REBUILD CAPITAL MARKETS

“The median net return of a token over the last five years is down 80%. That is that's the problem with the industry. And there's a lot of startup market structure reasons for that. But there's a broken structural piece that's unique to tokens, especially, I think, at the moment.”

“Everyone overcomplicated it, and something like the four year cycle is clearly in effect here. There's the initial dump, then there's kind of actually an initial recovery faster than you think that no one really believes because business sentiment and activity lags price by about six months. Look at 2019. Bitcoin doubled that year, and I remember it as one of the most depressing years of the time that we've been in crypto. So that's what I think this year will be. And then I think you'll start to see a resurgence, and people will think, oh, everything is back, and then the winners pull ahead.”

“The Coinbase example is so interesting because Coinbase gets punished from volatility because the analysts consistently miss on the direction of just how cyclical crypto is. In bull markets, if you go back and look at the analyst's expectations versus especially the transaction based revenue, it's always off. So Coinbase benefits a huge amount. Their stock rips because they outperform the analyst. They get punished, though, on the way down. That transparency, having the real time data, if the right amount is displayed, actually smooths volatility.”

“It's not just a revenue story. It's not just build great products, generate tons of revenue. We're actually doing that and the prices still aren't going up. So what it tells you is there's a trust problem. Investors have stopped. They never really understood what the difference was between a token and equity in the project. Token investors have been rugged so many times along the way in ways which would never in a million years happen to equity investors, like just buying out all of the IP and team behind a token. And the token holders get nothing.”

“Crypto in many senses was an industry and a technology, but it's also kind of a political movement in a sense. And there's an ideology that underlies that political movement. And I think, actually, funnily enough, what's causing the sentiment drift here is that that ideological movement industry blob that is crypto won. And so now that it won, it moved from being a movement which is on the fringe, on the outside, and countercultural to one which is in the mainstream and it's struggling with an identity crisis.”

“One of the other big problems that I think has existed with tokens so far, which is the founders and the team treated the shareholders and the customers as the same person. And that was kind of actually the vision, which was a fun vision for a little bit. It's like Uber bootstrapping the network and the people, the early Uber customers end up owning the Uber tokens. But in reality, what's happened is that your shareholders are very different than your customers. So this idea of governance tokens maybe was kind of the wrong vision.”

“If you had not even every token, because it's not gonna be every token. 10 to 15 tokens. If 10 to 15 tokens started to compound in return, I think it would solve every problem. I actually do think that's how we get out of this bear market, is that a few tokens say, we're gonna maybe kill our equity. We're gonna drive all the returns back to the token, and we're gonna have one simple structure. We're gonna generate revenue, and those tokens will get rewarded in the market. And then other founders will see those tokens get rewarded, and the flywheel will start to happen.”

“We are the connective tissue that powers these on chain capital markets with a layer of standardized disclosures, standardized data, and we connect investors who wanna deploy capital with on chain businesses that require that capital. The days of tokens just being able to launch this liquid instrument, not really define what it is, provide no disclosures about ownership, sales, those days are ending. And by the way, they should end. This does not work. There's actually a layer of disclosures that is the bedrock — what does the ownership structure look like? What are the emissions schedule look like? Who are the insiders? When are they selling?”