Everything Is Market: How Crypto Is Expanding Finance Into Culture | Jesse Walden

**Jesse Walden** (0:00)
Many of the founders that we work with in the portfolio, many founders who come in and pitch us, they're all working towards one North Star KPI, which is daily active traders, right? Like they want to see more people trading every day. And today, I would say we're somewhere on the path, we're not quite there, but we're definitely on the path. So there being a billion traders, daily active traders, that's I'm intentionally being hyperbolic, but that's the goal of many of these companies.

**Mike Ippolito** (0:29)
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 company's funds or projects discussed. All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. Today I'm joined by Jesse Walden of Variant. Jesse, welcome back to the pod.

**Jesse Walden** (1:27)
Thanks for having me again. Great to be back.

**Mike Ippolito** (1:30)
Yeah, this is fun. We're going to take a break. Bell Curve has been a little bit of an AI pod recently, but we're going to rediscover our roots and talk about crypto. And Jesse, you wrote something really interesting a week or so ago. And the title of this blog, this tugs at my own kind of nerd snipe heartstrings here, which is, Everything is Market. And I love that title. And it really addresses one of the core debates of crypto at the moment, which is, is like these promises of Web3 and kind of some of the early original nerd snipes about crypto being this coordination layer and building all types of apps. Are we going towards that world, that kind of Christixins side of things? Or is crypto mainly suited for financials and being an asset ledger and better financial rails? I love the way that you framed this year. Talk us through the kind of opening inspiration for this piece.

**Jesse Walden** (2:24)
Yeah, so I guess the back story is like, I got into crypto over a decade ago as a founder, and I started this company called Media Chain. And the goal was to bring every piece of media, a different type of digital asset onto public blockchain, help creators make more money.
So I would say I was very inspired by a lot of the more expansive possibilities of what blockchains could enable for digital media, for creators, for things that I guess would typically be associated with Web3. And today, or I guess back even back then, one of the big lessons from that startup was that markets drive new standards. So if you want to have a new standard for digital media assets, or digital media monetization, you need a market to pull that standard forward. So that's a lesson I kind of learned the hard way through the startups. And fast forward to today, this piece, Everything is Market, it sort of puts forward the view that both the kind of Web3 vision and the view that blockchains are just for finance are correct, in that blockchains are enabling many more markets to proliferate. And so the definition of what finance is, is going to be a lot more expansive than most people realize.

**Mike Ippolito** (3:43)
Yeah, I reference this post often, but one of the inspirational posts for me when I was first getting into crypto was a post called Markets Are Eating The World by Taylor Pearson, I think you also know. And yeah, I just love this idea of markets as a coordination layer and if you reduce the friction for spinning up markets, you make them global. And I really love, I want to dive into some of the particular innovations that you see in crypto. I really love this idea that you have of markets being an API endpoint and a potential input into other products that could get built on top. But I think this idea of markets just coordinating an increasing amount of activity, people kind of grasp the significance of that, but I think there's so much white space.