 Howdy, everyone. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for waiting. Welcome to Market Talks. I'm Ray, head of Markets at Cointelegraph. In this show, we discuss the latest in what is shaping the markets with valuable insights from industry leaders, traders, and influencers. And today's show is presented by our sponsor Web3 Antivirus, a security solution that helps protect users from online threats and scams on the decentralized web. Our guest today is Grant Shears, the founder of Blockmates, a company that basically creates crypto, DeFi, and Web3 content that is easy for anyone to understand. Hello, Grant. How's it going? Hey, Ray. Very, very good. Thank you. Very, very busy, as you can imagine. But yeah, really, really, really glad to be here. Thanks for coming on. I know you said you had a busy day. It's evening for you, I think. Yeah, man. It's like, let me just double check. It's like one in the morning. I'm just out in Asia at the minute. So I've been in a long old day, but you know, I wouldn't rather be doing anything else. You know, it could be something behind a cubicle somewhere, hitting myself, hitting my life, hitting the line of work I'm in. So can't complain, really. That's true. With that said, though, my new year's resolution was to get into bed by 10.45 every night. I think I've got like a 50% success rate on that, which is better than the last two or three years where it was like one, two, three every morning. So, you know, mind your health. Stand up late every night. It does have impacts on your health long term. Oh, man, I'm a serial sleeper as well. These are the times where we can be getting those sleep hours back in, I think, during the kind of bull market times. It was, you know, the regular bed times were just a thing of the past. But yeah, I'm using these times to try and recuperate and hyping it a little bit. So when, as you say, when the bull, when the bull comes back, should be already revitalized to try and do it all again. Yeah, you sound a bit like me. I like to catch up on that sleep on a Saturday morning, like have a good lay in till 10, 11 in the morning. So I don't know if it works like that. Like, can you actually add hours back in that you subtracted earlier in the week? But it feels good. Yeah, I don't know who's who's that head of the guy who's like PhD and like sleep science is like Matthew Walker or something. I think he's got something that goes completely against that. I'll definitely try and do it, you know, I've got I've got three dogs that will completely go against any kind of me time trying to catch up on sleep. Those guys don't care. But we give it a go anyway. Yeah. Well, markets wise, I'm not too sure where we're at. You know, seems like maybe bear market consolidation, finding a bottom, that sort of thing. So in the meantime, as you said, it's time to build, it's time to research, it's time to make a game plan for, you know, when to deploy capital, how and where in this next cycle, it's a good time to reassess mistakes made in the previous bull market and try to develop a framework for success. I guess for what 2022 and 2023 have in store, right? Yeah, I mean, it's been a it's been a really interesting one, particularly the turn of the year. There seems to be this hint of kind of optimism in the year, which is which is always good. But then it always makes you think we haven't suffered enough. But it's 2022, you know, you survive that you deserve some kind of OG recognition badge for that year alone. I know some people who came in very end of 2021 and all they know is 2022. So it's like they were had this real baptism of fire, as it were. So but I think what's what's really interesting and they just seem as you say with that kind of error, often so much stuff that is being built, which have just kind of been blown away by it. And I know it's a bit of a meme and like the whole the whole saying that the band markets for builders. But this this kind of the past year, there is so much kind of zero one innovation that's happening, particularly in the DeFi space and maybe some kind of NFT and DeFi crossover. But I've just been kind of blown away and feels feels for once that even though we've had a real harsh downturn, it feels finally that people have kind of conceded the fact that yes, there will be a return. It didn't really feel like that in prior cycles, it might have been like, that's it, we're done. Let's have a look at the next thing let's move on. But this this time it just feels like there's that inevitable but either the markets will return, they'll return much much stronger. Yeah, I agree with you. I feel like sentiment wise, there's been a mean reversion, right? So we went really high to all time highs, euphoric highs in terms of people's belief that mass adoption had happened that this market had matured that crypto was here to stay. And now we're returning back to kind of like the range that we were in before. And this time there's a road there. This time there's support. This time there's infrastructure. Whereas I agree with you in 2017, 2018, when we came back to what was the mean, there was nothing there, you know, like that was when I first kind of got into trading crypto. And there was nothing there but disbelief, uncertainty and fear. And because of that, it impacted your vision and your ability to like, think, should I keep investing? Should I hold on to these assets? Where do I get good information? And that's actually one thing I really like about what you do at Blockmates is you guys create content that really simplifies DeFi stuff, Web 3 stuff, crypto stuff and, you know, just breaks it into bits and pieces that are digestible. It's accessible for literally anyone like people walking straight off the street to someone with 10 years in the game, it still has that relevancy. So I really like what you guys do. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I'm really glad that it's received that way, because I think when you kind of doing this kind of stuff all day and trying to grow a brand, new media companies where we want to get to, but it's for me, it's always about create the content that you'd kind of consume yourself. And I think there was kind of a I feel as if there's this kind of disconnect between projects and the people that they're kind of trying to push their product towards. And I don't know if that's because a lot of people in this who are building this space are so kind of high IQ and their level of understanding kind of creates this, the way to describe it is they create this kind of flaw of language that they can actually convert to the rest of the people that are in this whole space. So what we try to do is it feels like a lifetime ago now, but just kind of come in and just really lower the barrier to entry for people who are coming into this space, but keep the content the root of why the protocol is working that way, like trying to strip back to first principles. But again, trying to, you know, just make the content as accessible for everyone as physically possible and keep it lighthearted. I don't like reading project documentation. No one likes it. There's so much jargon in there. The industry moves at such a fast rate. It's, you can be an expert one day and you can be left behind the next. They've been not keeping up. So it's, as I say, trying to keep it as lighthearted as possible. Some really, really terrible jokes, littered throughout all the content. But again, out there, but without without the kind of industry jargon, because I think it separates people and kind of puts people off a little bit. So hopefully we can kind of help project up in some little way. Yeah, I agree. I agree. The more the merrier basically for crypto, if it's too niche, then people, it's not sticky. So making it simple and inclusive is really important. So what's on your, like what's on your mind market wise, 2022 was riddled with hope and a ton of let downs, but now a new year is upon us. So what type of trends do you see emerging in the crypto market? Yeah, I mean, I think the big, the big one on everyone's kind of watch list and on the list lips of everyone at the minute is obviously liquid sticking derivative narrative. I think that's, I think that's still got some juice left in it with Shanghai coming up. We've seen a lot of kind of if 2.0 all coins and infrastructure players doing quite well going into the merge. I felt like that sold off a little too early. I think people are still a little bit scarred and that kind of whole move on piv potentially had a little bit more legs than it did. I'm expecting a similar sort of thing to play out with Shanghai 4 coming up. And I think there's some kind of a little bit further out there if you kind of dig in, obviously the natural progression for people to dig down into look at the likes of Lido Rockapool, you got some more providers than Stakewise and things like that. But then if you look a little further down line when it actually comes online and people are allowed to stay, my mind's typically going towards, well, where is the arena that's StakeDeaf, ETH and Rockapool, ETH are traded primarily and pegged asset exchange for me and DeFi is Curve, who owns the lion's share of Curve, Convex. So then you start kind of pile layers and layers and layers on top of the union and trying to think a little bit about whether or not they're going to play Stakewise or Stakewise, they're probably going to think about what's happening. Like even down to the upgrade and everything that comes with that, I think that's where I'm at at the minute. Right. A little bit of that broke up, but I caught most of it. So to give a little bit of context to the audience, with the Shanghai upgrade, locked Ethereum can become unstaked, right? And Lido right now kind of has market share for Stake Ethereum and then there's Stakewise, Frax is making some moves in that area, Coinbase also offers returns on Stake to ETH and whatnot. So from what I'm picking up from you, you kind of think that the merge was a buy the room or sell the news kind of event. If you got an early, it was a good trade. If you kind of did like a cash and carry thing where you were spot long and then short at the same time, that might have been good for you. If you're like a market maker or a whale or something like that. But you kind of think that the whole movement of these liquid Stake derivative tokens is a buy the room or sell the news event. In the last two weeks, most of those tokens, Lido, Rocketpool, Frax, they've doubled in value, right? They've really gone on a tear. So do you think it's more of a rotational trade or do you think that it's possible that this could be a catalyst for a new bull run? Because what I see is a potential flywheel where competition comes back to DeFi and everyone wants to boost their TVL. Everybody wants to catch fee capture, as you said, like with Curve. So this unlocked Ethereum is going to be competitive like different protocols will want to capture it and restake it. Therefore, they're going to offer a higher yield for it, aren't they? So do you think that there's like enough movement in that to kind of like revive DeFi to create some sort of price demand or pressure on Ethereum itself to create more activity in the network and make it deflationary? What's your kind of long term vision on what might happen there? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we were in this imaginary world where we could put macro headwinds aside, because I think you're a better trader than me if anyone knows what's going to happen there. Just for first and foremost. But this kind of thing with regards to the whole liquid sticking through this landscape, it on paper is something that 100% should be kicked out and kind of a DeFi revival. And when you kind of see personalities online that have said DeFi is dead, it doesn't have anything built over there. I just think that's kind of a load of nonsense. Even if you kind of digest some of the kind of big fallouts that happened throughout the summer with Lunar and 3AC and things, 3AC weren't going to Stani from RV and asking for an extension on the lawn. They were the debts that they were paying down first. DeFi was working exactly as intended and extremely well. So I think we must be hitting like a fundamental bottom with regards to DeFi. And I think something like this, as big a catalyst that it is and the kind of opportunities that it unlocks, it just feels primed and ready. All macro headwinds aside, I think, yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying. So let's kind of wind back a little bit. I think DeFi has a problem, or we could say it had a problem, especially in 2021 and 2022. And one of the issues that the sector dealt with was mercenary capital, high yields being really unsustainable, this leading to protocols having high emissions on their native token, high emissions on the native token basically equates to constant cell pressure on that token. And then another issue is hidden leverage, whether it's intentional leverage offered by the DeFi platform or liquid staking derivatives where you can collateralize your assets and lend and borrow off of them and then go and do that again and again and again and again throughout different protocols, whether they're cross chain or a completely different protocol, it just creates leverage within the ecosystem, within crypto itself and within DeFi. And we saw all of that unwind in like a spectacular fashion, right? And the wind up happens, I don't know, you can't track the wind up, we're not aware of it, everyone's just trying to make money. But the unwind is like spectacular and it's prolonged and it takes longer than anyone ever expected and there's always more casualties than you would think, right? So do you think that there are any projects right now that fix this problem or what does this fix look like? Yeah, that's a really, really great question and we definitely, particularly for the bar market, we've seen a lot of projects scrambling around, looking to try and fix the inflation schedule or their emissions and then everyone's seen that there was true value in protocols like the GMX were instead of just paying out emissions in the form of additional tokens coming on the market. Funnily enough, if there is actual activity in product market fit and there's actual fees to be generated, then you can actually generate like obviously the real yields kind of thing came out of the scene. But the one project that does stand out to me that has really looked at this in depth and they have a lot of documentation on this and a lot of data is the guys at Tapioca Dow. So they're effectively going to be an Omnichain, Abracadabra of an awful lot of different functionality on top of that, but just for the high level reference of what the protocol is. So a protocol like that from day one, what do they want? They want liquidity. They want long lasting liquidity and they want this kind of give and take with the people that are going to use the platform. In a regular world or what we've seen in kind of the first iterations of DeFi is people would come along, large amounts of capital, usually the similar sort of faces would pop up if you were kind of tracking to see who was depositing in these bills and then as you were saying, quite rightly saying it's mercenary capital, get as much of that high double digit or sometimes triple digit yields possible. They have no intentions of sticking around with a protocol long term and that immediately just gets taken to market. And there was an awful lot of projects that really struggled with that with the Lexus 3AC and Alameda, usual suspects, effectively farming and dumping the token. So how do protocols properly align incentives for sticky, long lasting liquidity with people that want to use the protocol, but they also want to be involved with the project long term? So their idea was, imagine they've got the kind of borrowing protocols that you can come over, let's say you deposit a stake and you borrow the USD zero state of the coin. So let's say you borrow a lot of value of around 70%. If you come to the protocol earlier, like day one, day two, day three, what they're going to say is if you want to lock up, I don't know, that's $100,000 worth of liquidity and we're going to lock this for six months. So what they're going to do is they're going to say that's great. We're not just going to give tokens away for free because we've learned from the past mistakes of protocols gone by. But what we will do is if you commit to lock up with us for six months with this amount of capital early on the protocols lifecycle, we're going to give you effectively an option to purchase our token at discount. So let's say you've came along, you've said 100 care six months, you've got my capital, the protocols got what they need in return, they're going to give you a 30% discount. So you get the token out dropped, the option to buy the token at a 30% discount. Let's say I come along, similar sort of time, I'll say I want to do 200 care and I want to do for 12 months. So you're going to get sticky liquidity and you're going to get a large amount. Well, the protocol then will spit out a number that will be a lot more advantageous to me. So they might say, well, we're going to give you 50% discount. So they can choose to do that and take the arbitrage immediately and sell the tokens or realize those and then restake on the platform. So it's kind of thinking of ways to align incentives. What does the protocol want? What do you want? People know that people want to make profit in the market. So I think this was like a really, really cool way to go about it. And they're also going to kind of, instead of just air dropping tokens as kind of community incentives and test net incentives and for early adopters and early supporters of the project, they're also going to air drop, they're not just going to give away tokens, they're going to air drop the right to purchase the token at a discount. And all those funds that are used to purchase the token at a discount and then put into the treasury and users protocol and liquidity, which will be effectively managed by Arrakis with the Palm product. So again, aligning incentives, coming up with innovative ways to kind of iterate on the past kind of high emission kind of protocols. And that's as soon as you brought that up, that was the number one protocol that I thought we're innovating in this business. Right. Well, some things that come to mind when you're talking about the model that they're using to like incentivize liquidity and lock it there is basically they have taken the angel investor or the VC model and opened the door to non accredited investors to like anyone to retail investors. Here you have the same privilege now and access that VCs got. But one thing that we saw that happened a lot in DeFi was VCs got these sweet like early token allocations and then they dumped on followers, right? And it's almost like I won't say any names because I don't want to have to like retract it or explain myself to certain people, certain protocols, certain venture capital firms. But it's almost like as unlocks started to come up PR pushing the protocol and like how it was revolutionary and great news about funding rounds and like all the all the height and discussions and podcasts and such were aligned with when VCs could release those tokens. So my one question is with Tapioca Dow, like if you're offering people a token airdrop at a discount in exchange for their liquidity, there is a vesting schedule for how long you hold their money. But what about how long do you hold our token, right? Like is that something that they're considering that's something that DeFi needs to keep in mind? Like you're still creating that sell pressure. What is the incentive to hold their token while also leaving your investment there and earning interest on it? What's your take on that? Yes, it's a good point. And that point you brought up about some marketing ramp up very close to Clefs is it's a really great point. I've noticed that so many times in the past, really, really great point. If anyone's new and wants to understand how the dynamics of some nefarious projects work, just just listen to that back. That was great. So yeah, they effectively with that with the option to buy a discount given a commitment for locked liquidity. The team are just saying you've got a week to exercise this option to buy. It can expire after one week. If you choose to if you choose to buy and then sell into the open market, that's fine. We've got your liquidity for X amount of time. And you know, it won't be as steep as 50% if someone wants to just lock for a week. They're looking for like long term commitments. And they have this kind of they took they took a look over what curve we're doing with regards to four year locks and how the VC RV decays linearly over time. And they've came up with like a time weighted ML on the back of that to kind of judge the average lock duration and how do we incentivize people to lock for longer and then how does the feedback and discount like play out from that. But people are once they've exercised that right to purchase that they're more than welcome to kind of sell on the open market. But again, and then they've also got the utility of the tap token where you can lock for a duration and then also get paid in ETH. So we're not going to get paid and additional any kind of ponzinomic buyback and buyback and better or anything like that. We're going to be seeing kind of real real yield generated from the protocol. So they're happy to kind of sacrifice people selling the option to buy a discount and things like that. So it's going to be interesting to see a play out 100% because people will almost certainly realize the option and then sell on the market. But it's something that's never really treated being done before. I think Andre came up with the idea with KP3R. But I don't think there was an expiry. So it didn't play out as well. These guys have set a set a one week limit on the right to exercise that option. So I'm all for innovation. I love I love this kind of stuff. So I'm really interested to see how it goes out. But that was a one of the innovative ways I thought that people were trying to get around this kind of rented the good issue. Right. Yeah, I'm all for innovation too. That's one of the things that drew me to DeFi was the innovation, the financial like these are experimental financial models. They're not guaranteed to work. And you know, if you take on the risk of experimenting with it, you might get an airdrop. You might get wealthy just because of you know, the AP wise offered or you might hit on like a unicorn and actually benefit from it or the whole thing might blow up and you know, you lose some money or all of your money. Of course it depends on your approach. But that's one of the things that kind of drew me to DeFi. Not that it was the wild, wild West and that it was unregulated. But as a simple investor who's not educated in economics, who is not accredited, who doesn't have access to the same like I can't trade options and futures in my now you can in your Merrill Lynch account or in your like personal brokerage account you can now but like in years past you couldn't, right? It was very difficult to kind of learn the tricks of the trade and here's something that gets me. I'm going to try to not go on a rant here, but we have a market. Here we go. Yeah, West. Okay. Capitalism and Western society and democracies are built on a free market, right? And in a free market you as a consumer or as an investor are allowed to take on risk. You're allowed to try things, right? What I don't like about the current financial system is that it shuts people out. It's overly complicated. It's presented to people in a way that's like riddled with jargon that's hard to understand. You need a whole bunch of certificates. You need to jump through all these loopholes and prove where your money came from in order to even start playing around with some of the financial tools that exist, right? And it creates a system where you feel like you have to go to someone who's educated in the space and has a certain degree and they're going to charge you a management fee for your money. So I'm not allowed to take on the risk and learn from it in a free market. I should be allowed to play with futures and options and anything. And if I get my hands burnt because I didn't do my diligence, then I've learned from it. Either I survive and try to try it again and succeed or it burnt me so bad. I never touch it again, right? But I don't like the kind of shielding that the government gives the American investor supposedly, right? But meanwhile, government and banks go and play with these instruments and create chaos and havoc in the market and that impacts the economy and that impacts me like it impacts the valuation of my stocks and my 401k and all that. So that's my little rant. You're free to respond to it or ignore it. We can move on. No, I love it. I love it. Honestly, it turns into like a, it's the same in the UK to be fair. It turns into a nannies there. But at the same time, if there was a big thing that happened last year with the fast payments infrastructure that allowed people to on and off ramp through Binance need basically the UK government to put a complete block on that on and off ramp and they kind of targeted Binance that way because they weren't playing ball with them. But at the same time, I could have opened up like a, I don't know, yeah, that 365 or something like that and just deposit my whole life savings in and gamble that away within a night's work, do you know what I mean? So it's, I don't know. I could, I could, I could riff on this topic all day, but I'll probably get to kind of philosophical and people will probably get bored of me, bored of listening to me. Yeah, I know. And on the flip side, like in the defense of regulators and government, right? So Luna, Wonderland money, FTX, endless DeFi projects, I guess we can say that, yes, a lot of things were allowed. They were, they were outside of the jurisdiction regulators and people had freedom to do whatever they wanted there. And the absence of that oversight, look at where we are now without regulation, without a framework to regulate crypto assets, without, you know, preventing people from messing around with futures and all that. The whole market got wrecked and most retail investors got wrecked. So I get it. There is a need for regulation and oversight, but I do feel like the absence of a clear regulatory framework allows bad players to come in and exploit people and build products that are like designed to extract their wealth and basically dump on them. So we keep going on. I'm going to move past it, right? So one other thing about this DeFi problem, right? And you've mentioned Tapioca Dow and that they also are creating a treasury. They're using some of the liquidity that they get from investors to build a treasury to then I assume maintain, you know, the amount of liquidity that's in the platform so that the order book can always be matched and to remain profitable because like paying out those fees, the protocol has to generate revenue. Revenue can't just be token emissions and then people go and sell those. So the token itself has to generate some sort of revenue and have a product to market fit, like you said. So when you mentioned Dow and treasury management, that kind of reminded me of Olympus Dow and minus the replacing token dynamic. Where do you think Dow treasury management and treasury diversification went wrong? Because even Doquan screwed that up. That was starting to be the beginning of the end for Terra when they started to kind of like, let's back our token in UST with Bitcoin and other assets. So I'm not like, I'm not trying to disrespect Tapioca Dow at all. This was a problem throughout DeFi. So, you know, what's your opinion on that? Yeah, that's we had we had a recording the other day that was kind of getting into this topic. And it's a strange one, isn't it? Because you'll see certain projects. And I suppose it's kind of in the communications and the detail as well. But if they want to say they're going to boast like a eight, nine figure treasury, but 18, 90% of that's made up of their own token. They're kind of it's vanity metrics at best and a bit kind of wishy-washy at worst. Because what can you what can you let's if you think about like running the kind of thought experiments, what can you actually do with that? Unless it's kind of bolsters in liquidity, but you obviously need to take the other side of that liquidity with stablecoins or if depending on what kind of per you want, we're seeing a lot of treasury swaps begin to happen now. So there was a recent proposal we've gone through now with the GMX guys and the redacted cartel guys. So instead of there being some GMX at idle in the GMX treasury and some butterflies at idle in the redacted treasury, then they can do a treasury swap. I think it was for like 250 care of each token at my price. And then because of the kind of composability that is in DeFi, they can both parties can take their new respective tokens and put them in the kind of yield interest bearing strategies on the protocol because it if a protocol owns 80% or 50, 60, 70% of the tokens, and then there's also staking them in a protocol, which is effectively diluting the yield for everyone else. It doesn't really come across great, you know, so you have to kind of think of these treasury diverse case and strategies, maybe that's through swaps, maybe that's through bonding or however you want to do it. There's a few ways that come on to the market, but we're certainly starting to see some partnerships build up with treasury swaps that can then be put to use and kind of yield our interest on the swap tokens, which is quite interesting. I know Tarun at Gauntlet is building some kind of DAO infrastructure that lets people propose how they would effectively manage small subsections of treasury and then slowly roll out strategies around that. I can't for the life of me remember what the actual product called. So that's a kind of put your money where your mouth is treasury management from like a DAO kind of grassroots up level, and then you kind of scale it through as kind of confidence builds in these strategies, but yeah, I think, but with kinds of with reference to what they did well for better or for worse, with the bonding mechanism is to show people that you could also a huge treasury, but it's how do you go and put that treasury to use, and you don't want to also don't want to be stuck with the lion's share of your treasury and stuck in your own projects token, because as you say, during that unwind, if you're left kind of holding the bag as it were with your own token, it's things just get worse and worse and worse. And you can't exactly just take them to market and sell them because that doesn't exactly install confidence in your investors and your users. So it's a really, really tricky one. But again, I think kind of building partnerships and treasury swaps and then putting them to use with composable protocols is a not a simple, but a kind of effective way. But with regards to kind of depth of liquidity, I think that's also great. If you can get some kind of protocols that will actively manage positions, particularly on uni v three, like a raqis, a couple more as well. I think that could be quite interesting. But yeah, that's a really tough one. I'm looking forward to following what the guys are currently going to do and see how that plays out. As I say, more Dow kind of involvement on how treasury should be structured. But yeah, it's a full question on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just open a ponder more to like just philosophize and pull apart. There's not really an answer that any one person can give. So basically, kind of from a bird's eye view, I remember the curve wars being the primary catalyst of the whole treasury swap and treasury diversification and managed Dow treasury. And the whole goal was to capture enough of the yield from VE curve and to generate like the capture of the entire curve and like uniswap fee share creation and redistribute that to token holders within DeFi protocols. So now it seems like basically where we're at is curve wars, but it's really state e th wars. Now that's the battle that's beginning now and you see different protocols chasing after ETH or state ETH and offering high yields for it and then devising plans for what are we going to do with the state ETH that we have to generate fees for the protocol and then what sort of utility are we going to give to our governance token or the IOU for the ETH, which also somehow kicks back fees to holders or incentivizes them to keep them locked. So I feel like it's playing out again and hopefully with more success and innovation and intellect this time. Yeah, I just kind of love everything that happens in this space. The rate at which it moves, you've just got to kind of be on the ball and it's really hard to keep up, but if you can keep up, it's a kind of enjoyable kind of journey to see how much innovation and kind of comforts and abilities. Yeah, as I said, the comfort comes seeing the exact same thing. Everyone wants to be the number one with stake and derivative. Frax are picking up some steam out there, Frax ETH as well. I really want to see how this reductive cartel's scenario is being able to kind of borrow whatever liquid stake and derivative that might be in the decentralized stablecoin. It's just great, like the whole landscape is great, everyone seems to be developing, everyone seems to be pushing right direction. And yeah, I'm just kind of interested, as I'll particularly post, which I think could be really, really good. Yep, we are now going to have a quick video from today's sponsor. Perfect transition, right? All right, so now that we got that out the way, NFTs have been pumping lately, and I recently saw something about NFTfi, NFTfinance, a new iteration of DeFi coming to NFTs as a sector. So what's your take on it? And does it solve the liquid jake pegs problem? Yeah, well, you know, as I say in prior to what I was jumping on for the stream, I was, it really was the kind of year for innovation and building. And I know it's a bit of a meme to say that I'm active for building, but there was just a few protocols that I used. And I like to kind of get my hands dirty and try stuff out. You don't have to spend a lot just trying stuff out, particularly with these new kind of L2s and things like that, where it's really cheap and cost effective to just give them a go, you know, even if they're on testnet. And someone sent me, someone sent me pseudo swap and said, you're gonna have to try this. And I was like, okay, all right, let's take a look. I, I kind of class myself as someone who kind of has a finger on the pulse of what's going on. So I'm looking at this pseudo swap protocol. So you can provide NFTs from a collection. And then you can also provide ETH set range, which you're happy to buy in range of the specific collection. So then it went down the rabbit hole. And I was playing around with it for a few days. And I just, I was just kind of blown away about how one, this hadn't been done kind of at scale with how incredibly large and how incredibly quick growing the NFT space is. So that was like a real kind of zero to one kind of moment that I don't think I'd kind of experienced since maybe, maybe even uniswap, maybe even Africa or Uniswap, those are the two that kind of really kind of blew my mind when I first used them. So it kind of got me thinking and trying to explore, well, what else is being built. And I know there was an NFT lending protocol called JPEG. So and that, that'd have two or three collections where let's say you've got a body or a punk lid idle in your wallet. Could be class as an opportunity cost. There's an awful lot of shiny things that happen in this space, an awful lot of things that move fast. Being able to kind of use that as collateral, have an oracle price feeding, an aggregated oracle price for the floor of that, or actually log in a price and then take a under collateralized loan, over collateralized loan against the actual JPEG itself. And then being able to have optionality and go to the market and do whatever you need to do with it. And obviously if the liquidation threshold is breached, then obviously the contract can actually sell that. And then I was just thinking, well, what else, what else is going on? What else is going on? So another one that we've just recently covered on, on the site, blockmates.com is NFT perp. So effectively speculating on a floor price of specific NFT collections, you don't have to post NFTs, you can just post ETH and effectively take a bidirectional bet on the floor price of an asset. I think they pull the oracle price in from lots of different NFT marketplaces just to prevent any kind of spoofing or things like that. So I think it's a nice middle ground and I think it gets the NFT crowd to want to defy a little bit more. And the kind of nurses on NFTs, I think it kind of, I've seen this first time, the guy who is completely a defy nut. He's so kind of in the weeds of every intricacies of every protocol. The first time that he truly understood NFTs was after he used pseudo swap. So I think it's like a nice little bridge for both communities that can sometimes kind of bang heads together to kind of see the benefits of both. And I'd like to kind of see it rolled out like much further down the line. I can imagine there could be ways for that to be integrated into kind of gamefire projects. I think the gamefire industry is probably still a few years away, to be honest. I know everyone's kind of wishing it and wishing it and wishing it to happen. But kind of bridges like this, I think are really important to allow that kind of whole niche industry to blossom as well. Yeah. So a challenge with NFTs is that depending on which one you hold, there's not always demand. So if you need to offload it, it's difficult to do. And if you need to offload it, you might need to do it at like a hefty discount, right? So do you think that trading NFT perpetuals, because I looked at Parsec finance and then I did look at NFT perp. And I noticed it's like charts, candlesticks, technical analysis, RSI, MACD, like it's just like looking at a Bitcoin chart basically, but it was the fluctuating floor price of the NFT. And I could see like the demand side and the bid and the ask side and all that, which was amazingly unique. So yeah, yeah. So as a sector that struggles with like liquidity and inflow, because a lot of it is speculative, right? So when the market's down, the liquidity's gone and assets are concretized, when the market's hot, you know, money's coming in and it's flowing. But do you think that perpetual contracts like injecting that kind of synthetic liquidity into NFTs, is that a game changer? Is that a evolutionary step forward for the NFT markets? I think, I think it's really, it's a difficult one, because a lot of the topics to walk even towards the last end of the cycle, when everyone was happy, and there was liquidity still in one, it's, there was the issues of kind of fragmented liquidity. And again, if you're going to fragment even further down or into the kind of application stack for specific kind of applications that are being built. So like, what would you need to have to have like tens of millions of dollars of volume on the likes of NFT, but you're going to need some serious liquidity, because for every taker that needs to be a maker and vice versa, it would be quite interesting to see if there was ways to have kind of universal liquidity layers. So I know the guys over at Hero, who we work quite closely with, so they're building a like a DeFi primitive on top of Solana. And that's the whole idea of this unified liquidity. So if there was different kind of permutals markets or pubs or futures markets, or like maybe someone comes and builds a NFT, like a perpetual NFT protocol on top of it. But at the end of the day, it's all tapping into this kind of unified liquidity instead of kind of fragmenting across different chains, different kind of areas and different applications. And I think kind of also layer zero could kind of help with that with the liquidity fragmentation, particularly if people are going to build these NFT financialized products as well. But yeah, you're completely right when you're saying you can effectively watch if liquidity inflows are happening or liquidity outflows are happening, that give you a decent indication of what the market's going to happen, particularly as it all unwinds in DeFi. So I don't know. That's a tricky one as well. I think the fragmentation of liquidity issues is quite a big one. And then it's how do you incentivize liquidity? And then we get stuck into basically what we were saying about the tapioca thing and how do you not just have mercenary capital come at the protocol because the science centers. So it's like you press one button, something else pops out. It's maybe there's only trade offs. I don't know. No, I get, I agree with you on that liquidity is a gift and a curse, right? Because with an indefensive like artists and NFT collections, if everything is a perpetual contract that can be speculated on, which we've seen happen with tokens when they get listed on Binance or FTX, then you can basically have your revolution co-opted. You can have your sometimes it's sometimes costs being low like per unit value is good for the protocol, right? And if the price of their token like goes through the roof, all of a sudden it can change what they're able to do, what they're not able to do. If they were oriented toward retail investors and have like a product or a service that has a market fit with retail investors, but now your token is like it's gone from 30 cents to $13, then you've kind of like cut people out that would have been able to have a go at it because it was affordable to them. So I could see like that heavy liquidity coming into NFT perpetuals and dominating and directing NFT floor prices being a negative for like NFT dows, NFT collections, NFT investors, you know, people that are trying to build in this in that particular like project. So I agree with you. It's like a gift and a curse. Yeah, you just made me kind of think there. I wonder if not to kind of put additional layers on top of the onion, but I wonder if there'd be an easier way to market it with kind of fractionalized NFTs and create markets around it that way. But yeah, that's a rubble. I really don't want to go down because that's a really, really instigate some thoughts there. I'll be raising that at $10 billion of anyone's wants to invest as well. So I'll send you the picture. Likewise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me join you on that. Let me join you on that. Okay, so let's talk about Bitcoin real quick. Was Bitcoin's recent rally a trap for bulls? Or do you think it's the emergence of a new trend? You know, this is a really interesting one because I've never seen so many people angry at the market moving up. So I don't just send people sidelines. A lot of people kind of caught off guard coming back into the markets early into the year. My head says yes, my heart says no. I wish I could be more kind of direct with that one. But I think the way I've typically been playing it is I've got my kind of medium long-term positions going into this alt and then the markets look a little bit top heavy. Then I don't mind taking a hedge on those positions by just shorting Bitcoin. And that's kind of how I'm going to play it. If I'm right, that's okay. I've bought kind of liquid-staking narrative quite low and market's going to move with Bitcoin regardless if we like it or not. It's being correlated, but the market's begun in this space. So instead of kind of having to cut those positions, take a lot of kind of time and effort to unwind and try and pick up new positions, entry and exit, I'll just kind of I'll just de-risk with a little bit of a short on Bitcoin as my hedge. So as I said, I obviously want continuation. S&P's kind of diagonal resistance as well at 4,000, quite psychological barrier as well. So I don't know, maybe one day we should wake up and just bust through it and then everyone goes crazy again. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're just still carving out a bottom. There's still unresolved black swans on the horizon like DCG and grayscale and Genesis. And how is that going to resolve in the coming quarters? There's always a threat of regulation. Of course, like you mentioned, there's the macro headwinds, but it just makes sense when you look at Bitcoin's price action now compared to like previous cycles that we would just consolidate. And there's always going to be like some sell pressure at 24K, 28K, 30K. Like there's people that want to cut loose who are at break even or have reached a point of acceptable loss and they're ready to get the hell out, right? And I feel like what we saw last week was primarily a short squeeze that was the product of a positive CPI that everyone was kind of expecting. Next week, we got the kind of like Fed FOMC talk on what rates are going to be, where that's in two weeks, what the rate's going to be. It's probably going to fall within the market consensus. So I just feel like we're in this technical range bound, very simple momentum based trade where you can identify clear overhead resistance and kind of like look at the order book and see that, oh, people are probably going to sell here at the 200 MA or, you know, at this price level and just play that and hedge appropriately. And it's kind of like easy accumulation trading right now. Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's kind of a, it's so annoying as well, because with the merge and with Shanghai, there's so many great, great catalysts in the space. And obviously, people can't town the markets around these kinds of things as much as we'd like to think they could. But I just always kind of think like macro headwinds aside, where would we be at now? We'd be looking at some really, really great numbers, I think. But, you know, a narrative is nowhere near as strong as, as I say, the macro headwinds. And we can try and convince ourselves otherwise. But if legacy market sneeze or the global market sneeze, then we get dragged down, down with it as a kind of a high risk on asset. So can't do anything about it. Just have to play as best you can. Yeah, Arthur Hayes actually put out a blog last night and in it, he's like, the Fed's going to pivot, but it's not going to lead to a moonshot for crypto. He's like shitcoins and Bitcoin are just going to collapse to new lows, like 15k level. And then from there, we'll see where we go. But that was kind of his thesis is that, you know, the confirmation bias that a Fed pivot or eventually reducing rates is going to like, catalyze all this money coming back into crypto. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's always good to look on the other side of what everyone else is thinking. So let's explore that. Yeah, I mean, he's, I love reading his stuff. He's great. He had like a ultra bull narrative coming out of the merge. Problem is with these kind of, if you put out like these like out there kind of theses and thesis around it, it's a lot of the time it's just particularly online. It's a lot of people just shouting over each other with completely different time horizons. So for these things that play out, my time horizon, your time horizon, it could be completely different. But in that, we could have completely different opinions based on what we believe on a current narrative or current sentiment. So if we're saying Shanghai is going to be bullish, what does that mean? A year, two years, liquid state derivatives, bullish, yeah, a year, two years. Then a lot of people get in the weeds and who are kind of swing trading and things like that. And, you know, say everything's bound to go down. So yeah, I love Arthur's stuff. He's a great kind of writer as well. He's such a great. Yeah, he uses a lot of hyperbole and it's like reading a book. So whenever I see 26 minutes, I'm like, Oh my God, how can a sub stack be 26 minutes long? I'm going to try and do my best, you know, and it's the never chart, so you actually have to read everything. Yeah, he keeps it in memeology and crypto jargon and different events. So yeah, he's a great writer. I don't want to keep you forever because I know it's late there. So one more question and then we'll start to close. In your opinion, what's it going to take to bring people back into crypto? And I mean pro traders, experienced retail traders and newbies. So what's it going to take to get people back into crypto? And generally, what's your outlook and sentiment for 2023 and 2024? Okay, yeah, great question. I think, I think from, from bringing back, bringing people back in from kind of more experience to retail investors or lesser experience, because sometimes you classify retailers into a skit, but that's not right. I'd say for kind of large funds and large players in the space to come back, I think, particularly in the US and certain jurisdictions, they need some kind of regulatory clarity. For better or for worse, at least that gives them a kind of scope and a kind of standard operating procedure of how they can actually enter these markets. So I think any clarity around that could be just some big things happening in the US, it's getting the first one to take a lot of influence from. So for, as I said, larger funds and large capital to come into the space, we need that. Institutional on board, we've seen a lot of recent conferences that didn't really happen as well. Fireblocks and things like that, that were all great, but the UI and the user experience from these traditional guys and from the filmmakers needs to improve. Trying to see if there's anywhere that uni v3 and APIs that you can plug into that. Again, with the, I keep, I keep bringing them up because I think they've got a great product, but Iraq is just making the liquidity provision on a dex as similar to as what a traditional market maker would expect on a centralized exchange. And I know there's a couple of decentralized exchanges that are popping up with order books with simple APIs that traditional use can be plugged into them. So that'd be interesting to see that this year. But again, I think high level regulatory clarity, as I say, for better or for worse. And then for, I suppose for retail to come back, in my opinion for that, it's no, no news is good news. As long as people aren't losing money, hand over fist, just have a couple, couple of months or two, three quarters of kind of silence, let people get on with what they're doing. We don't need a ripper or a bull market for people to slowly start building trust and gain again. And like, if, if we're brutally honest about it, it's probably going to be some, some meme coin that gets the headline while all this amazing innovation is happening and that draws a lot of retail backing and usually also could signal to start taking a little bit of 2023, 2023, as I say, just, just as I've just mentioned, I just want 2023 to be a year of peace. I don't know how much longer I can take this stress as little, as little news as possible, even though I know it's not going to happen. And then 2024, I think if we can get that right, a bit of regulatory clarity, hopefully they don't throw the book at everyone. But I think we'll be in a really good place. The space is definitely not going anywhere. If you're thinking about pivoting to kind of AI blogs and AI content, just don't do it. Don't do it. It's play for the week. The space is certainly not going anywhere. And I'll be around for as long as people can stand to listen to me, I suppose. Yeah, which is probably definitely going to be at least 10 more years. So I'd like to say everything that Grant has said that I've said that's being pushed through Cointelegraph. It's not financial advice. You're all advised to do your own research, do your own diligence. Go read the content on blockmates.com so you can learn more about crypto and DeFi and how these protocols actually work. Go read the articles that we publish weekly on Cointelegraph.com so that you can stay up to date on breaking news and inform yourself on what the markets are actually doing from our team of market analysts. I'm going to take a brief break and then I'll come back to you, Grant. We'd like to thank our sponsor Web3 Antivirus, a security solution that helps protect users from online threats and scams on the decentralized web. I think there's a video that comes from that. All right, so that's that, Grant. Thanks for coming on. I'd say the valuable things I got from this conversation as a recap is DeFi is not dead. Look for innovation and dig into that, right? Keep an eye on NFTs because new forms of investing and liquidity are arriving in NFTs where you can speculate on price or capture like the momentum, whether it be to the upside or downside using perpetual contracts. Shanghai could be buy the room or sell the news event, but it doesn't fundamentally change Ethereum's use case or its fundamentals. It's actually kind of a crossing of the Rubicon point again where we see do the fundamental reasons that make Ethereum attractive remain and are they strengthened by the marriage? Like competition's good. The more competition you have in the market, the better, the more innovation you have. It roots out oligarchy and monopoly and whatnot. So yeah, man, there's a lot of good stuff you shared with us. Where can we find you? If I want to learn more about you and what you do, where can I find you on socials? Where can I find your content? Yeah, for sure. So at blockmates.com, so D-O-T-C-O-M, someone pinched my handle. So I also got kicked out the original account. So yeah, you can find us on Twitter. You can find, if you head to the blockmates.com website, everything's pinned there. Twitter, Telegram, Twitter, Discord. You name it, whether you should be able to find the handle. Be careful about Telegram. There is someone with two S's at the end of the name, so just be careful. And I obviously want message first. So if you want to get in touch, probably verify through Twitter. But yeah, that's where we usually hang out. All right. Well, thanks for everything you do. You're doing God's work. Keep fighting a good fight. Thank you to all the viewers for tuning in, and we'll see everyone again next Thursday at 12 Eastern. Thanks.