Blockchain investment is taking off! 🚀

In this high-energy episode, Jason Fernandes Co-founder of AdLunam Inc. sits down with Vandross Idiake, Founder & CEO of Moonboy Capital Ventures and co-founder of Helicode Web 3 Academy, to discuss how blockchain is revolutionizing the world of finance.

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DIVIC goes live every Thursday on the AdLunam Twitter page.

Pioneering the Future of Blockchain Investment

SPEAKERS

Jason Fernandes, AdLunam Inc Co-Founder

Vandross Idiake, Founder & CEO of Moonboy Capital Ventures and Co-founder of Helicode Web3 Academy

Hello, folks, this is a quick Mic check. If you guys can hear me, let's use the reaction buttons and give it a minute for the for the room to fill up A Bit. You okay, let's get started. Hello, hello, hello, welcome, welcome. Welcome to Diving into Crypto. This is your host, Jason Fernandes, the co-founder at AdLunam.The program is about sharing insights, strategies and journeys of thought leaders, movers, shakers and candlestick watches. The program is brought to you by AdLunam, the all in one, web3 investment ecosystem, empowering early stage startups. Today, we have a very special guest for you. But before we begin here, a few announcements. Views on this program are of that of the speaker and thoughts shared and meant for educational purposes only. Feel free to use the reaction buttons as you hear gems from our speakers. At the end of the program, we will open up the room for QnA, your questions can be sent across to our Twitter account on AdLunamInc, if you get cut off, come back to AdLunamInc, and you'll find a new link that'll lead you back to the podcast. Okay, let's go. So like I mentioned today, we have a very interesting guest for you. Had a great, great time being on moon boys podcast, early, earlier, but we have Vandross Idiake, and it was sort of really fun to be on your show, and I thought it would be great to start chat with you. So Vandross Idiake is the founder and CEO of Moonboy capital ventures, a form that offers B2B and B2C, Blockchain consulting, funding and access to capital, to venture capital groups. It's got over four years of experience in the blockchain industry, and helps clients navigate complex and the dynamic world of decentralized technologies. By the way, I think of Vandross. Maybe you can sort of jump in and give us a sort of brief introduction about yourself, and then we can get started.

No, that's awesome. And in fact, I think, like, nobody can really get into the meat and potatoes or what you do better than you know you yourself, but it sounds like, like you got into, like, web3 from an educational perspective. And now you're sort of going back to with Helicode web3 Academy. Is that sort of how got, how you got passionate about web3 in the first place?

Yeah, yeah. Web3 for me, it was, it was all about the education. So I think for me, what, I'll just a little bit break down how it started for me. So I was in a stock market before, right? And I thought I knew what money was. And then at some point, my exchange, my stocking broker exchange, had this thing called Bitcoin, right? And I was very, very curious. And I was a curious person, so I just went to my phone and Googled it, like, what is Bitcoin? Because I've heard of it before, if I didn't really understand it. And I saw was decentralized money, and then it led me to start going down the rabbit hole to understanding what is money. And I've been on that journey for about four years now to the point where I feel very much that I am now teaching that to as my students as part of the introduction course, before we get into the skill based hard courses for Helicode Academy, we're focusing on why the technology is prevalent today, like where it came to be, what systems were put in place. We're talking about really deep topics, about all the different institutions and things that were put in place, like central banks, IMF, Swift, etc., quantities and quantitative tightening, fractional reserve banking. I think these things are super important topics to understand, on what is money, principles before you even get before you even get to why you should invest in cryptocurrency, why you should be a part, a pioneer for this, this new ecosystem that we're building to for a better world. So, yeah.

So what do you think in terms of, you know, when people come to you and say, Hey, like, what do you what? What should I read to get the maximum understanding of, sort of crypto in the most, in the least, consuming of time. Well, you know, consuming the least time, like, what do you recommend a book? Or how do you sort of recommend they do they do it.

There's multiple avenues that you can take. One of them, I would say for sure, is I recommend this book called layered money. I forgot the name of the author, but it's a really, really good read, and it basically dictates everything that you need to know in terms of tying what money is to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network and the Bitcoin standard, another thing that you can do as well. Sorry,

no, this is you just mentioned another book, The Bitcoin standard, by Stephanie and a moose,

exactly that. That's another really good book to, actually didn't read this one. Actually read layered money instead. Yeah, I know the Bitcoin Center is like the most popular one, and it actually ended up reading layered money. And then also, I follow podcasts, and I also podcast myself. You should follow podcasts, right? You follow minds. You can follow Jason has some really good content too, as well. Read blogs. Look for really, really good thought leaders. And then not just follow that thought leader exclusively, but try to take a holistic approach with data collection. And then, once you've gathered that data, come up with your own conclusion based. Off the holistic data that you gather, right? And this is kind of like my approach, because everyone has their own kind of opinions, so you kind of want to formulate your own opinion based off your own holistic research that you've done on your own, right. And if you, if you're not capable of thinking on your own, it's very hard to really understand the technology. But I would always tell people to start with the first principles of what is money, right? That's, that's you have to if you don't understand money, it's going to confuse everything that you learn about cryptocurrency. Because, yeah, as you know, Jason, you know, so money is so important, and it's something that a lot of people don't like talking about. But I really, really encourage people to understand what is money. I'm actually going to be dropping a three layered podcast on what is money principles too, as well, because I'm actually teaching it for free before we get into the hard skills courses. So you guys can get in. Actually jump in today at 7pm UTC, we were teaching the second part of what is money, but in our telegram group, you have access to all that free material and free content. We're teaching you blockchain basics before we get into the skill based courses of cyber security, web3 marketing, smart contract coding with like rust, solidity, I can Haskell and etc.

sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. I was just gonna, I was just gonna add on to that too, as well. Um, because, yeah, it's also because once you understand money, you can then understand inflation, and then you can understand how to deal with it better, because the entire idea is for things to keep going up in price, because how the system is designed, right? Because there's not a fixed amount of the currency right and supply right, so there's an infinite amount of thick of money, right in circulation, there's a limited amount of goods and services, right? So if you can keep printing more money for that same limited amount of goods and services, the prices will continue to go up infinitely forever, and people will continue to get squeezed in the middle class until the game ends. And that's just how it goes with fiat currency.

Yeah, recently, there was this, this new story about how opaque, has gone off the dollar, basically, and is accepting other currencies for oil. I remember thinking, you know, it's so much like, like a cryptocurrency, this losses, utility, oh, some of it because, yeah, like, a whole big use case of essentially what people were staking funds, if you want to think about it that way, at the you know, like I read somewhere that 70% I mean, it could be wrong. The numbers could be changed now, but something like 70% of Saudi Arabia's wealth was sitting in a bank called bank account in New York and the Federal Reserve, mostly proceeds of oil sales. And so it's all, it's almost like somebody just, like, killed a bunch of utility off of the token. And now, you know, there's, there's less people that need the token for to run their system. It's almost like you think about Ethereum, right? Like Ethereum ether being, being fuel for, for the network. You know, oil is literally fuel, and it's paid for in US dollars. So is the parallels are quite, quite striking, if you think about it that way.

No, not at all. Man, this is everything. Every time we have a chat. It's fun for me, but, you know, it's interesting. I think, how do you find the the access to the job market for for, you know, people that like go through academies and like vocational training and things like that, in Africa? Do you think that they because I bet there's like, a whole bunch of, you know, really, really good jobs that they could sort of have a crack at, and then sort of get into web3 and then move from there.

Yeah, great question, Jason. I think that the only issue that, I think that is happening particularly in Africa, especially, like, for instance, Nigeria has one of the best, most qualified, skilled talent pools in the world. A lot of people don't know that, right? The problem is being able to bridge that into, let's say, other companies that are, let's say in the West in particular, right? And having to, you know, have that conversation with them, that dialog with them, and having them being able to try it out and to see for themselves, right? So I think that that's what our company plans to do in the long term. Our vision is to, once we train up the adequate amount of talent that we that we have, and create the biggest talent pool in Africa for web three, which is our entire goal, we then use our company as a bridge, and I use my relationships I've built over the course of time as a bridge to be like, Hey, this guy is super trained up on rust, like he could show you. This is not check his GitHub. Just give him an opportunity to an interview. Check it out. Maybe you can ask, ask him to do a task that's also the best way to as well, and once, once you see, okay, he really does have the adequate skills. Now you could cut your production costs because maybe you were thinking of hiring somebody more in the West, because you thought maybe they're more capable, but which isn't really the case, right? So you can have the same level productivity and cut your cost 70 80% and this is exactly what we plan to achieve. And this will help boost web three as a whole, because people who don't have enough funding, as you know, another issue too is. Well, in web three is in web two. What changed the game for web two was cutting down the cost per acquisition of clients, right? Because before you're paying few $1,000 to just get one one client, right? But then what ended up happening was the introduction of ad tech, technology, right? So you had Google AdSense, so you're able to cut those costs you had, you had YouTube, you know, we take to all the stuff that we have now currently, right? So able to cut those costs by like, 90 to 99% right? And because of that, now people could run actual business models right, and not have to do rug pulls, right? So in web three, the same thing has to happen too, as well, where there needs to be an introduction of ad tech, technology, where you're maybe looking at the data sets from each individual wallet, like, Okay, this guy likes to trade NFTs, so we need to market with him. With NFTs, you get you need to personalize the experience. Yeah, yeah. This is what we're teaching. This is what we're teaching too, as well, with our web three marketing too as well, which we plan to launch as well, to teach people the current basis of web3 marketing and where we think it's going to go with this ad tech, technology, which is even more suitable for web three because we have the open source technology on the track. Yeah,

yeah. No, you're 100% right. Matter of fact, we have, we're also working on, on technology that, that, that's, you know, around that area. Definitely chat with you about that. But that later, but moving shifting gears a bit. Moonboy capital ventures. How did that all begin? And tell us a bit about that.

By the way, it's not just the retail investor that's like, helped by sort of the exclusion of capital web3. It's all it's also being able to having the opportunity to infuse capital into web3. It's also the entrepreneurs themselves. Like I had a company many years ago that was in IoT, and fundraising is really, really, really difficult in the IoT industry. It's just like, it's especially because you have building hardware, right? But, but with crypto, you have a completely international both access to funds. Your market, oftentimes, is international as well. And so that's like, massively democratizes things for people in, you know, countries like Africa, countries like India, we have, you know, team members. It's quite a few of our team members and co-founder, as well as from is from Africa and Asia. Pretty much everybody, I would say, with the exception of one of our co founders, is from Africa and Asia. So I think like that, because of web three, it sort of democratizes that and gives sort of everybody, like the ability to work remotely, because that's so much more accepted in web3. I mean, briefly, it seemed like that was going to be the way everybody did business, but I think everybody is pretty much going back, but with the exception of web three, which is still like lives on Zoom, you know. So I think that's one of those things that you know doesn't get a lot of play. I mean, it's one thing to. Help, you know, the retail investors make a bit of money and come up a bit but then there's the other, the whole other side of like, entrepreneurs also, you know, working the ass off, hustling, trying to, you know, move forward.

Yeah, absolutely, Jason. And another point I would like to add, too, is that I do see the future being more lean, where you see a lot more of these, because you have already multi billion dollar businesses that don't even have a physical address, right? They just operate completely digitally, and we're going to see that more prevalently, like also as well. If you look at Telegram, for instance, they have over a billion users, and they only have a staff of 30 people. And yeah, it's crazy. But I think that that is, it's actually not so crazy when you really think about it. I think the future is lean, you know, lean technology, software, cut a lot of operational costs where it's just, there's a lot of stuff that you end up paying for when you have, like, an actual building and etc., and people have to commute. And actually, it's more efficient when people can just get up, pop up their laptop and just get to work and finish their tasks they need for that day. So I think we're changing the dynamics of work. I mean, we didn't always, always have this 40 hour work week anyways, too, as well. This is, like, more of a new thing to try to increase productivity and so, you know, taxes and etc. But yeah, this is where I think the future is kind of going, is more of this Lean type of model. And yeah, we're also, we're also looking into that too as well. But yeah, man, Jason, I think that moving forward with the web three space, I think that one of the big things that I think that we need to really, really focus on in web three is talent and, uh, security and onboarding like these, are actually three things I think are really, really crucial, you know, is, uh, right to source the right talent. We need to make sure that it's secure, and we need to figure out ways to make it simple for people to onboard. You know, I don't know what you think about that specifically, though, but yeah,

yeah, it's difficult, right? I mean, this is a problem that square was trying to solve. They talked about it for a while. Jack Dorsey talked about, like, one of the biggest problems is so massively difficult to onboard people onto crypto. It's just not the user interface just leaves so much we desired.

Yeah, absolutely, man, absolutely, absolutely. And so this is something that I'm just looking into and seeing, I know there's some companies like in there's one called cojira, and I saw what they were doing. They came out with the seedless wallet. They're on the cosmos ecosystem. And that, I find that interesting, how you can choose the option of seed or seedless, and you can immediately just start engaging in defi and just pop in your credit card details and just go ahead and just go ahead and purchase what you need to purchase, and then they do everything in the back end for you, which is amazing. And I think that that unfortunately, yeah, yeah. It's unfortunate for someone like, maybe like you or me, who we like to, you know, self custody, we're all about, you know, hold our own seed phrases and etc. But for a newbie, somebody that just wants to get in on the game, you know, the little guy. I think it's a great onboarding mechanism, but I don't know what you think about that specifically. Yeah,

no. I mean, it's like, it has to be seamless, you know. And I think the future belongs to these companies that made it so seamless to onboard that you don't really realize that you're using crypto, right? Or that you're, you know, all this, what chain you're on, and how do you transfer funds from one change to another, bridging it, yeah, defy, like these things. It's just, it's really too complicated, you know, for the average, average person to really get it, get a hold into and I think, like the it has to be idiot proof. I once spoke with a UI designer, and she was really, really good at what she did, and I remember her saying, the way she looks at it is that if the customer can do anything that's not what the system would like it to do, then it's her failure, not the customer. It's not the customer that pushed the wrong button. It's, it's her fault for making sure that button was even there when they didn't need it, you know. And so I think, like, it has to be that idiot proof in order for, like, you have a flash, to get, like, mass adoption. I think, like, what is probably need to happen is something very mainstream, like, you know, the NBA or, or, I don't know, McDonald's or something, will have to do, like, maybe an NFT drop where everybody gets a wallet and, like, maybe they don't even realize that they're using crypto. But then it's sort of like a soft landing into the whole, the whole universe that they that could potentially wait for them.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I totally agree. And how close do you think we are to getting to that point where we can, we can start onboarding the masters. Because, you know one thing too, is about the internet. When you know the smartphones and stuff came out, I thought it was completely stupid, right? Because I didn't get the point. I was like, Well, I'm gonna pay extra for a phone so I can talk. Text on it, and it has a touchscreen. I didn't, I didn't get it in the beginning, right? And then I didn't know that. Oh, they're actually building apps on top of it. And then there was that one. There was a couple killer apps. One of them was the flashlight, believe it or not. Another one was Angry Birds, right? Yeah, and, and so I'm wondering, does web three need this sort of killer app that's really that light bulb hits off where it was like, Oh my God. Like, this is the one, you know what I mean, that's gonna really start onboarding.

I think probably you know what? The easiest one of that would be, some sort of app that pays people to do certain things right, like we play to earn was like, the revolution that really kicked off web3 gaming, of course, that's cool now, but it'll end up having to be some sort of engaged or in type thing that essentially pays people to do like whatever, whether it's sharing information or performing tasks or whatever, but some way for them to earn, even if small amounts of money, and then that is somehow gamified to where they don't. So, for example, it's going to be very difficult for like user on day one to essentially, you know, upload money like, you know, Fiat on, ramp money onto the whatever wallet, and then use it to buy crypto and then jump in. I think that's going to be really, really difficult. I think what's going to end up happening is some sort of service that will probably launched at pace that pays people in crypto. For example, these people are not actually paid for that crypto. They're not actually bought it, but now they own it. Then maybe they, you know, transfer that on an exchange for, let's say, Bitcoin or Ethereum or something, and then now they hold some actual crypto. And that's sort of a back end way to get into crypto without, like, the upfront investment. And I think once that happens, they'll start supplementing that with their own funds and and, you know, increase that investment. I think that's sort of like the best entry way where they're earning some tokens, maybe for free. Keep in mind, like, like, look at pie and all these really, really terrible cryptocurrencies like pie, just the reason they were so successful is because they're giving everybody free tokens. And of course, yeah, well, that doesn't work for a number of reasons, but, but for some reason. But if you're going to onboard people, you'd have to give them something for free. I think that's sort of where it's gonna make a change. Now, on buy, you can trade that for another, another token. So if you have them, what are you gonna do with them? Right? But once you start being able to trade that, let's say, for other tokens, then it's sort of a way to end up with Ethereum or Solana or something when, and you never expected to have that. So that's, that's sort of, I think how it's going to need to end up going,

Yeah, absolutely, I do start paying attention to some of the institutions that have eyeballs and are actually starting to engage in this economy. If you look at BlackRock, they've just initiated the Biddle fund, and so I'm very interested in that, and seeing what it is that they plan to bring, in terms of product suites, maybe it's going to be something in regards to some form of real world assets and tokenizing the entire stock market, which is, I feel like it's inevitable for the stock market to get tokenized, but it just, it just makes sense, you know. And also then it gives it's just better for you as a stock because now you have access to global liquidity, because anyone in the world can get access to eth or Solana, but not everyone can get access to US capital markets, right?

So that the problem with that is it any sort of if you tokenize, you know, a security market, that means that the token that you created was also a security token, and security tokens are highly regulated in most countries, which means that, you know, you're, you'll have to have be an accredited investor, at least in the US, for example, you have to be an accredited investor before you can invest in this, in a security token. So, like, there, I mean, yeah, I'd love to see, I mean, I love to see some utility there. Like, I just don't know how the problem with these security tokens is that they don't have same, it's like real world assets, right? Like it's very they're not going to have the same potential upside that that, let's say, you know, a utility token could have, you know, in all likelihood, in a good let's say, let's not say, in all likelihood, but in the best case scenario, a utility token could blow up, whereas a security token, especially if it's, if it's backed by something that's like very real world and easily, easy traced, you're not going to see a lot of growth there. You know, that's speaking of which, by the way, you since we're talking about, you know, investing in startups and stuff like that, what do you what are some of the factors that you consider when evaluating potential blockchain investments, and how do you approach risk, risk management?

Yeah, I think for me, the first thing that I look for is, is it solving a real problem? And it depends on what I'm trying to achieve, if I'm in it for a very long period of time, from looking at it, from the aspect of, okay, I want to make this return in. 5 to 10 years, then I'm going to approach it completely different, like, it's like, okay, I'm looking for a product that actually then solves a real problem. Because a lot of times what you have is a lot of the products that launch and do really well in the bull market don't actually solve a real problem, or they launch an oversaturated market and just write a narrative, and that's how they're able to make a significant amount of return in a short amount of time. So you could take that approach as an investor, depending on what you're trying to do, and if you're looking so I do, I do a combination of two, right? So I'll look at some products based off of the narrative. For instance, gaming as I think going to be a really strong narrative, right? So I looked in at the team. I look very, very thoroughly at who, who's the ones that are launching this thing. What are they capable? What have they done in the past? And I'll even try to contact them. I even sometimes go as far as to fly to fly to visit them. I've done that before, you know, yeah, yeah. And I'll meet them and hang out with them for like, a four or five days, and then, you know, fly back somewhere else, you know, just to be sure that, okay, if I'm gonna be dumping a bunch of money in this, I know that, you know, my funds are somewhat safe. Who and so, yeah, Team. Team is super important. If the team is probably the most important thing, honestly, like, if you don't have, if the team is not good, that the project is gonna it doesn't matter how good the ideal is. If the team isn't good, the project is more likely going to fail. So team, then I look at how are they positioned, in terms of partnerships and marketing? What is their marketing strategy? How they plan to generate traction, right? So this is another important thing that I think a lot of people don't realize and look into when they're looking at projects, to maybe just hear about it, or hear somebody on YouTube talk about it and then just go and buy it. But you really need to pay attention to these things. And then also, if the product, let's say, for instance, if the, if it's a product that's already out, then you start looking at, you know, is it a good entry for me? Also, are you playing the liquidity cycle correctly, right? Because, as you know, it's almost at that point where it's done to for you to fill your bags, right?

There's not enough. There's really not enough meat on the bone at that point when it's already a lot of times

Yeah, you know, I spoke to an entrepreneur today, and he was building something in the AI space, and he was saying how he has, like a small he's moved back to, he's moved to India from, the US where he was living, save like, you know, something like 50k or something like that. And he was figuring that that's what about 500k in India. And he was like, beginning, like, talking about how he was going to be self funding the development of his product. And I remember I was like, telling him that maybe it makes more really, that self funding is a really terrible idea, and generally, you should get funds as early as possible from investors. You have buy in, and also you have some degree of validation from from investors, somebody's actually putting in money. Or, of course, you know, if you have customers, that's even better, but, but sometimes that's not it. And so but, but he was sort of talking about, you know, not wanting to give up too much equity andandthings like that. Like, where do you stand on some on that sort of thing, and sort of building out one prototype before you go, go to investors. Or, do you think it's sort of better doing it simultaneously?

Man, it's another one of those really, really tough topics. Because here's what I would say. I would say, try to see first, if you can gain some traction, and if you have traction, then you have more leverage. Because the more traction you have, then the more expensive your equity becomes Right, right? But if you just have just an idea, it's very hard to kind of pitch that nowadays, because we haven't really changed the liquidity cycles yet, right? You're still operating on what 5.5% interest, right? And so you're going to have to wait until the best time to start looking for investors where there's more liquidity is going to be when the liquidity cycle fully changes and shifts back into an easing cycle. So Right? For, in this current environment that we're in, for investing, it's best to try to gain traction, I would say, and then use that as justification and leverage for investing, because you want to accelerate your product you want, you want speed, right? But then you also don't want to give your shares up for cheap. So to make them more expensive, you need more traction. And that's what I would say, is the best route that I would take personally.

Yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely a balance. I think green, you have to build something enough to be able to make a point to prove to investors that you can intention, can actually build, you know, build a product, and that, you can show that in any number of ways, but, but, but you have to make that point in order to be legitimate. I mean, I remember when we, I found co founded a token. One of our co founders was Gene Hoffman, who set up, started eMusic, right? And so he was like, See, he was, he founded emusic.com and sold his company for, like, a lot. And so I remember when, when we would talk to investors, just knowing that the gene was on board. This is a guy who's already built platforms that have scaled, have had, you know, millions of users, and then got on and sold a company, just knowing that this is a, this is a CTO that's capable of building, in many cases, is sort of enough to to convince people that you're legit, you're and you are going to actually deliver on what you're going to what you say you're going to deliver. You know, I mean, could be any number of ways. But then the flip side of that is if you spend way too much money developing this thing, and at that point, you know, because then you're not nimble enough to pivot, you know, it's like you build this thing, all of a sudden the market has shifted. You there's been some massive change. You don't have any money, because you spend all your own money to get there. And then at this point, you go to investors, and they're not interested, because the market has already shifted. You don't even have the funds to pivot, you know? So I think as like a like a balance somewhere in the middle,

yeah, absolutely. Another avenue you can take, if possible, is partnerships, right? Because partnerships, if you don't have the team credibility, is what I'm saying, right? So if your team credibility is not there, nobody really knows who you guys are. You're first time builders, and you're not second third time builders who have had, like, proven track record of actually building something. You can try to reach out and leverage strategic partnerships who have maybe bigger brand recognition and brand names, and so that way you can position yourself as, hey, look, these guys are partnering with us, and we're also partnering with these guys, a theorem Foundation, or, you know, finance ventures, or whoever, you know, whoever it is. I'm just throwing out some big names, but it can be even smaller, medium names. You know, some of the medium names. I'm not gonna throw them out right now, but, uh, and also launch pads too, as well. It depends on if you, if you're launching it, something that's tokenized. You could try to leverage launch pads another strategic way in which you can, and also you can, you can also strike those equity agreements too. You do that too, right?

Sorry, say that again.

I said you do that with the launch pads. Or, I think you, you were, you were part of launch pads before,

yeah, we are a launch pad AdLunam as well. So, yeah, that's like, you're 100% on one of what if our advisors is CEO of Enjinstarter, Enjinstarter is just you know, blows up every project that it launches. And if you look at the statistics, I think last year there was a the highest by average returns. Basically they were, like, the number one LaunchPad based on average returns over the year. So basically, if you put your money on, yeah, it's true. So if you put your money in Enjinstarter on average over a course of a year, and keep in mind, like, really the ROI, it really doesn't mean anything when x secret. Rank, because, very quickly, I mean if you got a vesting schedule, it's like a six months to a year, even three months to a year, like, good luck on that eighth, that 80 H is happening, you know, five minutes after TGE, and then you're, then you're looking at it like average returns, if you're lucky, you know. And so like that, I think they were the number one based on average return. So it's almost like, if you put money there your or, you know, a top 10 launch pad, it's a really good way to know, hey, this is these are going to perform well, because statistically, they've The stats are there. You can actually go back and look like the average projects that they've launched, how they've done. There's just so much data out there, you know, in crypto, right?

Yeah, I had a, had a question about, what, what requirements for you guys specifically, because you guys deal mainly with launch pads when you're looking and dealing with, with projects trying to come on your launch pad, like, what are the main KPIs that you're looking at?

Yeah, you know, that's a great question. So we're, we're actually our own token is launching soon and so only post then will we be, you know, launching other projects, on, on, on adlunam, but we do get a lot of deals of incubation, acceleration and stuff. And I would say by far the biggest thing that we look at is institutional buy in. So too often do we get projects that have zero institutional investors, they have either self funded or not really funded at all, and they're saying, hell, hey, all we got to do now is we don't really need any money. We're just going to now go to the public on a public sale, and it's obviously exactly that's not how it goes, right? I mean, you need you. They need way more money than they think they do, and they need the support of a whole bunch of people that they don't even whose names don't are not even familiar to them today, you know? So it's like they don't even know what they don't need. Rather, they don't even know what they don't have. And then one of the issues is sort of lack of institutional investors. Because ultimately, if you're a retail investor, like the only way for you to know what to invest, in your honor, you're not a tokenomics expert, you're basically going to take the word off the launch pad, the exchange just launching them and all the institutional investors that are backing them in and if and if and if, if your company has none of that, none of the above, you can't go, you can't go directly to retail investors. That's just not a path to, you know, doing a successful idea so that it that's one of those things that we find, you know, and I think that's mainly a product of the fact that it's just been such a difficult market for fundraising for a lot of people this year and then, and then the year before. And so essentially, what they're doing is, everybody's trying to bootstrap, and Bootstrap is it doesn't it's not going to get them any further, because they need, as usual, buy in before, you know, any of the bigger people start paying attention.

Yeah, absolutely. Man, what are you, what niches are you most bullish on, in terms of, you know, AI, gaming and, etc, what is, what are you looking at for the for this, you know, this upcoming Bull Run,

you know, what's interesting? I think this. I think that we the meta was, sort of cycle is gone. I think AI might have some legs, but I think they are also, it's also sort of, you know, we're not going to be seeing a whole lot of, well, who knows, never, say never, but I don't guess we're going to be seeing a lot of highly successful AI projects, very many more. And I think sort of, what the next thing season might be is probably something around the area of social fi, for example, and maybe Bitcoin layer twos. But I think social fire is a narrative that, just from a web3 perspective, does not get enough play, and with stuff that's going on in twit at Twitter. It's madness, by the way I watched. Oh, well, we're on Twitter, so I better not say anything bad about them, but, but anyways, with the way social media is on the web, in the web too, I hope that's vague enough, the way social media is and web2, it seems like this is ripe for some degree of of, you know, reinvention in the web3 space. So I'm curious to see where that takes us.

Yeah, yeah. So social fire is interesting. I totally agree with big I think the Bitcoin ecosystem in general, not just layer twos, is a super sleeper. I think a lot of people aren't paying attention to that. And there's a there's a lot of institutions. They're actually even tossing money from someone even, I think it was, it was a couple ETF institutions that were actually paying some money for Bitcoin development. I. Can't remember which ones now, but actually did a podcast on it recently. And so there's Bitcoin development that's going to occur, because now they're incentivized to write, because now their skin is like it, you know. So, so I think that the Bitcoin ecosystem is gonna thrive, and also Bitcoin ecosystem needs less percentage wise liquidity trickle down effect, right? So if, if you, if you have a 10% of a liquidity from the actual main chain going into the actual eth daps, that's far less than 10% of, you know, Bitcoin liquidity at the same rate in terms of percentages, you know, going into the Bitcoin ecosystem. There's not a lot of Bitcoin projects compared to eat so I think that's where the sleeper is, I think too, as well. And I also I like gaming. I like gaming a lot. Still. I know the narratives and stuff have died down a bit for the all coins, I think is going to pick back up. I hope that the stuff with the US and the elections and stuff goes well and we're able to have a good, positive turnout for crypto, because that's better for everybody, right?

No, I mean, I think, I think gaming is also going to be really interesting, but also with Bitcoin and, you know, the Lightning Network, that might be really interesting. If somebody were talking about earlier, about high payments being super complicated. I think that if you have, like, somebody implements the Lightning Network in a really easy way, or, you know, some sort of way to take care of, you know, lower fees, because keep in mind this, as the bitcoin price goes up, like that's also gonna have an effect on fees. And so sooner or later, it's gonna be worth looking into what's the cheapest way to transfer these things, and how do we sort of scale Lightning Network to where it makes sense.

Yeah, I like Lightning Network too. There's, there's a couple things, though, that I don't know if it's the it's the end all be all solution, just because I look at it like, okay, so I have to be either technically savvy to have my own node and run my own node, or I have to rent somebody else's node that then opens up a lightning channel and then is able to transact with somebody else, and then we close the channel, and then close it at the we finish the transaction off at layer one, right? I get the concept of it, but I don't know if it's obviously you're gonna lose a bit of decentralization regardless, because I see Bitcoin as the savings account. And I see layer two as the checking's account, so obviously you want to leave your main bags in the savings account, and then whatever you need to transact on day to day basis, you put into the layer two, and then you go ahead and transact that way. I also think that at some point there needs to, this is very, very controversial take, but I do think there needs to be a credit layer on top of Bitcoin at some point. Doesn't need to be credit expansion. Don't, don't confuse it with credit expansion, right? But a regular credit layer for people to actually maybe have time lock smart contracts to be able to borrow, because people still need to borrow and loan money. So I don't know if people are already working on that, or think that that's a suitable thing, because if bitcoin is supposed to be what, what people want it to be, there needs to be a layer two credit line a way that way they to enhance the credit system. Yeah, yeah. What do you what do you think?

Sorry, did you say to borrow off of it?

Yes, yes, yes, yeah, correct absolutely, yeah, to borrow off of it. So, yeah, I'm sure there's some really intelligent people that are thinking of ways to do that. I was thinking time lock, smart contracts. I don't know, I don't know how that, how it would work, how it's going to play out, because it's so early. It's only, it's a baby, it's like 15 years old.

You know XRex at all?

No, no, I haven't. Somebody told me about it, though, but I haven't used it yet. Haven't tried it. How is it? How's your experience?

Yeah, yeah. I love it. I love it. And essentially they have a way for you to essentially borrow off of your the cryptocurrency that you have. I'm not sure about how the fees work. I never actually done it. It's just, it's just scary. The whole concept of borrowing actually is something like I try to avoid, because you're basically betting money that you don't have, right? But I do see like it says, Oh, hey, your balance will allow you to borrow X amount of money. It comes up. I'm not sure I know enough about it, but yes, definitely, I think worth looking into, but I don't know if it does. Bitcoin, actually, I think it does. But yeah, it's definitely worth looking into, right? But you're right, like that, the people should be able to build a currently off of that, if people aren't, haven't already. But actually, let's move on to the moon cast. So what motivated you to start that and what hope? What impact you hope it would have on your audience?

Yeah, for me, I got so frustrated with people getting misinformation. And people would text me and like, oh, this person said this. This person said that. And I was getting really, really annoyed. So I was like, Look, I need to come up with a way to streamline. Really good information from really good quality experts in the web, three, AI space, and bring it all together, also investing too as well. So bring all these different verticals together into in an actual podcast. And that's why I created the mooncast, and it's to help guide people who maybe are being misinformed. People may be interested in certain topics, but don't really fully understand them, but think they do because they watch the Tiktok video of some guy, you know. So I try to bring on actual shakers and movers within this industry that actually know what they're talking about, and try to facilitate the exact knowledge that you actually need to know. And I do it through a conversational dialog, as you know, because you know, you've been a part of it too, as well. And I appreciate you coming on too as well for that. And

yeah, that was a lot of fun. No,

yeah, man, yeah,

I watched a huge influence. I suppose what you would do, I'm like, talk about meme coins and saying how the way to invest in them is, is like, invest in something that you think is funny. It's just, I thought was just, was just like, probably, like, if you're that's literally the opposite way across the way you should invest she thinks something's funny. Like, what kind of wood are we living in where that's how I make investment decisions, because, like, this made me laugh. This, this me made me laugh. So it's almost like, am I? Am I voting by, like, giving them money? It's just insane. But yeah, so, so I think there's definitely a dearth of information out on that good, good information where, where people aren't likely to get because, again, you know, some people are just opportunists, right? So they, if they feel like, you know, meme coins are going to make a lot of money, maybe they're in on it in the first place, as in there they're the behind some of the meme coins they're promoting. Who knows? I mean, they're meme coins by like, sometimes they undocks people. It's just a wild west out there, you know. So there's definitely needs to be somebody, people coming in, at least, to drop some knowledge on people. But, yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Sorry. So I just wanted to add on, yeah, my, my long term vision for the mooncast too as well, is I'm looking to eventually, if anyone also is listening to this too, as well, and with is, look, I'm looking at strategic partnerships with educational institutions, right to, again, Bootstrap and streamline that process and that funnel of the right education, right? I want to be that one of those educational platforms that really, really gives the right dialog on everything from funding to investing to web3 to AI to cyber security and all these different elements and try to put that into a cohesive package for students, right, as well as an outlet for them to get in the right information, man. Because, you know, as you know, bro, people are just super misinformed, and then they get pissed. They get pissed at them, the person that they credited the information to, right? Which actually you have to take personal responsibility for your ability to process information, and you have to use deductive reasoning skills at some point, right? Yeah, do, DYOR right.

Exactly, But by the way, we're like, I didn't even realize, I just looked at where nearing the end of this. So let's, I really kind of want to ask you about your personal philosophy, and like, sort of what keeps you going. So I think maybe that would be a great place to to close.

Yeah, I would say with personal philosophy, man, one of the things that I really prioritize is speed. I move extremely, extremely quickly. I do like to move fast and break things. And I'm very focused, man, and I'm passionate about this space. And another thing too, as well as I like to say, is I really enjoy helping people. Man, the more people you can help, the better you'll be as a person, I promise you guys you know. So go out there if you're interested in joining the web three communities. Try to, try to help. Don't spread negative energy. Try to, because every single project that you're able to even do anything for is a step in the right direction for web3 as a whole man. So go out there and figure out what your skill sets are and try to add value to any of these projects. They're trying to build the future so we can have a better and brighter future for the generations to come. Man, and that's pretty much what I would say.