasn't been revoked, then you can assume that he, if he's still in possession of those keys, that that's sunny and you could ask for additional challenges and whatever else around that. But, but Twitter, I think is, you know, they don't think about things that are on a global perspective, is very much a U S perspective on, on identity. And then also the second thing is they were very focused on getting as many active user accounts as possible, even if they were bots, they didn't care because they were just charging advertisers for tons of page views. Um, and there was no real incentive to stamp out the bots and reduce page views. And so it was just like, let's not have a high friction service. Now, I think that what, what, what the algos should be done should, what you should do with algos is this, you should say, if, if someone has a verifiable credential or claim or an identity attached to their account, that gives them a boost in the rankings. Now that

SPEAKER_74: means it's, you know, I will see your and Sonny's tweets way before I see some random tweet to account

SPEAKER_22: of falling that hasn't been verified. It doesn't mean that their account isn't being surfaced. It just means that it's lower priority. And what happens then is it forces people to say, Hey, let's verify ourselves to get higher rankings in, in, in results in, in Twitter results pages. And everyone who is a legit reasonable person would say, okay, if I can do it in a private way and I can verify my identity and I get more engagement, I get more exposure to a bigger audience, there's a, there's a good economic reason why I would do that. So I will verify myself for those who want anonymity or do not, you know, and you can bother, you can do this in an anonymous way. You can, you can do an assertion. So you could say, yeah, you know, here's a verifiable credential, which proves I'm a US citizen uniquely, and I'm over the age of 21 and that's it. And, and if I try, and then using those credentials, I can never reassert those credentials on another Twitter account without being marked as the same person, but you don't know who I am. So it's, it's, you know, so, so these are things we can do things like drop, um, uh, tokens into wallets. So we can, you know, civic does it with civic pass right now. We can drop a soulbound token into an ETH wallet or, or Solana wallet and verify that person's unique and any other wallet they try and create wouldn't have it. You can't have to replicate that same token. There are ways to do this. There's just no will

SPEAKER_75: for Twitter to change the way things work. They're just doing it. Like they've always done it.

SPEAKER_32: And that's the issue. Well, to be fair, it has always been, and arguably even is now, even though we're in the middle of a messy transition away from it, an ad supported social

Jason Calacanis: network. So like numbers were always, I mean, you know, there's plenty of evidence that Facebook, specifically the product has overstated its metrics to advertisers for a decade or more,

SPEAKER_82: because the important thing is like, Molly, we knew this, this is not news. I tweeted about this

SPEAKER_84: many times. That's what I'm saying. Like, I feel like maybe saying that maybe saying that all of the

Jason Calacanis: people who you talked to didn't understand it, maybe what they were actually saying is we have this business model. Your thing seems to involve a pretty big lift in terms of implementation and

SPEAKER_14: understanding on the part of our users. And yes, all of our engineers, and we have this other business model. So this isn't really necessarily worth our time. Oh, absolutely. You're 100% right.

SPEAKER_77: There was a total conflict with the way they were making money. So the issue Twitter I have with

SPEAKER_22: them is that they were not interested in, first of all, delivering value to advertisers. As an advertiser previously on Twitter, it was the biggest waste of money I've ever spent because they, you know, what they count as interactions and engagements and views is just bull. I mean,

SPEAKER_87: it's just like, it's just basically bot fodder, right? So I didn't bother with that.

SPEAKER_89: I mean, to be fair, you're talking about the entire publishing ecosystem at this point. Like, I don't know where you're getting value, honestly. Like, where are you getting value as an

SPEAKER_75: advertiser? Google AdWords has always been fantastic. You can set your price, you can track

SPEAKER_22: it all the way to conversion. Twitter always was selling this sort of like amorphous, arcane, oh, we have engagements and impressions and people are talking about you and blah, blah, blah, not tracking direct sales. Okay. When you look at direct sales,

SPEAKER_94: it was a display ad at the end of the day too, right? It was just a display ad.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, and then, and then they can't even bot views as impressions, which is rubbish, right? You're right. The incentives didn't exist, but, but, but, but the bigger picture here, Molly, sorry, let me finish the point. The bigger picture here is that Elon's not wrong. Okay. If you move to a advertiser list service or a lower advertiser service, and you can build real value in the system, the platform by having real people engage, you will have high engagement rates and the advertisers that are left behind will actually spend more money because they're going to get better ROI. You may have a smaller user base because you can't tout these big numbers, which aren't real anyway, but it would be a higher quality

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SPEAKER_10: purchase of a website or domain. If I could build a little bit, taking it back to like ID systems for a bit and we can transition from this one, but this is a good topic. So I dropped something in our chat, like India launched this national ID system called the Adar system. I think it was launched like back in 2009 or 10. It's been a long time. I think they have, you know, over a billion

SPEAKER_38: people on this system now. And it's incredible. It really implements a vision of what Vinny is talking about. And so, you know, every system in India, whether it's banking, your telephone,

SPEAKER_10: whether you're getting subsidies from the government, it all runs through this national ID system in the way that, you know, Vinny described. And I think the opportunity for Twitter, because it is sort of the one worldwide product is to adopt something like this at sort of a worldwide scale and say, Hey, let's let all in, you know, Twitter just has this unique position more so than Facebook or Instagram or any of the other at scale, um, networks that they could implement sort of a worldwide ID system for, um, for all services. Um, and that, that would be super, super powerful. And I think, um, it'd be really cool to see them leverage a blockchain to do that and build on top of it. And there's a, again, I sent an article here. We can share it in the links about

SPEAKER_109: like what all the benefits that have come from India's national ID system.

SPEAKER_32: It's also not without controversy because there's a question about the aggregation of that much data.

Jason Calacanis: Isn't there, wasn't there a project that was trying to do that? It was like, it involved a globe that would scan your eyeball and then you'd be issued a token.

SPEAKER_113: World coin? World coin. World coin. Yeah. I think it was, Sam Altman was involved with that one too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's to say,

SPEAKER_22: so, so Sonny's right. So this is my point. Okay. Twitter never actually put out a, um, you know, developer framework, a developer kit or anything like that and said, Hey, this is a framework we're going to adopt for ID verification. All the providers out there, feel free to plug in, give credentials to your users and they can reuse on the Twitter platform and we'll ingest them. Okay. They've never done that. And that's the first thing they should be doing because then they can say to every country in the world, if you've got a home affairs office, or you've got a state department, or you've got an auto service, just make it, you know, use the spec. We're going to use a W3C compliance spec with verifiable credentials. We can use, you know, you can use identity.com, which is nonprofit for, for, um, uh, you know, for, for the gateway, we have, we have a gateway protocol that we can use. There's lots of things you can use to decentralize this and make sure it's private and secure, and that users can get access to their data. Right now we're in a world where literally most IDs are issued physically and not digitally. And we need to get to a world where digital IDs are pervasive, where a bank can issue a digital ID to your phone. And by the way, they can do this today, right? So you can, you know, you can give a bank an SDK and they can make the credentials available inside their app. And then this, you know, uh, basically, you know, app to app switching, basically feed the credentials into Twitter privately, securely, or the user can have their own wallet to store it or whatever. There's different ways to do this. The issue is that there's, so the, the, one of the problems with decentralized identity, and again, this is the thing I've been working on for a long time is that none of the big players have ever had the, the, the, you know, the guts to go and say, we're going to

SPEAKER_75: adopt this. And I think Twitter should be that player because without that, your assertion,

Jason Calacanis: right. So your assertion is before, after core issues with the product, then identity payments.

SPEAKER_22: Well, I think identity is core. I think identity is core to Twitter, right? Twitter has so many problems with fake identities, fake accounts, whatever, like, you know, hacks, et cetera,

SPEAKER_111: It seems like it fundamentally depends on what the business model of Twitter actually is going forward, which is still an open question. Well, I think, I think we can, we can at least agree that

SPEAKER_22: the business model of selling ads, um, that displayed to bots for advertisers is just a bad

SPEAKER_132: business model. It's still ha it's still happening. I know. I hate it. I built ad tech platforms. Like I think it's just, it's, it's disgusting. I mean, everything is changing in that front. I

Jason Calacanis: don't know if you guys heard my interview with the Neva CEO, but it's, but like, once you change, I actually think you even step back from identity all the way to search. Like once you change search and the incentives around search and you start to have an ecosystem that is based on answers and not ad supported answers, then all of a sudden this entire universe of things that rely on, I'm getting a little off topic here, but that rely on that ad supported initial, uh, contact

SPEAKER_14: starts to go away. Like the recipe pages that are 30, you know, pages long because they want to serve you a thousand ads. Anyway, I do have a thing that I really want to ask you guys about because

Jason Calacanis: I just want to understand it and know if it's a big deal this week. You go labs is back this week. You go labs is dropping this NFT collection on the Bitcoin blockchain using this ordinance protocol, which I have been hearing about a lot. In fact, the eight times I've been on Twitter in the last, like four weeks, somebody has been talking about ordinance. So help me understand is the creators of board apes. They're working on this project called 12 fold. And it seems like the deal is that it maybe for the first time is an NFT project that actually interfaces with the Bitcoin blockchain.

SPEAKER_27: Um, I think it's the second one, but, um, but so like, let's kind of 12 fold is or ordinals is the ordinance is the protocol that they're using. Right. And then 12 fold is the product. And you're

SPEAKER_53: saying it's the second product using the ordinance. I believe so. Yeah. Got it. Got it. And, um,

SPEAKER_38: help me understand the protocol. Yeah. So, so let, let's kind of take a step back, um, and start from Ethereum and then we'll go why it's important on block on Bitcoin. So most NFTs,

SPEAKER_10: which we've spent a lot of time talking about, um, in, in, in this podcast in the past, have a combination of some information stored in the blockchain. And then generally some information stored off the block off the blockchain and maybe in some decentralized storage, like IPFS or, you know, Filecoin or take your pick. And so the interesting thing there is that you require kind of those two pieces to come together to get the full, um, information about what is the representation of, of the NFT. Um, so that could be in that, like, there's the, um, the data behind the NFT could be put into the blockchain and then the image itself or something like that lives in a storage system.

SPEAKER_38: Um, there was one project there's, I mean, there's several projects was one project,

SPEAKER_10: a reference that moved everything onto the blockchain and Ethereum was called on-chain monkeys. And what's interesting there is the entirety of the NFT is fully included into the transaction

SPEAKER_38: on the blockchain. And so what ordinals really, um, created was a similar thing on Bitcoin where, um, an entire trend, an entire NFT is encoded into like a Satoshi. And so, uh, all of the metadata,

SPEAKER_10: all of the information required. Uh, so there's no kind of secondary system required to recreate that. And I think that's, what's exciting about this. Um, you know, obviously it's on the Bitcoin ledger. Um, and so it, it kind of, um, you know, create some excitement that there's some more utility on that ledger other than just, you know, transactions, which have been there. Um, that said, you know, um, that, that ledger is much more expensive to transact on. And so if any, you're going to toss to you here. Um, and, uh, you know, when you think about, you know, doing these things at scale, you want to move to a place where the transaction speeds are high, the transaction costs are low. And so, you know, overall it's a very exciting development, but I don't think it's like an innovation forward in any way that like, um, um, creates sort of a new advancement for the space, but Vinny, I'll toss to you there. Okay. I mean, it's a bit too, it's a too little,

SPEAKER_16: too late type of thing. I mean, this is the, we, we, we've been through this with Bitcoin 2017, the Bitcoin is supposed to, but the argument for Bitcoin to be more than a store value that for that battle was fought and lost in 19, in 2017. So this ordinal thing, it looks cool, but it's not going

SPEAKER_22: to scale because Bitcoin is not going to increase the block size. It doesn't matter. It's a kind of flash in the pan. Maybe it becomes a layer two type solution. So it runs on lightning or stacks or whatever, whatever. It's not going to be something that natively runs on Bitcoin forever where, you know, it's, it's not going to get to scale. It'll be a niche thing, which maybe a few people want to use and some hardcore Bitcoin people want to use, but it's not going to go, but Bitcoin can't handle it. It's seven transactions per second. Bitcoin, you know, for the entire Bitcoin network, it's not going to be able to handle this. And the mempool, they're going to clog up the mempool with this stuff. The fees will go up and it's basically in a hype cycle right now. The fundamental issue here is the Bitcoin blockchain is a one megabyte block every 10 minutes. There is no capacity for providing the world or even a country with the ability to create NFTs on Bitcoin. It doesn't work. The math doesn't add up. And so unless the community is willing to increase the block size, which we know it will not, then, you know, it's not going to happen. Like there's an argument that this thing, this would probably work better on Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV because they've got much bigger blocks and they can scale it. Um, but that's not, uh, you know, that's not going to matter because, um, you know, Solana and Ethereum and Polygon really have such, such, such a lead on all the others. I don't think. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a dead end, but we'll see.

SPEAKER_10: The Yuga drop is only like 300, right? And so you, you can see that they've kind of had to, to navigate around that as well. So I think, you know, between the transaction price, the speed, I don't think this becomes anything, um, much bigger than sort of a little bit of a news splash here.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah. It's very, it's very niche. It's very niche. Not to cast any aspersions on Yuga labs, but is it a news splash slash quick bag grab? I mean, like you meant 300 or, you know,

Jason Calacanis: create 300 of these things that you, they get a lot of press and attention because it is inherently limited in all the ways that you've just laid out. Presumably they're going to be really expensive.

SPEAKER_14: So like, it feels like they just made three Rolls Royces or 300 Rolls Royces and sell those.

SPEAKER_149: I don't think you, you're going to have a liquidity problem here and people aren't going to be able,

SPEAKER_22: you know, there's like what, what marketplaces are going to support this? Who's going to buy it? Why are they going to buy it? Like it's, by the way, this is the same argument for NFTs and everyone else. I'm a big NFT fan, but the value of NFTs is limited to the utility of the NFT or the collector value of NFT. There's no, it's like off, right? So, um, the perceived value is what it's worth.

SPEAKER_14: So really they're going to creating a bunch of Rolls Royces that no one's going to want to buy. Like I'm having a hard time understanding. Why do it then?

SPEAKER_27: I agree with you. I think it's a bit of a cash grab. I think there's 300 people out there in the Bitcoin ecosystem that will buy these. And yeah, that's it. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: Cause they'll be like, these are the only NFTs that are actually etched onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

SPEAKER_167: Let's go back a second. Let's go back a second.

SPEAKER_22: These are not the first, these are not the first entities issued on Bitcoin. The first ones were, I think there were some red peppers and whatever else done on counterparty. Uh, you got, uh, spells of Genesis here, the Satoshi card back in 2015. This is not new now. Ordnows is a new protocol, but you know, they used a counterparty back in the day. So this isn't new. Like you can't tell me that this is a new way of, this is a new, you know, that NFTs never existed on Bitcoin. They did. I still have keys to my counterparty wallet that has, you know, um, NFTs on the blockchain. So it's just basically a new cycle. It's a rehype, but we, you know, kind of party failed because Bitcoin fees are too high. Okay. And, and basically NFTs moved to Ethereum and obviously now Solana

Jason Calacanis: as well. So it's not helping the NFT reputation. It's really not because like, I think there's been this sense in this argument that like, well, it's all evolving, right? The scammers come in, but then there's like a real thing and then you build on the real thing and then you eventually get to the internet as we know it today, for example, but this doesn't feel helpful. This

SPEAKER_149: doesn't feel accretive to the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, I'm never, I'm never, I'm never against experimentation. So experiment, go forth, prove me wrong, have this thing work out great. I don't see

SPEAKER_22: how the elephant in the room quite frankly, right now is this big, um, you know, one megabyte block

SPEAKER_27: limit, how we get past that. I don't understand it. Right. I think Molly just, you, you good,

SPEAKER_10: good example, Rolls Royce, right? There are people out there that collect these very expensive sports cars, right? That are, you know, they make a hundred of a year or less. And so it's just one of those things that are not very practical is very desirable by very few number of people, right? Um, Bugatti's

SPEAKER_51: kind of sags, right? There's a whole bunch of these, your money, man. Yeah. Go, go for it.

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Jason Calacanis: c-o-n-t-r-a.com slash twist. Anyway, yes, what's going on with this like Coinbase protocol situation?

SPEAKER_38: Yeah. So at the highest level, it's an Ethereum L2. And so, you know, that gives the ability to have a pretty low transaction costs, high transaction throughput, and then, you know,

SPEAKER_10: ultimately you can settle on Ethereum. Why are they doing this? Let's take a step back. So we've talked about this before. If you actually look at Coinbase, right, for as a company,

SPEAKER_38: for the most part, you know, it's a, it's a custodial system. And so, um, a lot of, um, a lot of what happens in Coinbase itself isn't really happening on the blockchain. Like they may

SPEAKER_10: enter, like, so if you go to Coinbase and buy, you know, any type of asset, Bitcoin, Ethereum, you're most likely not buying it from, uh, like a, like a blockchain transaction. Uh, you're probably buying it from a pool that exists within the Coinbase custodial system. Um, so I think one, you know,

SPEAKER_38: there's, uh, an interesting push to kind of create this system where a whole bunch of other applications and services, whether it's their own or others start getting created. Um, what you get by Coinbase putting it out there is you get, you know, there's a lot of these L2s that exist. There's even, you know, other blockchains, you get the backing of a public company running this system for you now. And so if you're thinking of, so if you're a company and you're thinking of building,

SPEAKER_10: you know, on blockchain for whatever that may be, um, could be NFTs, could be, you know, loyalty systems and any, anything along those lines, Coinbase is like the AWS in this case, um, offering a, you know, a blockchain that's run by them. Hopefully their services are put on it. They maintain the development and growth around it. And so it's a sort of a choice for enterprises and companies to build on. I don't think we see startups go there because I think startups are closer to, you know, what's happening more at the core of, uh, you know, the crypto and blockchain

SPEAKER_38: ecosystem, whether it's in Solana or Polygon. But I do think if you're a big company and you're looking to leverage blockchain for some type of service you're building, it's, it becomes sort of an answer that you can go after. Now, that said, all the big clouds also offer services. They don't have their own L2 that they're running, but you know, uh, I, I, I believe, you know, AWS has like,

SPEAKER_10: uh, an Ethereum service that they run if you want to, you know, interact with it through that system.

SPEAKER_38: Um, so it's, I think it's a play as part of like becoming an infrastructure provider. So looking more and more like an AWS, although I'm not sure, you know, how much energy from enterprises right now, given everything that's happening is going to go towards this. And unfortunately,

SPEAKER_10: like, you know, with Coinbase, they had their own marketplace as well, like an NFT marketplace that didn't really take off. And so the track record here on these kind of expansions from their core

SPEAKER_38: offering hasn't been so great yet. Um, but I, you know, it's, it's a trusted place for an enterprise

SPEAKER_19: Vinny. Got it. And it's so funny. I was on a call early on where I actually said the exact same thing. Like for Coinbase, outside the co offering, nothing has really worked well. And it's not,

SPEAKER_22: you know, for lack of trying, they just, I think, uh, yeah, the, the, the, the co offering is what carried them in the, the, the, the greatest benefit, like the greatest value to Coinbase, there were over a hundred million users worldwide. So they're trying to find ways to like give their users other things to do. It still goes down to the debate. Like, first of all, the L2 space is overcrowded. The L1 space is overcrowded. We haven't seen clear winners emerge outside of Ethereum and maybe Solana, uh, in the L1 space. And in the L2 space, it's still very subjective because they're very highly centralized. All these L2s are, I mean, this is a very centralized L2. It's an L2 run by Coinbase. So you can't get it more centralized. So it's not in the ethos of crypto, you know, from, like an old school OG perspective, but it may be something which uses my practical, but I, I think we're struggling to find it, you know, developers are spread thin across too many projects and too many layers. And, and there's just not enough users out there that are in the space. Like people are just, um, you know, not like people just not using crypto projects much. And so you, you, you know, you're selling to the crypto community, which is a small community. And like, you could argue there's a hundred, I mean, if Coinbase only has a only, I say the word only, because it's not a lot. If Coinbase only has 110 million users worldwide out of seven billion people, um, that's, that's a very small number. And if you look at all of those 110 million people, how many of them are really hardcore crypto users that use on a regular basis? I would say maybe 20% to 30%. I think the rest are like, you know, when, when, when, when the market's flying, they go into the accounts, they go buy some Bitcoin, when they lose money, they leave, they don't come back. So how many of those are real active accounts, or maybe they're storing some crypto. So then you, you, you're selling tools to, you know, and apps to 20 million users, 30 million users worldwide who are really, really active and hardcore. And it, and then you're competing with, you know, a dozen L ones, a dozen or two L twos that are meaningful out there right now. And your Coinbase and you, you know, you own the user and you have all these users are very verified, but now I don't think they've solved identity either. Um, and so I don't know how this plays out. I mean, this seems like, it seems like too much competition for a bear market.

Jason Calacanis: I have not, I'll tell you what, I'm just going to, I'm just going to confess right now, Vinny. I also have not solved identity. Help me. Just kidding. Um, so it sounds like two things are happening here in the case of Coinbase specifically, one thing that's happening is obviously a need for diversification. We know that if your primary business relies on trading volume and you're not seeing a lot of that, you definitely have to diversify creating some version of AWS, which prints cash for Amazon seems kind of smart. Create a dev environment to help popularize the kinds of things that will bring more volume to Coinbase. The concern is, did you just create a dev playground

SPEAKER_108: and there are no kids in your neighborhood? Yeah. And on the AWS example, Molly, you know, I know this quite well, like one of my co-founders, my last company is one of the early creators wrote

SPEAKER_10: one of the first papers on AWS. Um, that was created for AWS, uh, sorry, for Amazon. The reason they had to create it is, you know, they had to scale their e-commerce business and, you know, every time, you know, these certain seasons came around and they wanted the ability to do that sort of with their own control. And so, um, you know, I think, uh, for, for Coinbase, what they really have to show. And that's why I started with that is maybe if they move their a hundred plus million people and a set of addition, like their core services, but some additional services to this blockchain and show the benefit of using it. So like, as AWS did, we may see some innovation happen there. And I think in advance of that, like, I, I haven't seen anything about Coinbase moving their entire, you know, um, trading system and everything else to, to this protocol, uh, to the site, to this L2. And so, you know, that, that's also a more difficult one in the case of Amazon, there was a, well, we run our entire business on this thing. And so, uh, and we get some leverage for doing it.

Jason Calacanis: You should do the same thing. Got it. So this is more like we popped up a four, a four pay playground in a neighborhood that doesn't have any kids. And we're not

SPEAKER_199: even going to send our own kids there. Yeah. They haven't made that clear, but that's what it seems like. It's a dangerous swing set.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I'm pushing. I'm taking this too far. And then I love it. I'm going to use that one.

Jason Calacanis: I like that four play playground, you know, I only have one skill in life and it's translation through metaphor. Um, what, who would they hope be hoping to attract outside of that 20 million hardcore users that you mentioned though? Like, would they be wanting to become the development platform for a choice for like the next time a Starbucks wants to do an NFT based reward program? I w I would think. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, some of the examples we've talked about before.

SPEAKER_38: So like big corporates that want to make a choice around a blockchain and, you know, they've probably seen, and I think on this, you know, we got to give the polygon team credit, right? Polygon is

SPEAKER_10: getting a lot of wins recently with, um, you know, companies, uh, definitely like fortune 500 companies. And so they're probably looking at that saying, Hey, how do we, how do we participate in that? Right. And so we, we stand by the blockchain. It's to Vinnie's point, we run it. Um, and, you know, bring your, um, loyalty system here, bring your NFT project here, bring, you know, whatever, bring your, bring great marketplaces here, but they really now have to have a creation of an entire ecosystem, which is, um, and that's also vastly different than AWS. When you create something on AWS, it's kind of usable everywhere. If you create something on this, on this particular blockchain,

SPEAKER_38: it's not usable everywhere else. Right. So you're really, you know, it feels much more like walled garden than it does sort of an open platform. Hmm. Interesting. So, okay. Before I let you go,

Jason Calacanis: we just have a few more minutes. What else is, what else is happening? That's cool. We have other stories

SPEAKER_17: in our, our lineup, but let's do a little, like a lightning round here. Uh, I thought the Spotify

SPEAKER_38: testing, uh, you know, playlist that could be unlocked by NFT holders was pretty cool. This goes, you know, we've, we always kind of search for these, um, uh, use cases. And I thought, I thought

SPEAKER_10: that was very, very interesting. So, um, what, what did you guys think of that? So token gated

Jason Calacanis: playlist, let's do a little explanation here. According to a series of tweets by Kingship, I'm reading from tech crunch, a metaverse band signed to universal music group that's happening already. Okay. Anyway, according to Kingship, uh, the streaming company, Spotify is piloting playlists that could be unlocked through NFTs in certain geographies. So under this pilot, Kingship has released a special playlist that could be accessed only by Kingship keycard NFT holders. So is this like a more complicated way to buy an album?

SPEAKER_38: I think it's, uh, maybe a way to have a collectible, right. That's associated with the album. So, um, you know, if we think back in the days, I don't think it ever happened in the CD era,

SPEAKER_10: but definitely in the vinyl era, the, you know, was it, you know, weren't the, um, the, I guess, what did you call it? Like the, the vinyl covers collectibles for people. And so this is a way to kind of recreate that in a digital environment. Like why, why take that joy away from folks? Right. Um, and so I, I, I view it as that it's kind of recreating something and it feels exciting.

Jason Calacanis: I feel like this could totally work with K-pop. Like, I don't know if you know, I mean, all of the kids who are into K-pop right now are, they buy CDs to like crazy so that they can have the album art. And most of them don't even have CD players. Like they don't like, they literally have a piece of dead media that most of them don't listen to. Although I did get my son's friend, like a super cute standup CD player. It's like pink and she can, you know, K-pop it up. I'm like, okay, great. You've unlocked a series of accessories that can go along with this, but this is very physical. Anyway, I could imagine K-pop kids would be very excited about this or people who are really Spotify, just side note, kind of experimenting. They're also doing the AI

SPEAKER_51: playlists. Yep. They are pushing really hard on a lot of these. That's great. Great to see that

SPEAKER_10: good innovation in the space, but yeah, so I, I kind of chalk it up to collectibles, right? I still

SPEAKER_164: have, uh, you know, my dad was a big fan of Pink Floyd and he has like an original dark side of the moon. And so that lives somewhere in my parents' house. So I, I can see the value there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_32: I have, I have a purple rain poster from the, you know, from the actual vinyl album. Really? Yeah. Oh, where do you keep it? Actually it's in my kid's room right now.

SPEAKER_222: Awesome. I should probably protect it better, but yeah, I have the album. Yeah. Oh, see,

SPEAKER_26: there you go. All right. I get it. You know, I get it. Okay. All right. I'm picking up what you're

SPEAKER_64: laying down. I'm not super into collectibles, but like, uh, you know, yeah, I could, I could see it.

Jason Calacanis: I could see it. Vinny, what do you think? He's like, we're not talking about identity anymore.

SPEAKER_64: I've lost interest. How do you feel about Spotify's identity service? Have they nailed it?

SPEAKER_87: No, well that's, they don't need to do identity. Do you have collectibles? Are you a collectible

SPEAKER_228: person? I just invested in collectibles.com. Um, I don't think they've announced anything yet,

SPEAKER_229: but it's coming in. What's that? Collectibles.com. Well, coming spring 2023. Yeah. So, so I'm

SPEAKER_74: actually big into collectibles. So you're all in on this space. Well, I could imagine the

SPEAKER_16: gathering cards from 2003. I think I got like 20 year old cards. I collected tons of those. I've got, uh, I can, I mean, I collect, I collect physical bitcoins. Um, I have, uh, you know, and they're not, don't worry, they're not my house. I put them away safely somewhere. So don't come over. Yeah. Don't come over trying to look for them. Um, but, uh, you know, it's, it's, um, I've always been to collectibles, uh, comic books. I've got some comic books. We've got some,

SPEAKER_22: um, you know, I like collectibles. I, I like digital. I mean, I'm a big NFT collector. I've got,

SPEAKER_16: you know, hundreds of NFTs over the years of collecting over eight years. Um, I think that, I think that digital, digital collectibles are going to take off.

SPEAKER_14: Collectibles as applied to music is definitely a longstanding.

SPEAKER_19: De Quincey as well, which is, uh, Keatley's, Keatley's company and, and they're, I mean, it's not really collectibles yet, but they're doing some cool stuff in the music NFT space.

SPEAKER_14: So NFTs are not dead unless it sounds like today's takeaway is NFTs are not dead.

Jason Calacanis: Unless you go labs continues to give them the worst reputation.

SPEAKER_240: No, I wouldn't say that. I'd say, I'd say you can keep doing what they want to do. Like, I think everyone, the more experiments we run in NFTs, the better. I have an NFT project launching

SPEAKER_65: later this month, um, called explorers. Um, you could actually, I think the website's

SPEAKER_16: up explorers nft.com. Um, do you have anything you want to, um, pitch today? We've like had a long

SPEAKER_22: civic pitch and explorers, explorers, explorers are digital. There you go. And we're using, we're using civic for identity, of course. Uh, but this episode is sponsored by Vinny Lingo.

SPEAKER_249: Amazing. On that note. The only thing that's happening in the crypto space right now is Vinny Lingo.

SPEAKER_253: I'm bullish on NFTs. I'm bullish on NFTs. I think they, I think it's just that we're in a,

SPEAKER_65: we're in the trough of disillusionment right now for NFTs. If you look at the Gartner curves, we're in the trough part and we'll come out of it.

SPEAKER_10: You know, what's really positive to see though, Molly, like through the arc of everything that's happened, you know, since the formation of this podcast is there are some awesome things being

SPEAKER_38: built right now. And the Spotify thing is exactly that, you know, it's not right. You know, like, what are all the criticisms, a scam, no utility. Right. And you're seeing all that come together. There's a real utility here, collectible, you know, people can understand it. It's tied to a real world thing. Hey, I want to listen to this album from this team. It's not like this thing that just, you know, people criticize like a picture of a monkey and, you know, what does it really mean? And so we're actually, if you take a step back, like, this is pretty cool. Like it's a real utility and, you know, we, we know the, the physical analog for it and let's, let's run with it. It's being promoted by a company that's doing a lot of innovative things, right. And Spotify. So I think this is, all these things are really good for the ecosystem. Right. And frankly, if it's a way for

Jason Calacanis: these artists to make money more directly and not rely on that crappy little split from Spotify streams, I think that could actually be really powerful. Yeah. And you can support your favorite

SPEAKER_38: artists through that. You have something connected to them. They can create future things associated with this NFT. I think it's really, really great. Yeah. I think you'll see audience, audience,

SPEAKER_75: anybody, audience will probably innovate a bit more in NFC space. Hopefully. Um,

SPEAKER_16: what do you think they'll do? Uh, yeah, who knows? Um, I, you know, but I've seen, I've seen, um, I think it was, um, Royal, which is, um, uh, Justin Blau's companies. Yep. Yeah. Between, you know, what he's doing with like creating these NFTs that have, um, royalties

SPEAKER_22: attached to it. What, when, you know, an audience is doing, I think there's something, yeah, we just, we, we, as a community, we just need to support these guys and, and have them, um, you know, keep experimenting and guys like tech is only where it is today because of thousands of failed experiments, right? And in fact, tens of thousands of probably millions of failed experiments over the past, you know, 20, 30 years. And we, we, we, every time we fail, the people who fail, learn something and then they either go build something new or someone else learns from their learnings and innovation happens that way. Innovation isn't a function of, you know, getting it right every single time, because that's not historically what's happened. We've gotten it wrong so often. It's that we learn from our mistakes and then we find what does work and then we double down on that and we actually make it work.

SPEAKER_124: And that's what I like about this segment. We tell you what stuff is Rolls-Royce and you don't

Jason Calacanis: have to care unless you have that kind of money and what stuff is actually going to be useful to you in the future. Thanks, Vinny. Thanks, Sunny. See you next time. Awesome. Thanks, Molly. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. We will see you back here tomorrow. If in the meantime, you have suggestions for topics or news you want us to cover, email the producers, producers at this week in startups.com and make sure you join us on Twitter. If you're still there

SPEAKER_04: at TWI startups, have a great week.