The Blockworks Vision

**Mike Ippolito** (0:00)
Going back to Crypto, we won, we actually won.
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.

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:24)
All right, everyone, welcome back to both Empire and Bell Curve wherever you are listening to this. You got Mike and myself.

**Mike Ippolito** (0:31)
I noticed though that we're recording on the Empire, with the Empire logo. I don't know if that's a subtle- And who's doing the intro? Yeah, I don't know if that's a subtle power play that you're maneuvering here.

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:40)
Years ago, Mike and I were debating Founder One and Founder Two.
And for those who don't know Mike, he's actually pretty nice at ping pong. And he beat me. We did a game of ping pong for who's Founder One and who's Founder Two, and he beat me and he's held that title for years, and I'm taking it back with this podcast.

**Mike Ippolito** (0:57)
You know what? We were a couple of drinky poos into that game, and I actually changed my LinkedIn title to Founder One and Commander-in-Chief, and then didn't log back into LinkedIn for two years.

**Jason Yanowitz** (1:10)
Two years. Mike's LinkedIn title was Commander-in-Chief of Blockworks.

**Mike Ippolito** (1:15)
All right.

**Jason Yanowitz** (1:16)
Hopefully, people listening to this know of us, and maybe this isn't your first time hearing from us. But anyways, we launched a rebrand today. So Blockworks did a big rebrand today. Mike and I just wanted to get on the horn and talk to you guys about it. And I think maybe my super high level context and why I wanted to do this episode is, I think for the last year, I've been talking about crypto. There's this big line in the sand moment for crypto. You got the first 15 to 16 years, and then I'd say 2025 was this line in the sand moment, and you got everything after 2025 And I would say this rebrand for Blockworks marks that for us. We've got Blockworks was started, we started this December of 2017
Mike and I were living together in New York, started this December 2017 So eight and a half years in, this is the line in the sand moment for Blockworks. So maybe the best place to go to kick this off, Mike, is actually not about Blockworks at all. But I'd love to get your take on just the zeitgeist and this moment in crypto, and recording this the week of April 20th, and it's kind of low vibes, and there's all these DeFi hacks, and yeah, I would love to just get your take on what's going on in crypto today.

**Mike Ippolito** (2:26)
Okay, so let me try to put a somewhat original spin on this because the unoriginal take that everyone agrees with, and we have all this data to back up, is there's the institutional section of crypto, the institutional bull market, which is real and happening, and then there is kind of the crypto native side of things, which is struggling a little bit more. But maybe to put another spin on it, and I think one that informs the sentiment more directly, is crypto in many senses was an industry and a technology, but it's also kind of a political movement in a sense. And there's an ideology that underlies that political movement. And I think actually, funnily enough, what's causing the sentiment drift here is that that ideological movement industry blob that is crypto won. And so now that it won, it moved from being a movement which is on the fringe, on the outside and countercultural, to one which is in the mainstream and it's struggling with an identity crisis. So let me give you two examples of when this has happened in the past.
One which is a little bit happier and one which is less happy.
People have compared Bitcoin with the Catholic Church a lot, right? So this is actually a really good example because in the beginning, if you remember Christianity, the church, it was this outside, it was the ultimate outsider movement at the time. Then finally, when it became into the mainstream, and actually, Roman society was kind of petering off, the Catholic Church had to assume a lot of the roles of the state, but it also had to reconcile with the state infrastructure. You had to make all these weird compromises like, compromises like, hey, we used to rule the emperor as a god, but Christianity says there's only one god. We would be like, who cares? But that was 100 years of war. Then they finally were like, the emperor is an instrument of the god. Boom, there's your solution. Another example of this would be in early 1900s when the October Revolution succeeded in Russia and you had this crazy ideological movement of communism win. And then suddenly the communists are in control, but then it's like, whoa, we thought we were gonna share everything. Turns out that doesn't actually work. And then you actually ended up with a very central authoritarian state.