 So, we'll get started and I know that I think we are the last family to do as freedom, so we won't take, we'll keep it crisp. But I think we have a power pack, you know, full house here today and very good representation all the way from funds to exchanges, you know, exchange investment platforms to accelerators to enterprise investment platforms. So, I'm very excited about it. So, I think what we can start with is quick intros and maybe we can start with a compilation for all three years. Why don't we start with intros, maybe what your enterprise does, what is your investment thesis? Hi, I'm this compilation, I'm co-founder of Histricated. And we are at least stage VCCN, more focusing on the enterprise, Web3 and Fintech companies, not especially looking for the crypto and the end of the company. And my previous background, I was a CTO when blockchain started earlier and lead the hyperlager India and advisor to a few companies, especially in CBDC and Fintech. Hello, I'm Shauna. I'm the head of Web3 Fabric. I've been in the blockchain space for more than 10 years now. At Brink, we are a venture accelerator. We've been around since 2014. We've done more than 15 investments in Web3. My thesis is on Bitcoin space, deep pin, cloud computing and GPU compute. That's the spaces I'm really focusing on and very excited about. Hello, my name is Darshan Jain. I'm the founding partner of SunEyken Ventures. It's an early stage VC based out of Mumbai. The sector agnostic is a fund but we try investing in tech-based companies that are looking to cause a disruption. From an educational background point of view, I'm an engineer. I'm Parth. I'm with CoinSwitch Ventures. So it's a corporate VC arm of CoinSwitch. And basically the idea is to support the Indian Web3 ecosystem. So we've been doing early stage investments, pre-seen seed runs, and also opening up the Indian ecosystem to global capital. So we've created a very strong partner VC network where we're trying to get in bigger funds interested in Indian deals. Hi, I'm Lovit. I'm from CoinDCX and CoinDCX Ventures. CoinDCX, we are a centralized exchange and venture business venture arm. We do invest early stage only in Web3 and invest globally. Hi, this is Ravi Sravastav. I present Leo Capital here. What we again, similar to what some of our friends are doing, we are a broad-based technology seed investor. Web3 is one of the focus areas that we invest in. Broadly speaking, we invest in enterprise VW SaaS. We do fintech. We do some gaming logistics. So it's a broad gamut that we are focused on primarily at the seed and sometimes pre-seed stage. Awesome. And very quick intro. So I am from world less capital. We are currently deploying from three wagons. First in deep end, cross-chain infrastructure space, and third is a little bit. So I think with that, why don't we jump in, you know, I think very different perspectives. So maybe we can start with you, Ravi. From your lens, what are some of the trends which you are seeing in the Web3 space of all the business space in general and focus from the side? Sure, sure. But so in terms of trend, I know in the previous panel, there was a significant discussion around a couple of things that I had noticed common threads. One is the ETF launch, which has been a catalyst for the price action. Right. Let me add just a little bit of color on that. EDF launch in the US, that was highly anticipated event. The assets under management. So for, that's a very small anecdotal data point, but for the BlackRock ETF, right, and Rohit, you would know this very well, it went to $10 billion in under two months of launch. Now, and it broke some records. And guess what the record previous was? It was the Gold ETF, which has taken a little over two years to hit that same milestone. So that speaks a little bit about the, about the velocity with which now the industry is moving. The second, the trend that we are seeing, and again, just like previous panelists, you know, it's not really about the price action. It's about what validation it brings into the space. That has been great. I think a lot of the questions around, you know, this is a great power sink or it is for nefarious actors, all those questions have been subdued actually in the last year or so, but certainly after the ETF launch. So it has fairly legitimized the industry in some senses. The second part that was again listening to the previous panel about compliance and regulation, right. So we have multiple countries looking at compliance. Of course, there was a lot of discussion. I'm not going to repeat that around India and how the Indian government is looking at it. There are certain very specific, so Europe is a little bit ahead. It's not the best one, but the Mika regulations came out and it at least sets a path forward. It gives, you know, some light at the end of the tunnel in terms of here is an asset class, here is a new technology. We're all going to interact with it in some way, shape, or form. And here are the, you know, the basic guardrails around it. Again, so that's an increasing trend. If you can call that. Most countries are going to have some sort of regulation around it, which ties a little bit again in the CBDC space, you know, perhaps, I think a large majority of countries are looking at CBDCs in some way, shape, or form. It's to experiment with it, whether or not they will launch one is a different aspect. But nearly 90 plus percent of the world's GDP today is actually involved in some way, shape, or form reviewing that technology. So that's an increasing trend. Again, governments are very closely looking, you know, 19 out of the top 20 G20 countries have very close, you know, some sort of pilot, some sort of, you know, angle to a CBDC today. So regulatory, I think, tailwinds, if we may say, are an increasing trend in the space. And again, in the past, it's been very difficult. The U.S., fortunately still, you know, they kind of regulating by litigation in some senses. And there are some more regulations coming out. The Congress is considering a stable coin bill that might get passed in some fashion later this year. That'll be a big boost to USD based stable coins, which, by the way, are becoming very fundamental in terms of how capital and tokens move around the crypto ecosystem. So that'll be a very positive sign as well. So that's more on the broader crypto trend space. I think a few things in the Web 3, you know, DeFi space or, let's say, the token build-out space that we are seeing again is, I think we're at this inflection point to borrow the term again from previous panelists. We have infrastructure that is almost ready. Now, last year, we were here and, Roy, you remember we were talking about, you know, a lot of the inputs are going into infrastructure building and so on. It is not perfect today, but I think a lot of the entrepreneurs in the space spent a fair bit of time during the downturn, you know, heads down building it. And today, I think we're seeing sparks of application-level build on top of the infra build-out that has been out there. Things like, you know, let's say Eigenlayers are making extremely easy to, you know, to have security posture from the Ethereum underlying layer, right out the box, for instance. This is one example, which so you don't have to build out and worry about the entire security layer and still can get in a way on top. Or, you know, small projects like the Sonic where you can actually take these, you know, you can use AI to build out these, you know, the content, but then how do you prove provenance of these content? You can put it out on the blockchain, upload it to Spotify for consumption, and then you can, you know, you can get paid as a creator for having created that particular piece of music. So some of these are very interesting. I'll stop there, maybe just one last thing about AI that I mentioned. AI has been the rage, all the rage last year, year and a half. But that's a very centralizing technology, so to speak. We can talk more about that later. But there's a, you know, we feel the crypto-webtree space works as a decentralizing counterbalance to that. And then the variety of ways that we can do that prove provenance, prove incentives, or allocate incentives. So I think that's another trend that's increasing its kind of on, you know, going hand in hand with the AI or Chen AI boom. But I think that's going to be very important going forward as well. You're talking about key investment themes this cycle? Investment themes. And from your lens, how do you see this year-over layout? Sure. I mean, the second question is easy to answer. We're clearly in a bull cycle, at least until the end of this year, who knows about next year. But some investment themes that we're excited about, one is of course, restaking. A lot of interesting activity happening there, a lot of creativity, a lot of innovative startups starting in that space. Related to that is the data availability layer. So restaking and data availability are two themes that we're very excited about. Other than that, I think another space which kind of came at us from the left field is Bitcoin L2s. So there is a massive amount of innovation happening on the Bitcoin L2s. And I think Bitcoin L2, some of them are already out there in the test net phase. And I think they are a very realistic probability. And I think for certain use cases, Bitcoin L2s may actually do better than ETH L2s or the oil L1s as well. So those are some themes that we're excited about. Other than that, there is innovation across the board. Totally agree on the first part, in terms of the market is in a bull run. And there is a lot of experience back. I think the meme coin pump that happened in the last two weeks is a clear sign that a lot of people who made money in BTC are probably rotating into these altcoins and meme coins. So that's something that we'll see. I think it's going to be a highly volatile year for crypto. But post-all-time highs, I think the halving event is going to be like a major trigger for what happens next. Ethereum also is going to have its own separate interesting period after the tanking upgrade next week. So excited about the market structure in general. On the investment theme, so we look across Web 3 and I think now we've reached that stage where onboarding people is not that much of an issue. Like in the last cycle, getting new users was tough, chains couldn't handle traffic. Now I think both these problems are sort of almost near completion. And now we'll start seeing masses get into this phase. So I think one of the big triggers for that is going to be gaming. Web 3 gaming always lagged in terms of gameplay if you see it to normal games. But some projects from two years back are now launching their AAA games. GTA 6 is supposed to come out next year. All of this is going to be a big trigger for the Web 3 gaming space. And other projects which are non-financial in the sense that they reward you for engagement or they reward you for viewership. I think those kinds of themes can also really pick up because crypto enables it. Like the underlying blockchain technology can enable such new creator economies. So the social 5 space, gaming 5 space, these are two things that I'm really like purish on. Infrastructure continues to like keep getting built. I think Duncan upgrade will really help other layer tools as well to really bring down costs and speed up transactions. So I think from an infrastructure point of view, we'll be in a very safe space to compete with Web 2 in this year sometime. And that is when the real explosion of users comes on. One sector that I'm really personally interested about is privacy and security. I think one trend that we have seen in India in the past 10 years have been with the increase in the amount of internet, for example, that's available to everyone. We've seen the amount of data that has become digital. And suddenly we see so many organizations that actually care about what kind of practices are around data. So similar to how we have regulations around in, for instance, GDPR, we see DB, DBA also come up in India. And I feel any kind of, for instance, an idea that can help organizations in making sure that they're being compliant and kind of somewhere around that theme will potentially make a big impact. And I would also agree with Ravi what he mentioned about regulations, because I think you always want to be on the right side of it. And even as part mentioned about infrastructure, focusing on scalability, particularly at this point of time, even if you're building on, for Leo to instance, will be very interesting space. I think everyone's covered most of the spaces we're interested in. But we personally, I'm very, very deeply interested in the Bitcoin space, surely because of the size of it. Now for so many years, it did not have smart contract functionality. That's why it was all this untapped potential. So usually when you're building out, building out a product in a particular sector, we look at the time and then we go down to figure out your song. Now if your time is Bitcoin, that's a very, very big market to work in. So that's some, that's a space purely just from an investment point of view, I'm really interested in. But other than that, every year there's a theme to it. Now this year's theme is move as much of competition and data off chain as possible. The CEO of Rcaster has put it really delicately that putting everything on chain is undesirable and unwanted. So figure out if it is really required and only put that much on chain. Already most of things covered but what we are looking so we are actually mostly work with starters where we technically and business wise can help because we come from the technology background. Myself as the CEO of the previous company and another founder and partner has a huge experience in the industry. So the companies where we work we try to find out whether we can help with them not just money but about in terms of scaling their business. So the current theme we are currently working with some digital asset or some tokenization of fund or CBDC offline CBDC which is a emerging but obviously there's a need because the RBI and the central governments in the world is promising the applicability out. So the startup we're building in this area and where we can help them to get a business we are looking at. I think one thing again given the diversity of the panel because it's very difficult to get folks representing this diverse area of web 3 together. So one thing which I think will help the audience is maybe we can start from you. For each of you maybe with an enterprise mindset how are you looking at now right now from an enterprise mindset the startups which are happening maybe against some key hits or misses and what are you seeing from your lens in the web 3 space from an accelerator mindset from the exchange and again from a fund. So actually I started my blockchain journey with enterprise blockchain itself so as a part of the IBM blockchain team in 2016 I started as a developer on the attempt to build solution and use case from the day one in the blockchain space. So I seen the growth of the ecosystem maybe in the media we more talk about the web 3 crypto and other stuff but technically a lot is different during the last 8 years. I even seen the companies who even went to series A level even yesterday there is a company calling DCO they are used the high-paying ledger, Indie is a member they recently raised around 20 to 30 million dollars in series funding and it's not a crypto it's simply how you can solve the verifiable credential ecosystem using the blockchain. So this kind of use cases I know some CPDC platform companies in the early but they already have a 20 to 30 million revolution. So this question and use cases around agriculture or supply chain facility even we seen some failed startup like we dot and trade lens maybe use the data governance and others but obviously there are ecosystem is there and there are many use cases happening when I work in personal level company for consulting network to them where we are trying to solve the root cross root cross ecosystem in a traceability of the let's be productivity. So this kind of use case happening and I think this is and I believe in going to be next 5 years we see the more use cases around the enterprise blockchain we other people differ but then I pass my point. So from my background and my experience I've run a lot of companies in like all those gimmicky businesses okay anything that wasn't trained when investors were happy about I was building that those did not work out then I went into building a really boring business in a in commercial real estate which is like a proctech and fit tech mix damn boring I used to get bored but that did really well I got an exit it turns out it works really well that's where the money is made since then I'm really looking for companies that are not in hype that maybe nobody cares about users would never know about that are actually able to make money that are actually able to capture value sometimes a layer would not be able to make money but it's actually capturing value rollups will never make money that they cannot capture value but it's like the thing that everyone's going to invest in. So I'm looking for those businesses where there's a potential that even if they don't raise the next round they would still be able to at least get me a 10x return if not 100. From my perspective in terms of certain hits and misses is what I would answer certain investments that we've made have particularly focused upon there have been few that have been focusing on infrastructure where they want to make sure they can be scalable as a system there have also been a few in the meta space that kind of allow other companies that are traditionally in the web 2 space to enter into web 3 we've also seen certain companies that are kind of focusing around the privacy and security that has earlier spoke about in the supply chain space or in the agri-tech space as well but at this point it's kind of early to tell if they'll be hits or misses. As a part of the corporate we see it's a very different lens that we apply in terms of making the investments I think primarily the goal of the fund is to grow the ecosystem in India and that's how like we're like you know structured ourselves a little more collaboratively compared to like let's say the rest of the industry like I share a deal flow with over 150 vcs then this is network that has been set up with the last like one and a half years we started off like you know with about seven vcs we were also our investors and we said that you need more eyeballs on early stage Indian projects there was a lot of tourist money in the space I think in the last bull market which left like a lot of web 2 funds who had started tabling into web 3 they have also started coming back now so I think this cycle will be different in that sense that we'll have more long-term money enter the space and we want to be you know the channel partners for them to discover like good projects in the country. Building is not strong I would say one and a half years we've talked over 400 projects in the country who are building in web 3 so easy to say that with our developer strengths India's already the third largest web 3 developer market if the right kind of you know venture capital or like you know in general like you know liquidity enters the space we can create some world-meeting companies here. From our perspective also being in exchange and two things one completely echo our thought around supporting the ecosystem growth in India but beyond that even when you think about global protocols you know anytime a global protocol wants to enter India and no global protocol will be able to ignore India in the times to come you know a couple of years they will have to come into India for one reason or the other we do have the largest retail crypto base in the world it is going to be one of the largest crypto markets in the world and at that point when these global protocols want to tap the Indian market then who better to partner with than one of the you know leading kind of exchanges which is one if focused on not only Indian protocol than Indian builders but also global protocols because we see that web 3 in general is much more borderless than web 2 was it's a lot more you know international than web 2 was so you know we're just being a little bit more flexible on that one. Actually so we have a few I'm sure there's lots of misses actually and I'm happy to talk about that I you know how many hours you got but in terms of so what Darshan also mentioned I think about infrastructure we are there is one company for instance and I'll take that as just an example and and build out on top of it this company called Zee we we invested two and a half or years ago maybe three now they were helping you know set out node operations for different operations or different you know projects as they're coming online you know again this infrastructure that you want to be able to plug into and not have to you know worry about the entire security or or the you know the cycles and so on so forth that has done well and I think businesses like those have generally done well again the new cycle now they're you know the building of the node operations they're adding roll-ups to their mix of product line that they have again from a very very you know basic infrastructure level that you can plug in and start building on top of it those companies I think we continue to be excited about although now going forward we think that we will have more of this what I said before a boom in applications this one company and I wouldn't call it a pure well three company but it's a gaming company real money gaming company and one of the primary use cases today for them is is slow trading based games and that has done extremely well across the globe it's still very very early days as well trading leagues they are you know the goal is to actually educate about financial markets and surprisingly we talk about web three and crypto being very early and not many people know aware of it but actually if you look across the globe even you know traditional financial markets is not as much participation as there could be so so taking that broad example and and educating the masses about this asset class not just crypto but maybe equity asset class taking a gaming approach to that I think that is one application that we're very excited about in terms of misses again there are months there was one that I had made an investment actually I missed in this company called bitwise end up making an investment in their fund itself about things from the asset manager itself and if even if they've done really well they've been one of the leading asset managers for within the web three crypto ecosystem very dedicated asset manager in the space so that space also we're excited about generally speaking we've seen a few you know to the last point I think there is there is a new generation of folks who will come in and invest in the space even if they don't participate on a very you know granular level but they would say okay let me allocate some capital and see how it grows so that itself is a use case you know people say speculation is a use case you know investment is a use case of crypto and I think that's due to growth so investing in perhaps asset managers if you find the right out in some ways or something and so I think we're also coming through maybe I'll ask one more question so I just want to get a quick show of hands how many founders is okay so I think one question I want to ask specifically to the founders so maybe again for people who started with you is when you are here in the pitch what is it that you know sometimes gosh there is this is a question that we deeply think about all of that every day actually so in terms of when we say what makes us super excited of course you know there's the founder market fit and there is you know have you thought about the problem deeply enough have you learned enough that clearly you should be educating me in the room right that's my goal I should be in the seat where I'm learning from the founder but predominantly there is typically when there is this this sign of seeing the future this is very cliche are they seeing the future are they saying that this is how it will end up being rather than saying that oh we try this we try that you know the parts can't differ and they will surely differ but in terms of the goal of the problem that they're trying to solve that should be very very clear and you've seen time again if you know anytime you've compromised in that for one reason or another that investment hasn't gone very well so it's a clear sign in terms of what pulls us away again I think if it's given that free space has been criticized in the past for this you know like a hammer looking for a nail right just I have the solution where can I apply it I think that that approach even though you might actually find the right name and you have the right hammer but the approach of looking for the name because you have the hammer I think that you know pulls us away from that approach it's it's really have you identified the right nail you know right that has to go to and why it's important what picture you're hanging on that nail and therefore you need to put this hammer I think that's very important I think there's some table state things that every VC looks at you know it's the quality of the founder the side of the problem statement so those are daily states right there's no getting away from it beyond that I think what it sites me is a unique intuition or a unique insight that typical people don't have or or at least I would have so that's certainly one thing that it sites me a unique insight or an intuition that's number one and number two what I find the same especially amongst the three founders to be very honest is a view of the competitive landscape where three is the global guys very natured and it's it's way more competitive than that too you know there could be a fantastic team building us very similar products somewhere you know in a small corner of the world but you need to be aware of that and I find that every founders don't do the enough diligence from a competitive landscape model so those are two things that stand out for me which is a unique insight or an illusion or and number two especially in the battery space being aware of the competitive landscape and similarly they don't have these two things you know I'm a little less excited totally I think each stage investing is more hard than science like there are four broad things that I look at like from the team or team and probably tech there is very strong tech mode that comes in and in all these four I think still the stand out is the team so I think both are the positive and the negative side positive side if you know that this founder is trying to build something which hasn't been built before you must pack them and you get that feeling you get that sense of when you see like you know somebody is sort of like front run the wave which might come because the impression pack so I think there if you come across somebody who's building that with that spark you should pack them and try to build a new case on this rather than I still know that on similarly on the downside I think and even now at that point in the cycle where founders start saying no due diligence questions or they're like you're writing a small check hundred people don't know like you know so many people's I think that for me is a clear good sign that they probably don't know their business that well that they're not ready to answer it or they're just trying to like you know if there's some perseverance in the market like you know they're getting money for not really the product that they actually built and which can be like you know cross question to the point of any investor's questions and again like I know enhanced you are totally different volumes but we are at this point again where this happened in the last market also where paper ideas used to raise me I just so great points are covered over there that I was going to talk about but to reiterate I think it's very important for the founding team to have complementary skills that kind of help each other out and what kind of gets me really excited is when the founder comes up to me and provides a great insight as you know some of the mention that kind of gives you another idea as to how big or how big a particular idea can be that you don't know about and in terms of red flags or even yellow flags are when you know you just don't answer questions in a simple way and you try complicating them and also for instance one thing that particularly strikes out for me is if you don't only have a good amount of calculation to support what the market size of a particular idea is so like everyone said we have like standard hygiene measures that we do we have certain boxes that we need to take first post that since it's all early stage investments maybe we don't even have a product no traction forget revenue so we definitely look for a good team and a team that we can also work with maybe they have something a solid team they have had run previous businesses even if they did not work out they have worked out three if it's an obnoxious problem I will not work with you and the timing as they said timing is very important so if you are too early or you're too late you're still wrong so timing is very very important so I think every founder should know how to say it that is most important even I have a technology guy but I'll give more letters to sales and the adaptive nature of the founder because if he able to learn from his mistakes because I'll say many founders like they believe in the letter there's so much whether even they're realizing they are not able to convert the business but it's still more whether you overconfident whether you don't want to accept so how to say it is more important on that and off to the environment let's say this product is not working this will be able to tweak the pure and technology can scale and build later any time even like the past life with paper I guess did funding so that is not the same nature like how the founders would able to explain how they would be saying their product awesome awesome so I think great great thoughts guys I think I I wrote that everyone learned first and for the y'all which is to learn so with that why don't we just open it up to the audience so maybe a couple of questions yeah so anybody just raise your hand and we can give them this there is someone particularly want to direct the question to you can do it like maybe on the exchange side or all of it I'm a part of the crypto venture studio and we have all the state's crypto potentiaries capital and what my experience has been in this cycle is that these things are prioritizing already exists with the lower than average trade and they're more interested in tokens than a crypto so because they're basically want to capitalize on this bull market and make a lot of losses for the crypto meter so my question for you is what are your investment pieces on exits and what will help you timeline for a busy project and should projects focus on tg's and idios to make money early on or near the actual product development cost thanks so I think that if you got it correct the question is basically you on exit timeline for exit and should the focus be on teaching investing okay so so when we're talking about these companies we're referring to web 3 companies coming to us right so when web 3 companies come to us they come at a web 3 premium okay that is basically whatever normally we would value a company as as soon as they've added the web 3 term they've added a very high premium to the valuation and if we have taken the risk of investing in it we expect a quick turnaround because that's the risk we've taken for that higher valuation so of course we will be looking for an exit potential we are also a business we are also looking to make profits for our investors so to answer your question yes we also care about our exits but it's not which exits we look for that depends on the founder the founder who comes to us is the one who decides the tokenomics how our besting schedule will be like we come to agreement and if the founder has already agreed to a particular besting schedule that gives me a quick exit is that on me or is it on the founder if we can just add one point again it depends on where you are in the second I think last one and a half years there were only equity rounds also with token warrants there's no like clear cut tokenomics in place because nobody wanted to launch a token like one year down one year in the past nobody wanted to do it and now the cycles have turned around everybody wants to launch token which will probably get like a market gap and again besting schedules are pretty tight like most of them have like very little amount that is free for selling at PG and then there's like a year investing over like a year period so I think as long-term investors and strategic investors we are like in it for at least a two year time frame if you need an investment maybe just to add to that you know tokens I don't think every project should have a token so a lot of projects come and say that they want to launch a token but it's not clear that that project should ever have a token so that is one big question marked in my mind that said the projects that do have tokens of course we love it you know it gives us early liquidity because bc is a game where it can take 10-15 years before you get liquidity so there are certain projects which gives us early liquidity absolutely love it you know as we were just saying that you know we're at the business of giving returns to our investors and this gives us liquidity so next question right this is one of those thank you so much for that enlightening discussion my question is really just a venture investment one-on-one question so you mentioned that the timing of your investment when and when you're coming to get your I mean get funding for your idea that timing in the market is very important so what are some of the markers that someone is just you know starting out looking for funds that he or she should keep in mind to know but the timing in which they are participating in the round is that I mean opportunity right but then they're late early if you just go in that in any way okay this is in terms of choosing a particular center to work in based on funding data is that what you're saying that should be pretty easy to aggregate right you should be able to go to public forums and be able to aggregate that data for the road whether the funding is going or going down you should have a lot of papers up by and all these companies getting put out you'll get a good sense of idea if funding is on rise or if the market is not doing well whether investors are interested or not this is all public data that's freely available but if you want to know if the timing is right your guess is as good as mine in terms of going out and getting a certain problem and both for the founders entrepreneurs and also for investment in terms of investing being a little bit late is slightly better than being too early so that you see time again especially because we come in at a very early stage of the investment cycle so many you know so many entrepreneurs just lose steam and when they could have you know they could have stuck out another three years the timing would have been better so just keep that in mind if it feels so I'll this is an anecdote I'll give an example of Dave myself doing that in 2013 I stopped you know I came out of the prior high frequency training work and I was looking at the crypto space and I had played around a little bit with the bitcoin ecosystem I looked around and I said well there is coinbase they have launch already there's this point base there's big pay you know and there was one cross-border currency remittance platform that had come up which doesn't exist anymore but I looked around and I said everything has been solved I don't know what I'm what I can do with the crypto space anymore this was 2013 right so so timing is is all about having that conviction and if you're a little bit late don't don't fret you probably better place that place Hi I'm Prasad it's just a general question why is the startup funding is extremely low now 23 is 5 years low in 2020 as compared to what it used to be what is the scenario like you know is this we are not getting enough good niche startups or is there any issues like what are you what are the parameters the kind of processing your requirement the kind of thing that what has what has changed I think it's a very macro thing it's not specific to it's across the general question yeah we see funding has like it had reduced a lot I think it's on the upswing again that is because of macro factors and interest rates go higher risk capital becomes like very like you know of us you would rather just deploy it in like US countries and get 5% without like you know getting like a risky proposition and we have yet seen this when the interest rates were close to zero funding was like very much free flowing I still think there is a lot of cash lying on with these LPs which wants to be deployed it is sitting on the sidelines but they're still waiting for you know valuations to come to better levels or like a general interest rates as soon as interest rate gets cut you will see like another surge in easy funding that's great in fact it kind of ties back into that exit question and to your point but at least right now everyone is asking about exits because of the liquidity trends that has been in space is broadly speaking and also I think there is a little bit of a reflection self-protection around the venture space itself again not specific to web 3 but venture space now what is the time horizon is it worth taking that liquidity risk and this has come from allocators I think we also stepping back in terms of the entrepreneurs or managers who deploy the capital I think there was a little bit of of an existence in a couple years ago which is set it down right so if you actually look at free 2019 2020 data we are actually not way to go we're actually just about being able to right now maybe in the interest of time one yeah one last question and then you all can outside we'll take one last question sure okay two last questions and then actually we have a fly so sure I'll make it short but we'll take two we'll take two questions I'll make it short here myself I'm sigh this is more on the question on the metaverse friend with the investment perspective especially like I want to understand like the VC mindset when investing in metaverse metaverse company very much do you prefer investing in a token company like a company which has token giving token involved or with no token what are the factors that you look at and should the founder even think of creating an exit strategy or he should be focused on the product itself okay unpopular opinion or even opinion we've actually all got it really burned with the whole metaverse narrative and I'm not sure how fundable it is at the moment at least in the VC circles we don't talk about metaverse at least in the web 3 VC circle metaverse is no longer web 3 we have what do you call it got ridden of it it's no longer in web 3 so it's more on the digital entertainment side maybe a journey is a good investment that direction we personally I'm really not looking in the metaverse side so if you have a token great but whether we still see that kind of exit potential or whether we still see that kind of VC money flow inside it I'm not sure about just one part to add to what he said I think it would be a better idea to focus on the product and even more on that on the customers you know if you're ready to get you're looking to get funding might as well get a strong base of customers who really barge for your product and if you're able to do that then a bunch of VCs would be looking for you at this point like focus on the product first once you get traction VC money is going to come in in these tokens there is exit liquidity put for what like if the token doesn't have any value or like nobody's using the metaverse I don't think that will add much value I don't agree with the fact that metaverse is like probably dead I think still they're out here it's a long-term play with vision pro and like you know such kind of ARER hardware changes coming into play they will take one or the other four years or mainstreaming but like definitely think that there is going to be a longer term metaverse playing in the future maybe one final question let's go into the back please if you don't mind hold on hi this is Aditya Kumar my question is for getting funds so why did we get into approach business for getting funds and matters as to existing platforms for getting investment charges in big part though we don't know it's the last minute the best way is to reach out to us and of course if you have warm connectors that's respected but it doesn't change the odds yeah and I would just echo that a warm connect always has you know cold reach out sometimes you are going to slip through the cracks but a warm connect all the time hello this is Ajay Kumar my dad he comes out in a lot of just about the law and regulation of crypto law and regulations so how good that the trade goes on in India so I'm talking to the law and conference of crypto investment and regulations so I think basically India's taking a very slow and steady approach in terms of rotation and it also wants to do things from a global framework perspective so in India was the G20 presidency we pushed for like a global set of you know frameworks to be put in place for crypto because not one country can regulate such a global asset class and I think we will see some more directions in the right step post the elections post like you know clarity will probably emerge in the next budgetary session which happens as from an India perspective globally we have like mica as the north star which has like going to come an EU wide regulation across the European Union US also I think probably elections only after the elections we can expect you know some more proper laws and frameworks to be put in place how safe is the influence that's my how safe is the investment if you invest from India it is extremely risky it is the most risky asset there is if you are looking for safer assets there are like regulated assets and you can place your money there but similarly when you place somebody in small cap stocks I think just for you know risk adjusted returns you put place somebody into further thank you and I would just summarize that by saying that you know when you take a step back sometimes people get excited or the other way around in a minute one regulation comes out but the reality of the matter is regulations can never front-run innovation that is by its very definition regulations always have to play a lagging role whether it was Flipkart when they started e-commerce you know Zomato, Olao Kuber etc etc regulations always by its very definition have to come after the fact and that exactly what's happening in the crypto space as well the second point is when you actually take a step back and you think about it from a long-term perspective globally crypto regulation the secular trend is trending upward we're getting increasingly more regulatory clarity it is taking a little bit of time but the secular trend is trending upward so that's pretty optimal still last question wonderful discussion and generally got an overview of what VCs are looking for so we have already built a blockchain based payment app and we have a consumer who's ready to pay using cryptocurrency in US and we have a merchant who want to accept payment in crypto currencies the problem we are facing currently right now is in to find a payment processor like the result being or simple and the moment we talk about the problem and the business they are just like we don't touch crypto so like do you make do you think like what would be the way out here sorry I also do a real quick plug talk to our portfolio company got paid to you other there are basically your problem is on-ramp and off-ramp allow how to get INA into crypto so they are like if I you register like a blank platform set in I'm sure some of them are pretty easily available you can just go search on-ramp off-ramp you'll get any on-ramp is one company there's on-ramp there is transit all of these are the final registrations we are we have already partnered with transit but the problem we are facing we need a payment processor and if there are a lot of like specific crypto payment companies which allow exactly the act as given processes the act as a result being for accepting crypto payments okay it would be a great help because I think so again really find all the pandas for the sharing we are kind of easy to share and I hope it was