In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/
Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
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Adam Winnick, The Medici Network
In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/
Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
play_circle_outlineOverview of crypto's impact on financial markets and infrastructure.
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play_circle_outlineUnderstanding Blockchain vs. Cryptocurrency: Navigating Speculation and Liquidity Cycles for Effective Trading Strategies
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play_circle_outlineDemocratizing Ownership: Navigating Tokenization, Blockchain Challenges, and Regulatory Hurdles in the New Economy
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play_circle_outlineGlobalization and fractionalization of the financial system through crypto.
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play_circle_outlineRegulatory Insights on Stablecoins: Enhancing Dollar Accessibility and Fractional Ownership's Influence on Global Investment Opportunities
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineExploring Innovative Business Models and Community Engagement Through Token Distribution: A Framework for Compliance in Transactions
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play_circle_outlineRegulatory focus on stablecoin paving the way for broader token issuance.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineRethinking Media Distribution: How Blockchain is Transforming Data Ownership and Control in the Digital Age
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineThe evolving relationship between traditional media and blockchain-driven data ownership.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineInvestment strategies emphasizing early-stage projects with token launch potential.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineThe relevance of verifiable identities in creating new token economies.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineBuilding a community for financial institutions and crypto-native founders to connect.
>> Welcome back. I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE. We are here at our New York Stock Exchange studio here on the East Coast. Of course, we've got our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. And this is our crypto trailblazer series where we feature the leaders who are making it happen and expanding out as the financial markets get refactored at the infrastructure level, DeFi, TradFi, all aspects of crypto is changing digital commerce, obviously physical, digital converging in. Adam Winnick is here, Managing Partner, Finality Capital Partners is here. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. We're just reminiscing about how old we are. Been seen the movie before. Great to see you.
Adam Winnick
>> I'm honored to be here, John. Thank you.
John Furrier
>> Thanks for coming on. This crypto trailblazer is our hottest series. There's two programs we're doing right now that are super hot. AI factories, which is large scale NVIDIA build out, and the crypto trailblazers, mainly because the grinding it out during the dark times is now happening here in the US. You're seeing businesses built. They could be $20 billion IPOs and they're going public here so you're starting to see the folks that survive, the OGs that have built the industry are surviving and thriving. And now a new migration of mainstreaming of crypto. So everyone's like, "Hey, you can't ignore the money on the table."
Adam Winnick
>> Well, look, there was a lot of pent-up, a lot of money went into the space with the hope that the regulatory environment would change. And it took a while and it did, so there's a lot of pent-up demand.
John Furrier
>> How do you scope this for folks that are now putting their toe in the water for crypto? They see it, they see stablecoins, they see some of the CLARITY and GENIUS Act. How do you scope the opportunity? How do you explain it?
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Well, look, I live in Los Angeles, and it's not really a big technology hub. It's certainly not a big crypto hub. I call Los Angeles my fortress of solitude, and I explain that it allows me to do more orthogonal thinking, but I have to explain what crypto is a lot to people at my kids' school. I think about it really two ways. There's the money side and there's the tech side. Blockchain and crypto is a speculative asset that trades and it's highly tied to liquidity. The best way to trade crypto is to follow liquidity cycles. We do that in our hedge fund that we have. And recently, you've seen the end of quantitative tightening return, a reemergence of quantitative easing and perhaps a more dovish Fed. These are all positive things, but it will take time to play out. And over the next several years, I can't promise that buying now is going to be an opportunity for people, but over the next several years, this speculative asset will become bigger and bigger and bigger. In the meantime, underneath that is innovation. And within innovation, there's both the innovation around what blockchain can do, building permissionless systems, trustless systems, which is something that I'm very passionate about. And then the idea of tokens, and what tokens represent, which to me, especially in a city like New York that just elected a mayor that's a self-proclaimed socialist, I think the idea of democratizing ownership is a really powerful idea. We all know the responsibility and the feelings that come with owning things. I'm not saying that people don't have the opportunities to own. Some people don't want to own. It's a lot of responsibility, but when you own things, you're responsible for things, and it creates financial wealth. And I think that tokens are like stock options for users. Silicon Valley innovated the idea of stock options from the CEO level all the way to the secretary level. And tokens are going to do the same thing, but for users. We haven't seen the regulatory environment allow for that yet. What you've seen is a regulatory environment allow for stablecoin regulation first, which has really generated some really interesting things. So the first thing I tell people is, "Hey, you have dollars, but people around the world don't have dollars. It's not that easy for them to get dollars. Stablecoin regulation makes it really easy for everyone in the world to hold dollars."
So what I see happening is the globalization, the tokenization, the fractionalization, and what I call the memification of the American financial system. Crypto people are really good at memes. I think if you can fractionalize Palantir stock, put it on a blockchain and get it to a crypto wallet in Thailand that's already holding US dollar coins. Anyone that's good at memes is going to be able to market their stock and have a lower cost of capital. And so I think that's one thread, but these crypto wallets that are being held by people around the world that are holding US dollar stablecoins can also hold other things in those wallets. They can hold other tokens, tokens of things that represent ownership in projects they're a part of and supporting. And we can talk more about that, but the thing that's most interesting to me in crypto is the idea that we can create ownership. And ownership is a very amorphous term. How do you tell people ownership? There's a constant criticism on blockchain that it's a problem looking for a solution. You mentioned that you do a lot on AI and it's a very popular topic. We all know what AI is doing to the business that you are in, this search business. Agents used to crawl websites for free in exchange for returning traffic. That exchange has stopped. Now these agents are crawling websites to bring back to answer user prompts in chat groups, chatbots, and not returning user traffic. The relationship's broken. So who owns the data?
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Adam Winnick
>> I think blockchain can solve some of those issues because blockchain's about digital ownership. And you're seeing that. You're seeing Cloudflare blocking AI agents and actually announced a stablecoin. We can explore some of that stuff.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. I mean, that's basically they're instrumenting the tolls. They should be paying a toll. They're going to be raping and pillaging the content, why wouldn't they? I mean.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah, but now it's just going to be a new business model where you can now, a website can get paid for its content. It doesn't need to have traffic return. But I know that I'm putting a lot more personal information about myself in ChatGPT that I put on Instagram or Twitter. I'm becoming a micro publisher and ChatGPT is using the data that I put in about my life, all the questions I have about my life. I'm not getting paid for that data. I don't necessarily need to get paid for that data, but maybe I want some control and ownership over that data so I can use it in other services.
John Furrier
>> I mean, you're getting at structural things that are happening. I like where you're going with that because you mentioned a few things. One is ownership. Stock option is a good example. Not everyone could have ownership of say my company, and one we don't have stock options, but I have a big community. I could offer tokens to my users and say, "Hey, be part of my community," and figure out some token system, whether it's a utility or equity or security, that's a construct.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Well, you can't do it. It's hard to do with the laws today, but the first legal step was stablecoin regulation. That is making sure that everyone in the world has a crypto wallet, so then one day we'll be able to receive your token. The second piece is market structure to allow... No point in having a token if you can't sell it for cash. So you need a exchange infrastructure that lets people sell their tokens, borrow against their tokens, lend their tokens. That's the market structure bill. As part of that, and one of the biggest debates within that is what does it mean to issue a token? Once you do that, then you can say to your community, "Hey, community, I'm going to issue you all token. Why don't you vote on the next thing that our business does? And if we're successful getting to market, we're going to say that 5% of the revenue of this business is going to go to buy back the token," and you can do all that stuff. You can program these options tied to.
John Furrier
>> They're new business models.
Adam Winnick
>> Completely, business models.
John Furrier
>> All right. Okay, the regulations. So GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act, totally love the stablecoin conversation.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, CLARITY Act's not there yet. I'm waiting for that one.
John Furrier
>> That's a big one because that sets the governance up, doesn't it? Explain that.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. It lets peer-to-peer intermediaries allow you to transact with your tokens, and then it should allow you to be able to issue tokens to people. And then the next piece, which is the fourth piece, which I hopefully, and you'll appreciate this, is when you issue those tokens to people and they value, they don't pay taxes on it. We didn't have any internet sales tax for the first 20 years of the internet. We need that too, but I don't know if that's on the table yet.
John Furrier
>> Okay, so from a sequence of event standpoint, Adam, what do you see as for people to stay involved, stay building, because in AI and like crypto, adoption's a huge dynamic. Adopting and stablecoin certainly is going to accelerate adoption, especially outside the United States. I mean, talk about inflationary environments. You can have a crypto wallet and buy things in crypto backed by the dollar. That's actually good for the US, I think. That's amazing.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Let's talk about the globalization of the American financial system. I talk about America being a meme. Okay? America's a meme. The greatest meme on earth, the American dream, and it has its own meme coin. It's called USDC or USDT, okay? But there's other memes. America plus AI is a meme. You know who best represents the America plus AI meme? Palantir. Okay. It trades like a meme. Now imagine you could fractionalize that, tokenize it, put it on the blockchain, which people are doing. The next piece is how about America plus AI plus defense? That's a meme. What represents that meme? How about Anduril? What if you could fractionalize and tokenize Anduril stock? What if you create an option, a perp deck or not even have a... You can't get enough of the stock to trade, but what if you could create a betting market, a prediction market on Anduril stock? This is the kind of things that are happening. And the more people that have crypto wallets around the world that start with the dollar, they're just beginning their journey on the American financial system. And that's going to be huge for all of American companies, not just the government.
John Furrier
>> It's mind-blowing because what you just laid out is essentially disruptive to what we are right now. I mean, the bell will ring in less than 30 minutes here, but why even have bells? The markets are open 24/7, but if you can fractionalize ownership, have prediction markets, basically like a FanDuel for stocks and that interplay.
Adam Winnick
>> I think it'll get into distribution that you're still going to need trusted people. Okay? Curation still matters.
John Furrier
>> Explain the trust angle, because you mentioned that earlier the top of the interview.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, in the context of what I'm talking about here is if you have a permissionless system, yes, you could trust everyone to do business with them. It doesn't mean everyone's going to be good at what they do. Within that world, you have more people you can trust. Therefore, the people that are good can rise to the top. Think of the music industry when it stopped being about record company or getting your music distributed through the radio, what do music labels do today? They're really good at helping artists market themselves on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. When I think about what Goldman Sachs is going to look like in 20 years, when there's no IPO market per se, they're probably going to be packaging different tokens that represent stocks or represent blockchain projects and creating their own indices, and those will be really popular.
John Furrier
>> What's your view on this? I like the record example because I remember that vividly because when I was ripping illegal songs with P2P apps like Napster and Limewire, the record industry, basically the power law looked like a straight line down and then a long tail. There was no neck or torso into that business. Oh, you had all the hits and then there was nothing else but remnant tale. That went through, that was cratering basically. And then obviously the dollars a song on the iPod came out, then the digital side kicked in, now we have a whole different market.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, Spotify figured out the licensing on there.
John Furrier
>> Media is going through a similar destruction. We see some apps being changed. You see what blockchain's doing. Is that the pattern? Do we need to burn down or let the industries hemorrhage to the point of the record industry, that choked basically. What's your view on that macro structural piece of it? Because there are markets, like media is still valuable, right? But yet the business models for most of them pretty much suck, but there's bright sides for things like what we're doing. We see stuff on crypto, changing how production changes on films, the role of the collective intelligence of the audience. Games, like in game, I mean, gaming is just blowing up.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, look, I think fundamentally what you're asking me I believe, is how will blockchain affect all the incumbent businesses it touches?
John Furrier
>> Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Adam Winnick
>> Look, blockchain right now, a lot of the stuff it does is not disruptive to traditional industries, in my opinion. The things that make the most money in crypto aren't that disruptive to traditional businesses, but the more the technology matures, the more the regulatory environment allows for it, the more it's starting to do that. And you're starting to see that today in certain use cases, especially around stablecoins and financial institutions. And you're seeing people like Western Union announce blockchain strategies. I think the media, going back to your music example of the media industry, look, there's two things that a site like Spotify has. First is your music, which there's strong copyright protection. I don't think you're going to see blockchain violate the copyright protection around that kind of IP, but it has something else. It has your preferences, your data, what kind of music you like. That to me should be portable. I should be able to take my preferences where I want to go. Spotify leverages your data to make recommendations to keep you there, to make you a more attractive space for artists to put their music there. And that data should be mine. The open banking initiative after the great financial crisis, 2008, the government said banks have to make their data open, and it took 20 years to actually create the rules for that, and now JP Morgan's fighting that. But the government knew better than us, the government said your data's valuable. If we can help you get access to your data, then you can have sites like Chime and Revolut and other people help you get better control of your financial life. Imagine if I could take my preferences in these websites, any website that relies on data moats for user retention, which is all websites-
John Furrier
>> Yeah, everybody.
Adam Winnick
>> And export those preferences so there were no more data moats. What would happen to all those businesses? Spotify would still have a big music category, but it wouldn't have a data moat. And therefore Spotify could be a licensing business with that music, but it would come to me and it would tell me, it would compete more for me to be a user based on my preferences because other sites could then say, "Oh, you have these preferences? I've got the best collection of small artists over here. I got the best collection of artists over here. I know your preferences and I can expose those preferences to people and get better access to services."
John Furrier
>> So Spotify's got to be better to keep you.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct.
John Furrier
>> And you have more optionality as a user because the market will-
Adam Winnick
>> That works across everything, John. It's every industry. No more data modes. That's a key theme of my investment thesis. No more data modes.
John Furrier
>> Okay. So take me through your investment strategy, obviously hedging within crypto. Let's just take our business. Well, not that we have a data mode, but we have a lot of data, but we like to license it, I make it free. How do people make money? What's the strategy for the folks that rely on the data moat? What's the mechanism? What's the vision? Where does it go?
Adam Winnick
>> Well, again-
John Furrier
>> Or does it go commodity?
Adam Winnick
>> I almost think about it like the movie business, like MGM stopped making good movies. It had a couple franchises that were good, like James Bond, but I had a giant library. In the media business, people love libraries. I should only be able to have access, and blockchain actually is enabling people to get access to their data without permission. Reverse engineered mobile APIs. In that case, I have my preferences, but these businesses have lots of data across all users can become licensing businesses of that data. I think there'll be some armistice, some truth that happens where someone says, "Okay, look, now that I know you can get all the data, let me make it easier for you," and they'll just generate cash flow from the data that they have. It's almost like an MGM library.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, one air, just riffing with you.
Adam Winnick
>> That's across every industry.
John Furrier
>> One riff on that would be one distribution could be a great moat. If you say, "Hey, I'm going to make things open," maybe you have a network effect, maybe you have a-
Adam Winnick
>> Well, that's where I think tokens come in. Think of keywords. Think about the businesses that, like StubHub, for instance. My friend Jeff Fluhr was one of the founders of StubHub. I remember when he was struggling with liquid seats and he was early to Google AdWords. Started buying keywords and sports teams before anyone knew what they were. The greatest growth hack. What if you're the first company to issue tokens to your users? What kind of distribution can you get? It's a brand new distribution channel. I believe tokens are the greatest growth hack. Now, it's not easy to do it today because of the regulatory mind, but it's going to change very quickly.
John Furrier
>> What's your advice for folks? I think there's a lot of progressive people that will do this. Like you mentioned your example, your friend started that company close to the AdWords, saw it early, probably saw all the affiliate stuff happening too. He saw that early. What's the best advice not to step on a landmine? Because if you go back to 2019 when the ICO craze, it was all about utility versus security, tokens, and now you have actual token economics. That's fundraisable. I know people raising money with token economics.
Adam Winnick
>> The fact that the environment now is permissive. There's no enforcement right now like there may be in the future, but people are building compliance into the tech stack, so it's getting easy and easier to issue a token in a compliant way. Identity, KYC, AML, all that stuff are protocols. Great applications, John, have great middleware. The average Web2 application has about 15 pieces of middleware. You think of the cloud now, and you can go get-
John Furrier
>> They call it high level services.
Adam Winnick
>> Thousands of microservices available to make it easy for developers to build. One of the problems with blockchain is it didn't have micro services. It didn't have great middleware, but more and more middleware is being built to support great Web3 applications. And one of those things are, "Hey, I need to know the identity that people that are holding these tokens, but I can't hold that idea."
John Furrier
>> There are full stack chains now, so you're starting to see that software construct come in.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct. And by the way, I don't need to know your name. I just need to verify that you comply with KYC and AML.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you're a number.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah, but you still... I know you're not a bad actor. I can look at your basics.
John Furrier
>> So what are you doing now? What's the fun things you're doing? Talk about what's going on with the fund, the hedge fund. Is it a hedge fund? Do you call it a hedge fund?
Adam Winnick
>> Well, I have a business partner, brilliant MIT computer scientist. He uses a quantitative signal to put risk on or risk off. We have another partner that looks at liquid tokens and stocks.
John Furrier
>> Explain liquid tokens.
Adam Winnick
>> Projects that are... Tokens are basically like stocks. Maybe the question is about-
John Furrier
>> You mean there's liquidity?
Adam Winnick
>> Liquidity. There's maybe questions around value accrual, but.
John Furrier
>> But liquid tokens refers to.
Adam Winnick
>> Anything we could trade.
John Furrier
>> Basic money.
Adam Winnick
>> We have a hedge fund business that's doing very well this year. It's beating Bitcoin by an order of magnitude with much lower draw-downs. We do two things. We pick projects to invest in and we actually pick some stocks to invest in. And then we also manage risk by rotating on or off in the markets based on this macro signal. I focus primarily on our venture business.
John Furrier
>> In the classic sense, you mean?
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Well, I invest in early stage projects that will all launch a token at some point, pretty much.
John Furrier
>> Okay, got it. All right, cool.
Adam Winnick
>> That will one day be traded and bought and sold by our hedge fund. And what I try and do is focus on, with my partners, a theme or thesis that we believe the way the markets are going to play out over the next 10, 15 years. We meet entrepreneurs who either align with that thesis or contribute to that thesis. If they don't fit that thesis, we don't invest.
John Furrier
>> Got it.
Adam Winnick
>> If they contribute to it, we invest. And we try and find people that have that pattern match with the way we think about way the space is going. Early crypto people thought about launching a token, creating a permissionless system that they step away from. And I don't think of the world that way. I think companies, projects, even if it's permissionless, still need leaders and personal responsibility. We try and find people that want to be involved with projects for a really, really long time, and we help them build a great business. So I think what we do is where the world's going is this idea of convergence. As Web3 matures and starts impacting real world businesses, these founders need people that can provide real, that offer lived experience around startups, helping them manage the ups and downs, and also deep business networks that can help them grow their business. That hasn't always been the case with crypto venture. The things I'm excited about are these ideas of how verifiable identity. If I can verify your identity, let's say I know how many Uber rides you take or you're an Uber driver, how many times you drive and your rating. Why couldn't I start a permissionless network and issue tokens to these people to be part of a new network where they own more of the network?
I'll give you one of my favorite examples right now. Everyone's talking about the ticketing business. Why is it that the ticketing company like Ticketmaster gets so much of the revenue of a ticket? Is it because they have a monopoly? That's possible. If you look deeper, it's really because ticketing companies are banks. They give venues the money to go lock in shows and then market those shows. And what if you could tap into the entire pool, global pool of liquidity of crypto to help venues get the money they need to go book shows outside of the Ticketmaster system? We have a company called KYD that's doing that today.
John Furrier
>> Awesome.
Adam Winnick
>> And what's interesting about that though is to be able to make a credible commitment to that venue, they need to know the data inside that system. But that system company, whether it's Ticketmaster or Dice, does not have any API to share that information in a private, secure way with the blockchain. Crypto actually has a technology, zero knowledge proofs, that allows that to happen. You can go into a system and verify leveraging what's called the transport layer of security, verify secure connection that this venue sold this many tickets this year, has this many customers, generated this much money, and just verify that. And you could say this company, this venue is now verifiable and have the blockchain bid on providing money to let this company go bid on shows. It could completely disrupt the entire ticketing industry.
John Furrier
>> Well, that's a great example. I mean, there's so much going on. What's the coolest thing you're working on now?
Adam Winnick
>> Well, I think that's one of them. Another one that I'm really excited about is a company called HiFix and GeoNet. GeoNet is a... Have you had anyone that's doing anything in the decentralized physical infrastructure network space, DPIN? Have you heard that term?
John Furrier
>> No.
Adam Winnick
>> Think of, it's almost like Napster, but think about that where everyone connects their Wi-Fi for mobile phone service. That's a company called Helium, but there's one company doing it for GPS location data. And it's very easy for drones to be spoofed. If you want to do drone delivery to the home, someone could say, "Hey, yeah, I'm that address. I'm 345 Park."
It's hard to verify that. If you have a verifiable database of location data, you can have a bigger drone industry. The problem is America doesn't want, we don't want a Chinese blimp flying over the country. We don't want Chinese drones flying all over the country. So Trump is banning DJI drones, and the DJI makes a system on a chip that makes the cost of drones really low. We backed a company that is building a system on a chip to bring the drone industry to America and using blockchain location data to make it spoof proof. And that could create a whole new drone delivery market.
John Furrier
>> But basically remapping using immutable location and rewarding people for that.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct.
John Furrier
>> With the token.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct. And it completely can change how we do delivery in this country. And defense.
John Furrier
>> All right. Where can people get more information about your investment thesis? I mean, you have a clear mandate. This is what we're trying to do. If it aligns, you'll partner. What's some of the data?
Adam Winnick
>> I'm all about convergence. I write on Twitter at @adam_winnick. @finalitycap is my website. We didn't really talk about this community I built called Medici Network, which is all about bringing the top financial institutions together with the top crypto native founders. The idea is to help institutions go beyond Bitcoin to explore Web3. And there's not a lot, John, you're doing something very rare. There's not a lot of reporters that cover the tech of crypto. Most of the reporters are finance reporters that cover the price of crypto or token launch. The ones that covered the tech got blown out in '22 and moved on. You're one of the few people that actually interested in the tech. Well, stick around.
John Furrier
>> We're stuck because we're so addicted to the innovation.
Adam Winnick
>> Stick around.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Adam Winnick
>> Stick around. The next few years are going to be really fun.
John Furrier
>> Well, no, I would say just to that point, when the hardcore comp sci kicked in around 2014 to 2016, all the alphas were working on blockchain. And then the ICO bubble hit, then COVID hit, then the US regime hit. Now it's back. I mean, here in New York and out in California, it's rocking. It means we have some serious entrepreneurship happening.
Adam Winnick
>> Look, I got my ass handed to me, excuse my language, in the internet 1.0. Okay?
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Adam Winnick
>> The one thing I learned, the biggest lesson is never quit. I've become an-
John Furrier
>> There's always 2.0.
Adam Winnick
>> I've become an incredibly difficult person because what I've found is I just have to stay alive and stay in it and they'll come back. And that's the insight. The insight is just stay close to it, even when other people don't like it.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, exactly. Adam, great to have you on. Go for an hour. Let's definitely do a follow-up. I think that internet 1.0 experience, I've had a similar one. Then Web2 happened, and then SaaS happened, then you got AI, now you got crypto, but then crypto's kind of, was baking out. I think there's some massive lessons to be learned because now we have scale and we have new structural market opportunity. I mean, I think it's a huge opportunity with tokens. I would agree. So let's keep in touch.
Adam Winnick
>> I love to.
John Furrier
>> Good trailblazer. Again, the trailblazers, they take the heat, they eat glass, spit out nails, they got scar tissue. The ones that are survive and thrive are the OGs. And then the mainstreaming's happening. Young guns are coming in, you got young talent, people are building and really building products, entrepreneurial products and going after opportunities here in crypto. Again, up and down the stack, full stack, you're seeing a lot more of that. Of course, doing our job, and maybe soon we'll have our tokens on theCUBE. Until then, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.
>> Welcome back. I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE. We are here at our New York Stock Exchange studio here on the East Coast. Of course, we've got our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. And this is our crypto trailblazer series where we feature the leaders who are making it happen and expanding out as the financial markets get refactored at the infrastructure level, DeFi, TradFi, all aspects of crypto is changing digital commerce, obviously physical, digital converging in. Adam Winnick is here, Managing Partner, Finality Capital Partners is here. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. We're just reminiscing about how old we are. Been seen the movie before. Great to see you.
Adam Winnick
>> I'm honored to be here, John. Thank you.
John Furrier
>> Thanks for coming on. This crypto trailblazer is our hottest series. There's two programs we're doing right now that are super hot. AI factories, which is large scale NVIDIA build out, and the crypto trailblazers, mainly because the grinding it out during the dark times is now happening here in the US. You're seeing businesses built. They could be $20 billion IPOs and they're going public here so you're starting to see the folks that survive, the OGs that have built the industry are surviving and thriving. And now a new migration of mainstreaming of crypto. So everyone's like, "Hey, you can't ignore the money on the table."
Adam Winnick
>> Well, look, there was a lot of pent-up, a lot of money went into the space with the hope that the regulatory environment would change. And it took a while and it did, so there's a lot of pent-up demand.
John Furrier
>> How do you scope this for folks that are now putting their toe in the water for crypto? They see it, they see stablecoins, they see some of the CLARITY and GENIUS Act. How do you scope the opportunity? How do you explain it?
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Well, look, I live in Los Angeles, and it's not really a big technology hub. It's certainly not a big crypto hub. I call Los Angeles my fortress of solitude, and I explain that it allows me to do more orthogonal thinking, but I have to explain what crypto is a lot to people at my kids' school. I think about it really two ways. There's the money side and there's the tech side. Blockchain and crypto is a speculative asset that trades and it's highly tied to liquidity. The best way to trade crypto is to follow liquidity cycles. We do that in our hedge fund that we have. And recently, you've seen the end of quantitative tightening return, a reemergence of quantitative easing and perhaps a more dovish Fed. These are all positive things, but it will take time to play out. And over the next several years, I can't promise that buying now is going to be an opportunity for people, but over the next several years, this speculative asset will become bigger and bigger and bigger. In the meantime, underneath that is innovation. And within innovation, there's both the innovation around what blockchain can do, building permissionless systems, trustless systems, which is something that I'm very passionate about. And then the idea of tokens, and what tokens represent, which to me, especially in a city like New York that just elected a mayor that's a self-proclaimed socialist, I think the idea of democratizing ownership is a really powerful idea. We all know the responsibility and the feelings that come with owning things. I'm not saying that people don't have the opportunities to own. Some people don't want to own. It's a lot of responsibility, but when you own things, you're responsible for things, and it creates financial wealth. And I think that tokens are like stock options for users. Silicon Valley innovated the idea of stock options from the CEO level all the way to the secretary level. And tokens are going to do the same thing, but for users. We haven't seen the regulatory environment allow for that yet. What you've seen is a regulatory environment allow for stablecoin regulation first, which has really generated some really interesting things. So the first thing I tell people is, "Hey, you have dollars, but people around the world don't have dollars. It's not that easy for them to get dollars. Stablecoin regulation makes it really easy for everyone in the world to hold dollars."
So what I see happening is the globalization, the tokenization, the fractionalization, and what I call the memification of the American financial system. Crypto people are really good at memes. I think if you can fractionalize Palantir stock, put it on a blockchain and get it to a crypto wallet in Thailand that's already holding US dollar coins. Anyone that's good at memes is going to be able to market their stock and have a lower cost of capital. And so I think that's one thread, but these crypto wallets that are being held by people around the world that are holding US dollar stablecoins can also hold other things in those wallets. They can hold other tokens, tokens of things that represent ownership in projects they're a part of and supporting. And we can talk more about that, but the thing that's most interesting to me in crypto is the idea that we can create ownership. And ownership is a very amorphous term. How do you tell people ownership? There's a constant criticism on blockchain that it's a problem looking for a solution. You mentioned that you do a lot on AI and it's a very popular topic. We all know what AI is doing to the business that you are in, this search business. Agents used to crawl websites for free in exchange for returning traffic. That exchange has stopped. Now these agents are crawling websites to bring back to answer user prompts in chat groups, chatbots, and not returning user traffic. The relationship's broken. So who owns the data?
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Adam Winnick
>> I think blockchain can solve some of those issues because blockchain's about digital ownership. And you're seeing that. You're seeing Cloudflare blocking AI agents and actually announced a stablecoin. We can explore some of that stuff.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. I mean, that's basically they're instrumenting the tolls. They should be paying a toll. They're going to be raping and pillaging the content, why wouldn't they? I mean.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah, but now it's just going to be a new business model where you can now, a website can get paid for its content. It doesn't need to have traffic return. But I know that I'm putting a lot more personal information about myself in ChatGPT that I put on Instagram or Twitter. I'm becoming a micro publisher and ChatGPT is using the data that I put in about my life, all the questions I have about my life. I'm not getting paid for that data. I don't necessarily need to get paid for that data, but maybe I want some control and ownership over that data so I can use it in other services.
John Furrier
>> I mean, you're getting at structural things that are happening. I like where you're going with that because you mentioned a few things. One is ownership. Stock option is a good example. Not everyone could have ownership of say my company, and one we don't have stock options, but I have a big community. I could offer tokens to my users and say, "Hey, be part of my community," and figure out some token system, whether it's a utility or equity or security, that's a construct.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Well, you can't do it. It's hard to do with the laws today, but the first legal step was stablecoin regulation. That is making sure that everyone in the world has a crypto wallet, so then one day we'll be able to receive your token. The second piece is market structure to allow... No point in having a token if you can't sell it for cash. So you need a exchange infrastructure that lets people sell their tokens, borrow against their tokens, lend their tokens. That's the market structure bill. As part of that, and one of the biggest debates within that is what does it mean to issue a token? Once you do that, then you can say to your community, "Hey, community, I'm going to issue you all token. Why don't you vote on the next thing that our business does? And if we're successful getting to market, we're going to say that 5% of the revenue of this business is going to go to buy back the token," and you can do all that stuff. You can program these options tied to.
John Furrier
>> They're new business models.
Adam Winnick
>> Completely, business models.
John Furrier
>> All right. Okay, the regulations. So GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act, totally love the stablecoin conversation.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, CLARITY Act's not there yet. I'm waiting for that one.
John Furrier
>> That's a big one because that sets the governance up, doesn't it? Explain that.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. It lets peer-to-peer intermediaries allow you to transact with your tokens, and then it should allow you to be able to issue tokens to people. And then the next piece, which is the fourth piece, which I hopefully, and you'll appreciate this, is when you issue those tokens to people and they value, they don't pay taxes on it. We didn't have any internet sales tax for the first 20 years of the internet. We need that too, but I don't know if that's on the table yet.
John Furrier
>> Okay, so from a sequence of event standpoint, Adam, what do you see as for people to stay involved, stay building, because in AI and like crypto, adoption's a huge dynamic. Adopting and stablecoin certainly is going to accelerate adoption, especially outside the United States. I mean, talk about inflationary environments. You can have a crypto wallet and buy things in crypto backed by the dollar. That's actually good for the US, I think. That's amazing.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Let's talk about the globalization of the American financial system. I talk about America being a meme. Okay? America's a meme. The greatest meme on earth, the American dream, and it has its own meme coin. It's called USDC or USDT, okay? But there's other memes. America plus AI is a meme. You know who best represents the America plus AI meme? Palantir. Okay. It trades like a meme. Now imagine you could fractionalize that, tokenize it, put it on the blockchain, which people are doing. The next piece is how about America plus AI plus defense? That's a meme. What represents that meme? How about Anduril? What if you could fractionalize and tokenize Anduril stock? What if you create an option, a perp deck or not even have a... You can't get enough of the stock to trade, but what if you could create a betting market, a prediction market on Anduril stock? This is the kind of things that are happening. And the more people that have crypto wallets around the world that start with the dollar, they're just beginning their journey on the American financial system. And that's going to be huge for all of American companies, not just the government.
John Furrier
>> It's mind-blowing because what you just laid out is essentially disruptive to what we are right now. I mean, the bell will ring in less than 30 minutes here, but why even have bells? The markets are open 24/7, but if you can fractionalize ownership, have prediction markets, basically like a FanDuel for stocks and that interplay.
Adam Winnick
>> I think it'll get into distribution that you're still going to need trusted people. Okay? Curation still matters.
John Furrier
>> Explain the trust angle, because you mentioned that earlier the top of the interview.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, in the context of what I'm talking about here is if you have a permissionless system, yes, you could trust everyone to do business with them. It doesn't mean everyone's going to be good at what they do. Within that world, you have more people you can trust. Therefore, the people that are good can rise to the top. Think of the music industry when it stopped being about record company or getting your music distributed through the radio, what do music labels do today? They're really good at helping artists market themselves on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. When I think about what Goldman Sachs is going to look like in 20 years, when there's no IPO market per se, they're probably going to be packaging different tokens that represent stocks or represent blockchain projects and creating their own indices, and those will be really popular.
John Furrier
>> What's your view on this? I like the record example because I remember that vividly because when I was ripping illegal songs with P2P apps like Napster and Limewire, the record industry, basically the power law looked like a straight line down and then a long tail. There was no neck or torso into that business. Oh, you had all the hits and then there was nothing else but remnant tale. That went through, that was cratering basically. And then obviously the dollars a song on the iPod came out, then the digital side kicked in, now we have a whole different market.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, Spotify figured out the licensing on there.
John Furrier
>> Media is going through a similar destruction. We see some apps being changed. You see what blockchain's doing. Is that the pattern? Do we need to burn down or let the industries hemorrhage to the point of the record industry, that choked basically. What's your view on that macro structural piece of it? Because there are markets, like media is still valuable, right? But yet the business models for most of them pretty much suck, but there's bright sides for things like what we're doing. We see stuff on crypto, changing how production changes on films, the role of the collective intelligence of the audience. Games, like in game, I mean, gaming is just blowing up.
Adam Winnick
>> Well, look, I think fundamentally what you're asking me I believe, is how will blockchain affect all the incumbent businesses it touches?
John Furrier
>> Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Adam Winnick
>> Look, blockchain right now, a lot of the stuff it does is not disruptive to traditional industries, in my opinion. The things that make the most money in crypto aren't that disruptive to traditional businesses, but the more the technology matures, the more the regulatory environment allows for it, the more it's starting to do that. And you're starting to see that today in certain use cases, especially around stablecoins and financial institutions. And you're seeing people like Western Union announce blockchain strategies. I think the media, going back to your music example of the media industry, look, there's two things that a site like Spotify has. First is your music, which there's strong copyright protection. I don't think you're going to see blockchain violate the copyright protection around that kind of IP, but it has something else. It has your preferences, your data, what kind of music you like. That to me should be portable. I should be able to take my preferences where I want to go. Spotify leverages your data to make recommendations to keep you there, to make you a more attractive space for artists to put their music there. And that data should be mine. The open banking initiative after the great financial crisis, 2008, the government said banks have to make their data open, and it took 20 years to actually create the rules for that, and now JP Morgan's fighting that. But the government knew better than us, the government said your data's valuable. If we can help you get access to your data, then you can have sites like Chime and Revolut and other people help you get better control of your financial life. Imagine if I could take my preferences in these websites, any website that relies on data moats for user retention, which is all websites-
John Furrier
>> Yeah, everybody.
Adam Winnick
>> And export those preferences so there were no more data moats. What would happen to all those businesses? Spotify would still have a big music category, but it wouldn't have a data moat. And therefore Spotify could be a licensing business with that music, but it would come to me and it would tell me, it would compete more for me to be a user based on my preferences because other sites could then say, "Oh, you have these preferences? I've got the best collection of small artists over here. I got the best collection of artists over here. I know your preferences and I can expose those preferences to people and get better access to services."
John Furrier
>> So Spotify's got to be better to keep you.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct.
John Furrier
>> And you have more optionality as a user because the market will-
Adam Winnick
>> That works across everything, John. It's every industry. No more data modes. That's a key theme of my investment thesis. No more data modes.
John Furrier
>> Okay. So take me through your investment strategy, obviously hedging within crypto. Let's just take our business. Well, not that we have a data mode, but we have a lot of data, but we like to license it, I make it free. How do people make money? What's the strategy for the folks that rely on the data moat? What's the mechanism? What's the vision? Where does it go?
Adam Winnick
>> Well, again-
John Furrier
>> Or does it go commodity?
Adam Winnick
>> I almost think about it like the movie business, like MGM stopped making good movies. It had a couple franchises that were good, like James Bond, but I had a giant library. In the media business, people love libraries. I should only be able to have access, and blockchain actually is enabling people to get access to their data without permission. Reverse engineered mobile APIs. In that case, I have my preferences, but these businesses have lots of data across all users can become licensing businesses of that data. I think there'll be some armistice, some truth that happens where someone says, "Okay, look, now that I know you can get all the data, let me make it easier for you," and they'll just generate cash flow from the data that they have. It's almost like an MGM library.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, one air, just riffing with you.
Adam Winnick
>> That's across every industry.
John Furrier
>> One riff on that would be one distribution could be a great moat. If you say, "Hey, I'm going to make things open," maybe you have a network effect, maybe you have a-
Adam Winnick
>> Well, that's where I think tokens come in. Think of keywords. Think about the businesses that, like StubHub, for instance. My friend Jeff Fluhr was one of the founders of StubHub. I remember when he was struggling with liquid seats and he was early to Google AdWords. Started buying keywords and sports teams before anyone knew what they were. The greatest growth hack. What if you're the first company to issue tokens to your users? What kind of distribution can you get? It's a brand new distribution channel. I believe tokens are the greatest growth hack. Now, it's not easy to do it today because of the regulatory mind, but it's going to change very quickly.
John Furrier
>> What's your advice for folks? I think there's a lot of progressive people that will do this. Like you mentioned your example, your friend started that company close to the AdWords, saw it early, probably saw all the affiliate stuff happening too. He saw that early. What's the best advice not to step on a landmine? Because if you go back to 2019 when the ICO craze, it was all about utility versus security, tokens, and now you have actual token economics. That's fundraisable. I know people raising money with token economics.
Adam Winnick
>> The fact that the environment now is permissive. There's no enforcement right now like there may be in the future, but people are building compliance into the tech stack, so it's getting easy and easier to issue a token in a compliant way. Identity, KYC, AML, all that stuff are protocols. Great applications, John, have great middleware. The average Web2 application has about 15 pieces of middleware. You think of the cloud now, and you can go get-
John Furrier
>> They call it high level services.
Adam Winnick
>> Thousands of microservices available to make it easy for developers to build. One of the problems with blockchain is it didn't have micro services. It didn't have great middleware, but more and more middleware is being built to support great Web3 applications. And one of those things are, "Hey, I need to know the identity that people that are holding these tokens, but I can't hold that idea."
John Furrier
>> There are full stack chains now, so you're starting to see that software construct come in.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct. And by the way, I don't need to know your name. I just need to verify that you comply with KYC and AML.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you're a number.
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah, but you still... I know you're not a bad actor. I can look at your basics.
John Furrier
>> So what are you doing now? What's the fun things you're doing? Talk about what's going on with the fund, the hedge fund. Is it a hedge fund? Do you call it a hedge fund?
Adam Winnick
>> Well, I have a business partner, brilliant MIT computer scientist. He uses a quantitative signal to put risk on or risk off. We have another partner that looks at liquid tokens and stocks.
John Furrier
>> Explain liquid tokens.
Adam Winnick
>> Projects that are... Tokens are basically like stocks. Maybe the question is about-
John Furrier
>> You mean there's liquidity?
Adam Winnick
>> Liquidity. There's maybe questions around value accrual, but.
John Furrier
>> But liquid tokens refers to.
Adam Winnick
>> Anything we could trade.
John Furrier
>> Basic money.
Adam Winnick
>> We have a hedge fund business that's doing very well this year. It's beating Bitcoin by an order of magnitude with much lower draw-downs. We do two things. We pick projects to invest in and we actually pick some stocks to invest in. And then we also manage risk by rotating on or off in the markets based on this macro signal. I focus primarily on our venture business.
John Furrier
>> In the classic sense, you mean?
Adam Winnick
>> Yeah. Well, I invest in early stage projects that will all launch a token at some point, pretty much.
John Furrier
>> Okay, got it. All right, cool.
Adam Winnick
>> That will one day be traded and bought and sold by our hedge fund. And what I try and do is focus on, with my partners, a theme or thesis that we believe the way the markets are going to play out over the next 10, 15 years. We meet entrepreneurs who either align with that thesis or contribute to that thesis. If they don't fit that thesis, we don't invest.
John Furrier
>> Got it.
Adam Winnick
>> If they contribute to it, we invest. And we try and find people that have that pattern match with the way we think about way the space is going. Early crypto people thought about launching a token, creating a permissionless system that they step away from. And I don't think of the world that way. I think companies, projects, even if it's permissionless, still need leaders and personal responsibility. We try and find people that want to be involved with projects for a really, really long time, and we help them build a great business. So I think what we do is where the world's going is this idea of convergence. As Web3 matures and starts impacting real world businesses, these founders need people that can provide real, that offer lived experience around startups, helping them manage the ups and downs, and also deep business networks that can help them grow their business. That hasn't always been the case with crypto venture. The things I'm excited about are these ideas of how verifiable identity. If I can verify your identity, let's say I know how many Uber rides you take or you're an Uber driver, how many times you drive and your rating. Why couldn't I start a permissionless network and issue tokens to these people to be part of a new network where they own more of the network?
I'll give you one of my favorite examples right now. Everyone's talking about the ticketing business. Why is it that the ticketing company like Ticketmaster gets so much of the revenue of a ticket? Is it because they have a monopoly? That's possible. If you look deeper, it's really because ticketing companies are banks. They give venues the money to go lock in shows and then market those shows. And what if you could tap into the entire pool, global pool of liquidity of crypto to help venues get the money they need to go book shows outside of the Ticketmaster system? We have a company called KYD that's doing that today.
John Furrier
>> Awesome.
Adam Winnick
>> And what's interesting about that though is to be able to make a credible commitment to that venue, they need to know the data inside that system. But that system company, whether it's Ticketmaster or Dice, does not have any API to share that information in a private, secure way with the blockchain. Crypto actually has a technology, zero knowledge proofs, that allows that to happen. You can go into a system and verify leveraging what's called the transport layer of security, verify secure connection that this venue sold this many tickets this year, has this many customers, generated this much money, and just verify that. And you could say this company, this venue is now verifiable and have the blockchain bid on providing money to let this company go bid on shows. It could completely disrupt the entire ticketing industry.
John Furrier
>> Well, that's a great example. I mean, there's so much going on. What's the coolest thing you're working on now?
Adam Winnick
>> Well, I think that's one of them. Another one that I'm really excited about is a company called HiFix and GeoNet. GeoNet is a... Have you had anyone that's doing anything in the decentralized physical infrastructure network space, DPIN? Have you heard that term?
John Furrier
>> No.
Adam Winnick
>> Think of, it's almost like Napster, but think about that where everyone connects their Wi-Fi for mobile phone service. That's a company called Helium, but there's one company doing it for GPS location data. And it's very easy for drones to be spoofed. If you want to do drone delivery to the home, someone could say, "Hey, yeah, I'm that address. I'm 345 Park."
It's hard to verify that. If you have a verifiable database of location data, you can have a bigger drone industry. The problem is America doesn't want, we don't want a Chinese blimp flying over the country. We don't want Chinese drones flying all over the country. So Trump is banning DJI drones, and the DJI makes a system on a chip that makes the cost of drones really low. We backed a company that is building a system on a chip to bring the drone industry to America and using blockchain location data to make it spoof proof. And that could create a whole new drone delivery market.
John Furrier
>> But basically remapping using immutable location and rewarding people for that.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct.
John Furrier
>> With the token.
Adam Winnick
>> Correct. And it completely can change how we do delivery in this country. And defense.
John Furrier
>> All right. Where can people get more information about your investment thesis? I mean, you have a clear mandate. This is what we're trying to do. If it aligns, you'll partner. What's some of the data?
Adam Winnick
>> I'm all about convergence. I write on Twitter at @adam_winnick. @finalitycap is my website. We didn't really talk about this community I built called Medici Network, which is all about bringing the top financial institutions together with the top crypto native founders. The idea is to help institutions go beyond Bitcoin to explore Web3. And there's not a lot, John, you're doing something very rare. There's not a lot of reporters that cover the tech of crypto. Most of the reporters are finance reporters that cover the price of crypto or token launch. The ones that covered the tech got blown out in '22 and moved on. You're one of the few people that actually interested in the tech. Well, stick around.
John Furrier
>> We're stuck because we're so addicted to the innovation.
Adam Winnick
>> Stick around.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Adam Winnick
>> Stick around. The next few years are going to be really fun.
John Furrier
>> Well, no, I would say just to that point, when the hardcore comp sci kicked in around 2014 to 2016, all the alphas were working on blockchain. And then the ICO bubble hit, then COVID hit, then the US regime hit. Now it's back. I mean, here in New York and out in California, it's rocking. It means we have some serious entrepreneurship happening.
Adam Winnick
>> Look, I got my ass handed to me, excuse my language, in the internet 1.0. Okay?
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Adam Winnick
>> The one thing I learned, the biggest lesson is never quit. I've become an-
John Furrier
>> There's always 2.0.
Adam Winnick
>> I've become an incredibly difficult person because what I've found is I just have to stay alive and stay in it and they'll come back. And that's the insight. The insight is just stay close to it, even when other people don't like it.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, exactly. Adam, great to have you on. Go for an hour. Let's definitely do a follow-up. I think that internet 1.0 experience, I've had a similar one. Then Web2 happened, and then SaaS happened, then you got AI, now you got crypto, but then crypto's kind of, was baking out. I think there's some massive lessons to be learned because now we have scale and we have new structural market opportunity. I mean, I think it's a huge opportunity with tokens. I would agree. So let's keep in touch.
Adam Winnick
>> I love to.
John Furrier
>> Good trailblazer. Again, the trailblazers, they take the heat, they eat glass, spit out nails, they got scar tissue. The ones that are survive and thrive are the OGs. And then the mainstreaming's happening. Young guns are coming in, you got young talent, people are building and really building products, entrepreneurial products and going after opportunities here in crypto. Again, up and down the stack, full stack, you're seeing a lot more of that. Of course, doing our job, and maybe soon we'll have our tokens on theCUBE. Until then, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier