Base Is Different Than Other L2s l Overpriced JPEGs #190

Jesse - Welcome to Overpriced JPEGs. Glad to be here. Happy Friday. You and your your on chain summer Friday tee. Yeah, well, normally I just wear a black T or a gray to you. But it's Friday, it's on June 7. I was like let's mix it up. It's got a little color in there. Overpriced JPEGs Well, fun and friendly brand. You know, you're making your fashion decisions based on this. I know. Exactly. Well, very excited to chat with you. And congratulations, first of all on all the success that you've had in this rollout. And it feels like bass is just dominating my timeline and all the fun activations y'all have done here in the first week. So really excited to get into this conversation and appreciate what you're doing. Yeah, well, thank you. It's day one. That's my feeling. We are obviously exciting to see to see the world respond in a positive way and folks be fired up about the world coming on chain, but we feel like we're at the very beginning of what's going to be, you know, a long journey, but also a short journey to get the rest of the world on chain over the next few years. Well, that's what this whole conversation is going to really be about I think is is how do you plan to bring the next billion users on which is I know the the tagline essentially for bass. I don't want to dive I don't want to get too technical or dive too much.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
into like, Oh, you're on the Optimism stack or things like that. I think you've outlined up pretty well on other shows that deal with the technicalities, probably better than I do. And for folks who want that, we can put some in the show notes for other interviews to go listen to you. But I do think it's important to just kind of level set up front. And I want to use a question that we actually got on Twitter to do that, which is something I've heard you answer before. But let's let's just dive into it, which is what? What is Base really solving here that other l twos weren't solving? And what is like the real value proposition outside of or inclusive of but but maybe dive deeper on it? Like we're a public company? And there's now a layer two associated with us? Yeah, yeah, I think that like the starting point for answering that question is we don't think about layer two is a zero sum, or that this is kind of like base versus other layer twos. I think our general feeling and perspective and this came from about a year and a half of research is that in the future of the on chain platform, there's me many layer twos that run in parallel, that kind of collectively scale a theory. I mean, this is the super chain, this is the thing that we talk a lot about is kind of the collection of layer twos that make it all happen. And so I think, for us

Unknown Speaker  6:15  
base is is really a commitment from Coinbase a commitment from our team to contribute to that effort contribute to the effort of scaling Aetherium, of bringing the world on chain. So that's the starting point, it's positive sum is all about kind of how do we make the pie as big as possible? And how do we do that in collaboration with all these other folks who are building incredible technology? In terms of, you know, kind of inside of that context? How does Bayes really kind of stand out? And what are we focused on? I'd say the biggest thing is, is really ease of use both on the developer side, and on the user side. We're laser focused on how do we make it so a million developers and a billion users can come on chain. And I think the thing that, you know, we kind of have a unique position to do that from is that because we have been working historically, so closely with Coinbase, we have this opportunity to look end to end at that lifecycle, and to end from the underlying kind of technology stack of base all the way through different pieces of infrastructure and developer tools to the user experience in Coinbase and Coinbase, wallet and think, like what's actually required to make this work? What's required to make it so someone can go from never having been on chain before to doing something that's meaningful? That's interesting. That's cool on chain, and doing that in less than 60 seconds. And so I don't think we're quite there yet. You know, that's kind of been our Northstar this summer, as we've been working on on chain summer and all these things. But that's the goal, it's think end to end and figure out how do we get one really solid through line of this experience being excellent. So we can then replicate that again, and again, again, with every new on chain product, so that folks don't have to feel like it's scary coming on chain, they don't have to feel like it's too technical are just speculative. But instead, they can just see how powerful and cool this new platform is start to use the products. They're because they're easy to use, they're fun to use, and they make their lives better, and then kind of naturally fall into this transformation of the world where everyone comes on chain, and everyone lives better lives as a result of it. Love it. Let's do it.

Unknown Speaker  8:21  
Let's go. I've done great. It's been a great interview. And it's obvious. I mean, at a high level, I think that makes so much sense. And, you know, my brain can it's like, yes, Coinbase is an advantage here. And you get you can have this bigger picture of everything or front end, as you said, can you talk me through a little bit more specifically, like,

Unknown Speaker  8:41  
if there's anything you're incubating, that you can talk about where having the Coinbase affiliation, or the insights from Coinbase really makes a key difference in how something gets built? Yeah, I'll give two examples. One that's kind of like a new, like product area that we're thinking a lot about where I think that that will shine. And then the other is more kind of like just an illustration of what that looks like. And so on the new products, I think one of the big areas that we're excited about is identity. There's obviously a pretty big gap, I think in terms of identity tools, for kind of letting developers and applications know who people are on chain. And so I think this is a place where Coinbase has a really, you know, unique advantage in terms of having a large number of folks who we know who they are, and who we can start to kind of bring on chain, bring their identities on chain in a private way, and enable kind of new experiences that are around that. If you look at the kind of traditional financial system and you look at you know, in the United States and many other countries around the world, the most common financial products that people use, require people's identity, you know, like a credit card, right? There's under collateralized. And it's just not possible right now in crypto. And so I think like enabling better identity tools, having kind of Coinbase is resources. Coinbase is access Coinbase is a

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
kind of connection to customers to do that, I think that's one example where you kind of have that integration that is going to enable, like the next generation of products. So I think that's gonna take a little bit of time. Yeah, maybe had a question. No, I was just gonna try and really spell that out and see if I understand this, because that's an interesting one. So saying, like, hey, you know, so I'm obviously a Coinbase user. And so you might say, hey, we have this profile of the person, maybe we obscure name, and some of that key identifying information that makes people uncomfy, certainly in crypto, but say like, Hey, we have a profile of a person, maybe I'm not connected with real world coins, you can verify that, you know, I have my like, retina scan, thing, I'm real, whatever. But the point being, you have this, and you said, you know, my kind of trading behavior or what I've bought previously, or whatever, and then that can be packaged up, you know, in a way that exists on chain that allows me to move through a defy world in a way that just makes everybody in defi safer. Because you can verify I'm not a bot or I'm not, you know, I've got reputation built up. And I can start getting those kinds of under collateralized loans on defy because I have reputation points. That's what you're that's exactly, exactly. And, you know, like a product. Another product that we have today that it's kind of using the like MVP of that is we have a quest product in Coinbase. That lets developers reach Coinbase users basically say, Hey, we're gonna give rewards to Coinbase users to do certain things. And that relies on knowing that these are real human beings, because if I'm a developer building a business, I don't want to be paying for bots to come and do things, I want to be paying for real folks who I can actually know convert over time to be kind of like, genuinely beneficial and good for my business. And so you know, that that products been kind of just rolling out over the last few months and doing really well. But I think kind of having the next level of infrastructure is going to enable even better versions of that, for developers. And I think that's gonna enable a whole lot of growth for these applications. So that's kind of like a very tactical example, where it's like, here's that new innovation that basically can unlock from coin base that will enable new applications, new use cases that are going to bring more people on chain. And I think that that kind of like example, people often looking for kind of that tactical version of it. I think one thing that's kind of hard to explain to people is, if you think about the crypto experience today, it's very fragmented. And I kind of think about it like many links in a chain, right? From saying, I want to do something on chain two, I did something on chain, there's probably like 20 different steps that cut across a bunch of different pieces of technology products. And I think right now, a lot of the links in that chain are broken. And if you've one of them that's broken, people get stuck. And so it's like, oh, I need to get a while Oh, now I need to like do my identity in the wallet so I can get funds. Now I have my identity. Now I need to like, get the right funds. And now I need to get the right funds on the right network. Now I need to like make sure I know the wallet is that the apps on that network to like, there's the steps. And even if one breaks, everything breaks. And so I think one of the things that we are really uniquely positioned to do is because you know, base is kind of being incubated inside of Coinbase, we have the bottom or the at one end of that stack. And then there's the other teams at Coinbase, like Coinbase and Coinbase wallet, they have the other end the front end like UI and actual wallet. And that means that we can look end to end and be like, is this working like see where users in their journey are falling off? Yes, and experience it and then have the ability to make it better. And so like this summer was on chain summer, obviously that there's like a big part of on chain, something that's like, let's just build energy, let's get people excited, let's get people creating. But another big reason that we've done this is to force ourselves to make that end to end journey work. And so every day in August, there is one thing to do on chain that we are curating and a bunch of other things that the community great, but one thing that we curate, and what that means is from August 9 until August 31, every day of the weeks, Saturdays and Sundays included, there will be people who are looking at the experience of getting someone from no wallet to doing an on chain action and being like what breaks. And every day. I've done this for the last few days. I'm gonna do it for the next few days. I have an hour long meeting with the teams from Coinbase, the teams from clamminess law with the teams from base, and we've literally write what worked well today. What didn't work well today, what do we need to fix? That's very interesting that that's kind of a hard thing to describe in terms of like, basic, like why is base different, but like it's a big thing and the benefits and the improvements that come to Coinbase and Coinbase wallet and other wallets because we have similar relationships with other wallets

Unknown Speaker  14:45  
are not just going to create a base, right? They're going to accrue to all of these chains because that's the way this has all been built. But I think base and coin base we have the opportunity to kind of be first through the line and push the boundaries because of that tight knit and

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
integration, because of the way we're incubating this, it just make it really work and kind of be the the folks who figure it out first. And thereby enable a bunch of use cases and naval, a bunch of new developers to kind of get excited, enable a bunch of new users to get excited and help unlock this next wave of crypto adoption. And so, yeah, that's a hard one to describe to people. Oh, that's, I think you've done a great job and totally clicked for me. And I think the obvious next question that I would love to know if you can share is like, alright, you only have three days of data, but like, what is starting to emerge in those first three days as the places where things are breaking? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a lot.

Unknown Speaker  15:40  
Like it's all broken.

Unknown Speaker  15:44  
It's not broken, right? Like a lot of people. A lot of people are doing these things, right. Like, if you look at the activity that we've been driving through on chain summer, like there's, there's really significant, you know, activity that's happening. And so it's not all broken, right, the chain is working really well, the products are working really well. But again, there's like a million cuts that can get in the way of new people starting in the way of existing people who already have wallets activating. And I think that's a lot of what we're trying to figure out. It's like, how do we get rid of those paper cuts? How do we make it easier for folks to just do the thing, I'll share one example of this, this, this hasn't come from the last three days, this came from, you know, the last two months when we were preparing for this year, because even with two months of hard work, like it's still not where we want it to be. But you know, two months ago, we were like, Okay, on Gen server, it's coming, like it's here, and we're ready to join the party. We want to do some cool kind of like out of home advertising, where we kind of try and reach the everyday person to be like, get involved. And actually think today, those started going up. So we have like wild postings. Like, you know, the wheat pastes going up in like, I think like five cities around the United States, starting today for the next two weeks, just like telling the story of on chain summer trying to get people on chain. And we started thinking about that and experimenting with it. And what we found was, the way we wanted to activate people was you scan the QR code, you men, and then you get to do something like three steps, scan, men, pizza, scan, men, music, scan, men, art, scan, men, gay, whatever. And we started experimenting with that with Coinbase wallet. And the experience has actually scan, do 15 steps of onboarding that took five to seven minutes, and then min, and then get the thing that you want. And so in the last two months, we cut out 14 of those steps. And so now when you download Coinbase, wallet, you open app, you do face ID and you have a wall and you can get in dancin summer. That's it. And that is like, I mean, it's massive. Yeah, I feel like there's like 10 More of those, right where it's like, Okay, now to get funds on to base, we need to figure out how to get it from like 10 steps to one step, you know, like to make sure that you can get it from another L two, if you have it on another L two to get it from L one and the most cost effective way if you have it on what to get it funded if you don't have any crypto. And so I think this is a lot of what we're trying to do is like, just get really, really in it and be like, how do we go from zero to doing something cool on chain in less than 60 seconds. So we have more work to do, we got a lot more work to do.

Unknown Speaker  18:30  
So I'm curious, like, that's awesome. And I love hearing all of that. And I noticed intuitively as a user that there's probably a lot that needs to be done with all of that as a user of all of these things, because L twos are always a little clunky bridging from one to the next and all the rest of it. How much are you right now actively thinking about or measuring?

Unknown Speaker  18:54  
New users, right? If the goal is to onboard new users, are you in this very just kind of tactical, let's just like fix this experience using the people who are in this ecosystem right now? Because we need to have that working before we can get new people on? Or are you actively in a stage where like, we're actively trying to recruit new people to this space? We're ready for that. Let's go get them. I think I think it's a mix of both. I do think that like we are, it's like from from the experiences that we're having, I think it's a little early for us to go like all the way and be like we're going to spend huge amounts of money on getting the whole world on chain. Right. Like, we're close. We're really close. But I think we need like a few more months, maybe like six more months. I don't know exactly how long to get more and more kinks worked out of this. Before that that really starts happening. I think one place that we are not holding back on is on the builder side and the developer side and that's that's been another big reason why I've done on chain summer, like a big part of it was obviously working through this end to end user experience. But another big part of it was starting to really tell the story for builders that like

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
It's ready, right? Like maybe the user experience in the user journey is still has a little bit more baking to do. But from an Application Builder perspective, you have low cost layer twos that are finally cheap enough to build incredibly powerful applications, you have wallets that are good enough to get like a critical mass of folks actually using those applications and getting better and better every day, we have this identity infrastructure that's emerging. And so the window that, you know, the windows open to build applications on chain that I think will reach millions, 10s of millions, billions of people. And one of the things that I really believe about all of this is that I think we've been as like an industry a little bit.

Unknown Speaker  20:45  
Kind of like collectively traumatized by the last 10 years of the way crypto has grown, which basically flat. So crypto is flat from a growth perspective, except for these speculative spikes. But that's, that's like not normal, right? If you think about normal product life cycles, it's like you build a product, it takes a long time to find product market fit, and then you find product market fit, and then you grow. And so you you grow, right, and then it's like consistent growth, and you can look every month, you're like, wow, we're growing, that means that this product is working. And in crypto, like we've had some of that, but like if you look at actual on chain users, like it's not quite there. And I think the thing that is just starting to shift, I don't know whether it you know, has changed six months ago or three months ago or right now, or will change three months or six months in the future, is we're gonna hit a point where this product actually starts working like the product of on chain, the product of crypto, and then we're going to start growing, and we will not stop growing until the whole world is on chain. And I think we're I think we're there. I mean, I think I think it started this. I can't I can't stop smiling. It's so funny. I mean, yeah, we grow. And then we watched the whole rest of the world tell us that we're dead.

Unknown Speaker  21:54  
And I told you so and you're like, Ah, this doesn't feel as good as it used to be.

Unknown Speaker  22:02  
Yeah, yeah. Well know what my next question was going to be going into, when I've heard you speak. And when I think about bass, and maybe this is just the lens, I come at things through, given the nature of what my podcast is, like,

Unknown Speaker  22:16  
feel like you think a lot about consumer applications, which makes a lot of sense. And I guess that's not necessarily distinct from defy, but but I think of it as a little bit, you know, distinct and I so I think of you know, your your optimism, main net, and your arbitrations as being really defy chains. I think eatable is having this strong gaming focus. And I've sort of bucketed based in my head a bit is like this consumer application. Yeah, chain. Yeah. So I guess you're, you're nodding. So I guess you're agreeing. But I want to get you to react to that. And is that a is that a fair perspective for me to have. And then I want to dive in on that. I think that's a totally fair perspective, I, and I think it comes from a few places. One is like, I spent four and a half years building consumer products at Coin base three and a half, four years before that, starting a consumer facing company like that, that's a lot of where my like heart has been, I also have been an engineer my whole life, I also lead the full developer replatforming of our mobile apps at Coinbase, to a whole new platform of React Native. And so like, I kind of live in both worlds. But I think that that part of me is there. And so it's definitely influencing kind of what base is. I think the other thing that I have thought a lot about as we brought bass to market is like, what do we want to be when we grow up. And I think that coming out of Coinbase being incubated inside of Coinbase, the default for what we'd be when we grew up is a finance chain, you know, where it's just like, this is finance. And when I think about the mission that we've had of Coinbase, and like my personal mission, finances a part of it, but it's really about,

Unknown Speaker  23:45  
like, economic freedom, it's about creating incredible products. It's about like creating the next generation of the internet. Like that's why we've been doing this not because we want to enable a bunch of like, new ways of doing financial things. That's not like the next high frequency trading and, like, Yeah, and so I think that there has been

Unknown Speaker  24:07  
a component of this that has been me and the team and Coinbase really intentionally trying to be like, Look, finance is a part of it, but it's not all of it. And what we think is the most important thing to be focusing on is these consumers use cases because we think that that's going to be the thing that really ignites this next wave of growth and the finance stuff will slot in it will it will you know, enable people all over the world we think that payments and messaging Are you know, obviously you know a big part of it, but the consumer the consumer use cases and consumer products and then novel stuff that people can do from a consumer perspective on chain is what we want to be leading with and where we're focused. And it's it's cool to see the pieces coming together like with Adrienne summer we're doing on Jade summer, you can subscribe to unchained summer via messaging and Coinbase wallet and

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
So that's like on chain messaging connecting you to on chain games and on chain media and on chain music and on chain restaurants. And like the flywheel is starting to work like we're seeing more people use messaging because they started using on chain. So like, the pieces are clicking together and I'm really fired up about it. I we're going to talk about on chain restaurants because I'm here in New York. So I'm we're gonna Blackbird in a minute. But I'm curious, as we're talking about this vision of what you are, when you grow up, what are the metrics you would look out? What would success look like from a metric perspective? When you're grown up? When you're grown up? Like what do you be tracking to know that it's working million builders billing users? We that's it, right? We ask you, this is maybe a stupid question. But like, how will how will you track? How do you track new users? Cuz obviously TBL is not it isn't a metric for that. And even wallets can be a little tricky, right? Yeah, I think wallets can be a little bit tricky. But also like, not that tricky. Like, all of this data is out there. Right? It's all open. And there's like increasingly good heuristics that you can use for understanding what's real addresses versus what's not real identity. What are bots? Yeah. And you know, the identity piece fits into this, right? Like, you can look, okay, there's this address have a world ID doesn't have a gitcoin passport. Right? And so can you get to like 100% comments? No, but can you get to heuristics that are like pretty good for being able to determine like, what is the real user activity happening on these chains? Yes. Same thing for developers, like who's deploying smart contracts? And so like, with my, with my teams, every day, I look at those dashboards, I literally look at like, how many people deployed smart contracts yesterday? How many of those people do our internal heuristics, say, our real builders? How many of the people who transacted are real human beings? And I think those are our North Stars. It's like, we want to get a million builders, a billion users on chain. And so the thing we look at is how many users and how many builders are on chain right now? And are we in the phase where we have gotten consistent week over week month over month growth? And if not, what is the new developer infrastructure that we need to be building to enable those builders to come on chain? Or like, how do we help those builders or Coinbase builders create that next application? Yeah, that brings the users on board. Yeah, I want to ask about how involved you see bass or Coinbase, being in terms of insights, sharing with the daps that are building with y'all, and even just like the the UX the UI, so maybe the best way to get into that is let's let's start with this. I think I know some of your answers to this. But what are the consumer applications, the daps right now that you're most excited about that are either already on base or coming? Or, you know, that could include like a parallel, which of course, is a game, but But what are you most excited about right now? Oh, man, so many, so many things I'm excited about.

Unknown Speaker  27:49  
On the kind of like consumer application side, I think there's obviously the whole kind of like on chain media space. So the Zuora manifold highlights of the world, all those folks have been very early supporters of base. You know, I think there's like 10, or something different media products that are launching on beta that have launched on base and are participating in on chain summer in some way. I personally, like have known the Zora folks for ever, because they all worked at Coinbase with me, and they've really influenced my thinking on all this stuff. And I'm very convinced that on chain media is going to be a huge driver of growth. And so I'm really excited about that I now mint, something on chain multiple times a day, but I mean, that's Anjan summers really set it off even before on chain summer, that was like, at least once a day. And it's low cost. It's like a buck to collect this cool piece of art from someone who I think is cool. And who I know, like appreciate it. I mean that we've all been kind of conditioned to give our appreciation and likes and comments on Tik Tok, but I see no reason why that doesn't change to low cost transactions that are meant

Unknown Speaker  28:53  
it's just going to happen. So I think that that's gonna be a huge one. I think obviously, gaming, we're very convinced is going to be a big one parallel leading the way today, you know, they're, they're doing an on chain summer drop for their starter pack, it's awesome. Can, you know, get the like 40 cards and get playing, skip the line on the private data. And they like their trading card game that they've launched very serious, very cool game that lots of people love. And like, they're just getting started. They had this AI game called colony that they've been incubating for last six months that's powered by open AI. It's like an MMO RPG basically, that all of the agents in it are like full AI agents. And they just like learn and build the world. And they have a full asset like world that they've been building for parallel already. And they're plugging that in. And so I think I think like the whole parallel gaming ecosystem is going to be massive. So I'm very excited about that parallel makes me so happy. I was saying to your team earlier because I had them I had them on the podcast really early on in the lifecycle of this podcast and like

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
fairly early in their, in their journey, I think they were like guest number five or six on the on the show. And to see them really feel like they live up to the hype because there was so much hype, even in the early days, you know for what they were building and how they were doing it is just so gratifying because it felt like there was such a world where like, those things can go can go the other direction. So I had a number of people who were asking questions about parallel who are specifically excited about the the parallel news here. So we'd love to have you just speak a little bit to how that partnership came to be how to how to do in parallel sync up, and why are they building on base?

Unknown Speaker  30:35  
How did that partnership came to be? I that new interestingly, that one wasn't, that wasn't one that came through me, I think a bunch of folks on our team had gotten to know Sasha, one of the founders, or Carlos, one of the founders of parallel. And, you know, as they were thinking about where to build felt like there's just a lot of alignment, we were both interested in kind of reaching the next mainstream audience with consumer products, and, you know, just started getting built building together, and had a lot of fun doing that I just had dinner with a bunch of them in Paris. And that was super fun. You know, I think there's kind of like

Unknown Speaker  31:09  
I was I was actually talking about this with someone the other day, they're all of these layer twos are starting to have their own cultures. And I think that, like the base culture is a builder culture. And it has a few traits that I found to be pretty consistent. One is that people are incredibly hardworking. And I think that that comes from like Coinbase, which is like the hardest working company I've ever been a part of me, like I

Unknown Speaker  31:36  
I work very hard.

Unknown Speaker  31:39  
And just like a bunch of other people who've been around from the beginning. So I think that's a big part of it. I think there's also a part of the culture that is like, we do the right thing. Like, we do the right thing, always.

Unknown Speaker  31:51  
And

Unknown Speaker  31:53  
then another one that I think really stands out is like we're one like we're a team. Like, this is a team sport, not an individual sport. And I think that there's, there's just a lot of folks who feel alignment with that culture. And that brings us together like seven distinct from the value prop of bass or like, you know, the commercial terms, it's like, no, we like, share our values, and five, and we want to be building together.

Unknown Speaker  32:24  
I was I was, I was talking about, like, I cuz I've been trying to analogize and think about how does the super chain come together because it's this complex thing, right, where you have different altitudes, and they have to fit together. And they're like, somewhat competitive, but also somewhat, I mean, but very collaborative and all aligned economically. And

Unknown Speaker  32:43  
one of the mental models I've been using and this is not reflective of the global reality of all these tattoos, but more of the cultural reality of what I'm seeing develop is I was I've been trying to think about like OPI main net and Zuora network and base and what regions they would be in the United States, if we give them things.

Unknown Speaker  33:01  
I am increasingly convinced that Opie may net will end up being kind of like DC, where it's like, under the seat of the government. And there's like, obviously, a lot of very important stuff there. But it's, it's secret, right? Like, that is the place where the government lives. And so there's a lot of other stuff that like, it doesn't make sense to live there. And then Zara is starting to, I think, because it's like Brooklyn, you know, it's like the like creative raw or warehouses. Like, I mean, man, like, they're so good. They're so good, right? And it's like, I want to go there. Like I maybe don't live there. Like I'm not a creative, like at my core. I'm a builder on my shirt. What a fool me anyways.

Unknown Speaker  33:42  
And then I think that if I had to kind of like play space, it would be California, right? You'd be like, Silicon Valley. And there's still creativity there. Right? Like, but it's it's different. Right? Like the base team didn't launch base from the Brooklyn warehouse. We went to F WB fast and Idlewood, California in the mount? Yes, I actually want that.

Unknown Speaker  34:04  
From the star like we brought our store like we launched from the year with the culture of California. Yeah, and being surrounded by redwoods. And there's this like economic grounding of base that I think comes from Coinbase. And Coinbase was obviously started in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And I think it's, again, it's not financial, it's not like this is Wall Street. This is like this is the place that people build companies, they build products, they build things that are going to change the world. And I don't know if those analogies are perfect, but it's the best mental model I've gotten to thus far of like, how people could think about these and how people can start to be like,

Unknown Speaker  34:47  
how would I pick or how would I decide where

Unknown Speaker  34:51  
have you started slotting in arbitration? Have you got Ziqi thinking? They're like, wherever you put these other. You haven't gotten that far.

Unknown Speaker  34:59  
Mm.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
On day two of this analysis

Unknown Speaker  35:03  
of this analogy, let me introduce you to a brand new company that I could not be more excited about web three sense, a web three analytics platform that combines on chain data with Social Media Insights to give you the deepest, most meaningful intelligence into any NFT community. I have tested other analytics platforms out there. But web three sense has the most comprehensive capabilities I've seen in the NFT ecosystem. They apply it sophisticated data science to Wallet histories to determine behavioral patterns and helps shape predictive analytics. In other words, they can tell you which Twitter accounts are actually the influencers in your space. And they can tell you what resonates most within a community by looking at what other communities token holders are involved in the number of use cases here is virtually unlimited. So whether you're a trader, a creator, institution, brand, agency, I promise web three sense has data that you want to see with the deep end actionable insights that you need to build, analyze, grow, start, whatever you want to do within the NFT space. And in terms of building a business and a community. Now, they are still in very early days. So they're eager to connect with the community. So if you're interested in learning more about what what three cents can do for you and your business, and you should be go and fill out the very short form link to in the show notes. And someone who their team will reach out with more information and an opportunity for a product demo. Trust me, you won't regret it. Let me ask you this. And I totally understand. You don't want to hit any of these l TOS against each other. And nor do I and I think it is all a creative and rising tide lifts all boats in a in an in the phase Development Development that this is all is at. But we've talked about gaming. And I think a lot of people believe in gaming as a use case, I think of something like immutable, which is decided to be very gaming specific focused, which means that they start developing things like they have this global order book and they have passport, which is a tool for developers building games, like, Do you think there's something that gets lost by going more broad based and not hyper focusing like that?

Unknown Speaker  36:54  
Hey, it's just, it's just different. I don't know, if there's something that gets lost, right? Like

Unknown Speaker  37:02  
I think the base will likely end up doing commerce with

Unknown Speaker  37:06  
more chains than any other chain in the world. Right? Like, if you think about the, the,

Unknown Speaker  37:14  
like cross chain transactions, I think that base will be very, very densely cross chain, in that it will be kind of acting as an economic hub that connects a bunch of these other gonna be the Silicon Valley Bank.

Unknown Speaker  37:28  
Silicon Valley, is Silicon Valley Bank did finance a lot of these startups and was like this center for these companies. Do I think that that that will mean that like, we might lose out on certain specialized things? Sure, absolutely. But I think that that's like a really needed part of this infrastructure that we're building. And it feels like it's the thing that we're most well suited to build.

Unknown Speaker  37:54  
And, yeah, it's, it's also Yeah, like, it's, I'm me.

Unknown Speaker  38:02  
I love throwing parties, like, I don't want to just throw a game party, you got to have diversity.

Unknown Speaker  38:08  
You got to have energy, you got to have the technology people and the people and the people who are starting businesses like yeah, that I think is what is going to create this next generation of the internet. And that's, that's what we want to be part of. So you said the parallel relationship didn't start initially with you, it came through how much are you and your team actively going out to recruit partners you want, versus just opening up the doors and saying, come in, and hey, we're here, we planted the flag come build.

Unknown Speaker  38:37  
This.

Unknown Speaker  38:39  
It's definitely a mix. It's a mix. We, I mean, like, it's a mix. And we ran an incredibly diligent, thoughtful go to market over the last nine months. I mean, if you look, if you look out, and I saw, I saw someone tweet this, and so I will quote them. But if you look at what we've done in the last week, like we launched a network with 100, daps, that are like useful that people are doing things on. And we've gone from having like no transacting users to today, we will have more transacting addresses than any other L to every time I look at your TA TVL. It's like gone up by like, 20 million, like, like, you know, and so, you know, five hour periods. That doesn't just happen. Like, that is literally, you know, starting in December, we started talking to people and we started saying, Hey, we're building base, we want you to be a part of it. And we've been blessed for the last nine months to have a incredible, incredible, incredible number of people throw their chips in with us and say we want to be a part of it too. And I think a lot of those people have are starting elsewhere. Right? They're coming from a theory over there. They're like expanding from optimism may net, to be a part of bass. And I think that that's a really necessary seed, right? Like our thesis was like the way we want to launch bases. We want there to be things for people to do

Unknown Speaker  40:00  
When they come from Coinbase, we don't want to just start with an empty chain, we want to have things for people to do when they come from Coinbase. So we can actually do this end to end experience testing, and kind of like making better that we were talking about earlier. But I think that that, like that kind of go to market was very essential for the beginning of base, because it Venice gets started is like we call it the minimum viable ecosystem. But I don't think that it's the thing that gets us to the next phase, the thing that gets us to the next phase is that base builds and organic culture of people who live in Silicon Valley, or you live in California, you know, or live in base and like, want to be building with us. And I think the thing that's probably been the most exciting and inspiring for me over the last two weeks, as we've worked our way towards main net, is, I'm part of a chat group that was started not by me, started by someone else. And they're now like 30 people in it. And they are just figuring out how to build base and how to build culture on base. And I get to watch, I get to listen, I get to like, shoot some ideas in there every now and then. But it's like they're doing their thing. And sometimes they they're like doing things I'm like, I don't know, if I would have done that. But it's theirs. And that.

Unknown Speaker  41:14  
I mean, that's like, it's the most beautiful thing. And it's only possible because of decentralization only possible because of how these platforms work that that could even exist. So you're getting at something important. And you referenced this earlier. Right, which is it's it's the launch, I think has been awesome. And I think everyone would consider incredibly successful. And you cited some of the stats just now the 100 daps, essentially, when you launched and just transactions growing every every moment.

Unknown Speaker  41:40  
And that's great. But you know, how do you keep from being threads, right? Where you have this fanfare, and you've got a ton of excitement. And for the month of August, you've got a lot of activity, and then the hype dies down and the interest wanes? And like, Do you have a pipeline of developers that you're thinking about how to strategically roll out for the next 12 months? How far out are you thinking to keep and maintain the ecosystem? from falling into that doldrum? Not 12 months? Okay, that's all months. But yeah, we definitely have a pipeline and we have stuff lined up for a while. But also, I don't know, I've kind of gone back and forth, like, we obviously did a lot of planning and preparing for on chain summer.

Unknown Speaker  42:20  
But it's a lot of like centralized, like, there is a lot of centralization to that right to try and coordinate trying to coordinate it. And I think there's people on my team, who I think have given me a lot of really good feedback on that. I'm just like, we gotta let go, you gotta let go of control and figure out what are the investments that we make in enabling those next wave of builders, so that like, even if it's scary, we just trust that they're going to come and they're going to be there. And so I think it's going to be a balance of that, right? Like, we're not going to go all the way to the spectrum of like, Oh, totally hands off, we're also not going to keep being like, fully planned out and coordinated for everything. But what I will say is, we have a lot a lot of people were building on base right now. And that is a very good leading indicator that there'll be a lot of activity that said,

Unknown Speaker  43:08  
like, everyone, yeah, everyone has seen the startup graph, where it's like, peak of excitement, trough of sorrow, like, you know, long sustained Harbor, were day one, like, this is the peak of the excitement phase. Yeah, amazing. It's been awesome. I'm so excited. But like, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, if you're out in the world, like I am not gonna lie to you, like, it's, we're gonna reach the trough of sorrow, that's every single project product company in the history of anything has reached that phase. And so whether it's in September, or November, December or January, whenever, like, it's, it's going to come and I've now been working in crypto for a decade. And it's still day one. And so when that moment comes, what we're gonna do is we're gonna put our head down, you're gonna get good build and grind through it and make it happen. I mean, when you say you're investing, I understand your theory, or you're, you're like, hey, you know, we have to let go at a certain point and trust that the builders, if you build it, the builders will come, so to speak, right, and they'll continue to build on it. That and we just need to make our investments in making the richest ecosystem possible for them, I'm assuming is that a combination of both? Certainly, the technical investments that we talked about up top here, which is watching the user flow, figuring out what works, what doesn't work, presumably sharing some of those insights with people who are building the daps.

Unknown Speaker  44:31  
And then also monetary investments like, are you I should probably know, this. Maybe it's been announced, but like, Are there investment funds that you or Coinbase have, or to make sure that there's a ton of incentivized, I'm sure, yeah. I mean, huge investments on the technical side, from a decentralization perspective, from a developer tooling perspective, just to make it easy to build and to make sure that the platform we're building is secure, scalable and decentralized because that's what enables an open global economy on chain. On the monetary side. Yeah, we have a base ecosystem fund that we've been making, really small precede

Unknown Speaker  45:00  
precede investments out of since February. So I think we've done like seven investments, maybe all very early stage all just in people who feel like builders, who we think are building cool on chain products. And then we are just starting to do our first grants. So this summer, we have 100 eath worth of grants that's live. We've used this tool in called prop house, which comes from ecosystem. Yeah. And so we have four different prop house rounds that are running right now. One for on chain summer one for building on base, one for standard crypto. So if you record a little minute video about like how crypto changed your life, you can earn like one or two eath, and then one for account abstraction. And so that's kind of our first grant experiment we're going to scale are kind of like Grant spending and investment. We really want to focus our grants not on like pay to play where it's like, we'll pay you to come bring your app here, but instead, like finding builders who are building awesome things and making sure that they have the resources to keep building. So what are the biggest risks to base right now? And another way to maybe frame this that I asked every so often on this podcast? Is if this somehow doesn't work? What why? Yeah, the risk? The thing that gets me a little scared, I would say is, I think that people have a lot of expectations of like, Coinbase has 10s of millions of users Coinbase NFT, where everyone's like, right, that's it, we've hit it the mainstream, everyone's gonna buy it.

Unknown Speaker  46:31  
Bring 10s of millions of people and I was actually trying to figure out like how to tweet this or like, do a little video on this the other day, it's like, I have some good news. And I have some bad news. The bad news is that Coinbase will not bring users, the good news is you will build incredible products, that Coinbase will work tirelessly to get in front of users and make it so that the users want to use them. That is it. Like if we don't have good products, Quimby's can't do anything. Yes, we can. Like there's no magic light switch that Coinbase can turn on that cycle now will just funnel all of these millions of users into products that don't work. And so I think the fear for me is that people will like project that expectation and like oh Coinbase is gonna solve our problems. Coinbase is gonna bring all these users Coinbase is gonna make it so millions of people magically come on chain. And the message that I want to give to people is like, Nope, we are here to help, we are going to every day retro, how did the user journey from Coinbase all the way through your DAP on base break, and we will fix that, we will make it so good. And we will work tirelessly to do that. But if at the end of the day, we do not have incredible products that are built on chain doesn't matter. And so the most important thing that I think anyone can be doing is build building those incredible products. And we've created a platform where you can do that with base recruiting wallets that are gonna get better and better to let people use them with Coinbase and Coinbase wallet. And we are here to listen to feedback to give you data to give you better tooling to make all this possible. But we got to build great products. As we talk about start, we started the show talking about the value prop of Coinbase specifically, I know you've said log base is open permissionless anyone can build, there's no level of curation there because there can't be that's gonna, you know, is completely at odds with what this whole thing is. However, Coinbase, of course, can be creational. And so what is the relationship? How much will Coinbase surface, the best apps most popular after promising daps? And to what extent is Coinbase becoming and AppStore? Essentially in that sense? Yeah, yeah, well, you hit on it exactly right, like base is gonna remain open and permissionless Coinbase is gonna remain the safe, trusted, easy to use interface that lets you access the best of the open permissionless world. And so if you're someone who likes to live on the edge, like you can access Bayes however you want, you can go on the block explorer and transact. Right. And you know, maybe you'll run into some crazy stuff that gets paid, it's like you do your own research.

Unknown Speaker  49:08  
But if you're an everyday person, you can access it to Coinbase. And we'll have ratings and reviews will have, you know, warnings if you're running something that feels a little scary, like, that's going to be a much more hands on experience. And if if you open up, you're gonna open up the Coinbase app, and you go to the homepage. And we're just going to experiment with this. But if you go to the homepage, and you scroll down below the assets, you'll see like new daily,

Unknown Speaker  49:31  
basically, right IDC base paid

Unknown Speaker  49:36  
200 People like painted this canvas and then they sold it as an NF T and it sold for like, like three eath or something and then that was all split between those people. So like, this is like literally the the MVP of MVP is here. But it's not hard to imagine how this expands into much more engaging feed of like here's a bunch of really

Unknown Speaker  50:00  
cool stuff to do on chain. And so it's gonna be media, it's gonna feel like tick tock, where it's like, oh, I just can scroll through this. And these are all engaging things that I can like, I can mean I can do whatever. So it's gonna be game, so it's gonna be financial products. But that's, that's the lens, you know,

Unknown Speaker  50:15  
like Brian gave us like some of this new cycle of like swimming, it's gonna be a super app, a Super App is a web two concept, a super app is like we as a centralized party are going to build every single thing, and it's going to be a super app, like Coinbase is going to be the gateway to the on chain economy, and the on chain economy is gonna be built by millions of builders all over the world. And Coinbase is gonna make it easy for anyone to use that. And that's not super app. That's like, that's the future isn't the gateway, it's a super gateway

Unknown Speaker  50:45  
to your superhighway, you know, to the new frontier bank that's going west.

Unknown Speaker  50:52  
I want to talk a little bit about your marketing strategy for all this, you mentioned, kind of rolling this out or with friends with benefit and the the festival they did out in California. And

Unknown Speaker  51:05  
my sense would be that maybe you haven't gone full steam on all of the Normie marketing yet, because you said you're maybe six months away from feeling like things are really ready for that. But is that the plan is that is the plan to put a lot of spend behind Marketing to Increase marketing, maybe even the consumer apps themselves more than base to a normal audience or No, I won't comment on like coin bases formal plans here, right? Like I think our common bases, formal plans, but like that's,

Unknown Speaker  51:32  
at some point, these products are going to start working. And at that point, we will distribute them really broadly. Like that's right, like,

Unknown Speaker  51:40  
what was the connection with the F web, we had a big presence, their base had a big problem.

Unknown Speaker  51:46  
We flew our whole team to activity B fast for the three days before fast. And we launched we opened up base for bridging was actually supposed to originally be the main net launch, but then we were running behind. And so we had to do this like phased approach

Unknown Speaker  52:00  
the whole thing. So why there what what made sense from a marketing perspective or otherwise, like why did you choose to do it there, that actually wasn't driven by marketing is driven by it was driven by shoot by me, it was driven by two things really, one is that I felt like when we launched this thing, we all want it, we all had to be together. Like

Unknown Speaker  52:21  
you only get to find a chain once. And like all of us have worked for the last year or two years on this. And missing that opportunity to be there at the beginning. Didn't feel like we could do that. And so I think a big driver of it was just like, be together, like feel what it feels like to be together when we are doing this thing that if we, if we are successful, like this piece of technology could be around for 10s of hundreds of years. I mean, who knows, right? Like, I think Aetherium is gonna be around for hundreds of years, like base could be around for hundreds of years. And so getting to all be together, I think that was a big driver of it. And then why be together at fast.

Unknown Speaker  53:06  
And two reasons what one is like, there's kind of part of it that was like it fell on brand is like this California, like we're gonna do this from the redwoods, like, we're gonna have a story, right? Like we didn't launch this from the Coinbase New York office, like we went into the mountains, and we launched it with stars like

Unknown Speaker  53:21  
that. That is a part of our story. I think that was one big drivers just like wanting a story. But I think the bigger one was, when I look at Coinbase. And I look at even the base team. And I think about what is the kind of biggest risk? You ask this question. And I guess I didn't give the right answer before. The biggest risk is that when you launch anything out of a company is imbued with a corporate culture. But chains and decentralized ecosystem, you can't have a corporate culture, you need a culture, like a real human culture. And I think that one of the most important exercises and things that I'm trying to get our team to do, and I think that like every team, probably around the whole world needs to be doing right now to be successful, is figuring out how to embrace the native on chain culture that's emerging, and figure out how to, like generate and be generative with new culture. And so I wanted to just have to be brief. So literally, we could take all of our team and be like, surrounded with culture, like real organic culture that had art and music and creativity and was bigger than Coinbase. Because I think that transition, the transition of base, from being a coin base culture, to being a base culture that is organic, and decentralized and bigger than us. That's it. That's the most important thing that we can do. It's funny because it's not marketing in the sense of marketing, spend, etc. The way I had sort of asked the question, but it is brand identity, it is about identity, which is core, ultimately to being able to have any sort of good marketing strategy is to have a really strong brand identity, which is what you're describing. In other words,

Unknown Speaker  55:00  
Just like to build on our like another role a role, like one of the highest priority roles I'm hiring, we're not hiring for that many roles, because it's still, you know, how big is your team? It's small. It's like baby team, right? I can't give, I can't give numbers, because the Cotton Team will be happy. But it's a small team. But one of the roles that are important would love people to apply who are listening to projects. I'm hiring for creative director, who can basically work with me to figure out like, how do we tell the story of the Base culture? And how do we visualize that? And how do we proliferate that? And how do we work with this incredible decentralized community that's trying to exist around base to turn that into something that the world can identify and the world can feel connected to, and the world can be a part of. And we got a long way to go. I don't know if you saw on Wednesday, when we open up Base for everyone, we launched this base day one NFT, you can still maintain if you go to somewhere that XYZ slash Base, we went through a bunch of iterations of what we wanted that to be. But where we ultimately ended is it's the first line of a script. It's, I forget exactly what it says it says, This is the story of base and the world coming on chain to be continued. Yes, I've seen this Yeah, what will happen over the next many weeks and months and years is that NFT will change, and the content will reflect our story. And it will not be the story that is the Coinbase story. It's gonna be all of our story. And it's not made yet. We haven't brought a billion people on chain. But the thing we wanted to communicate with that, and the thing that we are trying to do is we're trying to

Unknown Speaker  56:30  
make it so all of us tell that story. Because it's bigger than it's bigger than just Coinbase. It's bigger than bass. It's bigger than me. It's It's about all of us creating this next generation of the internet and bringing the whole world on chain. I have a

Unknown Speaker  56:44  
I don't know, I have a funny question coming after that big lofty, beautiful sentiment, which is, obviously there was like some drama with the ball token shortly after the launch.

Unknown Speaker  56:55  
I'm curious your perspective on the role of shake coins, just in the ecosystem? Like do you think the Bitcoin thing is net positive for a new chain like yours for crypto in general? Or for the goal of onboarding a ton of people? Or is it net negative?

Unknown Speaker  57:12  
I think that crypto will always be crypto. And you know, to go back to like what we're talking about earlier with on June summer.

Unknown Speaker  57:20  
Then like, kind of like planning versus not planning. We had like a perfectly laid plan. It was like, we're going to do the test net. And then we're going to open up for developers. And then three weeks later, we're going to open up for bridging and then we're going to open up for everyone. And like the Sunday before we were supposed to start the next phase is like, Oh, cute. Here's crypto. And it was a reminder for me that like, can't control at all. Yeah. And it's not worth it. And that's the beauty of crypto, it's not it's not just that it's not worth it is that that's what makes crypto incredible is that it is open it is permissioned it is decentralized. And so I don't feel like I can even sit here and be like, Is this good or bad? Right? You're like it's inevitable? Doesn't matter. Yeah. This is crypto. And there's good parts about it. And there's bad parts about it. And there's creativity and there's risk. And

Unknown Speaker  58:11  
I think that doing anything other than trying to figure out like how do we engage with this as a part of who we are as a crypto community in the crypto ecosystem and crypto platform and figure out how can we support the creativity? How can we protect, protect everyday people and make sure that they're not getting themselves into bad situations? I think that's just part of what we have to do. And I think that if we can do that, we're gonna we're gonna end up in a world that's, that's much better to be the on chain world. Okay, a few final questions. I always say that, and then I asked him more questions, but I'm going to try and keep it to a few because I know we're a little over time here. So I think one of the overarching questions I wanted to feel like I got answered from this conversation is

Unknown Speaker  58:54  
like, why will this work? To your point, we've been stagnant now for a while and like, you know, or it certainly feels like even longer for those of us living through it. And there's plenty of L twos, there's plenty of L twos have been around for much longer than this. And it it hasn't worked yet. You know what I mean? Like we haven't had that crazy adoption take off curve. So my sense from this conversation is that maybe the core Why is just that technically we're not quite there yet. But that you feel like the end to end piece of this will mean that you can solve those technical hurdles, and then it'll start taking off it would that be how you would answer it? I don't think it's that we're gonna solve the technical hurdles. I think it's that over the last year and a half, we've solved like, 99%. And now it's like,

Unknown Speaker  59:35  
just gonna get a little further, but that little further is like, a big difference. It's the difference, right? It's like the final 10%, right? Like if we're the software project, or any project where it's like, oh, we're 90% done. And then you have the final 10%. And the final 10% is like you need to get in there and be like, let's get this really dialed in. And so I think that's kind of it. It's like we solved

Unknown Speaker  1:00:00  
To the cost issue, although it's gonna get better, we've solved a lot of the wallet issues, we've really made a lot of progress on the identity side. And now we just need to like put them together.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:09  
I think we're pretty I think it's it's launching summer. I think this summer, the world starts to come on chain, it won't be the last launch in summer, every summer. Now forever is on chain summer to be clear. Because on J this summer is one of one of infinity is

Unknown Speaker  1:00:26  
so and then my follow up question to that is do you have a thesis about which category and all of this gaming, you know, music fight, like go down the list, ticketing, whatever that like, really what you need is that one app that's a crypto app that like trends on tick tock, you know, or that one use or that thing? What's your story for that? Do you have one? I don't know if it's gonna be one thing.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:52  
No, it definitely won't be. There's like, yeah, yeah, I think there's, again, like going back to like crypto and what your question about meme coins.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:02  
Like we're at, like, it's a Cambrian explosion that's happening right now. And a lot of it is still like little, little green shoots. But all of the little green shoots are enabled by a same massive technology change that's like, just gotten ready in the last six to 12 months. And so I expect that when this comes in, again, I really think it's coming this summer, sorry, in the summer, it's going to be everywhere, like it's going to be in gaming, it's going to be in small businesses and restaurants, it's going to be in media, because people are going to, they're going to do one thing, which gets them on chain. But then they may Oh, now I have a crypto wallet. And now I can also pay my friends and also do messaging and also play these games and also collect media and also and also and also and also in all of those things will have been dialed in, because you have literally so many builders all around the world creating these things at the same time.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:58  
So I think it's going to give me slowly and then suddenly, so you think II think is it? Is it six months ish? To smooth out some of the last 10% stuff I know, who knows? It could be months? And then it's 12 months after that, or is it more immediate than that? You think it's like once the technical? I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist. I do like look, you can look at the

Unknown Speaker  1:02:21  
data, right? Look at the lat like

Unknown Speaker  1:02:24  
we talking about oh, at some point, we're going to hit this consistent growth phase, looking at the total value locks and layer twos over the last two years literally the most consistent growth up into the right Yeah, it's true. I've seen look at the number of layer two transactions over the last year.

Unknown Speaker  1:02:40  
Same guy up into the right and so like

Unknown Speaker  1:02:45  
hasn't started did start six months ago will start six months in the future. I don't know like I can't Tyneside we can come back to this conversation a year from now. But like, we are very close to it starting and then it will take time because you know, getting billions of people on chain, do anything takes time. Right. But I think like the I think it's either either has already started or it's close to starting. Okay. I love it. Okay, this, this will actually be my last question. And it's, it's a little afield of what you're talking about, but not really, you talked about this the super train. I'm curious, as somebody who's not as deeply rooted in a lot of the technical conversations that happen in this space?

Unknown Speaker  1:03:27  
Do you think are we going to live in like an Aetherium, EVM compatible world, and like, that's that and sure, there'll be side chains and you know, you'll have flow will will exist for things and others will exist for things, but like, it's really an Aetherium world, and we're all just living in it? Or do you see like a really multi chain kind of world where I mean, I think everything, like it's never gonna be like 100% 0%. But I mean, the reason why we build bases and the theory and layer two is because we have high conviction, I have high conviction that a theorem is going to be the 80%. And then layer two is going to be the 80%. And so I think other things will exist. But when I look at the network effects that exist around Aetherium, and layer two on Aetherium, they're incredibly strong, incredibly, incredibly strong, the tooling is incredibly good. The people are all there. And so that's, that's what I expect. And that's why we decided to build bases layer two. It's also why we decided to build on the OP stack, because I think there's also incredibly strong network effects that have emerged and are emerging even more around the OP stack and optimism. And so we want to be at the center of it, right? Like we want base to be a hub that connects in and so we're positioning ourselves and positioning this infrastructure to connect as many people as possible and help everyone get to that next phase of readiness from an economic perspective from a technology perspective. So we can actually bring a billion people on chain. Jesse, thank you so much for joining me today. This is so fun. You're fun. I'm excited to see where this all goes.

Unknown Speaker  1:05:00  
owes and will definitely, definitely be your guide. I know exactly. And I will say I rubbed people not that anybody noticed except for me but we did. I did say we were gonna talk about Blackbird and we did and but for folks who want to know blackbirds, it's founded by Ben Leventhal who's Leventhal resi. eater. Yep. And now he's the third one on chain on base restaurant loyalty. All built with like cool NFC your phone, you walk into a restaurant, you tap your phone, they know who you are, they start rewarding you on genius is awesome. And they're starting in New York City, which is like, like I am, I am the demographic I like crypto and NFT is I love restaurants. The reason I put up with dang Manhattan prices is so that I can have the access to the restaurant, I do have a bone to one bone to pick with their with their app. One of my questions was gonna be like, how hands on is your team, like at the product level for people that are building and it sounds like you're too small. That's definitely not something you're hands on with. But I was gonna say like, that's arguably a risk of risk to basically, you know, the the people don't build good enough apps. But I mean, it's actually great. There's a lot that's great about it. It just it's great. It's a great app, it doesn't make it clear enough. What restaurants are participating. Yeah, quickly.

Unknown Speaker  1:06:06  
I'll hit that up. And I'm

Unknown Speaker  1:06:11  
also on Tuesday or Wednesday, I forget which day one of the day next week, you can get a blackbird summer Pass, which is a pass. Oh, yeah. I think I saw something about that in the summer on part of it. Okay, got it. Got it. All look out for that because I'm definitely participating in this. I'm ready to go to Anton's West Village and scan my NFC tag. All right, Jesse, thank you so much. This is a blast. Thanks, Carly. This great

Unknown Speaker  1:06:37  
thank you so much for watching this episode of overpriced JPEGs if you liked this conversation if you liked this episode, please go ahead and hit subscribe. It helps me out it helps the show out and it means you will get alerts and updates when we post new content. Thanks again.