A New Era in Crypto: Product-led Founders Take Over | Roundup

**Myles** (0:00)
Crypto projects that have operated like fintechs have won, I think, the past two or three years.

**Mike** (0:06)
This episode is sponsored by Canton, the only public permissionless blockchain built for institutional finance. We'll hear more from Canton later in the episode. Blockworks Digital Asset Summit is back in New York, March 24th through 26th. We'll have top speakers from leading asset managers, financial institutions, DeFi protocols, crypto companies and policy makers all under one roof. Think BlackRock, Coinbase, Robinhood and more. Follow the link in today's show notes to buy tickets and make sure to use code BELL200 for $200 off at checkout. See you there. Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds or projects discussed.
Alright everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve.

**Myles** (1:01)
You got me, Myles.

**Mippo** (1:03)
Save.

**Myles** (1:05)
Good to be back, boy, I suppose.

**Xavier** (1:06)
Morning.

**Myles** (1:07)
Good to see you.

**Mike** (1:08)
Just a three short week countdown till bass. I know I took the words right out of your mouth, Myles.

**Xavier** (1:15)
There you go.

**Myles** (1:16)
The obligatory show.

**Mike** (1:18)
Exactly. Well, we'll be there. We're doing a live. We're doing a live. I think this will be the first time that the three of us have ever done a live panel or anything like that. So should be fun. It's a really interesting time to be doing this though, I will say, because the divergence in between, I mean, just the amount of raw excitement on the institutional side of the market, the amount of fintechs that are looking at faults. I mean, it's so different from kind of the rock bottom sentiment of the natives. And yeah, I pointed out at last task, but it just, the diversion continues to get larger and larger and larger. It's yeah, it's pretty, it's kind of the most interesting thing happening in crypto at the moment. So we'll see how it really marches.

**Myles** (2:03)
You mean like the RWA, DeFi intersection basically?

**Mike** (2:09)
I mean, what's like, what is happening in crypto at the moment? I would say you can broadly characterize it as an innovation in exchanges.
So this combination of the everything app, the everything exchange and prediction markets, stable coins and tokenization. RWA is RWA looping. I think that's...

**Xavier** (2:30)
Yeah, I agree.

**Myles** (2:31)
Well, I mean, that's the growth. That's the growth. Yeah, I think like...

**Mike** (2:34)
AI is obviously working, but is crypto AI working? Well, okay.

**Myles** (2:38)
So we could say crypto has faded into the background of fintech broadly, right? That's good. That's what I would say like stable coin, cross border is like a slam dunk, right? And crypto is trying to fade into the background of what's called like TradFi, like asset management, right? As more assets become tokenized and that just becomes the default rail for some things. And then, yeah, I think the exact same thing is being pushed from the AI side. Is that like, okay, cool. You have agents that do XYZ. That should be the headline.

**Mike** (3:15)
Okay.

**Myles** (3:15)
In the background, yeah, they're using like stable coins and crypto rails. But we have, we only have like hit escape velocity on that first one, I think, which is the fintech side.

**Xavier** (3:25)
I agree.

**Myles** (3:26)
I agree.

**Mike** (3:27)
And given that crypto and fintech are now so intertwined and increasingly where the leverage is coming from in crypto is changing and it's becoming external to the industry. This is my lead into the topic that we wanted to discuss today, which is the changing archetype of both founders in the space and investors in the space. And people say this often, but what got us here is not going to get us where we want to be. Crypto has been around for about 20 years now, which is kind of crazy. I mean, crypto the industry hasn't, but Bitcoin is 18 years old. So we're getting older in the tooth. And there have been a lot of real visionary founders that took big bets and really had to peer far into the future to understand how the space was going to be and how this technology could be leveraged. And some unbelievable, very brave, frankly, tales of investors who took early chances on them and put up capital when there was very little chance of success. However, it does feel, I think, if you're in this space, like we are potentially at a spot where there's going to be a changing of the guard. And I think it feels like that because we've had so many high-profile exits. We've seen Kyle Semani publicly announce his resignation from multi-coin and step down.